Totaly lost on PC-NPC-PC triangles. Are my PCs too tied ?

It has been 4 sessions, and I was not able to find any opportunity for a triangle. They all face the world together, even as they believe and behave differently.

The PC :
- Sundown, the Brainer. He psychically manipulate people into giving him their food.
- Shade, the Skinner. A cow-girl who dance (and more ?) in the saloon for a living.
- Ruth, the Angel. A mad doctor who experiments on anything/anyone unclaimed.
- Marcus, the Gunlugger. A big tribal guy, with a MG and a machette.
- Fate, the Hocus. His twenty followers believe in the fatality of life, and disdain possessions. They have to eat, though, and can go into wild savagery for it.
- Camille, the Savvyhead. A little boy/girl (ambiguous) hiding in his/her workspace, tinkering with electronics and sensors.

Their relations :
- Marcus and Sundown are both disciples of Fate.
- Marcus and Shade are lovers, but Shade soon bind him to her, and she dominates the couple. He is jealous and violent, but she makes sure not to cross the line in front of him.
- Fate secretly loves Shade, but his beliefs and Marcus stop him from following his sentiments.
- Shade and Sundown are friends.
- Fate knows very much Ruth, and has seen the truth in her soul.
- Ruth feels Marcus self destructive.
- Camille finds Ruth the most strange and resents the violence of Marcus.

The community :
- The 20 disciples, the PCs, the two Angel's assistants and the saloon owner (Jack) is all the community
- They earn resources by trading with all the travelers (it's on an important road between other communities)
- A deep fog surrounds the hills composing the landscape, and nobody ever returned from it. So nobody knows what is in the valleys.

The recent events :
- A part of a gang of bikers has arrived in the town, and it all lead to big trouble. First, they broke a statue belonging to the Hocus faith, so all the community tried to killed them. But as another biker offered to repair it, all went well.
- The followers, from hunger, push to kill the bikers and take their stuff.
- Finally, the biker boss and his lieutenants were taken to jail, and the PCs tried to find their base camp (to take the food), but I had already decided that they live in the fog, knowing paths to travel it. So the food-taking assault isn't an option anymore.
- They found a Gollum in a scrap yard, a nearly blind creature that eat rats and is very sneaky. Everyone think he/it has a contagious disease.
- Marcus stopped a follower, Rice, from taking one of his guns and devastate Ruth's infirmary to find food.
- Jack doesn't want any issues of violence with his customers, and continually asks the PCs to stay far from the saloon when doing their shit.
- Sundown has followed Gollum during one of his/its walk outside the town. He discovered that the creature steals food from another community, and offer it to Shade. There, he met Last, a young girl who proved really interested in following him into the fog, and he accepted (he lied and told her he lived in the fog).

But I failed entirely in providing tension between the PCs. Entirely. They behave like any classic dungeon party, with the classic twist that they have their little secrets, but nothing too big to severe the relationships. They share information and try to defend the community, they plan and act toward that. I hate that, I came into AW to fly away from classicism.

I tried very hard, last time, by searching for things a PC wants, that a NPC can give, but at the expense of another PC.
And find nothing significant. They all want power, in their own fashion, but they won't take it if it means being chased by the rest of the community. Their personal goals seem to stop right in front of their roles in the community. Even their belief is not a reason of conflict, because there is this couple Marcus/Shade, that seems to glorify openness, and I don't want openness in AW.

What can I do ?

Have you got some deeper and clearer advice than "try to make PC-NPC-PC triangles" ?

The simple, crude way is family. Blood kin is one of the resources in the 1st Session playbook. Who's related to who? Test the bonds; is the connection to a family member stronger than the connection to another PC.

Marcus and Shade are lovers, but Shade soon bind him to her, and she dominates the couple. He is jealous and violent, but she makes sure not to cross the line in front of him.

Give her lots of chances to cross the line. Put her lovers in his face. No actual lovers? Then someone is lying about being her lover, a guy in a bar and he's got a pretty convincing line of brag about it. Sure he'll get killed, but push that jealousy button; lean on it. Lover relationships, when they go bad, go REALLY bad. Your group will chose sides.

Camille finds Ruth the most strange and resents the violence of Marcus.

Put Marcus's violence, indirectly, in Camille's face. Marcus stopped Rice from looking for food? Maybe he goes to her, as someone Marcus wronged, with a story, maybe true, maybe imbellished, about Marcus's brutality. He wants revenge, if only Camille could cook them up some sorta weapon.
 

- Fate secretly loves Shade, but his beliefs and Marcus stop him from following his sentiments.

Put Shade's lovers in Fate's face as well. Tell him detail every time Marcus and Shade get all lovey. Take your time, give the details. No need to get sexual, if that's not your group's thing, but every time they do something, just look at Fate.

The followers are hungry? They don't want food from an outsider, like the biker, they want Sundown to get off his ass and food them up! He's been know to manipulate people into getting it. Make them assholes and don't pull punches. Put them between Fate and Sundown.

Last but not least, if they really, really resist ALL attempts to split them, maybe that's just the game they want to play. Talk to them about it and if that's what they like, keep on keeping on.

That's a tricky situation, no doubt about it, but you can still get to where you want to be.

For starters, Chris has good suggestions, especially about kin.  There are also some good general ideas in other threads.  Here are a few things that come to mind for me though:


1) Your recent events make it look like everything is either sympathetic or hostile.  I know that after years of D&D that's what my first instinct was to create.  What you want is for something that's a bit of both.

You've got a biker gang that arrives in town and breaks stuff.  That's hostile.  How about a migrating family of tribals instead?  They encounter Marcus first and befriend him.  Then some of their children find Camille and play nice with her.  Perhaps these interactions offer opportunities to the players.  After that establishes them, they bump into Fate and disdain his faith.  Or they tempt Sundown with their food.  Does Sundown take from them?  Then they go back to Marcus or Camille all starving and in trouble...

When you start fleshing out the individuals in that group, you could quickly have more and more triangles.  Just constantly look for a way to make NPCs sympathetic or difficult for specific PCs instead of the whole group.  You don't have to do this specific example, this is just a variation on the biker gang you did.  You could also change Gollum or another grotesque to match this idea.  Or you could do it to a follower of Fate's.  (Make a super religious character who Fate leans on, then have them trash Camille's belongings because she shouldn't have such possessions.)


2) The population of your town sounds pretty homogeneous.  I like to have at least three factions in my populations (shit, my Magic: The Gathering club in highschool had more factions than that).  Put every character into a faction as you go, and define some conflicts of interest between them.  Faithful and unfaithful, tribals and non-tribals, rich and poor, farmers and ranchers, etc.  If you don't have those divisions already, either retcon them in or bring in some immigrants.  (see above)

Then when you create TONS of named NPCs they'll naturally fall into different camps.  As the PCs create sympathetic relationships with them, they'll start being drawn toward those camps.  Make one of those camps a pain in the ass for a character, and then have them interact with another in a completely different way.  It sounds crazy, but it's easy in practice. 



3) Scarcity, scarcity, scarcity.  This is really the fuel of Apocalypse World.  In D&D you've got enough resources to do everything.  Sacrifice is rare and notable.  In AW there's never enough.  So if everyone's hungry and there isn't enough food, then have a story about getting food, but at the end say "Okay, you've got enough food for 75% of the people, who do you give it to?"  In D&D you'd get enough for everyone, but in AW you don't have to do that.  (I love to set it up so that the players can get 100% of the food, but not without giving up other, very important things.)

That's a simplistic example, but I can't stress the scarcity thing enough.  If you make the players desperate, if they feel like they can't get everything they want, then things will get interesting.  You can offer them imperfect choices.  Instead of "Do you stop Rice from demolishing Ruth's infirmary?"  You can ask "Do you stop Rice or save Joe's Girl?  You don't have time for both."  That get's interesting.  Especially if Joe's Girl matters to Shade, but the infirmary matters to Ruth.  Then Marcus can't make everyone happy.  Perhaps Ruth or Shade would let that slide once, but what about next time...

The scarcity doesn't have to be that obvious though.  In the west, why did farmers and ranchers have conflict?  There was a scarcity of land, and the two groups had very different ideas about using it.  The farmers and ranchers would have gotten along normally, but the situation pushed them to bloodshed.  What if you had a scarcity of children?  Shelter?  Warmth?  Knowledge?  Beauty?  Hell, what if you had a scarcity of car batteries?  Those who live above ground use them to power the water filter, those below ground use them for lights that keep the howlers at bay.  It's Apocalypse World, you shouldn't have any trouble coming up with scarcities that pull groups apart.




Hopefully that helps some.  :)

Use provocative, leading questions.

Have a newcomer walk into town, and say "Sundown (or whoever), you're the only one around." Let Sundown start being a psycho mindfucker.

Then, "Dusk, you arrive. You see Sundown leering over Whiskey - who is Whiskey, and why do you care so much about her?"

Instant triangle. Take it from there.