I have a question about fronts – specifically Grotesques, particularly disease vectors:
Are grotesques always one person, or can they be a group? It seems that most of the other kinds of threats encompass more than one person – even the “Warlord” encompasses his gang and others under his control. But under grotesques, it says that they are a person.
In the game, I have an npc, Momo, who is a prostitute, and she is sick. I was considering making her part of a brothel that’s spreading some nasty new disease as a disease vector. Or it could be that it’s just Momo who’s the threat, then add a Disease threat and add either the brothel or Momo’s boyfriend and cronies as a Brute threat.
Thoughts?
You want to make it “a person” so that it’s not something faceless or an inhuman monster, but making it a couple people is fine. The threat descriptions are abstract ideas that are supposed to inspire you to create something concrete and specific in the fiction–someone or something the PCs can interact with, usually–because if you don’t do that you can run into problems. You got Momo, though, so cool.
You can also decide later whether the disease vector is just her or something else. Maybe write it as a stakes question and see how things shake out in play. You will probably have to decide at some point, but maybe you’d rather do it after you have more info and the PCs have done a bunch of stuff. That’s totally legit.
Ok, great. That’s fine by me.
Writing it in as a stakes question might be good also. Maybe something along the line of “How many people will Momo be allowed to infect?”