Hello! I’m new to AW, and was very excited to find it while digging into Dungeon World. I haven’t yet had the chance to play or run any of the PbtA engine games, but I’m intrigued by their shared mechanics, as well as the places they differ. Of course, since sci-fi is a huge draw for me, I’m looking forward to diving into UW.
I have a question, regarding Fronts. These to me were one of the most interesting tools in Dungeon World. It seemed as though Fronts would do a tremendous job of rallying plot elements and keeping tension in an ever-expanding story.
Can anyone speak to the compatibility of Fronts within UW? Can anyone think of reasons they may not work, or reasons to keep Threats more separate? Has anyone tried using Fronts in an UW campaign? Any thoughts are welcomed.
So, Fronts work fine with UW. The reason they work fine is because of a little secret I’m going to share:
Fronts don’t do anything. Take a look at them and notice that they don’t have any mechanical parts, and they don’t really have directives… Fronts are folders, is what they are. They’re a place to put your thoughts on what might come next, who might be worth talking to, what the dastardly villain is doing, and how the setting might change forever.
All of that is dead simple to import anywhere.
In the case of UW, you already start the game with X Fronts: your Factions are each a Front. When you determine their strengths, reach, and motto you are detailing how those Fronts operate, and their agendas. When your players tell you what their Debts represent, you have an idea of what the Factions may immediately want from the PCs and can start dreaming up offers or demands to make on their time and lives. Dream up some Threats, attach them to your Factions, and you’re cooking with Warp plasma. From all of this you can milk locales, dangers, NPCs, and so on. Since you can add Factions pretty much whenever, you can add Fronts as needed. It’s as simple as could be to slap a 6 step countdown on your notes and pencil in what happens when/if X, if you’d like.
Beyond that, Sean Gomes has a conspiracy system coming out some time that should cover more concrete villainous plans, I believe. Am I right on that, Sean?
I agree with Alfred. I was arranging my rpg campaigns with something quite like fronts but with less consistent definition up until I got into Dungeon World. Factions and debts set you up in a way that are fronts on their own. What I miss from DW is bonds, but you don’t really need them. -Mechanically I think advancement triggers work better as all characters get xp from them. It encourages using each other’s strengths.
Interesting. That makes sense. It seems like one of the other intentions behind fronts is to help/cajole the GM into intertwining their threats from the start for the sake of narrative flow or cohesion or ‘wholeness’.
If I understand them correctly, an impending asteroid impact could be part of a front, though it’s not a faction and it’s much larger than a threat, if it somehow ties into the ways different factions are either responding to its approach or positioning themselves (and the characters) to mitigate or maybe exploit its impact. Replace asteroid with plague, and it’s a similar thing. I know in UW these are called Mindless threats, but they do tend to be vehicles for an option-lock or time-lock in a story. (Running out of options, or running out of time). The original Star Trek and its films actually uses such threats with frequency.
So in the movie Aliens, the hive is a Faction, the marines as a whole are a Faction, Burke’s company is a Faction, and the venting reactor is… a Mindless threat which in combination forms a front, but only if we choose to view / structure it that way? 🙂
Good stuff; thanks for thoughts.
I like the idea of having a list of Grim Portents (aka indicatoins that a front is making progress) as hard moves. They build complications into the fiction.
Alan Barclay This seems to be what the GM move ‘Advance a Threat’ could do. Most of the pieces are there, scattered through the UW rules — and since 2nd ed of AW removed Fronts, it makes sense that they’re not represented in UW… although AW replaced them with the threat compass. So in a way, what felt like it was missing was any suggested organizational tool for turning flocks of threats towards narrative cohesion. Sci-fi can be very cinematic, and these tools can help.
I may work up a kind of record sheet for Fronts in UW, maybe using some of the UW terminology instead of DW terminology. (Advances or Advancing Moves instead of Grim Portents?) I feel like I’ll use Fronts as an organizational tool, but I like how fluid the rule sets are in this area. It’s a welcome byproduct of their lineage as open source games, perhaps.