Building Threats

A threat is a promise the GM makes about what is coming through the door — and then has to keep, live, with the table watching. The file exists to make that promise legible and the keeping of it actable.

Tier is budget, class is genre

Tier 1–5 is how often the thing shows up and how much of the scene it absorbs. 1 is trash you chew through; 5 is a set-piece worth a whole section. Do not fill a site with tier 4s — a tier is not a power level, it is an invitation to spend table time. The class (shambler, sprinter, crawler, beast, armored, elite, boss, environmental, human) tells the GM how to play it: what it chases, what it ignores, what it does to geometry.

Write for acting, not statting

The most valuable fields are the ones that act: behaviour (how it moves, hunts, and reacts — written so the GM can perform it), tell (what players hear or see just before it arrives — your free telegraphing tool), and spawn condition (what brings it into a scene). A threat with a good tell and a clear behaviour needs almost no numbers to be scary; a threat with perfect numbers and no behaviour is a name on a stat bar.

Numbers that mean something

Toughness is punishment absorbed; threat rating is the number the GM rolls or contests against. The rule of thumb: keep both small enough that they never outshine the behaviour. If your elite's damage is the interesting thing about it, you have written a damage number, not a threat. Pair each number with a GM-facing note on why it is that number — the design intent that stops a future edit from flattening the fight.

Weakness is the gift

Every threat gets a weakness that actually stops it, and the skill or choice that unlocks it. This is what turns a fight into a puzzle and prevents every encounter from degrading to dice attrition. The weakness should be discoverable — through the tell, the site, or intel — and it should cost something to use. A weakness that is free trivia might as well not exist.

Origin and continuity

A threat's origin can point at a faction or a location — who made it or where it came from. That link is how threats become clues instead of fixtures: the crawler under the wreckage that was built by the faction guarding the next room is a sentence of foreshadowing. Tag continuities only where the thing genuinely spans several storylines; otherwise the wall keeps it home.

The ladder

The horde escalation table in the rule set does the pacing work for you — pressure climbing through the rounds, environment tightening, elites arriving with names. Build threats to fill that ladder: know which of your threats is the round-8 beast, which is the round-12 crawler, which is the round-16 elite with a name. A threat list built against the ladder runs a session for you.