So here is my crazy apocalypse world story idea o am trying out today with players. I love the idea, but I also think it’s tropy as hell and also really mysogenistic…yet not? I can’t tell if this idea is good, bad, awful, or just plain perfect tropy apocalypse. I need to say it though out loud so I can know if I should.
My 6 year old daughter wrote names for our AW campaign she wrote one named baby. I decided to make baby an enemy handhold without thinking much more since they never met baby yet. Then a psychic teller told our hero team that they need to go to Baby secretly to stop a warm between the two holds.
Then game ended and I thought about what you do game 2 and here is the crazy F’d up apocalypse I came up with.
Baby is a malevolent demon in the maelstrom (possibly Lucifer) and it communicates to our world as an unborn child inside the hardhold that is his mother known as the Reverend mother. The Reverend mother’s hold is a hospital and he rules it from the maternity/labor and delivery ward where they can always keep her and Baby safe. As long as the Reverend mother is pregnant baby speaks to her and is actually the real hard hold. When Baby is born The entity leaves the mother and is inside a baby. Since the baby can’t communicate the hold is defenseless at this time and the Reverend mother does the best she can to rule and protect. When the Reverend mother gets pregnant again the entity of baby returns to her and Baby can begin advising the hold again. All of Reverend mother’s children are connected to baby psychically. This cycle will then end when the Reverend mother’s first born is old enough to impregnate her so baby impregnates baby and then the child born will be the Antichrist god king child when it grows up. Until then the Reverend mother keeps searching for eligible suitors to be the seed of baby so that all he children will one day be princesses and princes that rule the Apocalypse once their King is born.
…..
So I think is idea is super crazy totally apocalypse and so much friggin weird I love it. Meanwhile I hate that it has so many tropes against women it because I try to avoid those in games. Yet there it is my super crazy convoluted disturbing hold.
‘Play to find out: there’s a certain discipline you need in order to MC Apocalypse World. You have to commit yourself to the game’s fiction’s own internal logic and causality, driven by the players’ characters. You have to open yourself to caring what happens, but when it comes time to say what happens, you have to set what you hope for aside…’
The fun thing is that the PCs have no idea if that is true or not. Mom could just be batshit crazy. Getting the lore to the players might be tricky, perhaps some blabber-mouth cultist will spill the beans.
In ‘play to find out’, it would be a hoot if the PCs in order to find peace have to find a suitable mate for the Reverend Mother.
Oh see they went better, Todd Zircher one of them went weird in front of her and had a talk with abby in the psychic maelstrom. He gave the two fo them a choice either our female player would be the next host for baby. Or the male character would be the father of the next iteration of baby. BY the end they said, yes I will be the next father in a few months. Then they left looked at each other and said “we are done, we are leaving, we are getting our of here.” Since the male player is a driver he took their car drove off and now the characters are starting a new life far away form all of this. Apparently a place they made up thats is run by Grammar Nazi’s whoa re actual nazi’s. (I have to think of what that looks like)