My first front

This is my first front for our game. We have played two sessions. We are now forced to wait a while for the third so I thinking I should take the time to really get how to build and use fronts. I have som thinking and questions in the end of the texts.

On big question is also how to use the “MC Moves” in game. Should I make list of the fitting moves for each session, should I just have the in the back of my mind or should I have the list in front of me to look at? I know is seems to be a bit dumb question and I know you can answer it with- do what you like, but I wanna know how you do it.

Our second session started with the players looking at me, me looking at the MC moves, not finding anything fitting, the players looking at med, me looking at the move, me ignoring my front and just hit them with a random car bomb (which didn´t really fit the front but got the whole session started- and rocking).

Two player- one is the operator Wilson, the other is a Battlebabe named Beastie. Wilson is Beasties older brother. Wilson pursues luxury, guards things, helps with deals and fucks the hardholder Tao for money. They have a crew of three (+Beastie), Pe the gunlugger, Wasted the driver and Jamie the medic.

Front
Is called: Civil war
Expresses: Hunger
Dark future/ agenda: The coast falls into total civil war, a new apocalypse, friends kill each other, everything is thrashed
Stakes: Will Temple (the Hold) go to war? Will the refuges be protected? Will Taser get his revenge? Is Tao (the hardholder of Temple) really a part of the Sun cult???

Threat 1.
Called: Monk the warlord (leader of the Hold Monk´s Paradise)
Kind: Warlord- Hive queen
Impulse: To consume and swarm
Description and cast: Monk, Tavi the brainer
Custom move: When you go into Monks territory roll +Sharp. 10+ You see ruined and burned villages 7-9 you see monks guys attacking innocent people On a miss – you meet innocent people just before Monks troops attack
Countdown: 3-6-9 Takes another village closer and closer to Temple. 10 Cuts the food supply to Temple. 11 Cuts the water supply to Temple 12 attacks Temple

Threat 2.
Called: Storms
Kind: Landscape
Impulse: Furnace, to consume things
Description and cast: Storms, tsunami waves, lightning and thunder
Custom move: When you move in the wilderness roll +Weird. 10+ The weather is fine. 7-9 Storms is coming but you find shelter. On a miss- attacked by a storm, and no shelter to be found..
Countdown: 3- the water is rising drowning several of the villages on the coast. 6- balls of lightning roams the countryside 9- earthquakes. 10- Gigantic wave throws water all the way in to Temple. 11- Lightning puts  the hold on fire. 12 Gigantic waves crashes in on the hold

Threat 3.
Called: Sun-cult
Kind: Brutes
Impulse: Cult, Victimize and incorporate
Description and cast: Foster (father of Taser), Taser (they killed his girlfriend in 1th session), Laura (hires mercenaries) , Milkshake (lost love of soldier Chipdale), Starshine (their sister), (Tao?????)
Custom move: When trying to make people in Temple work to build defenses against Monk or the weather roll +Weird. 10+ they are helping. 7-9 they are part of the sun cult and try to make you join whilst working. Miss- they are part of the sun cult and think only prayers make the sun come back

Threat 4.
Called: Tao and her soldiers of the hardhold Temple
Kind: Warlord
Impulse: Dictator, impulse to control
Description and cast: Tao and her female soldiers. Chipdale
Custom move: When making deals in Temple roll +Sharp. 10- not noticed. 7-9, the deal is on but the soldiers wanna know what´s going on. Miss- Tao takes her share or forbids the deal…

This is the basic front. There are some dilemmas though.. Chipdale is a soldier of Tao, but in game she has been helping them, to get them to kidnap her lover Milkshake who has joined the Sun cult. So I´m thinking about making a front about love, somehow.

There are also two members of the Operater of the crew- Wasted and Pe. Wasted recently was really injured in an explosion and mysteriously woke up from her narcossis and declared her love for Beastie. Also, when Wasted was almost dying one of the other crew members Pe declared his love for Wasted. So have a triangle there to play with somehow.

Another triangle is their sister Starshine who is a member of the Sun cult. She loves her younger brother Beastie and hates her older Wilson who abandoned her for money at early age.

Then there is Tavi the brainer. He appeared first as a member of Monk gang. Then Beastie killed him while he touched him, poisoning him with his own mind, his auora. He seemed to live on inside Beastie. Then we discovered that he is inside all of the Sun Cult people as a mental virus or something. He now also has infected Wilson. I have some hunch that Tavi is not taking orders from Monk, but that he is a virus, or a person who can become a mental virus, and that he has an agency of his own, he want´s to control/ ruin the whole coast. I think maybe I should make him a threat in a front. It would be good if I could make him a front together with maybe Wasted and Pe, with their love issues. Don´t know how yet.

There is a super doctor as well, “owned” by Tao. His name is Oscar, and the characters made him save Wasteds life in return for forcing the refugees out of Temple (something Taos ordinary soldiers were reclined to do, since the whole town would hate them). 

MC moves are something you always say, as part of the principles. I don't think there's such a thing as a "fitting list for each session". Learn them all, internalize them. Have a cheatsheet.

The easiest is Announce future badness.
"You see the reflection of a rifle scope on the hill ahead, what do you do?"
Hitting them with a car bomb is putting them into a place, sort of, it can also be just inflict harm, but that kind of stuff can be boring, just make sure you wrap it up in fiction. If they weren't really in danger but some NPCs died, that's looking through crosshairs.

Learn what they want, give them opportunities, tell them the consequences and ask. Make them buy.

If they're just lazing about, put them in a spot. Announce future badness, with increasing threat.

The game works best if you have proactive players. If they're reactive, they'll be constantly looking at you, and that can be taxing. Not cool.

Who are all these innocent people in Monk's territory, that get attacked all the time? I'm guessing you have some more specific ideas in the fiction, but my gut reaction whenever I see the unqualified phrase "innocent people" in a discussion of AW is "whatnow?" In this case I get the idea of Monk's territory as this impressive ideological factory that randomly manifests abstractly-innocent groups of people to get beat up. Maybe they could be a specific type of people, to tie in with one of the other Fronts?

In general, for your custom moves, I would say you need to seriously jack up the 7-9 options. 7-9 is the sweet spot where you want the fiction to really shine -- it's gotta represent what you see as the real potential for the move, a kind of MC best-case. I think the Monk's territory one does this pretty well, but the others could use spiking.

When you move in the wilderness roll +Weird. 10+ The weather is fine. 7-9 Storms is coming but you find shelter. On a miss- attacked by a storm, and no shelter to be found.

This move seems like a perfect opportunity to make the players choose on a 7-9. Something like: On a 7-9, the storm is coming, choose one:
* You find shelter
* You are not acting under fire from the storm.
* The storm does not open your mind to the psychic maelstrom.

Or whatever. I'm not sure what the storms are about, in the fiction, but if you are making a custom move for them they must be about something.

The cult one, the 7-9 option just seems toothless. Aren't the sun cult always trying to recruit people? Are their recruiting methods like, super-violent or otherwise problematic? Right now it just sounds like they're chatting about how great their cult is while otherwise doing exactly what the character wants...

The last one, I'd just do another 'choose one' with the two bits you already have there: either the deal is on OR the soldiers don't poke their nose in your business.

I´ve changed the custom moves:

The Storm
Custom move: When you move in the wilderness roll +Weird. 10+ The weather is fine. On a 7-9, the storm is coming, choose one:
* You find shelter
* You are not acting under fire from the storm.
* The storm does not open your mind to the psychic maelstrom.  On a miss- attacked by a storm, and no shelter to be found..
Like you said

and the Tao soldiers in Temple:
Custom move: When making deals in Temple roll +Sharp. 10- not noticed. 7-9, Choose one The deal is on, or The soldiers poke their noses and wanna have a piece. Miss- Tao proclaims that the deal is Hold business and takes the stuff

And the th Sun cult:
Custom move: When trying to make people in Temple work to build defenses against Monk or the weather roll +Weird. 10+ they are helping. 7-9 they are part of the sun cult and they make you open up your mind with their chanting while they work. Miss- they are part of the sun cult and try to drug you or your co-workers to spread the sun-cult mindvirus

I have also been thinking about the villages Monk is terrorizing- of course they should be a front. I´ll make it tonight and post it.

Thanks for the help!! :)

I have been thinking about The Sun cult. At the moment they are just some kind of cult, with a Sun tatoo, and their mind infectet with Tavi the mind virus. I also know that they want to make people stop fighting- embrace the decay and let the warlords ruin everything! They "Victimize and ancorporate".

I still really don´t know what they want and why. Who are they?

I think the "brainer" Tavi controlls them from somewhere in the distance. Maybe the worship the sun so it shall sweep away the apocalypse and start the new paradise? The fill Tavi with power with their chanting and sacrifices of children. Tavi really is a good guy who thinks he can turn the world around with enough power from pain and suffering and sex (?). Mental power- he feels what his followers feel and take power from their agony...?

He whant´s the coast to collapse and people to be apart of the cult so that the immense mental suffering will fill him with power... Hmm, I´m on to something, I think. Then maybe his cult i a threat, a brute, and he is a threat, a Grotesque one?

His thirst for love in this world. He is old enough to have seen the world before apocalypse- he was a father, a lover, a friend- of people now dead.

Can I ask something?  Why is the Sun-Cult move making the players roll +Weird?  I mean, I guess it's a matter of their luck whether they run into the storm cult, but it really doesn't seem to be an especially weird experience, more of a social problem.  Since the difficulty is getting them motivated, wouldn't Hot or Hard be more appropriate?  

ETA: I ask because you're already using Weird for the storms...

I was thinking that the Sun Cult is really a mental Weird virus spreading and incorporating people in the cult. But as you say, it´s absolutely a social act to meet the sun cult people. So yeah, maybe it could be be Hot, I think.

The move isn´t really well-design, ´cus Im still learning. The move is both about finding people in the Hold who hasn´t turned to the Sun Cult and make them help AND then making people who are a part of the sun cult help in preventing decay for the Hold. So I probably should have stuck to on or the other- but now I just wanna see how the move works out in play- to just test this, and my coming front as MC.

But I think it´s a good idea to change it to Hot instead, so it´s different stats for different moves.

Well the question is, when you're interacting with the sun-people, what's the biggest challenge?

Is it that you can't get them to do what you want?  Or that they are mentally infectious? 

Since you phrased the move as "when you try to get them to build defenses", I assumed that the defense were the focus of the moment rather than the weirdness.  It seems to me that if the challenge is motivating them, Hard, Hot, or even Cool might be appropriate.

If on the other hand it's not a question of whether you can get the cultists to work, but whether you run into cultists or normals, than Sharp or Weird makes sense.  Or if the Cultists cheerfully work, but try to infect you, then Weird makes sense.

Finally, you could break it down into two moves, I guess--make the custom move a Weird roll JUST to determine whether the player gets infected, then force them to actually Go Aggro or Manipulate to get the work done. 

Hmmm, good point. I think the biggest question is IF you encounter them at all- ´couse then there is gonna be trouble, always... And it really should be that they are mentally infectious, I think, that´s more fun, isn´t it?

I think I´ll go with Hot, kinda of the ability to attract the right people for the job, kinda...

But then again, it should be, as you say two different moves. But I´m gonna go with this one and see how it feels in game.

Okay, if the question is "do you run into the Sun Cult" then I agree that leaving ti as Weird is probably for the best.  The only other option would be Sharp, to reflect a perceptive character steering clear of trouble. 

Once they've run into the sun cult and dealt with the consequences of that move, they can use their Hot or Hard for their next move to try to get what they want. 

I think the "brainer" Tavi controlls them from somewhere in the distance. Maybe the worship the sun so it shall sweep away the apocalypse and start the new paradise? The fill Tavi with power with their chanting and sacrifices of children. Tavi really is a good guy who thinks he can turn the world around with enough power from pain and suffering and sex (?). Mental power- he feels what his followers feel and take power from their agony...?

He whant´s the coast to collapse and people to be apart of the cult so that the immense mental suffering will fill him with power... Hmm, I´m on to something, I think. Then maybe his cult i a threat, a brute, and he is a threat, a Grotesque one?

His thirst for love in this world. He is old enough to have seen the world before apocalypse- he was a father, a lover, a friend- of people now dead.

So, not to poke my nose in your front or anything, but talking about him being filled with power due to suffering made me think "hmmm, the Maelstrom has something to do with the immense suffering of the apocalypse itself, he's a brainer so he interacts with the maelstrom, maybe the suffering makes the maelstrom stronger, and he draws on that power. Or he's being manipulated by the maelstrom, or something". You could use this whole threat as a way of exploring your world's psychic maelstrom (or a piece of it).

Sounds neat so far!

So, this is some kind of attempt at making a front about love... Still don´t get how the villages clos to Monk´s hardhold could be thirsting for love... :)

I think I made a big error in not defining the Sun Cult more before I started making the fronts- but I will just roll along, and play to learn... Unfortunately one of the the players have been forced to work in a different town for a while so this campaign will have to rest for a while. Hopefully we will start another one tomorrow with some other guys.

Front 2.
Is called: Thirst for love
Expresses: Thirst
Dark future/ agenda: The price is more than the gain??? The sacrifices to still the thirst dries everyone out. Relationships are thorn apart- No love can exist??? (This seems strange…?)
Stakes: Will Tavi create a new paradise? Will someone in the crew (Wilson´s crew) find love? Will Pe turn against Beastie because of his love for Wasted? Will Tavi figure out that the Maelstrom is using him to whreck the coast?

Threat 1.
Called: Tavi
Kind: Grotesque
Impulse: Pain addict- craives others pain so that he can be more powerful and create a paradise of love.. (?)
Description and cast: Don´t know yet if he´s got a physical form- but he exists in infected people´s minds in the maelstrom like a teenage caucasian boy with tattoos of Disney characters and the likes.. Maybe he is actually an old man living close to the sea, in a cabin with his lame-legged dog?
Custom move: When you open your brain to the maelstrom and miss- Roll act under fire. Tavi is trying to infect you. 10+ Escaped from his all-consuming mouth 7-9 Tavi infects your soul. See countdown for The Tavi brain infection. Miss- See The Tavi brain infection but start at 9.
Countdown: The Tavi Brain infection. When you are infected start the countdown. 3-6-9 you hear Tavis voice whispering, you feel nothings worth doing- The sun will solve everything, 10 when you are destroying thing- roll Act under fire to stop killing and destroying. 11 roll act under fire to not sexually abuse someone or something when an opportunity presents itself 12 you are under the control of Tavi and you worship pain and destruction. You feel a calling for the meetings, the rituals, the killing, and the abuse…

Threat 2.
Called: Wilson´s crew
Kind: Brutes
Impulse: To close ranks, protect their own.
Description and cast: Pe loves Wasted, who loves Beastie. Jamie thirsts for Wilson.
Custom move:
Countdown:

Threat 3.
Called: The villages close to Monk´s Paradise
Kind: Brutes
Impulse: Family, to close ranks and protect themselves
Description and cast: Three villages, ruled by a queen who… does what? Thirsts for love???

Threat 4.
???