In AW, how do you handle the psychic maelstrom? I’d love to hear examples beyond “it’s just there, no one knows why”. What caused it? What form does it take? Things like that.
In AW, how do you handle the psychic maelstrom?
In AW, how do you handle the psychic maelstrom?
It’s one of the nifty things that the players can make up whole cloth.
I’ve run games where the maelstrom take the form of the ghost of Elvis. In an other it was a all powerful cartoon Skeletor.
What ever it is, it should be weird. The stranger the better.
Ask your players those exact questions. “What caused it? What form does it take?” Serious, when a player opens their brain for the first time, I ask them “What’s that like? What does the psychic maelstrom look to you?”
Some more notable answers:
It’s endless water, kind of the reverse of the real world; I’m on a log and I have to paddle with my hands to get anywhere.
It’s like a 2D chalkboard and there’s constant screeching
I’m in a garden full of spitting sentient plants and thorns
It’s a giant grey void with neon signs for no reason
Y’know how subway maps look? It’s like that, with this constant web of different colors between all the minds that connect to the maelstrom and I’m like a spider running along those lines.
As to what caused it, play to find out! Rogue satellites, the spirits of the mass extinction, a snap with reality that is contagious, the miasma left by toxins in the water and soil and air, a nuclear fuel dump that gained sentience – whatever!
In a game set amid the aftermath of an alien invasion, it was the echo of the telepathic network of the Overlords. It had a hum and a hiss to it, and a feeling it would be unwise to delve too deeply.
I get that it can be decided in game by the players, I was curious what form(s) it’s taken in your games.
I think the normal approach is that the MC doesn’t answer any of these questions. If someone accesses the Maelstrom, the MC asks the character what it looks like ‘to them’. So that every character at the table ends up having a different version of the maelstrom. As for why its there, that’s not normally something that ever would come up. Are the characters going to forsake all their normal goals and go on a scientific mission to try and find out how the maelstrom formed? That could be a pretty interesting AW game I suppose, but definitely not one I’ve seen happen.
It’s the voices you hear if you listen to the howling wind, which have always existed, it’s just that there’s a lot more howling wind in the perpetual winter.
It’s the consciousness of a great tree whose roots spread out under the entire known world. Many things that look like separate entities are just sprouts from that tree, and it can see, hear and speak through them.
It’s the spirit world of an old mystic tradition, surging back with a vengeance now that the modern ways of thinking that suppressed it have collapsed.
It’s the Herd, the telepathic hive mind of about a hundred probably-mutant cows. If you want to speak to the Herd, you have to make the cows recognize you as one of them.
It’s an unstable augmented reality network left over from Before. People can still access the network, but it’s become so corrupted that navigating it is a risky business.
It’s the darkness from which all things came and to which all things shall return, and now that the world has ended we’re close enough to the darkness to peer into it. Naturally, it peers back.
Sebastian Baker has a probably more useful answer here 🙂
The Maelstrom itself has actually been entirely undefined in a few games, though mostly just shorter ones.
Some notable examples from when it has been defined, include:
The violent oppression of heavy and ever present rain;
The thing that now is where the sky should be, the thing that approaches when you open up to it, the thing you should never look at or stay in the light of;
The feeling of love.
Interestingly, these are also all very closely tied to the apocalypses of their respective games. I wonder if that’s universal…
However, what I’ve noticed as being very consistent (over a number of different groups) is that the way each character opens their brain is a very personal thing, acting as a sort of expression of their inner self.
In our game its an actual storm that somehow was a cause or catalyst of the apoc. It changes things from one thing to another (like water into gasoline last session). It can be manipulated by some and opening oneself to it is a very personal thing that is shaded by your personality.