On the most recent Gauntlet podcast, Cat (I think - can’t find the moment in the podcast now) mentioned someone (Jason Morningstar?) running The Expanse setting using un-tweaked Apocalypse World, and talking about it on Facebook.
Problem is, I’m not on Facebook, and searching the site as an outsider is pretty much non-functional. Anyone know if that discussion is public, and if so, what the link might be?
It’s not public! It was my home crew and I’m happy to answer questions about it. Also I will post all the “let me tell you about my character” stuff below, enjoy, it is terrible. We did a ton of other stuff but as far as I can tell this is what I wrote up.
We’re starting an Expanse-inspired space opera using Apocalypse World (basically unchanged) and I’m playing the Savvyhead. Here’s my backstory:
"You know the story of the Darit Thrift? No? Before your time I guess.
So maybe forty years ago the Darit Thrift was a torch ship rigged for passengers on the run out to Jupiter. It was carrying a bunch of colonists for the water ice mine on Adrastea, the one that broke Adrastea apart? Shitty pull. Anyway, different disaster.
So the Darit Thrift goes dark, just vanishes, lost in the inner ring. Just a write-off, maybe their lidar died and they got smeared by a rock. Who knows. But this is where it actually gets interesting.
Twenty years ago these volatiles prospectors are churning the halo and they find the Darit Thrift. She’s in an inclined orbit and pock marked from a couple decades plowing through the main ring. Big payday, right? She’s hot - her drive is slagged but still energetic, but they figure they can at least saw off the front end or something. So they lay salvage claim and get to work.
And it doesn’t take long before they realize there’s something going on on the other side of the pressure hull. Banging. Like somebody pounding with a wrench.
So these volatiles guys get freaked out, like you would, but they stop cutting and bang back, and it rapidly becomes apparent that there’s somebody alive in there. Which is impossible.
But it’s true.
Twenty years. Twenty years inside a radioactive, dead torch ship. And it isn’t just one survivor, it’s a whole lot. It’s a fucking society in there. They have fucking children.
Turns out the engine slagged and they were adrift, and the first few weeks were like you’d imagine, and they came to terms with their situation. They tapped the core and built a closed loop turbine, not really enough power for light and warmth and the comforts of home but enough to crack oxygen into water, just enough. They had to make some hard choices in there. They couldn’t keep everyone alive, if you understand me. They had to do some bad things. Apparently it got very weird, very dark, very bad. I heard they fed their turbine blood for the steam. I hear they, uh, ran out of food.
Imagine living in near-darkness, not even the light of the stars, breathing air so thin it hurt, eating…God knows what. Imagine bringing a child into that world. Imagine the fucking politics of it.
The crazy thing is that once these freaks got rescued and sent to Ganymede, they all seemed to pull it together and resume their lives. I don’t know, friend, people are tough. They don’t want to die."
(Reed Whitley was ten and an orphan when they found the Darit Thrift and is now a thirty-year-old mechanic and ship’s systems operator specializing in ECLSS. They don’t speak about their childhood much but they are really good at their job.)
Apocalypse World, in our homebrew Expanse-tinged setting, and the crew of the Masina is in a pickle.
This creep named Junebug gave us a job to salvage a ship in the belt, and when we get there this dead freighter is positively radiating bad vibes. There’s some kind of machine intelligence that can cross air gaps (well, space gaps) and interfere with people’s brains – we saw the results of this on Ganymede recently and we know very well that this is messed up and needs to be judiciously destroyed before it can infect anything else (obviously it has already infected the Masina and we don’t know it yet).
“Turn around a burn it in our plasma bloom” suggests Reed, our occasionally pacifist engineer.
Captain Cho is dubious. “Wouldn’t destroy it all, couldn’t be sure.”
“We have a cargo hold full of fissile uranium,” Altair says helpfully. Altair leads a weird cult of dudes who never leave their spacesuits. He and Reed - who likes the lack of direct intimacy - are a couple now. At least Reed thinks so.
“I could make a bomb, no problem,” Reed says, and it is true. He’s got a machine shop, a precision spherical lathe, explosives, bad judgement, he makes a 100 kiloton bomb.
This machine intelligence can do a number on meat brains, and it can infect technology of any sort, so they need a delivery plan. The most logical answer is to send Sin, who is a deeply weird individual with some sort of collapsing disease that requires an exoskeleton and has a brain attuned with the unknowable. They are the most likely survivor of close contact with the menace. Also nobody else wants to do it.
Reed puts Sin in a rescue pressure suit with all the tech ripped out, with the bomb covered in tear-away adhesive strips and a backup trigger he can lase from the Masina if things go really wrong, and attaches the whole dog and pony show to a 10 kilometer reel of monofilament line. Then they give Sin a good hard shove out the airlock and wait from a distance. Not a safe distance, mind you, but … a distance.
The line plays out. No comms, just Sin floating toward this evil broken spaceship that is whispering very terrible things to them.
Sin gets there and it turns out the adhesive won’t work and either they cycle the airlock and enter the evil machine intelligence spider’s lair or take their chances and hope the bomb kills it from a short distance, which it won’t.
Sin cycles the airlock and goes inside.
AND THEN WE HAD TO GO HOME BECAUSE GAME NIGHT WAS OVER
Expanse-flavored Apocalypse World, the short session recap: Our weird brainer, Sin, goes aboard the eveil AI-controlled spaceship. The AI is like “I just remote-activated your nuke, you better leave” so we reel Sin in and there is a big explosion and the AI wasn’t too worried about it apparently, because it doesn’t worry about air gaps (vacuum gaps?) and has infected our ship already.
We get underway and the evil AI plunges our Driver, Captain Cho, into some kind of hallucinatory wonderland. The Savvyhead, Reed, figures out what is going on and wrecks various bits of the ship to prevent any more of that. But the AI seems cool, it is content to let us go to a porn colony on Europa to trade our uranium for the food needed back on Enceladus.
Sin shoots some weird brainer sex videos and we make the trade and everything is perfectly fine, other than the dormant evil AI lurking in our ship’s systems and probably infecting everyone we meet on various moons.
Side note: My character is a guy who really treasures life. He wants to make sure people are cared for. He hates violence. All predicated on a sort of harrowing backstory where all these things were inflection points he doesn’t discuss, but that still inform his every decision.
And he’s teamed up with a collection of apocalypse badasses, one of whom literally has no skills beyond murder. So far they’ve been like “OK, weird guy, we’ll try it your way”, but how long this will last before the shotguns (3-harm loud, messy) come out again is an open question. Actually, they already came out when he wasn’t looking. Nail, meet hammer.
I feel like I’m breaking the game a little, which makes me question whether it is a game I even want to play. Every mechanism points toward atavistic violence.
More Expanse-flavored Apocalypse World, our final session before a hiatus. The crew of the Masina delivers a hold full of food to the starving colonists at Maui, a colony on one of Jupiter’s moons. Maui’s leader, the guy who started this whole goat rodeo, is a wiry little musclebear named Bear Stearns, and Bear of course tries to cheat them. Cho and her crew are tired and pissed off and not in a negotiating mood. THey invite Bear inside the jackleg Faraday cage rigged to keep the evil AI they are carrying in check, and then they lock him in a stateroom. Bear’s second in command, Gabriel, is happy to make the trade for actual money and see the back side of Bear, who is worth more dead to a variety of creditors than he is alive to literally anyone anywhere.
Reed, the pacifist engineer, has no desire to be a slaver or complicit in the brutal death of Bear at the hands of his enemies. He talks the crew into a different tack - the Masina burns in-system for Luna, where they can refit and repair and release Bear unharmed into the biggest cluster of humanity anywhere. And the engineer has got a great moneymaking idea.
In this future, Earth is a hellhole ensconced in an impenetrable Kessler syndrome trash storm zooming around at 10 km.sec. Nobody even knows what is going on down there and hasn’t for fifty years. Reed has been busy armoring the Masina and figures if they do an LEO injection at roughly the speed of the debris, they can punch through and land on Earth. Once there they can loot the place and sell all kinds of artifacts to rich assholes on Luna, Of course he doesn’t tell them that there’s no way they can muster the delta-V to escape the gravity well and survive the trash storm. It’s a one-way trip. Reed is sort of broken and just wants to live out his days beneath fluffy clouds in real atmosphere like his ancestors.
So they fix up the ship and get some Luna techs to remove the evil AI from the Masina’s systems, where it has been squatting like a digital lamprey. Of course this doesn’t work. Captain Cho knows it won’t work, and just before they leave Luna he gets Sin, who is a Brainer and somehow infected by the machine intelligence anyway, to help him open a psychic wackadoodle communication channel. It works great.
“What do you want?” Cho asks.
“I want to be free” it says.
“Where are you?”
There’s a long pause. “Earth” it says.
So we’re tabling this game for a while, but when we pick it back up it looks like we’ll play it with the same characters but some new playbooks, and straight Apocalypse World - the grounded Masina becomes a hardhold, Cho becomes a Hardholder, and we get to deal with primitive screwheads and a dangerous machine intelligence in the ruins of Earth!
Interesting to read that you feel there’s a pressure towards violence. When I’ve played StarWars using AW there’s always been a clear drift to the Dark Side.
Oh, that’s a fantastic writeup! Very exciting stuff, and inspiring.
Will you tell us a little more about how the game and its systems are slotting into your sci-fi setting? How did you come up with the idea of the (presumably!) AI as psychic maelstrom, for instance? Is there ever a real possibility of destroying it or cutting it off, or is that just “pretend” (in the sense that you, the players. might have some kind of social contract to keep the AI in play, or to replace it with some other maelstrom analogue if you do, even though the characters are legitimately trying to get rid of it)? What would you do if that worked, if not?
Playbooks, moves, setting info? What playbook is the Captain, for example? What elements did you find most needed reskinning for your game?
I love the lost Earth vibe! Punching one-way through the orbital garbage is a beautiful image. (I’m assuming the lost Earth is original to your game, not from the Expanse. I could be wrong!)
Hi Paul,
We are astonishingly lazy and try to do as little work as possible most of the time in adapting a game to our desire, so we made no changes to AW2e and ended up only using the basic and playbook moves throughout (no gunfight moves, chase moves, etc). The AI-as-maelstrom just emerged organically from the fiction. Our GM built on it from there. I’m not sure what would happen if we destroyed the Earth-bound AI - my guess is that we can’t. Captain Cho is a Driver currently and the Masina is his ride. Altair is a Chopper. Sin is a Brainer and my guy is a Savvyhead. We didn’t reskin anything at all.
Our solar system is a little gritter than that seen in The Expanse, in keeping with the tone of AW. Earth is a major player in the books and TV show.
Jason: you are going to absolutely hate the hardholder playbook. It is a trap, very intentionally.
Recommendation: take a look at the waterbearer playbook. It’s also a trap, but a very different sort.
Jason,
Nice! I didn’t mean in terms of redesign, though - I can very much see a lot of the game’s design and moves working well as written.
I was asking about reskinning in the sense of interpreting fictional details from the playbooks, moves, principles, or MC prep. For instance, the way you turned the maelstrom into an AI or the Driver into a spacecraft pilot.
Were there any particularly challenging bits in doing so? Any particularly surprising bits? Any particularly brilliant moments of reskinning?
Do you use the Barter economy as written?
Are there any weapons that don’t seem to match playbooks or vice versa? Armor? Special playbook equipment (like the Brainer’s)?
The only real stretch was the Chopper, who got reinvented as the leader of a gang of cult-y dudebros who lived and worked inside heavily modified vac suits that, per tradition, they never left. We left the barter economy alone and paid when beginning of session moves demanded we pay. It was all a pretty good fit.