Writing Threats and Fronts

The most common way to break this system is to stat an antagonist as though it were a character. Do not. Here is the discipline.

A threat is five lines

Scale, Pool, Wounds, Trick, Want. If you find yourself wanting a sixth number, what you actually want is a better Trick.

Pool is one number for everything it does. A Scale-appropriate Pool is roughly 6 at Scale 1, 7–8 at Scale 2–3, and 10 at Scale 4+. It rarely needs to go higher, because at Scale 5 you are almost never rolling against the party anyway.

Trick is one thing that changes the scene, written so the GM can execute it without a ruling. "Ignores the first Condition each scene; moves through walls rather than around them" is a Trick. "Very strong" is not.

Want is what it is trying to get. Never "kill the heroes." The shipped Halcyon Watchman wants to file its incident report, with imagery, before shift end — it will break off a winning fight to do that, and that single line generates more interesting scenes than any stat could.

Every threat above Scale 2 needs a Lever

This is the rule that keeps the system honest. If the party cannot reach it and you have not written down how they reach it anyway, you have built a wall.

The four Lever kinds are environmental, scale-matched tool, a vulnerability discovered in play, and Face/Focus. Write one down in the lever field before you finish the file. Ridgeback's is his own Want — he will not accept a body count, so anything that makes the recovery loud makes it fail. That is a Lever a Scale 1 party can actually pull, and it required no gear and no ally.

Scale, honestly applied

The hardest thing you will do as a GM in this system is run a gap of 2 the first time. The party swings, and you have to say "that does not work — it is not a roll."

Do it anyway. Do it clearly, and make clear it is a fact about the world and not a bad roll. Then let them find the Lever. That one scene teaches the entire system better than any explanation, and every table that has it stops arguing about Scale afterwards.

Fronts are clocks, not organisations

A faction file is mostly one question: what is the clock, and what happens when it fills?

Give each Front a clock that fills for a different reason:

• One that fills through neglect — it advances whenever the party is elsewhere
• One that fills through success — the party's own visible power advances it
• One that fills through failure — someone the party was protecting loses

@Missing file is the second kind, which is why it is the campaign's engine: the more the players ascend, the more evidence Ardent has that a Hazard Class ordinance is necessary. They cannot punch it. That is the design.

@Missing file is the third: it is an ally the party cannot rely on, and its clock filling is bad for everyone including them. Every setting wants one of these — a body that is losing, whose loss makes the world worse.

@Missing file is the first: it advances quietly, in the background, while the party is doing something more urgent, and one day it owns a Scale 4 asset it did not have before.