Author: Clarity Flowers (Cerisa)

After all this time, I’ve finally pulled together a group to play some Apocalypse world. I’ve written out a summary of our first session with some pretty pictures! Check out the awesome things Foxtrot’s player has done with his playbook.

http://serssa.tumblr.com/post/124304287360/apocalypse-world

I’m currently looking towards sharing my *world game with interested parties in the community, and I realized that Letter-sized (8.5×11) playbooks may not be the ideal you folks out there who don’t live in the USA, and seeing as how my playbooks involve a brochure-style fold that gets pretty ugly if the paper’s the wrong size, I thought I’d check in.

For the non-USA people out there: wWhen you’re printing out character sheets for a game, what is your ideal paper size?

I’m currently in the process of writing up more in-depth discussions of these, but I thought I’d share the Agendas and Principles of Adventure World (my heroic fantasy *w hack) as they currently stand.

AGENDAS

-Portray a world larger than life

-Help the players make a story worth telling

-Play to find out what happens

PRINCIPLES

-Embrace cliché

-Fill every corner with wonder and danger

-Address the characters, not the players

-Make everything relevant

-Skip over the boring stuff

-Use “the plot” as a standard unit of measurement

-Never speak the name of your move

-Make the characters important

-Let the players tell the story

-Make magic create more problems than it solves

-Be a fan of the characters

-Ask questions and build on the answers

-Assume nothing

Six days of Adventure World, in summary:

Day 1: The Hero comes up with a sash that grants him herculean proportions when he uses it. The Scoundrel forms a personality that revolves around an ever-shifting identity. The Witch is cursed by dark tainted power, but is not necessarily evil. The party ends up straddled between two points in time when a city thought to be lost to the desert sands turns out to be somehow connected to a present-day city, and the heroes journey into the past, looking for a spell capable of draining the evil sorcerer-lich emperor of his powers.

Day 2: The Hero’s Artifact is a bow that slowly steals the life of anyone pierced by its arrows over the course of months, but seems to be tied to horrid dreams of a demon that grows stronger with every day. The Empire of Flame, on a warpath after its princess absconded away with her lover, becomes the major “villain” as it destroys the city that the heroes begin in. As they flee, the Witch comes up with the spell “conjure escape”, which creates a means of escape somehow tied to the component sacrificed. He uses a spyglass, but accidentally summons a galleon inside of a relatively smaller trade river. Finding themselves trapped by the other boats in the river, he used the spell again, this time with an eagle feather. The boat then grew massive wings and took off into the air, but in the process of making sure everyone was in one place, the Veteran got his hand cut on the arrows the of the Hero’s bow, beginning the life-draining process. For the second half the adventure, the adventurer’s stage a large-scale rebellion in the Veteran’s once-glorious-now-conquered homeland, toppling a symbol of the Empire of Flame’s power with a massive “water mech” and the Veteran undergoing a sort of batman-style “masked warrior” transformation.

Day 3: The Hero’s artifact calls upon the god of void and shadow, which ties into The Nowhere, the centerpiece of the Sage’s Grim Portent. After a fight with some cultists and a strange void monster goes a bit messier than the expected, the Sage summoned a spirit of Travel, and asked it to take them to a place of healing. Unfortunately, spirits of travel take you not where you expect, but where you need to be, so they ended up in a roadside sanctuary in the far north, where the Veteran used to serve in his order to fight off the rebels. This sanctuary was both on fire and under attack from the rebels at the moment of the transportation, and so a second, back-to-back fight ensued, involving the unintentional summoning of another void monster and the discovery of a golden needle and thread with the power to mend things together.

Day 4: The first day with more than three players, and the introduction of the Trust system. The end result was incredible. We had the Sage, who had a stuffy authoritarian attitude. She learned that the return of the Thorn Queen was imminent, which mattered quite a bit to the Veteran, who was a walking suit of intelligent armor that lost his occupying paladin in the battle to defeat the Thorn Queen the first time, 100 years ago. Also connected was the Hero, whose sword with the ability to cut away shadows was once carried by another one of these old heroes.  To make things more complicated, the Scoundrel turned out to be a bit of a klepto, and the Witch was a seven-year-old girl under the care of the Hero, who happened to be possessed by a flesh-eating and completely horrific demon. She just wanted to have friends, but also to kill everyone and consume their bodies. The two main encounters were against a vine-kraken made out of plant life in the ancient lost city of pirate-slavers, and an escape from a raging mob after the Witch decided that murder was a good punishment for not giving a good deal for a night’s rest in an inn. With this many players and the constant flow of “get into danger -> get rescued by ally -> repeat” the group dynamic was outright electric. We quickly started framing scenes in terms of TV shows, with hilarious visual gags and wonderful tension between everyone involved.

Day 5: This was going to be a day off, by my friend’s little brother and his friend ended up wanting to play, so we ended up with a weird and strangely-tragic story of an anti-Hero with Living Armor capable of controlling the living and dead flesh of others, a scoundrel who owed the Hero his life, and a Vassal who served an order of Time Police. The adventure involved a raid on a surprisingly well-defended bandit camp (including hill giants and dragons), and involved hilarious time travel incidents where the Vassal would travel back to discrete moments in the past in order to set up advantageous situations in the present. The situation ended with the hero failing his thread of “I will protect my friends” as his two allies were terribly wounded in a dark cave as he engaged in badass dragon-on-dragon fights. By the time he tried to help his allies, his only solution was to use his Artifact to mend the wounds, but its corrupting influence twisted his intent, turning the other two into horrid monstrosities, perversions of their past selves.

Day 6, part 1: We continued the session from Day 3. The players decided that it was snowing, so I built off of that to create a situation where natural travel was impossible. They countered by inventing the “path moose”, a strange create with an antler on only one side of its head, that it drags through the snow. So, of course, as they followed the trail of the path moose, they encountered the mythic Elder Path Moose, with two massive snowplow-like antlers and a body nine times the length of any man. This is also where we saw our first Slayer, a man who hunts anything an everything in hopes of turning a profit. The situation escalated as the lake that the Elder Path Moose stood upon shattered, and an even more massive lake monster arose, while a pack of “path wolves” (they follow the trail of the path moose to hunt) came up from behind. It turns out that giving the players a move to just make up facts about the world can make for a very, very weird (and hilarious) world.

Day 6, part 2: one of the people involved in the earlier session left, and a new one joined, so we started another batch of characters, which ended up being my favorite game out of all of them. We had the Slayer, a grizzled monster hunter who kills werewolves, vampires, and all the like; the Vassal, a manipulative spirit-binder who sacrificed souls to her deity in exchange for powers over life and death; the Witch, a charming-but-terrifying (think River Tam) sorceress with an uncontrollable sense of curiosity, a chipper attitude, and a Mr. Hyde-style evil personality that is slowly gaining power; and the Sage, an ancient all-powerful archmage who thought he was finally getting a chance at eternal sleep, before being woken up hundreds of years later by the Vassal and the Witch’s chaotic magics. His body long gone, he now occupies all the remains – his skull, hung on a chain and used as a glorified lantern. The world of this game was quickly established to be the super-campy monster-filled kind of setting that we see from stuff like Van Helsing, Hansel and Gretel, or MTG’s world of Innistrad, complete with a spooky castle on the mountaintop that are always surrounded by lightning storms, shrouded in bats, and silhouetted by the moon.

Every session invited a whole realm of stories that could potentially follow, and the characters always ended up incredible resonant. The game mechanics really did lend themselves to telling our own versions of the stories that we’ve all grown up reading and loving. I can’t wait to play it more, and also to get it to a state where I can share it with the world at large.

So, I’ve been working on a heroic fantasy hack of the *W engine for a while now, and because a week of my free time was conveniently lining up with me having a playable draft of the game ready to present, I asked my good friend Grady Wright to wrangle together some people together to run a playtest. He decided to one-up me on that, and gave me six straight days of playtesting, for which I am eternally grateful. A public “beta” release should be coming sometime soon (all the GM documents are entirely in my head, as I was prioritizing getting the players able to play), but in the meantime I thought I’d give a short introduction of the system, and share some of the highlights from this past week.

Adventure World is a game about stories. You know the ones. There are good guys, and bad guys, epic action sequences, situational comedy, and a band of disparate heroes who must learn put aside their differences to achieve their dreams. The currently-existing Archetypes are as follows (3 more are planned, but not nailed-down in concept yet):

The Hero, with a powerful artifact of the player’s description and a tendency to get thrown into dramatic plots. The Hero is the only playbook to start with a +3 to the MOXY stat, which allows them to leap into incredible danger and come out with nary a scratch, assuming the dice cooperate.

The Sage, who has a terrible Grim Portent (of the player’s design!) that will usually become the centerpiece of the plot. The Sage’s role is to guide others into doing what they need, while occasionally resorting to a variety of very powerful — but very dangerous — magics.

The Scoundrel, who has a nasty reputation and a pocketful of dirty tricks ranging from lockpicks to hidden weapons to second identities.

The Slayer, who likes to stick sharp things into other things. The Slayer is the ultimate killer who carries (count ’em) one massive oversized weapon, two practical hand weapons, two strange-yet-useful specialized weapons, and one emergency backup weapon.

The Vassal, who has made a bargain with a being of great power, be it benevolent diety or terrible demon. Unlike the other magic-users, the Vassal must first ask for their power, and the price they pay may end up exceeding any potential reward.

The Veteran, who is too old for this shit. Carrying a symbol of what they have lost, be it a missing eye or a broken heart, the Veteran frequently gets dragged into the antics of their less experienced allies.

The Witch, who dabbles in dark and dangerous magic. The Witch has a classic spell list, but the play gets to write the entire list from scratch, with the Research a Spell move creating a wide variety of strange, wondrous, and delightfully complication-causing magical powers. Just make sure to keep an eye on the Witch, because if they dig too deep, they just may be swallowed by the darkness.

Some interesting new mechanical ideas include Threads, written-down personal goals that serve as a way for the players to create their own Fronts which the GM then challenges, and Trust, which is mechanically identical to Hx, except the systems that interact with it create a mechanical emphasis on heroes slowly learning to come to terms with their differences as they all have their “Big Damn Heroes” moments saving each others’ skins. Another interesting experiment is the Fatigue/Exhaustion mechanic, in which heroes are slowly worn down by all the action and excitement, and the Wounds/Conditions system that ties into this by causing a wounded character to wear themselves out faster by pushing themselves too hard.

Since this is already a pretty long post, I’ll take a break and come back with highlights reel in a separate post.

So, this is mostly likely a precursor to another, larger post on the same topic, but for now I’m just looking for a little bit of help.

I’m currently designing a mechanic for my high fantasy *World hack that fills a design space somewhat similar to Hx, Strings, and Bonds, and have hit somewhat of a dead end. So, I figure it’s time for me to do some research and look at as many different solutions to this problem as possible, instead of just stumbling around in the dark. That said, what games (and what structures therein) do you guys recommend I explore? I’m looking for mechanical representations of interpersonal relationships, as well as ideas of personal goals/character development/individual subplots.

I’m pretty new to the more ‘storygame-y’ side of tabletop RPGs, since I come from a D&D background, so I’d be pleased to receive even the most obvious suggestions. Thanks!