Front Fuckery

Why a ton of Fronts works

My greatest campaign (not just AW, but any RPG ever) consisted primarily of the Hardholder Colonel, his Brainer Sin, Dust the Hocus, and (much later) Duke the Gunlugger. They were set up in your standard Hatchet City scenario with the Hardholder raiding the people of the city surrounding his ridiculously fortified 4 story concrete fortress. During our first session our Hardholder left 15 minutes in, leaving his Brainer in charge. The gang boss Brimful continued purging the Wader shacks. Our Hocus found himself embattled when he found his cult infected with the mud fish.

What happened next: The Brainer and Hocus lost the damned city. The Hocus was forcibly recruited by Brimful to help with the Wader purge and stealing supplies from a smuggler warehouse. Ambergrease's troops came up in trucks from the south and wiped out the southern half of the city, forming a war camp. The Brainer tried to ally with Dustwich to put her in charge of the Hardhold, and it would have worked had he not botched the sex roll and inflicted 1 harm AP. The Hocus lost half of his cult when Brimful attacked and suffered a debility to keep from dying. And lastly, all of the people from the holding tried to escape into the city, but were trapped and locked into the great hall by Colonel's last two men.

It was looking grim, Ambergrease's men ready to storm the hold, Brimful just barely holding them at bay. When Dustwich and her 40 men arrived at the hardhold with the offer to take over, Sin and Dust happily agreed.

And this was just the first session. All in all there were about 40-50 threats over four or five sessions. It was awesome because very rarely was a threat totally destroyed, just damaged. And no matter what the characters did, it made things that much worse. For example: killing all the waders allowed the mud fish to multiply and devour the landscape. Killing Mercer, the psycho mindfucker who tried to open the sealed preapocalypse mega-prison of Marta Tarsus, trapped his mind in Dust's body.

Moves snowball. Threats snowball.

Right on.  Good threat snowballing is part Countdown (I use Portents from DW instead), and part just letting them crash into each other.  A basic sense of escalation should already be built into the countdown for each threat, but when they start interacting with PCs and other threats, things REALLY start snowballing.

I make a lot of Fronts too, and scatter their headquarters or holds around.  No matter which direction you go, you'll find one.  And of course these Fronts are (usually) aware of each other as well.  In fact some of the Fronts have stronger rivalries with each other than they would with the PCs.  So unless the PCs do something about it, there's gonna be a war at some point, and it will affect pretty much everyone in town.

The downside of having lots of Fronts is: When it's time to make a move, you have to choose one!  Don't always choose the closest.