These are helpful points of view, although I had been hoping to see a few direct examples from other games.
Okay, but I am going to struggle to keep this at all short. This is all from memory, and was awhile ago, so I am sure what I think was my process and what my actual process were are no longer the same thing.
Anyways, I ran a game quite awhile ago; as with all our AW games it started with the players talking about what sort of Apocalypse we were into, in very general terms. We agreed on a cold Apocalypse, and we also wanted to play in a more urban setting with a greater focus on some basic scarcities. One player contributed some much more specific imagery: the idea of weird radio signals (which have existed historically in real life) that broadcast weird garbled text, or random beeps, etc. The player went on to play a Savvyhead with an eventually Augury-capable workshop. This Savvyhead had a kind of intimate obsession with the radio signals, and his workshop was in fact a semi-functional radio tower.
I don't remember if we played a full first session immediately; I suspect we did not, because I remember having time to go away and think about the setting and specifically what the Maelstrom might be like. Since the Savvyhead's player had by far the strongest/most specific Maelstrom-related concept (and I really liked the idea of the strange radio stations, broadcasting despite or perhaps because of the Apocalypse), that was my starting point. I remember at some point (probably during the initial discussions) writing down the word STATIC and this eventually became the seed-word for a bunch of different things in the setting, including the Maelstrom.
The connection between STATIC and radio signals is pretty obvious; the question that occurred to me was 'is the radio the Maelstrom or is the static the Maelstrom?' This was not a question I answered immediately. I also brainstormed a bunch of other STATIC-related ideas -- the idea of personal static, conflict between people, and also the idea of static as the disintegration of data or identity. Static-as-interference turned out to be the key to my understanding of the Maelstrom, though this developed only over the first five or six sessions.
I was pretty excited about this general Maelstrom concept, mostly because STATIC is such an evocative word -- it's the perfect word to help guide a Maelstrom, because it is simultaneously abstract and concrete. No matter how wildly you associate on the word, it is very easy to snap back to the literal object, whether it be the hiss and crackle of a radio signal or the visual static on a television. In any case, my excitement meant that I ended up forming a great deal of the setting around this concept -- even when the Maelstrom itself was not directly involved in a threat, the metaphor of the Maelstrom was clearly at play.
The other thing I was most excited about was the idea of a cold Apocalypse, which I had brought to the table as a player during our initial discussions. It should not be very hard to see how the idea of a world in which it is
constantly snowing might fit extremely well with a world in which the visual and cognitive metaphor of
static was running rampant. Static on television screens = snow, after all.
The third point from our initial brainstorming was that we wanted at least one crucial, basic scarcity; I think we decided in our group discussion that it would be particularly ironic if the scarcity was drinkable water, despite the fact that it was constantly snowing. Whether it was decided then or immediately after, this idea -- that there was snow all the time but for some reason the snow was not safe to eat/melt/drink -- formed a perfect bridge with my notion of the Maelstrom as a static-producing, disintegrating force. I decided that the snow was in fact a
vector for the 'personal static' that I had been thinking about. That people who ate the snow lost a sense of themselves, and became dysfunctional in society; that they progressed through various stages of psychological breakdown the more snow they consumed, eventually culminating in a complete loss of self. This formed an explicit, concrete connection between the scarcity of potable water and the much more abstract scarcity of society, identity, etc.
Process-wise, most of these decisions either emerged from or were made increasingly explicit by my post-First-Session MC work. STATIC was the first Front I built, and one of the threats under STATIC was the Maelstrom. I don't remember offhand what sort of threat I made the Maelstrom -- I am actually pretty sure I made it two types of threats at once, which is something I tend to do a lot with Threats I find particularly interesting.
In fact, I ended up adding the Maelstrom to all three of my initial Fronts, assigning it a different threat type in each case. It wasn't called the Maelstrom in every case, but focused on some particular part of the constellation of concepts and concrete effects that were slowly coming together as 'the Maelstrom' in my head. Because the effects of the Maelstrom were so widespread, it manifested as threatening in different ways, depending on what fundamental scarcity (and therefore what Front) was at issue. In all cases, the Threats were very clearly of the same abstract family, but in each case having to choose specific threat types -- in the context of the Fronts, which also tended to be more concrete (with the exception of the STATIC Front, which was specifically for tracking metaphorical dangers) -- forced me to crystallize my vague, abstract ideas of the Maelstrom into
specific, immediate effects on the people and the environment.All this was coming together over the first three or four sessions, with input from the players in the form of Opening Their Brains (and telling me what it was like) and also with more details from the Savvyhead on what his specific experience of the radio signals/stations was like.
By this point I had two things: a very clear FEELING for what the Maelstrom was like, in terms of its personality and what it desired; and also an increasingly large number of very specific EFFECTS that the Maelstrom was having on the PCs, NPCs, and environment. The former was still extremely vague and abstract -- I knew it wanted to make it harder to know things, including making it harder for people to know who they were and what they wanted. But the latter was all stuff that was actually happening, because of what the Maelstrom was like. I knew people were becoming psychologically empty, wandering around in the snow forgetting who they were; I knew there was an entire Hardhold of NPCs who were all halfway-there, because of the fish they lived on; I knew there was a PC who made a living harvesting glacier-ice, which was somehow free of static; I knew that the NPC who controlled the only working water-filtration system was far more important than anyone particularly thought; etc. And knowing all of these things fed back into my abstract understanding, and made it clearer what part of these things was because of what the Maelstrom really wanted, and what part of these things was only indirectly connected to the Maelstrom, as a sort of fallout.
And then the Savvyhead finally invented his AUGURY MACHINE, which I am going to have to cover in another post because this one is already super long.