Discussion of different threats on the official forums:
Amazing stuff.
http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=7479.0
Something like this should probably be in the 2e book, just saying…
Discussion of different threats on the official forums:
Discussion of different threats on the official forums:
…ok. Take the first two lists, throw in some Gamma World, and you have the most horrific set of 13th age Icons ever. Yup, those are all the power players. Which ones do you have positive relationships with?
Afflictions and Landscapes…
As a challenge to gain some measure of comprehension, I am thinking of making a few fronts limited to only these two threats and their types…
…being so intrinsically different from the personas of entities that might be thought of as near-human (or at least organic) in form:- I can see how they might be difficult to conceptualize, but I think I’ve got them figured out.
Comment them here when you post them.
Easily recognizable pop-cult example might be;
The Capital Wasteland Front
Threat 1 & 2
>DC Ruins
(Threat: Landscape Type: Fortress Impulse: to entice, to deny access)
>The Subways
(Threat: Landscape Type: Maze Impulse: to trap, to frustrate passage)
Key Moves:
Reveal something to someone.
Display something for all to see.
Bar/Open the way.
Shift, move, rearrange, or provide another way.
Offer a guide, guardian, or goal.
Disgorge something or someone.
Take/Hide something: lost, used up, destroyed.
Threat 3 & 4
>Shifting Pockets of Radiation
(Threat: Affliction Type: Condition Impulse: to saturate, to expose people to danger)
>Rumors of High-tech Caches
(Threat: Affliction Type: Delusion Impulse: to entice, to dominate people’s choices and actions)
Key Moves:
Someone neglects duties, responsibilities, obligations.
Someone flies into a rage, and takes self-destructive, fruitless, or hopeless action.
Someone approaches, seeking help, comfort, or sanctuary.
Someone withdraws and seeks isolation.
Someone proclaims the affliction to be a just punishment or blessing.
Someone refuses or fails to adapt to new circumstances.
Someone brings friends or loved ones along.
and I found a thread or two relevant to this;
http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=7423.0
http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=2171.msg12948#msg12948
…noting also someone’s interesting use of Impulse: to saturate a population < Type: Disease < Threat: Affliction < Front: Mercantile Economics, in an area dominated by popular consent with Communist and Socialist paradigms. Using Afflictions to embody headless political movements… brilliant!
http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=2191.msg13121#msg13121
Swinging the other way; a Front: Communism < Threat: Affliction < Type: Custom < Impulse: to promote and justify violence shows a way to put these Front Threat Types at odds with each other — which also brings to mind, conflicts in a political Landscape as a possibility of expressing such threats of ambiguously non-physical personas.
I’ll make a note of that; Jesse Cox… getting assistance in gaining a handle on these two in particular, seems to be a common oversight. I’m thinking it is due to the ease of seeing the direct correlation with a specific NPC offered by Warlords, Grotesques, and Brutes… even though Fronts and their constitute parts, are not really restricted to a rigid physical form.
As I’ve shown… somewhere… in the past; The Changing Seasons can be A Front ported right out of Mouse Guard, with each season as a Threat, or each Season it’s own Front and the Four Threats expressing the Four Hazards (weather, wilderness, animals, and mice) of The Territories with countdowns and custom moves… or both, nesting Fronts within Fronts is also possible, depending on scope and scale.
Thank you.
No problem…
update note: after toying with the idea of Political Landscapes… I am thinking what plagues the minds of mankind and the harmony of social hierarchies, is best expressed as an Affliction.
It sounded better than it looked, whence it was barfed out on paper… save your processing power, and avoid parsing that lexical trap — like calculating pi^tau, this could’ve become a bit of a self imposed mind virus, luckily I have sufficient safeguards. XD
Landscapes are best served as physical locations, no matter how evanescent or transitory the existence…
Afflictions are the catch-all for abstracts beyond human scale perception, though within the scope of human perspicacity to categorically label.
Maleficent Diseases of the body, and malevolent Conditions of the soul:– Conspiracies of Custom among organized men, and Consensual Delusion within the hierarchy of social estates:– And, in common strife for struggles, midst the inherent impositions of Sacrifice, or against any presented Barrier to the advancement of humanity:– These are what nightmares are made from.
And, thus is the provisions of fodder to pasturage the maelstrom of the common human psyche, where the subconscious is embodied with manifest forms, via the serendipity and synchronicity at play on the tapestry of causality, in a fractal kaleidoscope of living cosmos, across The Maya between the physical and phenomenal worlds.
(A Neanderthal’s head tilts, and says; future-man speaks many fancy words, for simple concepts. A myriad of millennia in the materialism of modernity has really messed us up… and occluded some of the least complicated concepts, under the hoof and tire of progress — fortunately there is an apocalypse to fix all that.)
😉
Now that’s some tone poetry.
Fate and Spark both talk about putting faces on things in order to interact with them. It’s an old bit of animism that makes solid sense for a constructed world.
Landscapes don’t lend themselves to having faces, save perhaps from the guides and guardians they disgorge, who are indirect — they give you someone with a face who “knows this thing and can read its moods.” Landscapes seem to be much more about resources and information — they obscure and reveal and sometimes tempt, but it’s mostly the basic MC moves with more stark relief.
Hmm. Which might make dangerous research an interesting Landscape — a mystery, a criminal investigation, efforts to build that matter synthesizer…
Afflictions are funny because their “faces” are the people affected by them, who likely do not actually think of themselves as serving the “motivations” of the affliction.
Like abstinence-only sex ed. Proponents will say it’s about preventing young people from having sex before marriage. But as far back as birth records in the Middle Ages, where the average time between marriages and associated baptisms was something like three months, that’s not the actual effect.
The effective drive of abstinence-only is to result in pregnancies in the young who then have strong community pressure to marry, and strong community support to stay in those marriages and have more children. It’s not a nonsense system, or even a terrible system, it just doesn’t act like its faces tell you it acts. and that makes it hard to think about.
Abstracting landscapes in that way might be a rare requirement, especially with the precedent play to find out…
A mystery scenario likely has a face (masked or away and windward) peccant in the events motivating an investigation… though, with some occurrences the face may be a burdened environment, a cursed locus, a landscape with an affliction.
The Summer Drought is a Landscape Afflicted, that may be the culpable nescient locus to a Front expressing itself with mysterious events of heedless natural evils. A summer in drought is temporally presented as a position of situations… with no tangible visage, motivated only in cognizant animus of persona. Threats might come from Brute:Mobs of people and animals motivated by Afflictions of Conditions and Sacrifice, trapped in a procedural trip through a Furnace behaving with some aspects of a Prison, via the nature of linear time itself.
OTOH: If during the course of these events, a murder or theft takes place — an investigation into the identity and motives of the culprit, is likely to lead to the face of some specific rabid wasteland beast… and the degree to which the blameworthy is occluded by masks and misdirection, really depends on the nature of said beast. It could be a Maze of clues and misdirections, with Delusions and Barriers to illuminate the trail, passively circumstantial or skilfully crafted.
The “in your face” nature of AW would be one that makes a carefully tangled web of mysteries a little pointless… but, not so pointless I’d discourage the attempt outright. Just be prepared to waste a Front Sheet that is discarded as uninteresting, unresolved, and made useless, in the time it takes the players to say… “SQUIRREL!”
more
quickthoughts;> Will the ‘protags’ get the information they need?
> What will the ‘protags’ do with the information they’ve got?
> What will the ‘catals & antags’ do if the information remains undiscovered?
These are the kinds of progress arc questions always being asked in any fiction.
By the dynamics of an RPG… I might be bold to say; every RP session is as much a Mystery Investigation as every Game is about Survival, as fiction emerging from the improvisational potential of ensemble processes.
Seems to me, every Front masks agendas, encourages fallacies, and hampers enlightenment… until it’s in your face, blasting both barrels, or past the hope of rational reconcile.
To present a Supernatural Investigation Front, some Threat of The Lurking Fear might take the intangible forms of a Mirage and Delusion in Types, lending Conditions and Mazes, to key components of other Fronts — insinuating influencing tentacles throughout a region like a semi-cogent and dreadful intelligence with a passion for perversions.
Can’t force fear out of the players, but you can present the spread of fear, rise of panic, and possible acts of hysteria, in the population of faces around them… as a Condition in Mobs and Families, or a Charismatic Prophet also acting as a Disease(Condition) Vector with a Hive Queen in a Cult.
Nothing says Fronts couldn’t or shouldn’t trade, harass, and steal the ‘Threat Resources’ of other Fronts… even if they do so in very clandestine, shadowy, and mysterious ways.
What is repeated advice, a Front be built out of what the PCs actually see in front of them as they face any particular vector in the fiction, and focus on what interests them, and what they notice and react to.
Such a nameless shadowy Front, lurking faceless in unknown and unknowable Landscapes, is almost a given… but, then there is a feedback loop between the abstract and explicit.
“Inconsistencies,” answered Imlac, “cannot both be right; but, imputed to man, they may both be true. Yet diversity is not inconsistency. My father might expect a time of greater security. However, some desire is necessary to keep life in motion; and he, whose real wants are supplied: must admit those of fancy.”
“Pride,” said Imlac, “is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages, and envy feels not its own happiness but when it may be compared with the misery of others. They were my enemies because they grieved to think me rich, and my oppressors because they delighted to find me weak.”
“The causes of good and evil,” answered Imlac, “are so various and uncertain, so often entangled with each other, so diversified by various relations, and so much subject to accidents which cannot be foreseen, that he who would fix his condition upon incontestable reasons of preference, must live and die inquiring and deliberating.”
~ The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia; by Samuel Johnson, 1759
/sub
Quote Daniel Wood from thread:
~~~
“For me this started out as ‘well what if this Landscape was also a Warlord?’ — but in light of the above, I think it would be just as sensible to say ‘well okay this is a Landscape, but it is the brain of the Front as well’ as a way of explaining why it seemed to also have Warlord characteristics.”
~~~
Really condenses a conceptual paradigm I’ve explored with more words.
What if;
The Affliction is The Face…
The Landscape is The Voice…
The Warlord a reluctant and involuntary Figurehead to a full six-way-set of Brutes acting as indistinguishable Catalysts — rather than casting about for blatant Antagonists and scapegoats… and The Brain is absent in de facto reign…
Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than that. ~ also from the thread…