Author: Patrick Henry Downs

Had a fun session of Apocalypse World this week with lots of hard moves and looking through crosshairs at people. The best hard moves all came from my Maestro d’ this week as I would ask him stuff like “Well, either Spector is going to set off a booby trap here or something bad is going to happen to your Arcade, which is it?” He never picked his Arcade, it was great!

I have decided to adapt Patrick Stuart ‘s Sonic Pigs into a custom threat for my Apocalypse World game. (http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2013/01/egg-dead-and-sonic-pigs.html)

In the City by the Sea slaves are forced to tend the sonic pig pits, feeding them and corralling them until they have grown fat from sucking on semi-nutrient mud. They are more than just a food source though, when the slavers want to demoralize a populace they will release the runts and mutated babies of their litters around the perimeter of a town they want to subjugate, herding the pigs toward the populace with sticks and whips while protecting themselves with earplugs or scavenged headphones. The sonic pigs will search for food amongst a town’s refuse but react with terror when confronted by crowds or loud noises.

When you scare a sonic pig, roll+sharp. On a 10+, pick two. On a 7-9, pick three. If you are deafened or have a way to cancel sound, then pick one less:

– you shit yourself (you are +messy and prone to +disease if you don’t clean yourself)

– you are dizzy (take -1ongoing until you get +far away)

– you are disorientated ( act under fire or else stay where you are clutching your head)

– you are filled with despair (the MC holds 1, they can spend this hold to prevent you from gaining experience)

On a miss, all four are true, even if you are deafened – the vibrations from the sound rattle your bones and make your intestines hum.

Awesome artwork by Logan Knight 

https://33.media.tumblr.com/3359e431d6dd92bab70649c79d96df9a/tumblr_n9a7u5biEB1qj9jfoo1_500.jpg

If the apocalypse happens within the next two months then The Gecko would probably be a very good playbook for it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/07/24/there-is-a-lizard-sex-satellite-floating-in-space-and-russia-no-longer-has-it-under-control

My players haven’t been using HX very much at all, so on the next session’s love letters I’ve included this move on all but one of them

Howling & Haranguing: whenever you roll+HX to help or interfere with anyone, you get +1 xp.

Last night we played Apocalypse World using the Harm move in the opposite way as written. That is, the results for a miss and a 10+ were swapped. I’m writing about this here because Vincent Baker  asked me to report how it went, but the thread where he mentioned this has been closed to further commenting.

We found that the Harm move didn’t feel very different but complications were more frequent. Only three PCs suffered harm during the session and most of that was either 1- or 0-harm. However, one PC got attacked by a gang and suffered 3-harm and the Harm move, when swapped like this, becomes very beneficial to the PC getting grievously injured because with a Harm+3 roll you would now have a 50% chance of getting the “miss” result, as written you would only get this result on a roll of 2 or 3.

The real purpose, I think, of the Harm move is to include a complication to the PCs’ narrative positioning, and by swapping the results it means that PCs who would get seriously hurt can potentially have their harm lowered at the cost of a complication. As an MC, I thought it worked really well and it felt like a better use of the harm move from my side of the table.

After two months away from the game a few of us are getting together to revive our last Apocalypse World game. I’ve decided that two months have passed in the game world as well, which means the local trading post has had it’s threat countdown filled and the whole place went to hell in a handbasket. A custom move I came up with for returning characters is

Look For Old Friends: when you look for an old contact while you’re in town describe who you’re looking for and why, then roll+sharp.

On a 10+, they’re still alive and you find them (or know where they are).

On a 7-9, choose 1:

• you don’t find them but you learn that they’re still alive somewhere

• you find their body/grave

On a miss, you have no idea where they are or if they’re still alive, and somebody (not necessarily a good or bad person) notices your interest.

–

I’m writing a game, not an Apocalypse World hack in strictest terms, but I did write an Agenda for the GM:

• Keep the people real with real problems, real goals, and real lives that continue in the absence of the players.

• Keep the world strange, mysterious, and deadly.

• Fill the players’ character’s lives with danger and opportunity.

• Play to explore the definition of science fantasy, in any and every way possible.