After the Fire: Getting Started

After a few weeks of design work, my Apocalypse World hack “After the Fire” is in a playable state and I’m playtesting it with my weekly gaming group. Today we’ll look at some of the early design decisions that have shaped the game so far.

At first, I had the idea that there must be a PC Hardholder, a character that runs the town. The Hardholder’s player makes defining choices about the town, such as how many people it has, how well-defended, what the people on the whole do for a living. As I got into the idea of running After the Fire as a hack of AW, one of the first changes that I wanted to make was to make the town itself a character, similar to the crew in Blades in the Dark. To this end, I changed the term that I used for the town from hardhold to settlement, and I put some thought into how to evoke the settlement as a character. In Blades in the Dark, the players choose a type of crew, such as assassins or smugglers, which sets several parameters for the crew before they make other choices. I like this starting point and decided that the first choice the players would make would be a type of settlement. My types were about location and nature; the first two I thought of were a fortified compound and a nomadic camp. With this as a starting point, I came up with two more possibilities, a sprawling farm and a ruined refinery. I would tie several parameters for the settlement to the type, including how well-defended it is and what resources and production it has access to.

With the type chosen, most of the rest of the town’s parameters could be set using a modified version of the Hardholder’s list of choices. Now it was time to design playbooks. I went through several ideas, but the first ones to really stick with me were the Captain, a character that leads a work crew and directs building and other projects in the town; the Hammer, a heavy who keeps the law and can raise a posse for frontier justice; and the Stitcher, a medic who can create a Stitched Abomination, a sort of Frankenstein monster. Of the various other ideas I had, I chose to design the Scout, a traveler and survivor; the Oracle, a character with unique interactions with the psychic maelstrom that focus on predicting the future; the Junker, a salvager and mechanic who can jury-rig a machine to do something other that its usual function at the risk of breaking it permanently; and the Hearth, a more community-focused take on the Maestro D’, a character that owns an establishment in town that can provide food, shelter, and safety to those in need.

Coming back to the town, it was time to deal with factions. Even when I first conceived After the Fire as Apocalypse World out of the box and RAW (rules as written), I knew I was going to divide the settlement into factions, groups of residents united in how they wanted the settlement to be run. This is partly because I want to reinforce the sense of the game as one of community and survival, and partly to raise the stakes of murder so my players won’t see it as an easy solution to whatever problem they have with an NPC. Anybody you harm in the town is part of a faction, so the consequences of dealing with NPCs by simply disposing of them become a serious consideration.

With factions, again I started out with a couple of ideas and grew from there. Clearly a militant faction should be an option, as well as a survivalist faction. As these seemed to be good fits for the first two settlement types I had conceived of, a fortified compound and a nomadic camp, I decided that each settlement type should have a faction tied to it. If the nomadic camp is chosen, there is always a survivalist faction, etc. Now I needed a few more options, as I figure the optimal number of factions for a medium-sized settlement is four, and I want to offer choices. Six seemed a good number to work with. In creating the factions, I started with their main drive, their shared priority for the settlement. The Militant faction was easy: “take what is ours by right.” The Survivalists started with “move the settlement” or “maintain a mobile settlement,” but that limited them to only being happy in a nomadic camp and doesn’t have the prepper/doomer vibe that I felt they should have. I wanted to keep the factions’ drives pretty straightforward, so the Survivalists’ drive became “find new sources of supplies and resources.” From there I added Isolationists (“keep strangers out”), Expansionists (“expand our sphere of influence”), Spiritualists (“enforce a moral code”), and Industrialists (“increase the settlement’s production capacity”). I was looking for a group of drives that would create tension between factions, but would avoid two factions having directly opposite desires.

I wanted to flesh out the factions, so I added some detail. Each got 4 “likes” and 4 “dislikes,” all based on the faction’s drive, that would help guide how the faction would respond to various actions a player might take or changes that could occur during the campaign. I went on to describe a couple of things each faction owned and a couple of things they could do for or offer to a PC in good standing. For instance, the Militants have a small gang, and they will happily aid an ally with enthusiastic violence or building fortifications. Finally, I wrote down what the faction would likely do to cause trouble if they are vexed, and what measures they might take if desperate. For the Survivalists, causing trouble leads to them hoarding supplies, and if they are desperate they will attempt to lead an exodus from the settlement. 

I’ve touched on how I changed the MC’s rules in other posts, and this is where some of the biggest changes to AtF live. They’re behind the scenes, but they change the mood of the game and how the MC is to run it. Here, I started with reading the MC’s Agendas, Principles, and Moves, and assessing whether each one felt right in After the Fire or whether they should be changed.

Starting with the Agendas, I feel that play to find out what happens is foundational to the storygaming style and needs to be there. Make Apocalypse World seem real and make the player characters’ lives not boring set the tone for AW, but these I felt I could tweak slightly to reflect the style of game I want AtF to be, so they became make the world of After the Fire seem bleak and dangerous, and keep the players’ characters always on the edge of survival. They’re pretty close to the original Agendas but a little more specific to AtF.

I expected a little more change to the Principles, which guide the MC in “how” to achieve the “what” that is the Agendas. Barf forth apocalyptica became evoke a bleak and hostile world. Address yourself to the characters, not the players is something I find to be sound advice in most RPGs, and it stayed unaltered. Make your move, but misdirect, and make your move, but never speak its name speak to how the MC applies the mechanics of the moves, and I needed to keep these as written. Look through crosshairs is an important piece of Apocalypse World: everything in the game that the MC owns (anything that isn’t a player character) can be destroyed. I put a lot of consideration into this principle, and in the end I inverted it to target the players’ characters. The world of AtF is bleak and dangerous; the characters should never feel completely safe. This principle became see the danger in everything. Respond with fuckery and intermittent rewards is great in AW where you’re always creating a charged situation for the PCs to deal with. In AtF, the situation is always charged by virtue of the setting: you’re going to die, your settlement will be wiped out by the cold, unless you can find a way to hold on. This principle became two AtF principles: give them their wins, because they’re going to need them; but also, remind them that death is always at their shoulder. I kept the remaining principles unaltered, as each felt right for AtF as much as for AW.

Reading over the MC moves from AW, I didn’t find anything that I needed to change to fit AtF, so the moves are the same. The MC moves as written give me a broad scope of actions I can use to keep the story moving. They facilitate one of my favorite parts of Apocalypse World: failing a roll is never a dead-end. Using a move always goes somewhere, just not always where the player intended.

With the foundation for After the Fire laid out, next time we’ll get into the specifics of playbook design. Until then, I hope your life is not boring as you play to find out what happens!