My most recent campaign of AW was pretty well focused, not by any intention, upon my own fears of being a parent. In the game there were three children, two human children and a monstrosity at the center of the earth waiting to be born. Added to that was the feeling I got that all of the PCs were also childlike, a Touchstone with a faith in death, a Faceless who joyed in murder, a Savyhead with a child’s belief that things could be fixed, and a Quarantine who was like some great newborn taking his first steps into a terrifying new world.
The theme built slowly over the sessions and were not something I could have intended if I had wanted to. It came from my subconscious lifted on the wave of shared mind. We worked our way backwards from the adults to the children, to the newborn, to the birth of a whole new world with terrible new gods to watch over it. The gods were parents who are like any parents, just tall children with no idea what to do with the responsibility they had been handed.
Watching the players fumble and struggle to do right by the children in their care, even though each one was more horribly alien than the last, and succeed in new and amazing ways was a pleasure.
Immediate collaborative fiction has a tendency to have those sort of dynamic themes, as you don’t have time to take things back after you react. Someone else is running with it, and it belongs to everyone.
This goes in my top twenty favorite AP reports for AW ever.