I've wanted to play and/or run Apocalypse World for a very long time. There were several challenges, however. First, it's not really a game made for one-shots, which is my usual way of experimenting with new systems. Then, there were the Special Moves/Sex Moves which gave me pause. Finally, I found the implied setting difficult to relate to. I've engaged with some of the related media, but something about it just didn't click. I especially couldn't get my head around what the Psychic Maelstrom meant.
Thankfully, several things changed for me. First, Vincent Baker, the co-creator of the system, shared how he ran the game in convention one-shot slots. That gave me some confidence that such an experiment will go better than my attempt at Sorcerer. Second, I kind of understood the purpose of the Sex Moves - to express how having sex can change relationships between people, and this is an attempt to express mechanically how any given playbook's character relates to this kind of intimacy - and also took to heart that it's possible to simply not engage with that subsystem, especially in a one-shot. Finally, I watched cult classic The Warriors. The striking starting premise, the almost absurd theming of the various gangs, and the repeated intervention by the mysterious radio announcer providing a kind of Greek chorus to the events, all in the decrepit landscape of 1980s New York, came together into a premise I thought I could work with. So I took the time to read the rulebook through, spent a few years regaining my courage, and finally, last Wednesday, set up a successful one-shot, although one that has given me a lot of food for thought about how to run the next one better. I will probably go into the details further when I've run it a few more times, but I do want to explain the basic concept now.
The implied setting of AW is a wasteland with a few points of interest. The wasteland is arid, sometimes diseased or mutated. There's some kind of weirdness at the edge of thought and also at the geographical border that is mystical and/or psionic.
In Apocalypse City, I replaced these with the wreckage of a City, a barely concealed stand-in for New York City, specifically how it looked in some media: The Warriors, especially, as well as Streets of Fire, and Escape from New York. I feel like in quite a few films in the 1970s and '80s, cities like New York and Los Angeles were presented not just as victims of an economic downturn and white flight, but as downright post-apocalyptic. The Warriors in their namesake film walk around a ruined urban landscape sparsely populated by gangs. Remnants of the past are shown, and sometimes used, like public buildings, the subways, etc, but will clearly never be rebuilt as they once where. Street of Fire provides a similar perspective. Escape from New York is supposedly futuristic (for the time - 1997 is in the past for us, of course), but the issues and characters who appear in this Big Apple are very much creatures of the 1980s. The Terminator's LA also bears these themes, even if we ignore the more literal apocalypse of the future that the protagonists are trying to avert.
As for replacing the Maelstrom: the radio DJ in The Warriors knows too much, and puts everyone on edge. The idea of spooky radio appeals to me, especially since I've sampled old-time radio dramas teeming with horror and mystery - see, for example, my October 2022 project centering on The Weird Circle. It felt like a much more approachable weirdness than the Psychic Maelstrom. Spooky television could also be a good fit, especially as presented in Stay Tuned. My rationale was that the people who fled to the suburbs, and to whom media in the 70s and 80s often catered, effectively left the City entirely behind, and the radio and television broadcasts they generate are so surreal and disconnected from urban reality that they might as well be some kind of Psychic Maelstrom from beyond.
Of course, this change in setting would suggest some mechanical adjustments. So far I have not gone as far as to actually hack the game - I simply avoided playbooks that are not a good fit for this different type of weirdness, and made sure to have a starting situation and list of potential threats that were in line with this theme. But if it continues to work well, I might have no choice but to either change some playbooks or downright replace them with my own, and possibly add some more mechanical differences. I am also wondering whether I will manage to garner enough interest for a fully-fledge campaign, where AW is really supposed to shine. Regardless, I am happy to finally be back to running games, and putting some of my role-playing ideas to practice.
