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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7609359" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've been reading the rulebook for Apocalypse World. It's not the first Vincent Baker RPG rulebook I've read, and the punchy style and unequivocal evocation of the spirit of the fiction and the expected feel of play is not surprising.There's one particular bit that I wanted to post about. Discussing how to set up and run the first session of a campaign, and having laid out the process for character generation and forming a "party", Baker says:I’d just say it outright to your players: "your setup's easy and now you’ve already done it. Mine’s harder so I'm going to take this whole session to do it. So no high-tension kick off from me, let's follow the characters around for a day and get to know them. Cool?" A couple of you groaned, I could hear you from way over here. Oh great, getting to know the characters, that’s a recipe for will anything ever happen? Following the characters around for a day and getting to know them, it could mean establishing a whole unwieldy mass of status quo, right? It could mean that but it doesn’t. Say it with me: there are no status quos in Apocalypse World. What it means instead: it's your job to create a fractured, tilting landscape of inequalities, incompatible interests, PC-NPC-PC triangles, untenable arrangements. A dynamic opening situation, not a status quo you're going to have to put your shoulder against and somehow shift, like pushing a futon up a ladder. No: an unstable mass, already charged with potential energy and ready to split and slide, not a mass at rest.I've started campaigns in media res. And of course I've started campaigns with some form of mission, sometimes with the PCs carrying it out, sometimes with the briefing scene being a prelude to some sort of in media res thing. Off the top of my head I can't think of a campaign I've started where the setting is the situation, in virtue of being free of status quo in the way Baker describes. Maybe the closest I can think of is (unsurprisingly, maybe) an <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?642562-In-a-Wicked-Age-session-report" target="_blank">In a Wicked Age</a> session I ran a little while ago.Any thoughts, and/or experiences, would be welcome.</blockquote>

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