88. Between Sessions and Example Threat Maps

Sometime after every session, before the next, get out your threat map and look it over. What’s changed? Have any threats come closer? Have any receded further into the distance? Have any notional threats proved real? Have any moved, circling the characters or acting on the world outside their bounds?

Flip through your threats’ listings and update them. Who was killed? Whose stakes questions did play resolve, and what do you wonder about now? How have their countdowns progressed?

Create any new threats you’ve introduced.

Remember that the purpose of your prep is to give you something interesting to say when the next session starts. Remember that your NPCs are just not that complicated. You’re not holding back for a big reveal. You’re not doling events out like you’re trying to make your Halloween candy last until New Years. All your threats have impulses they should act on and body parts leading them around, so for god sake, have them act!

The real power here is that final paragraph.

There is a lot implied about your threats up until this paragraph, how to prepare them and how to use them during play. They give you things to say. They have spatial trajectories and temporal trajectories. They are whizzing across your threat map like balls on a pool table waiting for impact with the PCs. But here it is explicitly stated that you need to actively drive those threats and NPCs. Since you are not creating a story through which the PCs can travel, there is no “big reveal” for you to make. The drama comes from the players’ and characters’ decisions, not from some plot twist you’ve been preparing. The analogy with Halloween candy is fantastic—don’t dole them out! The game’s design lets you as an MC push hard with everything you have at the PCs to see what they do. In fact, if you don’t push hard, you will have a flat game with little dramatic tension and action. Your tools are your NPCs in Apocalypse World and you must use them aggressively without concern about what will happen next. Indeed, you have to have a big fat question mark about what will happen next. You need to not know and need to want to know!

The example threat maps that close out this chapter beautifully show what you can expect if you MC the game according to its own rules. We begin with a bare outline of what’s in the world and what direction things are heading. We know that the Water Cult is exerting some pressures to join them, that Dremmer’s raiders are to the South, and that the Barge People are to the East. There are apparently refugees from the Barge People heading toward the PCs. By the end of the second session, threats have been fleshed out and numbered. Members of the cult and gang have been defined (presumably through play). An emissary named Rothschild has approached the PCs looking for something in particular. The refugees from the Barge People are knocking on the PCs’ doors and also heading north toward the notional refuge (the “ha!” of which tells us its existence is dubious at best). Dremmer has installed a slaver over the Barge People, explaining the refugees. A hunting pack has appeared “outside,” either from the world’s psychic maelstrom or way elsewhere. By the end of the third session, threats have been fractured and re-detailed. The refugees are spreading, the furnace pits have entered the picture, and the troubles surrounding the PCs are expanding. In every map, we can see what the MC is curious about, what they have sworn to themselves to find out through play rather than by decree. (As a side note, I’m in love with Schroedinger’s Village with is simultaneously to the South and to the West, and only ever notional.)

The maps prove to be a single-sheet tool for the MC to see at a glance all the growing pressures on and questions for the PCs. The world and threats develop and grow through play, and every addition gives the MC more “things to say” and more actors to “have them act!”

The threat chapter has more graphics and physical examples of play artifacts than any other chapter. Threats are not a suggested means for MCs to get the best play. No, threats are a designed part of the game, a subsystem that exists to guarantee that the game plays the way it was designed to play. The examples show that the authors are well aware that this is a tricky and possibly daunting part of play and they try to make it all as clear and non-threatening (no pun intended) as possible. It is no coincidence that the threat chapter is the chapter that has undergone the most revisions from the first to the second edition.

Before I move into the Moves Snowball chapter, I will have a couple of other posts covering some odds and ends, such as revisiting the concept of hard moves, looking at the use of natural language vs. jargon in the text, and the way MC moves are structured and presented in the text. But before I cover any of that, I need to wrestle with a bunch of work projects that have stacked up while I have buried myself in RPG texts and theory. It will probably be a month or more before I can get back to posting regularly, but I will be back!