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I'd say you succeeded. Your alternate elf cultures are cool and interesting. I run a lot of Apocalypse World games, both one-shots at cons (or when I'm play-testing hacks or re-skins) and as campaigns. I don't remember where I heard the original suggestion, but I use the "adjectives" method whenever starting a game: I ask each player, "Give me an adjective or word that comes to mind when you think 'apocalypse.'" I'll also generally give the table some way to individually or collectively veto a word such that if someone says "Zombies!!!" and all the other players groan because zombies have been done to death we can do something else. It can also help avoid subjects that one or more of the players find uncomfortable, though to date I've never had anybody do anything that would invoke this. Anyway, once I have the adjectives, I quickly hammer out a conceptual world where they all fit together. I describe this to the players in broad strokes, just to set the tone. During character creation (especially during the Hx round, where the history of the relationships between the PCs are established), I ask a bunch of questions of the players - specifically with an eye towards incorporating those adjectives into the emerging narrative. This method is great because all of the players have buy-in from the very beginning. It has also produced some fantastic settings. The first one-shot I ran was "Arid, Lawless, Tribal, and Mutated." It was pretty Mad-Max, until the 3-armed gunslinger showed up and things got weird and awesome. My first campaign was "Cloudy, Damp, Moldy, Fiery, and Animal-Infested," so I set the game in post-apocalyptic Appalachia - the game started in a hold whose industry centered around an old coal-gasification plant. It drizzled constantly, everything rusted, rotted, or mildewed very quickly, and there was a super-aggressive slime-mold called "the Creep" (that could take root and grow in the human respiratory system) whose byproducts were hallucinogenic. "Cold, Dark, Vast, and Degenerate" took place on a dilapidated space station on the far side of a collapsed wormhole, long cut-off from Earth. In that campaign, we discovered that during cryo-sleep, your brain was laid bare to the psychic maelstrom - most people were bug-gently caress insane when you finally thawed them out, so there was a part of the station's inhabitants that simply cut to the chase and ate them. "Scorched, Hunted, Haunted, and Flashy" took place in "Abilene," a shining city on a blasted plain. Abilene had a functioning (if creaky) Tokamak reactor, so power was effectively free - it was all glitz and neon. The power also maintained "the Grid," which was the only thing keeping out the ghosts. This produced one of the best answers from a player I think I've ever had - since there was no PC Hardholder, I decided that Abilene was run by an executive council called "the Jury," and most of the PCs had some connection to its members as patrons or enemies. When I asked the player of the Brainer, "So what's Burroughs' connection to the Jury?" the player thought for half a second before stating unequivocally, "I'm on the Jury." Well, of course you are! And from that point forward the game had a political dimension that I had not envisioned when we first sat down. My current campaign is "Primitive, Religious, Shadowy, and Tormented" and sees a rigidly orthodox faith contending with the existence of literal demons in a feudal-tech world plunged into perpetual darkness. The orthodoxy believes that the darkness and the demons are god's punishment for mankind's sins, and are full-on flagellants-and-inquisitors crazy. But out in the countryside, the "Appeasers" have decided that safety demands sacrifice and have instituted lotteries for who among them will be given to the demons such that the rest may live. Then there are the Dammerung, who say, "gently caress this, let's fight the demons," and everybody views them as dangerously heretical lunatics. A absolutely love the challenge that this method gives me as a GM. I literally have no idea what the story will be about until we get rolling, and incorporating details as we go in a way that hangs together produces some really satisfying gaming experiences. Players go nuts when given a little encouragement, and come up with some really creative and cool ideas that just maker the whole soup better. I've done maybe 15 of these over the years and they've all been radically different. If you're even halfway decent at improv, I highly recommend giving it a try. Ilor fucked around with this message at 16:03 on May 19, 2019 |
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May 19, 2019 15:59
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 17:52 |
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ZorajitZorajit posted:I give worldbuilding a lot of flack for being a masturbatory exercise combining all the pedantry of a fanwiki with the insularity of a game you'll never play. Also, aren't you the boustrophedon guy?
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May 20, 2019 22:34
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Can confirm, songs are good. I once got a bunch of plot elements for my long-running Shadowrun/Call of Cthulhu/In Nomine crossover from The Tea Party's "Edges of Twilight" album. Good stuff.
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May 22, 2019 18:21
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