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For the past three or so years, roleplaying games based on Vincent Baker‘s Apocalypse World have reached heights of popularity rare for most indie creations. With Baker’s blessing, the system was adapted into numerous amateur and professional titles, using a template that became known as the Apocalypse World Engine (AWE). While there is no official basic rules set for this engine, a set of common conventions is often used across those adaptations – also called hacks.
AWE’s ability to easily translate the flavour of other media into a roleplaying game is one of the reasons it gained so much traction, similar to what the D20 system went through in the first decade of this century. While there are many systems that can be adapted to emulate different genres, AWE is one of the few that does it easily, and at the narrative level.
With that in mind, I wanted to walk through part of the process of creating an AWE adaptation and explain how its elements are used to achieve a specific game feel. For an example, I’m using a game of mine called Battlesuit Wizards, which tries to capture the feel of mecha anime and manga, with players taking the role of ace pilots operating powerful robotic combat suits.
What do you do?
The foundation for every AWE game is the basic moves. They often answer the simple question of “what are the most common actions the players do in this game?” Take Dungeon World for example, with Hack & Slash being the first move most people will read – the common way for characters to engage in close combat. Even its name speaks to the essence of the genre. Other DW basic moves are all derived from the character’s attributes, which emulate the classic D&D ones, and deal with the moment-to-moment action of a hack-and-slash adventuring campaign.
Similarly, basic moves in other AWE games such as Worlds in Peril – a comic book superheroes game – also deal with the immediate, hands-on actions a character of that genre will want to take during a session. They get used many times in close succession, as demanded by the game’s narrative. Moves don’t need to be all about combat. In City of Mist – a supernatural noir detective game – the very first basic move is Investigate, because that’s what characters spend most of their time doing.
In Battlesuit Wizards, characters represent both the human pilot and their battlesuit. We’ll have basic moves for when the pilot is inside the suit, and when they’re not. The most straightforward move will be combat-oriented: attacking using the suit’s weapons. Next, a move for piloting the suit under pressure – dodging enemy attacks or staying off the radar. For times when the pilot is away from their suit, we’ll need a physical move representing the pilot’s own abilities, plus a move for social situations. And since this game is built around military drama, there’ll be a move for the pilot’s tactical thinking. We’ll probably round it out with a Bonds move, since those are an important focus in most AWE games.
How do you do it?
The second element that helps convey a game’s feel is the stats. Not all AWE games use them the same way – or at all – and they have a relatively small mechanical impact, but a substantial impact on flavour. Dungeon World uses the same ability names as D&D. Apocalypse World uses simple verbs that complement and contrast with each other (cool and hot, hard and sharp) – the jargon of a post-apocalyptic world. The stats are just tags with associated flavour, but they do a lot to carry that flavour through to the moves built on them.
For Battlesuit Wizards, we need stats that say something about the suit, some about the pilot, and maybe one in between. Since we already have our basic moves, we know the kind of actions characters will take. Attacking with your battlesuit requires Firepower; piloting the suit under pressure requires Maneuver; when the pilot acts physically on their own, they’re using Body; social situations use Charm; and planning and outsmarting opponents use Tactics.
Wrapping it up
The final thing to discuss here is special moves. While most of what applies to basic moves still holds, special moves have the luxury of stepping outside the usual box and handling edge cases. AWE games tend to use them for two things: defining the core game cycle, and covering rare actions that are still important to the game’s feel.
Dungeon World is a good example. The special moves tell a story about your adventuring party: when they go on a quest, they undertake a perilous journey. They reach their destination, maybe make camp, take watch to ward off dangers. They complete their quest, head back to the steading where they carouse with their riches, get supplies for the next adventure, maybe hire hirelings. This cycle gives the game a specific flavour. In Worlds in Peril, special moves separate which actions are done as a hero and which as a civilian, highlighting the tension inherent to comic book stories between the character’s two identities.
The other type of special move covers edge cases and rarely needed core gameplay elements – things like the Last Breath move in Dungeon World (used when a character is near death) or the Level Up move, which is almost purely mechanical but still essential to the game’s feel.
Battlesuit Wizards will probably have special moves built around the contrast between the pilot inside their battlesuit and the same person operating as a normal human. This might include rules for repairing suits damaged in battle – a basic move that spends the suit’s resources, with the special move used to recharge it. There’d likely be moves for when the suit is lost and how to recover it, and so on. Those edge cases tend to require the most playtesting, to figure out which occur often enough to warrant their own move.
A final word about playbooks
While playbooks are important to most AWE games, I think they’re more the icing on the cake. Even without unique character playbooks, most AWE games can achieve the flavour they’re aiming for through stats, basic moves, and special moves. Playbooks are about options – giving players a variety of tools for completing mostly the same actions. Some games, like Worlds in Peril, take a completely different approach and don’t use playbooks to separate character classes at all. But most AWE games do use them as archetypes for player characters, because they do a great deal to help players get into the game quickly.
For Battlesuit Wizards, I’d probably use the archetypes presented in series like Gundam Wing and Gundam 00, which feature a cast of four or five protagonists all using specialised mecha: the stealth suit, the long-range one, the heavy weapons platform, the melee specialist, and so on. Sometimes those types overlap, which is where multi-class moves – like in Dungeon World – come in useful.
Playbooks extend the foundation you’ve already built and let the game’s feel come through clearly. That’s about it. I haven’t covered every aspect of creating an Apocalypse World hack, but hopefully there’s enough here to get your gears turning.
Have fun.
(Yes, the title is a Pacific Rim reference.)
BONUS: in 2012 I ran a Battlesuit Wizards game using the Marvel Heroic Roleplay game. You can read the character sheets here.