@Lumpley- Thanks for clarifying! I was reasonably sure but didn't want to nerf a Playbook until I was certain.

@noofy- No sweat! As you say, these aren't game breaking issues. Just something that seemed out of place to me, and I wanted clarity on.

@Pooka- That sounds interesting, tell me more about how you used them?

@Noofy- My problems with stakes were (a) I didn't really care about what happened to the NPCs as much as what the PCs would do, which maybe would be less of an issue if I was better about "naming everyone and making them human" (b) I couldn't really see how assigning stakes changed the game much. I felt like I played every situation about the same as I would have if I hadn't written them.

To turn the question around a little, how has writing stakes improved your MCing?

@Noofy
Savagery- I'm really not sure what you mean when you say it's descriptive and prescriptive. In the AW text Vincent uses that phrase to mean that the mechanics influence the fiction but the fiction also influences the mechanics. I can't see how that applies here so you are either using those words in a different sense or I completely missed the point you were making.
To clarify my issue- Savage (pg. 250) is a cue a gang can have, and Savagery (pg. 257) is a want a holding can have. They are fictionally and mechanically distinct, since you can have a gang and not a holding or a holding and no gang, or you can have both and the gang is savage but the citizens aren't or the people living in the holding can descend into savagery but the gang still not be savage. In the rules on page 59, there are two ways to get the Savagery want, the first of which also reduces surplus by one. Since the second option references the gang, I'm like 90% sure it was meant to add the Savage cue to the gang and not the Savagery want to the holding, and just wanted confirmation.
...And I just noticed that in the rules on pg. 252 for other character's taking Leadership, there is an option to give the gang +Savage. So now I'm nearly certain that my reading was correct.

Leadership- So your reading is that the Leadership move means the gang is better organized than the Pack Alpha move, and that's the source of the additional point of Harm? That had crossed my mind as well, but again on pg. 252 the gang does only 2 harm, so it's not something specific to the Leadership move. Maybe something specific to the Hardholder, or maybe a typo? It also looks like you can choose to have a poor armory even if that reduces you to 1 harm, if you get Leadership as another playbook, not sure how that plays into this.

The rest of your post all seems like good advice, thanks!

Two elements of Fronts rules were non-starters for me- Fundamental Scarcity and Stakes. But I suspect I may just not be getting something, so I was curious if anyone could make a pitch for them, or tell me about your positive experiences using them. I'm hoping something will "click" for me so they can become useful elements of my prep.

I'll comment a little more about my experiences in the hopes that it will help you zero-in on what isn't working for me.

Fundamental Scarcity: On my first read through, I liked how they drew attention to scarcity as a core theme of the game, but found it odd that Hunger and Thirst were distinct, and found some of the examples strange (why are the Burn Flats associated with Ignorance?). When I first used the rules after my first session, there were threats I wanted to group together but which didn't share a common scarcity, like the cultists and the disease they were spreading- the cultists represented despair to me but the disease threatened the water and so were associated with thirst, but it seemed to me they should belong to a common front. Or the slavers, whose Warlord was ambitious, but whose lieutenant might have been a better fit to despair and whose foot soldiers are more motivated by hunger. Should I be grouping these threats into fronts by scarcity rather than the conceptual groupings that seem more natural to me? Is there an advantage to tying them into a common scarcity instead of whichever seems most natural for each?

Stakes: My problem here is that the things in the story I am the most interested in finding out are mostly about the decisions the PCs will make. What moral lines they will cross, what they are willing to do to achieve their goals, whether they can put aside pride to work with a common enemy... Those kinds of questions about NPCs aren't as interesting to me since I am usually the one who decides those, and the questions about the physical welfare of the NPCs, which the examples seemed focused on, just haven't gripped me as much. Maybe as I get better at fleshing out human NPCs I'll get more concerned with their welfare, but so far there haven't been a lot who I really cared whether they thrived or suffered.
The other problem I ran into here is I didn't find that picking out a couple stakes changed my MCing during the game. When I decided that which NPCs got sick was at stake, I couldn't really see any difference in how I MC'ed the next session versus how I would have handled it if I hadn't singled that out as an issue at stake.

Also, on a totally different note, I saw two oddities in the rules that looked like they could be typos, but I wanted to check...
1. Page 59 and 252
"your gang is a pack of fucking hyenas. Want: savagery."
Should that be "Cue: Savage"? From the chapter on stuff it looks like gangs can have the savage cue to indicate that they behave horribly, and the savagery want means that when a holding is in want that society breaks down. The cue seems appropriate here.

2. Page 58
"• an armory of scavenged and makeshift weapons.
• a gang of about 40 violent people (3-harm gang medium unruly 1-armor)."
Is that really supposed to be a 3-harm gang? My impression was that gangs get harm assigned based on the weapons they are armed with, and every other example of a gang using scavenged and makeshift weapons gets 2-harm, which makes sense to me since crowbars, knives, and handguns all do 2-harm. Or is it just a perk of the Hardholder that their gang inflicts one more harm than a similarly armed gang would for anyone else?