Countdown Best Practices?

So... I'm heading into my third session of my AW game next Tuesday (see the "Another My First Front Post - Cannibal Farm" for details on the game, if you're interested), but I'm still struggling with Countdowns.

I wish I had a more tightly focused question, but I really just find myself with "blank page syndrome" when I start thinking about countdowns - I have some solid fronts/threats (I think) and some ideas about what they want and why they want it, etc.... but countdowns keep coming out flat or I have trouble coming up with enough things to put at the ticks of the clock.

So, if anyone has any general advice/best practices/lessons learned on crafting good countdowns for fronts and threats, I'd be much obliged.

For context, if it helps (so you don't have to go look up the other posts), right now I've got this layout of threats/fronts:

FRONT: The Farm (Corruption)
THREATS: Gnarly (Grotesque/Cannibal, the woman who runs the place and raises human livestock there), Twice (Warlord/Slaver, helps with the livestock and runs the city's only real medical clinic), The Farm Itself (Landscape/Prison)

FRONT: Dead City (Despair)
THREATS: The nanites (Affliction/Sacrifice, people destroy stuff/kill things to have the nanites rebuild them into mementos of the past), Kava's Gang (Grotesque/Pain Addicts - the Hardholder PC's gang)

FRONT: The Masses (Fear)
THREATS: The Sisterhood (Warlord/Hive Queen, a quasi-ascetic religion that preaches salvation through incorporation), The Unwashed Masses (Brute/Mob, basically the folks who live outside the main holdings), Dog Head's Crew (Grotesque/Mutants, the core of the gang are soldiers from before the apocalypse)

Well, what do these things want and what are they trying to accomplish, and what are all the intermediate steps in getting there? That's how I think of it.

Like, if the nanites are trying to rebuild everything I would figure out how, if unchecked, that would manifest in stages. Like would it start on one end of the area getting the deercows and then creeping towards the farmsteads and then from there hitting the market and moving towards the hardholder's mansion? And then make each of them a step.

For people it would be the phases of their plan or the progression of the Front, ike if Twice is becoming corrupted she might start off by withholding assistance towards lifestock or people unless they give her way more jingle than usual and maybe then she starts asking for extreme asks of service from family members of sick people in order to heal them and accumulates a gang of thugs who see that she has what other people need and there is power to be had there and then the whole town starts ending up in her debt.

I think you have to look at the Dark Futures you've written for your Fronts, and how the individual Threats work into that -- there's no need for a countdown if there isn't some forward progress that is going to happen (to some degree) with a certain degree of inevitability (barring PC interference.)

One thing that I find tricky is coming up with at least a few points on the clock that can be both prescriptive & descriptive -- so that the clock can advance for fictional reasons as well as according to whatever moves or arbitrary schedule I've come up with.

That said, I haven't got a lot of use out of countdown clocks yet in the current game I'm MCing -- but I also don't feel like my pacing is off-kilter, either, which seems to be the main use of the clocks-as-a-tool.

I didn't write countdown clocks for my fronts. Instead, I just decided how the problem of the front would get worse if the players ignored it.

Some fronts the players went after, and so I didn't need a countdown clock because the front would just react to what the PCs were doing.

But if they ignored it, I could just put it aside for a little while, then I re-introduced it, slightly more threatening (or a lot more threatening). And I decide how it will get worse if they ignore it again, just in case they do. At a certain point (i.e. at the end of the countdown clock) the threat will destroy everything, and you know the players can't ignore that.

So, really, I just kept my countdown clocks really nebulous.

I generally use countdowns for travelling, so I don't have to keep track of mileage to get from A to B. I put interesting landmarks at each tick of the clock, or threat moves that I might consider.  Advancing the clock might be a roll, or it might just advance when they say they travel. 

I also use countdowns for important people's tolerance of the players.  For example, my hardholder King Millions had a countdown before he'd send his gang after the players.  Checking off the timer happened whenever they'd question him, or show him up in some way.  Or Amy's tolerance of being fucked around by JC (an Operator PC), the countdown essentially representing how many times he can let her down before her heart broke and love died.

Hmm... I've done it for diseases, when tracking how sick a person or group got.  Essentially, the whole purpose of countdowns is a pacing mechanism, essentially a barometer for the MC to use so that he can ramp things up in a logical sort of way. 

As a suggestion:

The Unwashed Masses Discontent: Advanced whenever something good happens to the holdings.  3pm - grumbling, 6pm - Thrown bricks at hardholds, 9pm - Open threats, 10pm - Gunfire at the hardholds, 11pm - War drums 12pm - open hostility, attacks

With this one, you can keep announcing the future badness.  Again, see how it ramps up, each event feeding on the other, again the countdown just keeps it advancing.  At each point, there's a chance for the players to get involved, and do something about the situation, before it gets to the end badness. Again, think of pacing.