Powered by the Apocalypse

It is not the mind of the Psywild, but as you start to perceive the mind, the face you get is that of the Lord of the Psywilds.

Hello, I'm Paul Purnell, the DM of Dustworld Neon City, an actual play podcast where we use a game, Dustworld RPG, powered by the apocalypse, to tell an awesome narrative story.

Roll the intro.

Welcome to Neon City.

that lineage versus most of the other games can be kind of attributed to this website called The Forge and the community around that.

Most notably, it generated PBTA, Powered by the Apocalypse, which is a very common system that leads to things like Blades in the Dark and The Forge in the Dark system and many others.

And those are kind of that narrative side of the spectrum.

So people will often talk about this dichotomy, even if there's like a wider spectrum.

maybe to start, like you said at the beginning, like this dichotomy that's being presented isn't actually as black and white as it sounds.

Yes, and so I would challenge, like we mentioned earlier, I would challenge a bit, even though Plotweaver uses a D20, and, you know, like when you look at just the summary rules for it, it's just showing you the pure mechanics of it.

I think that a game is a lot more than its task resolution system, right? Like, you know, you could boil PBTA down into a single dice roll with three results, right? Like, that...

And, you know, like you have a bell curve versus like a more linear curve and that changes how your modifiers interact with it.

They're the author of Parksville Community Witch and an ongoing series of queer romance novels.

And they, of course, are and remain an excellent game designer behind games like Our Traveling Home, Fellas is a Gay, and of course, The Watch, a second or third generation PBTA game, and one I think gets the mechanical framework extremely right.

It's all about a military fantasy story where all the men have become corrupted by the shadow, and everyone who's left have got to band together and go beat the crap out of them.

the watch is back for a second edition on kickstarter now and it's going to space that's right now you can fight the shadow in a whole new way on mars i play tested this thing i loved our campaign of it and i wanted to have ash back on the show to talk about some of the influences behind this second edition to do that ash brought on a mechanic From Night Witches, an even earlier PBTA game by Jason Morningstar, all about the real-life all-women squad of Russian World War II fighter pilots who spent the war dropping bombs on the Nazis.

And railroad ties when they ran out of bombs.

Night Witches has an extremely solid big picture structure to its play.

Like an interesting, dramatic story, right? So I was returning to Night Witches here.

I haven't played Night Witches in quite a few years now, but I was returning to it for this episode.

no but like it's yeah like i think the people who are seeking a different play experience will hopefully find it elsewhere but i think my biggest fear is always if that's not your style of play then you think that no one plays that way and then bounce off the hobby forever like that's my greatest fear i'm i'm the person who was like okay well fuck you i'm gonna make my own shit i'm Or I'm going to find it.

And that's how I ended up finding PBTA and then all the other stuff.

And now I'm into EBT, TTRPGs because I'm insane.

But like some people are lucky and they're like, oh, I like this style of play.

Both terms are capitalized.

And I'm like, okay, I guess going ham is going to be this book's equivalent of like a PBTA hard move.

But then I never saw going ham anywhere else ever again.

I don't know.

2D6, aim for eight, and then you're good to go.

For a while, I had revisions that brought in Powered by the PBTA bands of degrees of success.

I'm like, just...

Eventually, I boiled it down to 2d6, aim for 8.

I think that a good referee puts interesting challenges that are worth overcoming and then should be celebrated for doing that, but I don't think it should be adversarial.

But I do think that if If the guaranteed success of a devil's bargain at some particular cost is something that you want to avoid, then taking that sort of slightly harder route of rolling dice to see whether or not you succeed.

And at that point, I could do away with the PBTA bans because at that point, you've already established what the stakes are.

And so you know what failure is going to be.

I had a great time.

And my Tuesday Story gaming group, we're doing Armrest or Advent, which I think we probably will for the next couple of years, which is a mech RPG that draws on a lot of mechanics from a lot of PBTA games, all sort of like in a big stew pot that I've been really enjoying.

And then we're actually leading that with Ocean Tides, which is a Firebrands game.

D&D with my college friends.

It just, you know, I've never played it, so I shouldn't be too hard on it, but we'll just say that when I first got this game, I was very much in a kind of an indie story game mindset.

It's when I was exploring a lot of stuff after my fate days, um, PBTA is not for me but I looked at a lot of other story games kind of thing came across Cthulhu Dark and started sort of searching and this one always struck me it's just like oh man for taking such a lean chassis you've added all this like other stuff that has that matters and it really kind of changes what I think Wamsi was after with it so yeah There are some weird combat mechanics where if you don't, this is very, very story game.

If you don't like the outcome of the action, there's like a rewind tool the player can use to take a more measured course of action.

So I don't know.

Ooh.

There's also a series of game structures called Powered by the Apocalypse, and I'm getting way into the weeds here, but it offers a little bit more of a narrative form of gameplay.

And there's hundreds of different titles across that.

Some of the most famous ones are like Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a Powered by the Apocalypse game, which is about like queer love and sword fighting and adventure and enemies to friends and enemies to lovers archetypes and things like that.

There's another game called Glitter Hearts, which I'm a fan of, which is like magical princess powers, like the Sailor Moon sort of like trope of like transforming into like a magic girl.

These are not gendered, by the way.

Any of these don't have any interest in like having a specific gender or anything like that.

But Monster of the Week is another Powered by the Apocalypse game for fans of like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Supernatural or the X-Files, like these kind of like weekly Monster of the Week format games.

That could be more freeform.

You know, I'm reminded of like Powered by the Apocalypse.

How many of those games, each move is like, if you're investigating a situation, you can ask one of these questions.

And it's like that.