News Roundup: Apocalypse World Gets a Third Edition Update

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This week, we learned about the official release of Apocalypse World’s Third Edition, which will be the next big update for the original Powered by the Apocalypse TTRPG. Wizards of the Coast’s John Hight also spoke on AI and MMORPGs.

Apocalypse World, the Original PBTA Game Gets Revamped

Apocalypse World, the game that started an entire subgenre of TTRPGs, is getting an update after a decade.

Lumpley Games announced that it is redesigning and relaunching Apocalypse World, which is the first game to use the system that game designers now call “Powered by the Apocalypse.”

Initially published in 2010, Apocalypse World introduced the world to the Powered by the Apocalypse philosophy of design. PBTA has become the base for several popular games within the TTRPG space, including Monster of the Week, Masks, Urban Shadows and many more. Players use “playbooks” to create characters within certain archetypes and then use specific moves designed for specific story purposes and roll two six-sided dice to determine levels of success. The game has been adapted in several ways since the initial inception, but the core rules cling to this narrative-heavy/rules-light storytelling style.

Apocalypse World received a second edition in 2016 that replaced several key mechanics and updated its playbooks. The Bakers have been working on Apocalypse World: Burned Over (the title for the third edition) since 2021, although it was more of a “hackbook” with new changes to established rules rather than a new system built from the ground up. The new system will still be made by the original creators Vincent and Meguey Baker. The upcoming Kickstarter release is expected to be a complete edition, although little else is known about the new property so far.

Apocalypse World: Burned Over is a “pretty deep redesign of Apocalypse World,” the publisher said in a post on their site about the 2021 hackbook. “Suitable for play across wider age groups and more general audiences. No sex moves, a more reigned-in take on violence, less adult horror in the grotesquerie. In many ways, if we were to create Apocalypse World today, Burned Over is the game we’d create.”

The playbooks are currently available for those who want a preview of the system’s updates.

Apocalypse World has been on my to-read list for a long time, so I’m eager to get a closer look at this new book.

WOTC’s John Hight on Franchises, AI and MMORPGs

Wizards of the Coast president John Hight is a busy executive, but he seems to love to talk about his plans for future video games. That much has remained relatively clear since the only interviews I’ve seen out of the executive have talked about video games. I’d love to hear him talk about physical cards or TTRPG books at some point.

Hight spoke with Gamesindustry.biz on Friday in a fairly lengthy feature. Here are the highlights:

• He’s excited about Magic: The Gathering after its massive success with the Final Fantasy release. I mean, who wouldn’t be excited after $200 million in revenue in a single day? It has played a significant role in expanding the market to new customers.

• The physical production side has been ‘fascinating’ for the former Blizzard executive to oversee. The “spectre of tariffs” prompted the company to change its approach to publishing to do so within the US (which buffered them against some costs)

• He abides by the ‘franchise’ view of the company, which was further reinforced by how the company split up MTG and D&D into two different ‘divisions’ with the hope of coordinating cross-media projects (such as releasing a D&D book related to Honor Among Thieves at the time of the film’s premiere.)

• He aims to make it easier than ever for digital and physical play (whether MTG or D&D) to be “fully integrated,” allowing people to shift between the two seamlessly.

• Hight said that Magic and D&D are “very supportive of the art community,” but he’s open to AI being used to brainstorm and to help out with development. This also includes prototyping, which involves testing how lines in a video game feel before releasing them. He also brings up cases like checking for coding errors or developing ‘dynamic difficulty.’

• He also really wants to make a D&D MMORPG (even though there already is one? I’m confused how he doesn’t know about that since D&D regularly promotes it. It is old and kinda crappy, but it exists.)

I’ll let the piece speak for itself, but the interview leans heavily into the digital forms of gameplay, which are interesting but also somewhat speculative and forward-facing. But getting a look inside Hight’s priorities is still worth the read. Now I’m waiting for a chance to sit down with Dan Ayoub, who I think has a more direct impact on D&D’s future.

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