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Apocalypse World took the indie roleplaying scene by storm. In its sixth year, Vincent and Meguey Baker are kickstarting a second edition.

Apocalypse World has a post-apocalyptic setting, or rather; helps the players generate their own settings in the genre. It's a violent, dirty, poisoned world, but with room for hope. The designers have decided to stick fairly closely to the original system in the new book.

Meg: The single biggest improvement is the flow of battle. The combat in AW1 was often a place where the pace slowed and people had questions about the process. When we were looking at that system and how to streamline it, it clicked into place that we already had a solid system for the flow of action in the PC and MC moves, so why not see if a series of moves would work to handle battle? And lo and behold, they work great!

A major change is doing away with fronts and using threat maps instead. Threat maps give a better sense of how all the various dangers play off each other, and support an even stronger sense of the world. There are also significant changes to the Hx system that help make it smoother and faster to navigate.

Vincent: I'm pretty excited about the new threat map system. The old system for fronts was a little, I dunno, abstruse, a little too conceptual. The new system has you place threats directly on a map, centered on the PCs, it's more intuitive and more concrete. It really ties the threats the GM's responsible for to the landscape of the game, both when you're originally creating them and when you're updating them between sessions.

I: What was the original appeal to you with the post-apocalyptic genre?

Meg: Oh my goodness, what's the appeal?! It's everything. I'm a big history and archaeology and anthropology fan, and pretty much as far back as we know, people have been experiencing world-altering events, living or dying through them, dealing with the aftermath and the rebuilding process,and warning everyone about the next one. The current mainstream images of the post-apocalypse are mostly dry and dusty wastelands because we are on some level deeply aware of our utter dependence on potable water, but there's a dozen different scenarios that spring to mind from history. Top among them in my mind are the Black Plague in the 1350s, the arrival of the Spanish and smallpox in America in the late 1400s, the great fire of London in 1666, the dust bowl in the 1930s in the US, the second World War, Chernobyl, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, the poison water in Flint Michigan going on right now.

The end of "life as we know it" is a really, really old idea, and one that keeps on happening,even if it's only the end of life as you know it within a 20 mile radius of your home. To explore it and examine it, to look at scarcity and want and decide what you are going to do, where you are going to make a stand and say "I will prevail, I will remain human, I will remain humane" -those are fascinating things to look at and play with! And Apocalypse World offers players a framework to do that, to create and explore the nature of the apocalypse, whatever that looks like to them. I've run games with a wide wide range of apocalyptic landscapes, and heard about many more.

Vincent: I am, at most, a casual fan of the genre. Back in 2008 I was reading Gregor Hutton's game 3:16, one of my very favorites, then new, and it came to me that I could use the post-apocalyptic genre the way he uses military sf. The old power structures and systems of control are breaking down around us; we have this marvelous opportunity to carve out space for ourselves in their ruins. I wrote Apocalypse World originally to reflect on that.

Apocalypse World provided a toolkit for other designers to create their own "hacks" of the game. There are now over two dozen published games using the core system/method from AW, many of them indie favorites in their own right, like Monsterhearts and Dungeon World. In addition there are several fan-made hacks using elements or the system in its entirety.

I: What do you think of the growth of "Powered by the Apocalypse" games and hacks? Do you have any favorites?

Meg: We love it! It's incredibly gratifying and humbling to have something we made inspire so many other people to design, and so many of them are so good! My personal favorites are Monsterhearts, Sagas of the Icelanders, The Warren, and Epyllion. And World Wide Wrestling.

Vincent: My favorite is a relative unknown: Epidiah Ravachol