Other scavengers, whether competing groups from related societies or alien scavengers with incomprehensible cultural priorities. (E.g. they scavenge food but not technology; or they scavenge food and actively attempt to destroy technology. Or they bring all the scavenge in an area to one central point and then just leave it there.)

'Blood rivers' and living below the surface makes me think about the danger of flooding from above, and the intricacies of water tables (psychic or otherwise.) Open the wrong elevator shaft and maybe you let something in, something that's not necessarily visible to everyone. This makes skeleton keys as dangerous as they are useful.

Someone has a dream of the surface, of what the surface could be, that has been keeping them intact all this time. Maybe now is the time to start telling people about it.

Someone else has a secret way to the surface that nobody knows about, that has been keeping them (and their family) alive all this time. They know some things -- some dangerous things -- about the surface that sound crazy when you say them out loud. Will they reveal their secret, if it makes people listen to the warnings?

I'm still lost as to why you'd ever choose anything other than "They do what you want," on a 7-9.

Well the most obvious answer is 'you were hoping to roll a 10+'. You do have +2 hard, after all.

A 7-9 result is a push-comes-to-shove question: now that you understand this is gonna be a struggle, what part of that struggle is most important to avoid? If you can't see why a Chopper wouldn't want to avoid having to make an example of their gang, or avoid generalized dissent -- I dunno what to say, except think about a few more situations and I am guessing it'll become clear. Sometimes discipline is more important than effectiveness; sometimes you only have six gang members left and you need them all in working order; sometimes the thing you wanted them to do wasn't as important as making them do it.

I mean... group power dynamics are complicated! If that's not true of your Chopper's gang yet, don't worry -- it will be after a few more 7-9 Pack Alpha results, especially if you just keep choosing 'they do the thing.'

I like 'The Show' option and also 'the Battlebabe chooses if it happens or not.' The latter has more thematic distortion -- like, it seems a very different thing than the default, and is also just strictly 'better' -- than the former, but it may feel like more of a 'move' in a way that encourages the player(s)/signals that a real adjustment has been made.

But I also don't have a lot of direct experience with this, other than having played a Battlebabe and been at least a little sad when I didn't get to do something extra after hooking up with someone. That said, my Battlebabe was sexy af and didn't need a move to explain that to anyone and everyone who was willing to listen; he also never slept with any other PCs, so I didn't have that anti-climactic experience -- which I agree can be a bummer.

Do grenades have the 'unlimited' tag in 2nd edition or something?

I mean, if they have a lot of grenades, they must be getting them from somewhere? Seems interesting enough. These aren't just bullets or knives, after all, someone needs to know what they're doing to make a bunch of grenades.

But, like, 'the Gunlugger is overshadowing everyone else because they're so good at murdering NPCs' is not particularly a problem with grenades. Would it somehow be different if they were shooting everyone with a pistol or something? Because NPCs die from 2 harm just as much as 4, in most circumstances. Shoving a grenade in someone's mouth and then kicking them around seems pretty stylish, if prone to catastrophic error.

It means Going Aggro in a battle. As for examples, take any example that would be covered by Going Aggro, and have it happen during a battle, like so:

A battle is raging, gunfire everywhere. Ampersand the Gunlugger sees Rolfball, the treacherous rat, running across the battlefield -- he's trying to get to a jeep somebody abandoned during the fighting! Ampersand's player is like "fuck no, Rolfball, you are not getting away that easy -- I fire a warning shot from my AK right in front of his nose and shout out 'Get the fuck back inside, Rolfball -- I'll deal with you later!'"

or another battle is raging, explosions and bullets flying everywhere. Klaxon bursts in through the doors of the previously secure bunker where the enemy hardholder's mostly-not-that-armed civilians are cowering. Though some of the civvies are armed they clearly weren't expecting this, and they definitely aren't going to fight back, at least not right in the moment. Brandishing her flamethrower she shouts 'put your hands where I can fuckin' see 'em!'

I mean, anything can happen as part of a battle, generally speaking, and so NTBFW means that if the PC ends up Going Aggro in such a context, they're gonna do extra harm at the very least. Arguably, as in the second example, you might decide that NTBFW allows them to Go Aggro on a larger group of people than might otherwise be reasonable.

Most of the time, but it depends on when the move gets rolled, whether they hit a 10+, and many other things besides. It's pretty common in my experience for someone to decide to Read a Person due to something that has come up in a conversation -- e.g. to discover if what they just said is truthful or not -- but it is also common to use the move because someone is generally acting suspicious, and then to engage in conversation; in the latter case, holding your questions makes the most sense.

I also think players often have one main question in mind when they roll the move, and so 10+ results mean that they run out of immediate, obvious questions before using up their three hold -- this can happen in both the general cases described above. Extending the conversation allows them to both see if anything else comes up OR specifically guide the conversation towards something they'd like to use their last (few) hold on.

Probably the most common time I see the hold mechanic being used is when PCs are reading other PCs, because that's the most common case where the roll seems valuable as a purely speculative roll -- you're practically guaranteed to want to know something about another PC over the course of a scene, especially if that scene has dramatic charge.

Sometimes this is done to clarify to what degree the character understands what is obvious to the player -- since the player often has a much better idea of how the other PC is feeling, having watched all their previous scenes, etc. So sometimes I will see players decide to Read the other PC and then use a question to confirm that they definitely know, as a character, that the other PC is upset/lying/whatever. But other times they will just roll the move to indicate a general curiousity or wariness, and in that case the hold mechanic is particularly useful.

After a running my first session I'm now gearing up to send out the players' love letters. The first session went well, though I made a few slip-ups and poor choices, so I'd like to start the next session off a little better.

I admit my first question here would be why you are sending love letters after a single session. Is your intention to do these every session? Did a significant amount of time elapse? Do you want to skip over the immediate consequences of whatever happened last session, or does it feel like not enough things happened, or?

I am significantly less enthused than most MCs seem to be about the love letter technology -- I think that when they're good, they're pretty great, but that they should be deployed sparingly and in particular circumstances. It seems particularly difficult to come up with good love letters after only a single session, since there really isn't that much happening yet, and love letters generally excel at either fast-forwarding existing things to a point of crisis or resolving things that are well-developed but keep falling just outside the scope of an individual session.

But anyways, that's my bias, on to the letters.

Dear Saffron,

The market will be back on it's feet in the morning, but last night's disruption will have messed with your supply lines. Roll +hot to touch base with old suppliers and make new connections. 10+ pick 3, 7-9 pick 2, miss pick 1
-You resupply on coffee and drugs
-Some of your people don't get poached by water-slavers
-You fleece some sucker for 3 barter
-You show your face enough that those scuzzers don't think they can get away with selling the password to your place
-You pick up a hot tip (you get to ask one question from the read a sitch/person list for free at any time).
[That last option I'm not 100% on, but not sure of a better way to portray getting good gossip.

Well, more bias: I am not a fan of 'avoid a negative consequence that did not exist until I wrote it down as an option on this move' as an option on love letters. But everyone else seems to absolutely love them, so I can only plead for you to at least phrase them as a positive character activity or achievement rather than the passively-voiced suggestion that the hand of fate just randomly decided to spare them.

For example, instead of 'Some of your people don't get poached by water-slavers', something like 'You interrupt some water-slavers trying to poach some of your people.' By making it something the PC actually did in the fiction, you not only are more likely to get interesting consequences out of it -- you could start the session with the scene where the poachers are being interrupted, for example -- but you at least obfuscate the fact that you just made up a way to screw the player and then let them spend their hard-earned currency to stop you from doing it.

(Note that much of my dislike of this form of move does not apply if these are well-established threats -- things you have set up with previous moves and foreshadowing, and the player has consciously left unaddressed. It seems unlikely that this applies after a single session.)

The last option seems fine to me, another version could be 'take 1 forward to read a situation.'

Dear Lost Rabbit,
Well, that was a hell of a party last night and the chaos has opened up some opportunities. Pick whose toes you're stepping on for each of these then roll +weird:
-You fortify the warren [TRADERS or SAFFRON]
-You recruit new students [BABIES or SAFFRON]
-You wrangle 2 barter's worth of booze [BABIES or TRADERS]
On a 10+ pick 1 option that pisses off the group in question, for the rest you talk your way in/out of/around it. On a 7-9 pick 2. On a miss, they're all pissed off.

I actually just straight up can't figure out what this means, or how this move works. Is Lost Rabbit doing all those things, no matter what? Are they only doing one, that they're picking? When are they picking it? Why are you telling them all the things they are doing in a love letter -- did the player express an intention to do all these things? Aside from the confusion of how it is phrased I feel like this letter is really short on meaningful player choice.

Dear Spice Lion,

After last night's brush with the biker gang, it's time to work your magic and make some friends. Pick a group: BABIES; TRADERS; THE AUTHORITY; SAFFRON's STAFF and roll +hot. 10+ pick 3, 7-9 pick 2, miss pick 1.
-You Hypnotise an influential member of the group (I'll tell you who) with 2 hold.
-You don't draw attention from that group's enemies
-You ingratiate yourself to the group as a whole, ensuring they will be friendly to you
-You don't piss off the troublemaker of the group
-You get some dirt on another group, which you can use for leverage.
[Spice Lion came from out of town, so I want to get some connections going and setup some triangles]

This seems fine, though again 'you don't do a thing' or 'a thing doesn't happen' never feels like a particularly fun choice to me. These just seem like miss options dressed up as hits -- if I was the player I would basically never choose these options, especially if very little has been established yet about the group in question (does the player even know who the 'enemies' of each group are, at this point? Do you?)

Similarly, the 'on a miss, pick 1' thing for this and the first letter seems kind of meh to me. I would suggest rephrasing/conceptualizing it as something like 'On a miss, pick 1 and I'll tell you how it goes wrong.'

Dear Stinky Baby,
While the market knits itself back together, you need to get out there and get something to trade. Get 5 barter's worth and roll +hard. 10+ pick 1, 7-9 pick 2, miss pick 3.
-You get shafted by a scuzz trader, get -2 barter
-Happy baby and Slappy baby went and got treatment for their wounds, you owe the local doc 2 barter.
-A victim gets away, now they're out for revenge.
-The water you trade for is Nasty. You and the babies are bleeding from the eyes unless you spend 2 barter on upkeep.
[The Babies (his gang) get by raiding outside town and trading what they get at market. Nasty water is an affliction, but eye-bleeding isn't immediately harmful]

Barter seems to be much more relevant in the new edition, so can't really comment on this other than to say that the barter parts of these choices seem the least interesting. Luckily most of the options are solid enough choices on their own -- though the player is presumably guaranteed to pick the option where his gang members get medical attention before the one where he just straight up loses 2 barter. I would suggest adding something to the 'you get shafted' option -- a potential upside, or just interesting apocalyptica that makes it seem like a cooler option.

Dear Amiette,
Maybe it was the smoke, maybe it was the bodies, maybe it was the maelstrom, but now you can hear dead people. Specifically, you can use Deep Brain Scan on dead bodies. If the cause of death was beheading, you automatically get 10+.
[Amiette's player won't be able to make it next session, so I figured I'd give them a custom that'd get them excited to come back and use it]

Interesting option -- do we know, at least, that Amiette's player is interested in Amiette being able to scan dead bodies? This seems to potentially imply a lot about the Maelstrom and the PC's relation with it in particular, depending on how much has been established so far. Otherwise, sounds neat.

It's just, like, all the same thing over and over, in twelve different moves, and then plus a curse. I'd rather play any other playbook who just happens to be 'jinxed/cursed' -- have you considered turning this into a playbook expansion of some kind?

Alternately I feel like you need to find another dimension for this playbook, other than making everything shitty for everyone in the most straightforwardly mechanical way possible. Like, the curse is fictionally interesting, but every other move feels like it's just penalty to roll, harm, extra harm, you die!, you die!, etc. Would suggest reviewing Johnstone Metzger's 'Heralds of Hell' playbooks if you can track down a digital copy, for ideas on villainous/bad news playbooks that are still iconic.

Also, Black Magic's 7-9 sounds like a miss to me. A 7-9 should still involve success of some kind.