Threats and fronts

Threats and fronts

Threats and fronts

So i have a Problem with fronts. I can find threats in the game but I find it hard to put them together as a front. I can maybe come up with 2 things that can work together more or less but it’s hard. I understand that maybe half of the threats should be stuff directly found in play, the other half would come from my evil mind.

Is there a good front workshop somewhere online? The stuff in the book doesn’t help me enough. I will post the stuff going on in my game later but at first i want to know if fronts themselves are needed or if a bunch of threats can be enough.

I somehow also just stars at countdownclocks all the time empty minded. I know that it isn’t that hard or shouldn’t be but I just don’t know what to do. Mostly I have either a startpoint or endpoint and don’t know further.

7 thoughts on “Threats and fronts”

  1. I find that stakes questions / dark future is what solidifies fronts for me. Some question or looming possibility occurs to me and the front, including what threats to include with it, emerge from there. The front isn’t just a collection of threats, it is something that will change in the world. The PCs are going to determine which way that change goes, but the moment you put down a front it is a promise to change the world.

    Even so you’ve got to stick to the principles, which I think is the tricky bit. It isn’t a script that unfolds so much as a set of tools to understand what’s going on, what’s changing. The countdown clock tells you how close the monstrous child is to being born, and all the threats are arrayed to midwife it. When the PCs interact with it, all that should give guidance on what happens as a result.

  2. Also, how much do you advance your clocks per session? I held back to much in the beginning because i thought i needed more time to grow them in play and they would have to serve me for quite a bit of time. Through this i lost quite a bit of momentum i fear. 

  3. I advance them as they demand. If outright war is on the table with a neighboring hold and the PCs make an act of direct aggression, I jump the clock as per that act. In terms of advancing and then having things happen, when I have a chance to make a hard, direct move and the one that seems appropriate is one that advances the clock I do it.

    I had a front with a countdown clock that included “Dog’s Head takes command” early on in it. This could have been filled in if the players installed him as leader of this raiding gang, but as it happened the PCs supported the current leader–but a blown Hot roll led to it not going their way. It was an organic advancing of the countdown from their point of view–they tried to throw their weight behind someone, it didn’t workout, someone else took power. Later on when the clock filled and Dog’s Head scorched the hold to the ground because it wouldn’t submit to him, that moment came back to them and they really wished they’d actually fought to keep Dog’s Head out of power.

  5. Meguey Baker didn’t you write something sweet somewhere about having a mountain being an entire front, with different aspects of it being individual threats? i remember that example being super-helpful to me when i was struggling with this.

  7. Well, the hillside threat and the path threat and the trees threat were all part of the mountain, which could easily have been written up as a front, yeah. Glad to have been of help.

Comments are closed.