I haven’t seem much discussion of Menaces and Threats yet.

I haven’t seem much discussion of Menaces and Threats yet.

I haven’t seem much discussion of Menaces and Threats yet.

Have you used many menaces / threats? How do you use them? Is there any examples other than the one presented in the book?

#menace   #threat  

8 thoughts on “I haven’t seem much discussion of Menaces and Threats yet.”

  1. In the last MH season I ran, the menaces were based on two families in the small town it’s based in. One family with royal bloodlines who were decended of the town founders the other werewolves, a powerful new money family. Together, they formed a “Business Improvement Association” that was subjugating lower class people in the town, including parents of a PC and teachers at the school.The royal’s eldest son, and brother if a QPC queen was the third Menace, trying to perform a ritual to take his bloodright power.

    Threats included kidnapping a teen that had a crush on a PC. Threatening the job of a PC’s mother. Threatening the PCs grades. Trying to seduce a PC to the darkness. Full out werewolf pack attack.

    This season, now that the BIA has been run off, usurped and destroyed, there are very different threats, but a player in this game reads thus forum, so no telling. 🙂

  2. I mostly use them as hard moves when there’s nothing immediate that works.  They kickstart play in a different direction when you’re running out of steam in the current one.

  3. Do you guys have any examples of menaces you’ve used? Did you find the cravings, offers and capacities in the book were enough to cover everything you wanted? Or did you have to come up with other ones?

  4. Quite frankly, I never use Menaces when I’m running games. I prefer my games to focus on the drama caused solely by the interaction of the main characters. I prefer to keep the conflict internal. don’t like shifting the conflict to some external thing that the characters all band together to deal with. In other words, I prefer to play more like Gossip Girl and less like Buffy.

  5. Sometimes, in smaller groups, an external threat is awesome. Even with a vivid love triangle, you need something for the odd-vamp-out to do while Wolf and Ghoul have their alone time.

    Sometimes players will telegraph the threats they’d like to face. I made a biker, so my GM had me face off with a rival gang. Ghosts need to deal with their pasts, and if they don’t have something, a villain who’s taking advantage of their trapped-in-Earthrealm-status gives characters something to battle against.

    At the end, one of the characters is USUALLY the villain. Or two are. But sometimes, a creepy cult can do the trick.

    The key is to foreshadow in the first scene. Odd howling, everyone dropping something (and someone they’ve never met handing it back to them’), mysterious bird attacks…you don’t need to know 100% of the time what the badness is, because the ghoul yelling at the vampire will give you time to lay back and set up some schemes.

  6. You’re absolutely right, Adam Goldberg. When I said I didn’t use Threats and Menaces, I didn’t meant that there were no external sources of conflict in the games I ran. I still have NPCs with lives and agendas sticking their fingers into the PCs activities to keep things interesting. I simply meant that non of them have even been a “proper” Menace as described by the book. They’ve only ever been fictional constructs.

  7. We’re currently running a gm-less 3 player game, and agreed beforehand what the menace should be and decided to keep it relatively subtle.

    In our case we decided to kick it off by killing Allison (It’s a tradition, the first to die is always named Allison) at a party. Death by fire. She hadn’t shown up for the party, but we heard her screaming when the wicker man was lit…

    We decided she’d been sufficiently injured to die and found strange markings on her body. In other words, we’d disrupted a magical sacrifice of some sort, and that meant whoever did it would need to do it right, and we’d decided that the sacrifice had to be pure.

    The menace in our game was a cult that was sacrificing a virgin every (something) years to keep the town safe and prosperous, and since the ritual, we discovered, had to be completed within a certain time-frame, we needed to figure out who the virgins were and how the cult found out (the better-than-good-no-evil-bone-in-her-body Catholic Priest’s daughter).

    In our second season the menace is a demon that’s been accidentally summoned by a classmate who’d used a ritual found in our Witch’s Book of Shadows. It didn’t work when our witch had cast it (before the campaign started) because the town was protected by the sacrifices.

    Now, this demon isn’t a physical threat, but whispers half-truths and dirty secrets in the ear of the one it possesses, and since the exorcism released it instead of banishing it, it’s now found a new ally in the lovely Arianna, who’s always sooo concerned about everyone…

    Oh, and Arianna was already the one who wanted our Chosen dead…

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