Tim Groth – Powered by the Apocalypse G+ Archives

Stuff that players might have or find.

Stuff that players might have or find. I can imagine a lot of transition artifacts, attempts by those in the midst of the apocalypse to survive and to improvise.

http://lifehacker.com/recycle-plastic-bags-into-a-strong-waterproof-rope-wit-1473108535

Has anyone expanded Murderous Ghosts to run with more than two people?

Has anyone expanded Murderous Ghosts to run with more than two people? I could see one explorer with many murderous ghost players, but figuring out who does what on the murderous ghost side would be key to having it run smoothly.

The second session of Black Stars Rise went well.

The second session of Black Stars Rise went well. The game runs great. In this session the characters found that pictures of halls in the building show extra doors. The reporter got the artist to sketch a section of wall the librarian bashed through the outer surface of.

Instead of sketching the patchwork of different wall types under the drywall, the artist ended up sketching a wall full of doors without realizing it. He then decide to try opening a door in the picture. It worked. He failed to keep it together and perfectly drew Other Me. The door was the door to his other self’s office where he had his medical practice.

The other characters went in and spoke with him there. The reporter’s babble insanity meant he could only speak coherently to he doctor or everyone else. When they exited the office, he became the artist again.

It got crazier from there, even after they shutdown the problems in the apartment building it had spread elsewhere. The artist has a video of the building unfolding like a flower into many different possible versions of itself. They are now off to save people lost elsewhere.

I ran Black Stars Rising last night, and it worked out damn well.

I used the Renovation set-up, where all of the players lived in a newly renovated apartment building (some apartments built out of a warehouse in the shitty upstate New York town of Colemanfeld). Everyone jumped into investigating the night time banging together, each bringing an interesting spin based on their playbooks (the Artist does multimedia projects and wanted creepy footage, while the Priest worried that someone was locked up and human trafficking was going on).

The injury system was pitch perfect. The Artist fell down a ladder into an underground space because he tried to climb down with a camera in one hand and a flashlight in the other. I injured his Study move, and he staggered around disoriented until he figured to go to the ER the next day.

We reached the point by the end of the session where players were rolling to Keep it Together without being prompted, and the Reporter totally lost it. His Keep it Together is injured (and he’ll violently lash out potentially), and he’s picked up a madness. Just because they keep hearing and seeing the same phrase over and over again.

I gave a player a heaping amount of drugs in my play-by-post game. Now I’m thinking of the drug moves

When you take dream tar, you feel great and getting off your blissed out ass wrecks the whole thing. Getting into gear is acting under fire, with the fire being just slumping deeper into your disordered and delightful thoughts.

While dream tar is in your system whenever you are in a situation charged enough that you need to act under fire, you also automatically open up your brain. Dream tar stays in your system for about an hour per pinch consumed. Consult with your MC if you have a dream tar trip lasting more than four hours.

If you get hooked on dream tar mark XP.

If you are hooked on dream tar anyone offering you some counts as having a 10+ hit on manipulating you.

Does anybody have experience with, and advice for, running Apocalypse World one on one?

I think that Hx with NPCs would be something to include in that case–if only to use the Hx options–but other than that, I’m not sure if anything needs tweaking.

A random question about your Apocalypse Worlds.

How much physical weirdness is there?

There’s a lot of psychic weirdness baked in, given how Weird works. However except for some color examples, physical mutations and so forth aren’t really present.

Do you have much physical weirdness in your games? By which I mean mutants, bizarre physical effects of Weird uses, things that may impair your apparent humanity if you encounter it (like other post-apoc games).

Author: Tim Groth