I’m thinking about running a campaign of Apocalypse World where the apocalypse happened recently enough that most adult characters would still have first-hand memories from before everything went to hell. Is there any advice/tweaks/custom moves people would recommend?
I’m thinking about running a campaign of Apocalypse World where the apocalypse happened recently enough that most…
I’m thinking about running a campaign of Apocalypse World where the apocalypse happened recently enough that most…
The rules of apocalypse world is that the world ended 50 years ago. However, the world psychic maelstrom could make sure that every adult remembers it happening to them, even if they weren’t born yet. I don’t actually believe you have to keep the 50 year thing, but using this work around is deliciously fucked up.
Don’t discount how awesome 65 year olds can be and what they can accomplish.
If you want things to be fresher, ask lots of questions about what the PCs lost, how they mourn (people, their dreams, their possessions, the institutions they were invested in), the good things they remember, how things have changed (their status, their support, how they view themselves, how others view them), and how they’re dealing with the changes. Asking these loaded questions will help the players frame their characters in the context of the radical turn their lives have taken.
David Rothfeder That’s not at all what I had in mind, but it is deliciously fucked up.
Scarcity is less and less of an issue the more recently the Apocalypse happened. Of course, you can just work around this by having a really, really bad apocalypse, something that destroyed most resources in the world. Maybe a Noah-level flood or something. Play Waterworld.
I am pretty sure that this scarcity problem is the only thing that matters. Apocalypse World was written to take all kinds of apocalypses into account. Also, it’s fresher having the mix of older and wiser characters and younger characters full of naivety about the past and nihilism toward the future.
About 15 years works out well.
Long enough for scarcity to reasonably apply and new f’d up societies to emerge, recent enough for characters to remember the old world.
A 22 year old would now be 37
A 12 year old is now 27
A 5 year old is now 20
Each of them will have very different views of the old world, the fall, and the way things are now.
Minor: Names might not work as well.
Make sure to have at least one PC born after the Apocalypse so you can exploit the difference. “At least you HAD a world, oldtimer.”
When I ran my Appalachian mountaintop removal AW, the landscape is pretty much straight out of the 1990s, with toxic water, mutated fish, no birds, and weird skin conditions as a result of high metal levels in everything. I just ran a session where the apocalypse is the “black dusters” that destroyed Oklahoma in the 1920s. I know folks have used Chernobyl and NOLA during Katrina as settings.
Which is to say, the apocalypse is happening all the time, you just have to find it. If you want to have it happened in easy living memory, just do it. The only issue I’ve had to think about is making the effects of the event large enough to cover the area of the campaign, but once you have established your setting, you don’t need to even think about how there might be other places where the event didn’t happen unless that’s interesting to you in some sort of Thunderdome/quest/cargo cult /messiah kind of way.
Also, Dean Baker, that’s one way to see it, but I tend to go the other way. Immediately after Chernobyl, during the Dust Bowl, the areas were hellish and everything stopped and scarcity was the name of the game. 50 years on from Chernobyl, there’s plants and animals and all kinds of things to hunt or scavenge. 100 years on from the Dust Bowl, there’s Starbucks and schools and plumbers and hospitals in Oklahoma.
An interesting take, Meguey Baker. That of course rides on there being enough civilization left to get the gears turning again, or enough plant and animal life left to repopulate the region. Depends entirely on the nature and size of the apocalypse in question.
It pretty much follows suit. Hiroshima after WWII is probably the closest thing going to a sudden and extensive apocalyptic event. Haiti after the earthquake, possibly. Time brings recovery, and human need and resourcefulness pushes it on. It’s the sneaky ones, like gutting public health networks and deregulating business, that really do lasting damage.
I suppose it depends whether one views these little apocalypses (apocali?) as being on the same level as the Apocalypse with a capital A. When I play AW, it’s always with a world-shattering civilization-ender. I like big and flashy. But such things take a lot longer to recover from. Look at Europe after the barbarians sacked Rome, or at the native Americans after the introduction of syphilis and smallpox. So much was lost, and it took so much longer to recover from than compared to Hiroshima or Haiti. Everything is relative to scale.
Which is an interesting point. Smaller apocali (this must become a word ^^) are terrible to behold immediately after the event, but have fewer lasting repercussions. Whereas civilization-ending apocalypses might leave more resources for the scavenging immediately after the event (due to higher death rates = fewer scavengers), but such resources will run out quickly only to leave a more desolate world as time passes on.
And sometimes the lasting repercussions are not what one would expect. I’m reading A Voyage Long and Strange, about European contacts with the Americas, and De Soto’s march across Florida and Alabama and etc pretty much destroyed the well-established civilization of city-states that had existed prior. The Creek and Seminole and other southeastern tribes we are familiar with originate from the shattered remains of what was utterly changed by the apocalypse of Spanish exploration and exploitation. I bet at the time no one thought that could ever happen.
What was your first contact with the Psychic Maelstrom?
What do you do to block out the constant pressure of the Maelstrom?
What line did you cross to survive?
What skill from the old life do you still put to good use?
Do you cling to the old laws or have you abandoned the idea of civilisation?
I’d suggest that abandoning outdated and no longer relevant laws is a sign of civilization, I.e., stoning people to death, sumptuary laws and most “blue laws”.
Meguey Baker +Dean Baker The only caveat on this is that there was an outside world that could help with rebuilding Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If the Apocalypse is everywhere, or mostly everwhere, then that’s a whole ‘nother story!
Agreed that it’s the long term unintended consequences that really bites us in the collective fundament.
Been toying around with the idea of a ‘quiet’ Apocalypse along the lines of the novel Vanishing Point (by Michaela Roessner), where some ninety, ninety-five percent of the world’s population just vanished overnight.
Marshall Miller Your comment about awesome 65 year olds got me thinking, what if the apocalypse also means no new people. Everyone is from before the apocalypse and everyone is old. Some things might need tweaking. See Greybeard by Brian Aldiss for inspiration.
Then again, young people have always been the apocalypse…
there would be a few things that would need to change. firstly the apocalypse would have to be more well-defined, what happened, whose fault was it. second, you may want to disallow the quarantine. also, the maelstrom will have to be alot more menacing or insidious, because it’s new, not something people have lived their whole lives with.
also, tonally, I wouldput a lot of NPC’s in with the goal of “fixing the world”, or rather, returning to the status quo of the past. people haven’t had time to move on.
speaking of which, add in NPC’s who’s drives come directly from the apocalypse. someone who clings (emotionally) to a dog or other pet, because it’s all they have left, a maelstomized child looking for it’s parents a man who is slowly wasting away because he lost everyone, someone who has never felt more alive.
it actually seems fun to watch some “modern sensibility” clash with the harsh new world
josh savoie The clash between “modern sensibility” and the harsh new world is a big part of why I’m considering this in the first place.