[Apocalypse World] Gainax Apocalypse

[Ron Edwards]

We've arrived in the zone of Apocalypse World play I know well from other games and other media, both for its potential and its pitfalls. I'm thinking about the difference between two extremes based on character choices:

Imagine a group of characters consisting only of Gunlugger, Angel, Driver, and Operator, and for added community complexity, Hardholder and Chopper. This is clearly mainly about practical social power and resources: finding water, battling mutants, keeping the nuts and bolts of an ideal alive, and at its best, raw sociological SF-horror like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog. As you know, I very much like these two films so I'm emphasizing that this isn't a bad thing. It might even be the most reliably fun way to play the game. I think the Battlebabe and Skinner represent "volatile" versions at this end, characters who disrupt as much as they unify.

Compare, though, the far end of another vector, when a group includes two or more of these: Hocus, Brainer, Savvyhead, as ours does. And now that I think of it, the Angel (which does complete our line-up) might have more of a foot in this zone than the others I mentioned earlier. I'm talking about opening your mind to the maelstrom. Technically any character can do it, and a couple other classes can choose a move which maxes their chance to do it, but brainers and hocuses and savvyheads automatically start that way, they get lots of supporting moves, high Weird (and highest max), and access either to augury or to freaky-deep psychology.

You can probably see what I'm on about. With two or more of these character types in action, sooner or later you're going to be talkin' to the Apocalypse, face to face, nose to psychedelic swirly. In this case, the book's back cover quote becomes more than Color and way more than genre. Here it is with the middle "play in leather" gamer-tempting text taken out:

Something's wrong with the world and I don't know what it is
...
... brainers see what none of the rest of us will: the world's psychic maelstrom, the terrible desperation and hate pressing in at the edge of all perception, it is the world now.

And you, who are you? This is what we've got, yes. What are you going to make of it?

(Note: "only brainers," my hocus ass - they're actually a bit less effective in this precise act than savvyheads and hocuses.)

Clear enough, right? Story-wise, this is access to thematic punch via the route of in-fiction mysticism or SF content which is basically techie/psychedelic code for mysticism.

A mild dose of this kind of stuff is great. It's easy to portend, easy even to weird it up - some of us have made whole GMing careers from a talent at this (cough*Glorantha). It's a lot less easy to get anywhere with it, when a character via a player "boldly goes," if you will, and spits in the eye of the alien geometries - and wants to know what the fuck this is really about.

Interestingly, both Sorcerer and Dogs in the Vineyard slam that door shut in the players' or anyone's face. In those games, not even the GM's opinion matters regarding the ultimate metaphysical or even thematic-aesthetic quality of the in-fiction universe. The "meaning of meaning" is forever left in existential nowhere. A player-mismatch about that can be a bummer, as in my modern necromancer Sorcerer game - I used a lot of ninth-gate imagery, inspired mostly by the Garth Nix novel Sabriel, and one of the players, Dave, deliberately sent his character "all the way through" and demanded to know what was there.

Well, unlike Dogs in the Vineyard, Apocalypse World is tuned right in this direction, more than mildly. The characters' in-setting experience sets up the possibility of real-world statements responding directly to that back-cover text as if it were talking about our real world instead of the fictional one.

Plenty of stories invoke this effect but flinch back from it in the name of "humanity" or some extremely concrete human interaction, as at the end of Altered States. But you all know what this is like when it forges ahead instead. The TV Tropes guys call it the Gainax ending, recognizable by an all-out assault on the viewer's senses and a complete absence of naturalistic resolutions. In my age group, the references were The Prisoner and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and more recent pop culture typically references Akira, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Cube.

I happen to like Gainax Endings (and the variety of story-types detailed on the TT page), which may be a character flaw of some kind. In some works I think there is a successful, emotional utterly symbolic meaning, for instance in Hedwig and the Angry Inch if you recognize what street the title character is crossing at the very, very end. I happen to be in the minority in liking the final episode of The Prisoner very much, on the same basis - it's helpful to abandon any idea of what the creator might have meant, and treat the whole thing as beatnik poetry.

The problem is that in-fiction revelation and real-world revelation aren't the same thing, and trying to make the former experiential is ... well, let's call it a thorny technical problem for an aesthetic creator and leave it at that. Because I think there's a real stupidity event horizon over which plenty of stories have disappeared when they tried to cover up their utter lack of actual story-ness with a big blast of so-profound smoke up my ass. Which is way, way more common than the successful ones.

My Conan-rolls dice outcomes have put this right out there on the table, and into Sarah's hands, extremely soon in play. I won't complain because so far Brother Bat's flock hasn't (for instance) torn him limb from limb, but on an entirely abstract level it might have been cool to see lots of logistic development for the community, and resolution of a couple of fronts, maybe over seven or eight episodes, before the aesthetic demands of the resolution system called down the Apocalypse Spiritual Airstrike into play. It's all front and resolution-driven, no way around it, especially with this complement of character types, so here we are. I'm glad I'm not the GM, frankly.

Sarah, teasing aside, I would welcome your or anybody's account of playing with me here in this forum.

Best, Ron
edited to fix TV Tropes link - RE

[glandis]

The Gainax link is empty - I think this works: Gainax Ending.

Unsurprisingly, I've run into this issue as well. On at least one occasion, if players and GM had simply communicated that a , um, "Gainax event" was entirely acceptable and an ending wasn't required, play could have continued and (we decided afterword, so take it for what it's worth) developed towards a probably-more-satisfying conclusion. But I also remember "that's just how it's gotta be" Gainax, so - good luck to all!

[ndpaoletta]

In my experience of Apocalypse World, with an even mix of players driving towards Maelstrom-weirdness and those not especially, the technique of "what does the Maelstrom look like to you?" helped build the existential stuff starting early in play. The first time any character opened their brain, the MC would ask that question and we'd really go into it, and in so doing we built a general Maelstrom aesthetic earlier in the game that made it easier (from the player side of the table, at least) to imagine what _there_ was there.

[Ron Edwards]

Link fixed, thanks Gordon.

Nathan, is that a textual technique? My check into the basic description of the move (p. 88, p. 204) or for augury (p. 90, p. 211) didn't turn it up, but if it's somewhere else, let me know.

[lumpley]

I can answer that! P204, middle of the page, paragraph beginning "at first when you ask questions..."

-Vincent

[Ron Edwards]

Cool. It may not have been apparent that "questions" apply to results of 10+, which is what I've typically been rolling for augury. Or maybe I'm not remembering the questions from play if they were used, who knows.

Editing this in: actually now that I think about it, Sarah did nail me with a question, but it was all about his moral stuff, very relevant to the situation of play.

Best, Ron

[ndpaoletta]

In the textual rule, it does say "on a hit", which covers 7-9 and 10+ (weak hit/strong hit). My first AW MC was Joe, who's run it a lot, and I think his personal spin on it born from experience was to put that specific question "What does the Maelstrom look to you?" front and center for each character the first time they opened their brain.

[Rafu]

So, time has passed (a year I guess? two?), but I've totally been there. As an AW MC, I mean. The Maelstrom becoming the centerpiece of play in the late sessions of a game, things getting really weird, and this "level" of play tying fundamentally with the players' ability to get a sense of closure out of the game.
Here's a vague break-off of what I remember I did that, in retrospect, I believe laid the ground for those final session or two to be successful — not that I consciously planned for it, mind you:

- In my preliminary daydreaming about apocalyptica, before session #1, I had instinctively settled for a basic aesthetics of the apocalypse being the sum of many smaller man-made events: ecological disaster, industrialization-driven climate change, war & the general collapse of early XXI Century society — but nothing "special" about it, no spectacular big event. I wasn't looking for, or needed, a "cause" behind the apocalyptic collapse, since I pretty much earnestly believe such an "apocalypse" to be a pretty likely, reasonable outcome of how we all are currently living our lives in the real world.

- Since I wasn't looking for a "cause", I never looked at the psychic maelstrom for one. It was pretty much an (unexamined) given to me that the p.m. was "just" a thing that had either come into being or merely come to be known to mankind shortly after the apocalypse, or maybe as a direct consequence of it.

- I was, myself, excited about the psychic maelstrom since the beginning! I like every small bit of color associated with it in the text, it shines with promise and makes me tingle with excitement. Brainer, Hocus and Savvyhead are the character-types from the book I'm personally most enamored with (together with the Skinner, I guess) — and one player chose the Brainer. I sorta had an unarticulated expectation of play going this way since the beginning, and was instinctively attentive to this side.

- I remembered to ask each player what the psychic maelstrom was like for them, first time they opened their brain to it; I took note of those answers and later elaborated on them whenever I could (incl. with each failed Open your brain roll).

- I kept it as "personal" as I could. For the first few sessions, I didn't actually venture into the blatantly metaphysical, but I acted as the P.M. was entirely a psychological, subjective thing - at the low end of the parapsychological spectrum, let's say. I often and gleefully had the P.M. ask questions back to them, and these questions were mostly about the details of what had happened to the characters before play begun ("background", if you like the word): like the P.M. was a shrink trying to unearth hidden trauma. Turns out there was quite a lot of hidden trauma to unearth, and the weirder/more open-your-brain inclined a character, the more it had.

- I focused on ad-libbing a vivid, disturbing and ultimately consistent imagery for the maelstrom, based on the inputs I got from the other players and my own imagination. Highlights included a combination of immediate physical sensations of danger (such as being underwater, on fire, or buried alive) and the unsettling presence of the dead as half-seen, half-hidden, grotesque shapes. We soon came to understand the P.M. as a "spirit world" of sorts, coexisting with the material world and basically connected to it through the minds of living people. The cryptic knowledge to be gleaned by opening one's brain to it was apparently a combination of the dangerous wisdom of the dead and the insight to be gained by gazing into one's own deepest shadows.

- I had the occasional, obvious supernatural phenomenon happen in relation with the p.m., usually in connection with a character either opening their brain or failing to do so. Things like teleportation. But I kept it rare, unpredictable and unreliable. "Horror" logic before "sci-fi" logic, if you'd have it that way. I made it clear that rationality didn't apply. OTOH, I kept such phenomena consistent with symbolic logic, the psychology of the characters, the imagery I had built.

- Additionally, I left blanks in my Fronts during prep, which, by filling them in at a later date, basically allowed me to stage what in retrospect looked like foreshadowing. But more on this later.

Things happened which forced an evolution throughout play, of course, and had me set my mind on some things or change how things appeared to be...

- After maybe two sessions of play, one extra player joined us and only stayed for a session or two. He chose to play the Quarantine, which sorta implies as a background that there was a technologically-advanced military sometimes in the past which expected the apocalypse to happen and prepped contingencies for it. This necessarily affected both the general outlook of play and my strictly personal opinions about the "apocalypse" being a chain of "regular" events. Before the Quarantine left, we had pretty strongly established through play that:
-- the geographical area of our game was located somewhere in the former British islands;
-- there was a sealed "vault" with military supplies buried right beneath our hold;
-- a large scale traumatic event had happened in the past, of which Quarantine had unearthed a flashback via opening his brain to the maelstrom, and which involved the death of at least a majority of the population of London in a horrible fire, as the consequence of some military personnel pushing a button. It was somehow implied that the psychic maelstrom "began" that day.

- One of the player-characters was this Brainer, Lively, basically terrified with his own powers and running away from his very own self, always fearful of hurting others (and he regularly did). After a few sessions of strong drama between player-characters, the Brainer basically found himself running as far as he could from the centerpiece hold, alone, in what amounted to a red-herring "quest" suggested to him by crazy visions from the psychic maelstrom. For a session or two, I had this player-character essentially play by himself, only interacting with NPCs.
-- Undertaking this journey was essential to affirming and developing the character's own issues, providing a platform for character development, but in terms of plot was instead blatantly aimless. It was also increasingly taxing on me as an MC, as I had to come up with a disproportionately high number of setting details ("apocalyptica") and NPCs which I had no way to develop into long-term threats of any sort. I was longing for some way that the Brainer could be reconnected to the other PCs and could expect no other climax for this particular story-arc, but of course it wasn't my job to force anything like that.
-- I then found it expedient to "escalate" the role of the psychic maelstrom from subtle, inward-focused state of altered perception to all-out supernatural force of nature, by bringing into the fiction (through my legitimate moves) an increasing number of obvious paranormal phenomena as the answer or consequence to PCs opening their brains. This created a channel physically separated characters could somehow affect each other's life at a distance.

- Simultaneous with the Brainer's solitary journey, one of the other players found it fitting to create (as an advancement option) a second PC and picked the Maestro D' playbook for her. Appropriate to a character who basically popped into the story from nobody-knows-where, it was determined (I'm not sure if as part of detailing her establishment, as an effect of one of her moves or maybe a combination of both) that the establishment this character ran was, like, a "magical" place which could be accessed through different doors at different times, from anywhere in the world or something. This of course found its justification in the psychic maelstrom, as all inexplicable things go. In fact, IIRC, at some point the Brainer did access the bar by opening his brain.

At this point, things were turning bat-shit-crazy. Like, at some point we established the "Dragon" - a scary metaphorical entity made of fire that one PC had a contact with through the psychic maelstrom. But at some other point the Dragon just showed up at the Maestro D's bar and had a drink, acting like it was a regular.
Call us Gainax-ending-lovers, my friends and me, but that the weirdness had escalated to such a level signaled, to us, that we were approaching closure. This was not the only thing to point us that way, mind you: things like the advancement options crossed out on one or two PC's playbooks, or our actual RL schedule, were all telling us it was time to tie it together. But trust me: the time felt "right" due to the almost unbearable surrealism and blatant supernatural escalation, and that's what it made ultimately satisfactory to us as people to call the campaign to a close.

The final step required to achieve such a closure, though, was to turn the fiction on itself and have it point, again, toward the characters as people and their issues. Here's what happened: at some point, I turned one of my prepped threats from the Fronts on its head, moved it to its own Front and redesigned it to be a personal "challenge" to Lively the Brainer in addition to what it already was. OK, I concede this may sound contrived to you now, but I swear it came perfectly fluid and logical in the moment, nothing deliberate or forceful.
The Firesnake people had been "in" the game, but acting exclusively off-screen, since the very beginning. One player had coined this name, mentioning them dismissively during session one, in the context of Impala the Driver bringing news from afar back to Vega's hold. Impala mentioned the Firesnake people dismissively, as I said: «They're just savages carrying torches, you know. But people fear them as they march South, and refugees from the countryside are flocking to Lord Facebook's hold.» "Firesnake people" was duly marked somewhere outside the PCs' perimeter, facing Ignorance.
Defined as a threat, I think in the same Front also hosting Lord Facebook and his people, these Firesnake people then kept staying off-screen, acting through advancing clocks and manifesting through vague rumors, as a distant geopolitical force that displaced populations and sent them Vega's way in waves, a constant source of conflict. First it was some more unarmed refugees asking admittance into the hold, then it was Xmas's armed gang of bikers razing the farms, pushed South by Facebook's people leaving their usual territory. Then Facebook came and attempted to take Vega's hold, by treason. Such had been the developing saga of Vega, tough woman and ruthless leader, reaffirming her dominance over her gang again and again in face of new enemies and impressing her charisma on defeated enemies she then incorporated into her "family" — in itself a whole different game from the Brainer's, as Ron correctly pointed out.

Now, the Firesnake people were mysterious and scary by virtue of never being on-screen: qualities which likened them to the psychic maelstrom. What I decided to do, all within my head, which brought closure was to confirm that link: that the Firesnake people and the P.M. were from the same Front (metaphorically, at least; I don't think I ever wrote down the P.M. as an individual Threat, though theoretically one could).
As Lively was running from Vega, as far as he could from her hold, I had him finally run into the Firesnake people, on-screen at last! As Lively was actively, desperately looking for "a place to stay" (in the biggest, psychological comfort sense of a teen not fitting in in their world) I made the Firesnake people that place. I made them happy, satisfied versions of Lively. Turns out the Firesnake people are hippie boys and girls with Brainer-ish powers intent on what looks like a big peace march, led by the maelstrom Dragon. They smile a lot.
What makes them scary is that they speak by whispering right into your brain (like so many of the dead found in the maelstrom) and that they are completely selfless at the individual level, very obviously possessing a hive-mind. But they're, like, super-welcoming to Lively: they want him to join their ranks.
They have a clear, explicit agenda, too. They're out to fix the world. They want to stop all the violence, by relieving people of their false sense of individuality - by making them aware that we're all as one. They're Humankind 2.0, the maelstrom-powered version, and whatever the "apocalypse" actually was it did everybody a favor: it gave people a golden opportunity to fix the world, to fix themselves. Or something like that. It's obvious that such bullies like Vega (PC), Xmas and Facebook (NPCs), striving to carve order from chaos by hard force of arms, are exactly what they're out to stop now - the people they're not welcoming into their ranks.

So, yeah, that's when Impala came looking for Lively, and we got our super-satisfying, high-budget ending.

I'm not sure whether this long AP here can be of any use to anybody, but god, writing this reminded me how good AW is.