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Tuesday 20 October 2015

The Week in Stories - October 20

Gaming has been sporadic recently, which is too bad. Hopefully as my life settles down a little, so will the lives of everyone else. I guess we'll see.

Apocalypse World

We got back to our Drowned World post-apocalypse, and it's much changed. Two of the Mothers are dead, and an army is approaching from the North, complete with soldiers who have lost their selves to the speaking sickness. My character's ex-lover, Marsh is at the head of that army, and she is seriously wigged out by that.

Gremlin brought the Thrush (freaky-looking teenagers who are infecting people with greensong) to Mother Darling, only to find out that the "Man from the City" had killed her and taken over. She demanded to see him, only to find it was Fox (Bill's character), the lover she'd recently screwed over when leaving town.

He'd just had the crap stabbed out of him, so he was less combative than Gremlin, who slapped him for killing her one connection to finding more road. Fox tried to convince Gremlin that there is no more road, and that she needs to trust him and stay and fight this time. That made Gremlin feel pretty panicky, even though Fox reassured her that he didn't want to own her. Eventually, she decided to stay, although she's not entirely convinced about the road yet. She also started to see that Fox really loves her, which creates a bit of a dilemma.

She's very freaked about getting close to people, and that's built into the Driver sex move. I don't want to get away from it, so a few options present themselves to me. First, if she fails a roll entirely again, react the way she did before, and try to get away. It's interesting, but I've done it. The other two options are a little more interesting.

One that strikes me right away is that she shies away from sleeping with him again - getting emotionally closer pushes her physically further away, a reversal of the sex move. So that's a possibility, and will probably what I experiment with for a little bit. The other is that if she does sleep with him again, and it does go badly, that she takes the -1 ongoing and lives with it. It would be a very real and mechanical penalty for trusting someone that would make her life very difficult.

They're all options, and interesting ones, and I'm glad to see where it will go.

One other moment to talk about, because I think it half came across the way I wanted it to, but that I didn't commit to it enough. As the first scene between Gremlin and Fox was coming to a head, I wanted to end it with a gesture that at first looks like it might lead to another slap, but ends with her hand on his cheek. That felt right. But Bill was across the table and I couldn't reach him, and describing it wasn't enough. So I got up, walked slowly around the table, and laid my hand on his cheek.

I'm not sure I committed enough to the first part of it, as I'm not sure it looked like it was going to be a slap. But it felt pretty good, and even more so how tightly I was holding my body as I walked back to my seat, that physical reminder of how hard any kind of opening up is for Gremlin. Body movements reinforcing emotions, emotions reinforcing movement. I love that stuff.

2 comments:

  1. Re: Slapping, I didn't really see that part of the motion, but it was a nice moment nonetheless. Though the scene was surprising to me, overall.

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    Replies
    1. Yeah, I didn't really commit to it enough to make it apparent. Ah well.

      What was surprising?

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