Author notes

#30: & World

nekoewen

on Feb. 13, 2012

Vincent Baker is one of the most popular independent tabletop RPG designers, and Apocalypse World is his latest and greatest game, about sexy post-apocalyptic people having desperate human conflicts. The rules act as a sort of tight interface between fiction and rules, so by changing the relevant parts of the rules you can make it be about all kinds of things with relative ease. Dungeon World turns it into a game for D&D-style fantasy, Monsterhearts does paranormal romance (and its IndieGoGo fundraising campaign is still going for a bit longer BTW), and so on.

While finally reading the Dragon Half manga (which was never officially translated into English, alas), I hit on the idea of doing an Apocalypse World hack for 90s comedy fantasy anime, which I called Dragon World. Not too long ago I posted up my first complete draft, and it’s proven fun so far, but definitely still needs work. And when I posted the link on Story Games it was Adam Koebel who said that since we have both Dungeon World and Dragon World, there needed to be an Ampersand World, I guess to fully go crazy with symmetry.