I haven't written one of these in a while - too many things to write, and most of them are my dissertation. But I find myself with a bit of time this morning, and I've been missing writing small things about the games I'm in, so we'll see if I can get this series kickstarted. (With no promise that I'll be regular about it.)
I could go back and talk about the games we've finished (Superhero U) or the game I was running but had to abandon until this dissertation is done (Shakespeare VA.) But then this project seems larger than I can do. So I'll settle for talking about the most recent sitting, which was only two days ago, of:
Apocalypse World
So much has happened in this game! The episode before last, my husband's character, Fox, rolled a complete fail on his Fixer roll at the beginning, meaning everything in his life went to shit. Since my character, Gremlin, had slept with him the night before and failed her Sex Move, that was a perfect opportunity to mesh two catastrophes.
So not only did Fox have some unsavoury business negotiations that ended with part of his ear bitten off, Gremlin had a burning desire to prove that it wasn't like Fox owned her or anything.
(And I was happy with what I decided was the trigger - it wasn't the sex. It was that Fox had taken her out for a nice dinner the night before. And when she woke up, heart racing in the middle of the night, it was that that reminded her too much of Marsh, the man who had last tried to own her, change her name, give her nice things, and possess her utterly.)
So while Fox's business life was falling apart, Gremlin was in his apartment when his other girlfriend, Rosalita, walked in. Gremlin did not help the brewing storm that was one girlfriend finding out about another by airily declaring that Rosalita could have Fox. She was done with him anyway. Rosalita got angry, Gremlin kept making things worse, then walked out and Rosalita trashed the place.
Oops. Sorry, Fox! (Now Gremlin's feeling that she's totally proved she's her own person, she'd be up for renewing the relationship. She is one screwed-up woman. With good reason.)
Then Mother Darling offered her the one thing guaranteed to make Gremlin do irrational things - the promise of more Road. So Gremlin enlisted Spider and Pity (there is more to this story, but it's what happened from Gremlin's point of view) to help her find the strange children called the Thrush, who seem to be replacing the speaking sickness with birdsong. Then she double-crossed them, intending to take the Thrush to Mother Darling instead of Mother Jones.
(The Mothers are increasingly in disarray - the session on Sunday started out with the news that Mother May I had been unexpectedly killed.)
On the way to taking the Thrush to Mother Darling, Pity and Spider jumped out of Gremlin's van to try to save his followers, who were being massacred by Mother Jones' people. (Gremlin wasn't going to stop - she's not really a very nice person.) Gremlin drove on, running into another former lover, Salvador, his mind lost to the maelstrom, and, given his appearance, apparently the person who had laid waste to Mother May I and her forces.
She freed him from the bonds he was carrying, and when she still couldn't get him to recognize her (being far more tender than she would have been had he been tracking), brought out the Thrush to see if they could replace some of the howling in his head with their song. (She's been infected by the greensong, and is now way less wary than she should be of that particular danger.)
Of course, now she's taking everyone to see Mother Darling, and Fox ended his next horrible day...by killing her after she told him about her plan to infect everyone with the greensong and go to Neverland. He threw her out the window telling her "second star to the right, and straight on till morning."
So...shit. Gremlin is not going to be happy.
To be more specific, she wants that Road. I'm trying to figure out how to play her reaction when she finds out about Mother Darling's death, without deciding too many things in advance. Part of why I'm thinking about it is that the reaction likely to be very emotional, and that's hard to jump into cold, particularly if it's at the start of a session. So it might manifest differently.
She's also going to freak the hell out when she learns more about the approach of Marsh's army from the North. She got her first hint of it, seeing large Ms on people's faces as they chased her down the road, remembering Marsh trying to teach her how to read.
So there are lots of emotions in the offing, and I am looking forward to it! I still roll dice so rarely, though. I honestly don't think of it that often. So my advances are coming slowly, but I'm happy with what I've taken so far.
It's a problem - my style vs. most games. I like getting into scenes so deeply I would never think to prompt for a die roll, and don't necessarily want my scene partner to break out to do so either. But because of that, no experience. Ah well. If the tradeoff for not getting advances is getting meaty scenes, I'd take the latter any day.
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