My Question: What ties the Dangers of your Campaign Front together?
I have run three Dungeon World campaigns now, and I find this to be one of the things that still causes me problems. When looking at other peoples’ Campaign Fronts, sometimes the Dangers seem completely unrelated, or only related by the fact that they are all happening in the same area. In that case, they are not really a “Front”, but instead a list of dangers that all happen to be located in an area. But then, if you try to relate them to a single event or object, they feel like they overlap or rely on each other too much.
Sometimes a Front can be just an area, depending on how you are playing. It’s more common in a setting like Apocalypse World.
I think the key is that the Front needs to have something pushing the players to interact with it (repeatedly). It needs to encroach on the players’ home base and threaten things they care about. Otherwise it’s not a Front.
Front is basically a war term, like you’d have the western front and the pacific front etc.
If you’ve got some unrelated dangers, I reckon what you’ve got is more than one Front in play.
I use the whole Front system as a count-down clock.
Say, the orcs are on the march to the east and witches are kidnapping people living around the dark forest, what do the players go for? and what happens on the other front while they’re not around?
Often though you’ll have a bunch of unrelated monsters hanging out in a dungeon, and for speed, they might just go in one Front titled “Shit that Will Eat You in the Temple of the Toad.txt”
I have found that when I have trouble creating Fronts and Dangers I need to keep playing.
That said perhaps it would be easier if you described your front to us and your dangers and we’ll see if we can give advice.
Tony Ferron has it. View the Dangers as ever-worsening clues and events leading up to the terrible Doom that will happen if the PCs don’t stop it. I start with the Front and the Doom, then fill in the steps in between.
I think I have a pretty good handle on what a Front is and how Fronts and Dangers work. My question is more: how related to each other are the Dangers within your Front.
For instance, take the Front created by Pablo LaFrossia posted a bit ago in this forum. These are cool and interesting Dangers, but in this case, they don’t seem all that related to each other (I’m certainly not downin’ on you, Pablo, just an example). It seems like they are just two different bad things that are related to each other.
But other folk I have seen have all of their Dangers within a Front all related to a single magical item or something.
The idea of Dangers all being ticking time bombs to the impending doom is great.I love the mechanic of it and the idea. But then we have Fronts, which sometimes seem like nothing more than a box you toss the Dangers in. Is this really how it is supposed to be? Or should all the Dangers within a Front be thematically linked?
You have the freedom to decide how you want your world to be. Some people like stuff to be tied together, some people feel that randomness adds a feeling of realness.
I like to have a couple of Dangers tied together with a 3rd which is only slightly connected.
Besides, it’s easily to tie Dangers together. Just ask yourself the question: Why now? Usually you can come up with some central trigger like some disruption of magical energies causing a tribe of orcs to get riled up. They don’t know about it, they think they’re behaving normally.