Apocalypse World: Hacking the Game

In a bleak and snow-choked mountain range, the group of samurai heroes had tracked the evil summoner to an abandoned castle. After fighting through his undead minions, the heroes finally confronted the summoner, but before they could defeat him, the villain fled through a magical portal. The heroes pursued, and found themselves in a strange new world. The world seemed to be inhabited by giants, with the heroes themselves now the size of mice. Mice that talked and had their own politics and problems. Mice that the samurai would become friends and allies with, in order to defeat a mutual threat - an army of rats, now led by an evil summoner.

When my friend came to me with the seed of this idea for a campaign he wanted to run, I was immediately excited. I love game design and hacking RPGs, and this premise was a great canvas to work with. We used the setting for Legend of the Five Rings as the origin of the samurai and their nemesis, choosing a number of its PC classes to modify and rewrite as playbooks for a Powered by the Apocalypse game.

Apocalypse World is a great game on its own, but one of the things I love most about it is that the creators encourage hacking the game and even publishing new games using its mechanics as an engine - Powered by the Apocalypse. Indeed, I have found the system very easy to hack. The moves system is modular such that it’s fairly straightforward to write new moves, whether one wants to create a custom move for a game of AW or to create an entire set of new moves for an original game using AW’s mechanics. AW 2nd edition even provides a framework for creating custom moves. The rules pertaining to the MC (Apocalypse World’s GM) are primarily narrative: principles to guide the MC in how to run the game, and MC moves that are actions taken directly through the game’s narrative. For instance, the MC never need announce that they’re using the move Put Someone in a Spot - they narrate the situation: “you can hear someone approaching your hiding place, it’s Chucks and Riven from the gang that’s hunting you. They’ll be on top of you in a moment. What do you do?” Thus, changing the MC’s mechanics is a matter of providing different principles to follow or narrative actions to use.

I’ve hacked AW on several levels. For the Samurai and Mice game, I changed the structure of the PCs’ stats to the Five Rings, wrote new basic moves and remapped all of the moves to the new stats, created new playbooks with unique moves, and new equipment and tags lists. I wrote new agendas and principles for the GM. We ended up with a game that’s barely recognizable as Apocalypse World. I would still call it a hack because I kept systems like history and harm almost without change; one of my rules of hacking is don’t do more work than you have to. If it’s already done and it works for your game, focus on the changes that you need to make to run the game you want to. Other hacks I’ve done have been less extreme. In one game I had my players decide on a shared resource or facility that belonged to all of the players and I created a set of moves and rules about how it was used - they chose a rift into the world’s psychic maelstrom, so that game got wild. I’ve also done hacking on as granular a level as writing new moves specific to the PC they were for, based on what had happened in the game.

After the Fire isn’t quite as extreme a hack as Samurai and Mice - it is still definitely Apocalypse World, but with substantial changes. I’m making incremental changes to the MC’s agendas and principles, but even incremental changes here will be significant in-game. I’m replacing all of the playbooks with custom designs that are geared more towards my idea of a game about community and survival in the apocalypse. For these playbooks, the Special Move trigger from AW - “if you and another character have sex” - has been replaced with “when you break bread with another character,” making the use of the Special Move more focused on community building. I’m adding new basic moves and new custom moves that will be global mechanics, e.g. the Exposure move that compares your character’s warmth (from equipment or shelter) to the environment’s cold when a character is caught out or the settlement has to weather a storm. I’m dividing the settlement’s inhabitants into factions, each defined by a primary drive that says what the members want the settlement to do. This is in addition to the drives that people have from their threat types, which are more individual desires; the factions are about what a group of people want their community to look like.

In hacking a game, you’re focused on the changes you’re making, but it can be just as important to note what you definitely want to keep the same. For AtF, I went over the various pieces of Apocalypse World and analyzed how they fit into the game I want to run. The stats, the basic moves, and the harm system are big building blocks of the game that define how things work and that I want to keep for AtF. Likewise, I looked at the MC moves as a group and individually, and found that I want to keep them just as they are. And while I made tweaks to the MC’s agendas and principles, I kept many of the principles unaltered, and I kept the agenda that I feel to be the heart of Apocalypse World and what makes it a unique kind of game: play to find out what happens. Some of the playbook moves and mechanics came over too, unaltered or slightly tweaked. The playbooks themselves however are not direct analogs of AW’s playbooks, so some moves landed in places that might be a little unexpected.

In future posts, I’ll track the journey of creating After the Fire as an Apocalypse World hack. In the meantime, I wish you the best in your own RPG hacking adventures!