I can devise interesting Dangers easily enough. But I can’t seem to group multiple Dangers together as Fronts with out it feeling forced or superficial. The best I’m able to do is group Dangers by location with a Front like: Troubles of Brierton. Any tips for grouping Dangers into a Front?
I can devise interesting Dangers easily enough.
I can devise interesting Dangers easily enough.
Any locus can be made a Front, and the Dangers associated with it have to do with its nature.
For example, your idea of a location — a town, dungeon or temple — is easy to grasp and can offer a number of possible Dangers.
But what if the Front is an event, for example a masked ball? Dangers might include ferreting out the assassin, maintaining peace with the hotheaded foreign diplomat and preventing the Duke from learning what your Bard did with the Duke’s “innocent” daughter?
Or a relationship? Or a seagoing vessel?
I look at a Front as a scene (more or less). I then add Dangers based on the central idea — just enough to give it spice, but not so many it takes a score card. Ideally, when two or three are run simultaneously it should be more like a rich story than a linear “if this, then that” series of dice rolls.
Just take Dangers that have related goals. The example in the book uses “the opening of the white gate” and all the different groups trying to open it.
I find the concept of fronts to be most valuable as a way to suggest additional dangers that might be involved, rather than making dangers and then trying to tie them into coherent fronts.
Like, if your Front is “The Ruins of Kravenghast Manor” and you’ve got Dangers of the Ghoul King (Power Mad Wizard) and the Amulet of Algol (Sentient Artifact).
Those are both Arcane Enemies, so maybe mix it up. Maybe the Ancient Catacombs are a Dark Portal, somehow overlapping with the Gehenna Necropolis. Maybe there’s a rival adventuring gang moving in (Wandering Barbarians) who just plan to smash and burn and loot and not really worry about the consequences.
And if you’ve got some other Danger that you’ve thought of that doesn’t seem super relevant, cool. Put it aside. Move it up to the Campaign Front and let it simmer.
I think i do it in a way where i think what kind of atmosphere/playing experience do i want the players to have.
So for example I did have a location front, the forest where my druid and wizard came from.
So i wanted there to be danger in going into the forest and it to feel like if you went the wrong turn you would be captured by something so I created: Centaurs which were windering hordes that didn’t like humans.
The players came with a smuggler so i wanted there to be that roguush group which could be allies or could be anyogonists so I made a smuggler city in the firest.
Of course the big bad was the emperor so I had to have the emperor’s guard in destroying the forest for their own means.
In game sometimes these things didn’t connect but they did serve the purpose i want by giving different sessions a different feel and creating the atmosphere/world I wanted as well.
AW2 removes the need to put things together as fronts. Having enough threats (and enough is more then you would think) is sufficient.
Tim Franzke is there more to it, or is it just “you don’t need a front”?
Threats are enough. If some are related, mark them as such and go on.
Tim Franzke cool. That’s basically what I do anyway. My “Fronts” are just named based on a story arc or major plot and then I dump related threats into it.
Tim Franzke In AW2 how many threats are recommended? Is there a rough guideline?
In my 5 session, 4 PCs game I have 23 right now with a few more I probably need to create.
Bascially, every settlement, every group, every powerful individual, every organization, every group of monsters, every single monster, most named NPCs, every landscape, every dungeon, every magical phenomenon etc. all of these you would create as a threat.
This is not to punish your players and threaten them from every side – a lot of these might not even impact them directly yet – but to have a lively world where stuff is happening constantly.
Sounds like it’s the pretty standard “make NPCs with interesting goals” that pervades most RPGs, just with the “interesting goals” described as a list of steps.
yep
Tim Franzke that sounds more natural to me. Does every threat have an Impending Doom or whatever the equivalent is in AW? Or just Portents (Countdown Clock)?
The way I do it right now is things have 1-3 things that might happen and I have a countdown for these things individually. Ones they are done I come up with the next step.
So
Hols and Rolfball kill Tao [ ] [ ] [ ]
They raid Baron Hall for fuel [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
etc.
That is how it is done in Swords without Masters (and AW2 suggests a similar approach) and it works really well for me.
Some things however make more sense in the multiple steps that are all predefined method. Like describing how the weather changes during the winter.
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