83. Threat Maps

RPGs have long used maps to keep track of what is important to game play. The most common map is of course the physical terrain, be that the graphed layout of a dungeon, the floor plan of a single room, the vast sweep of landscape surrounding the protagonists, or the details of a clearing in a forest. Maps visually organize information that exists in relation to the other elements on the map. The desk is in this corner, next to the standing lamp, and the fireplace is over here. With that information, reasonable and consistent decisions can be made about the fiction by anyone privy to the map.

If a game demands the use of maps, those maps should be critical to game play. For a dungeon crawl, the dungeon is the game. The GM can’t change their mind and move rooms around at will. To do so would not only be unfair to the players but would also break the shared reality being constructed during play. Other games may not care about the physical terrain except in the most general terms, but instead care greatly about who is connected to whom and who owes whom what. Relationship maps connect those dots by laying out complex matters in a visual landscape. You can tell what is important to a game by what it chooses to map. You can tell even more by what it needs to have mapped.

Now to Apocalypse World.

We are advised in the Master of Ceremonies chapter to “[m]ake maps like anything. Have the players make maps like anything too. And sketches, and diagrams, and any kind of ephemera that seems good” (93). Sketches, diagrams, maps—these all ensure that the players are on the same page of the fiction as it is being created. But none of this mapping is required: “They’re just good practice, and I recommend them” (93).

The only map demanded by the game is the Threat Map. In the passage we are looking at today, we are specifically concerned about the tiny threat map that appears on the individual threat summary sheet, but what is said here applies equally to the larger threat map that is to be consulted during play and revised between sessions.

Mark on the map the threat’s location and, if it’s moving, its direction.
• The innermost circle is for the PCs’ gangs, holdings, vehicles, etc.
• The first ring out is for threats near the PCs.
• The outer ring is for threats at and past the PCs’ horizons.
• Mark notional threats, rumors, fears, “here be monsters,” outside the map.
• N, S, E, and W are the cardinal directions.
• U and D are up and down, for threats above and below the characters.
• I is inside, for threats within local landscapes and populations, like cults, diseases, parasites.
• O is outside, for threats originating in the world’s psychic maelstrom or even elsewhere (116-117).

The threat map is wonderfully well-conceived. The PCs are always at the center and the crazy world whirls about around them. Visually, it is a reminder that the PCs are the protagonists, and as much as you might love the threats you have created, their movement and existence are only important insofar as they affect the characters at the center of the wheel. Moreover, every direction from which a threat can come is covered in the chart, from the cardinal directions, to above and below, to within and without.

In a lot of ways, the threat map is very much like a dungeon map, in that it tells the MC at a glance where the threats are in relation to where the PCs are and what directions they are moving. A dungeon map tells us that if the PCs go here, they will encounter these bad dudes. A threat map tells us that if the PCs take actions affecting these things, these bad dudes will have a reaction.

Aesthetically, I love that the threat map echoes the radar screens we see in movies (and in real life, of course), in which the green line sweeps around the central point to reveal all the objects in the detectable vicinity. This resemblance is especially true for the individual threat sheets, in which a dot is placed in the appropriate quadrant, like a blinking danger on the screen.

On a final note, I love the aesthetic similarities between the countdown clock and the threat map. Both are circles with radiating lines. Both are used to physically track the possible dangers to the PCs, the threat map detailing threats spatially while the countdown clock details threats temporally. I realize that those radars upon which the threat map is based are not unique to the 80s, but in my mind they are very reminiscent of cold war suspense films, which makes the threat maps physical design doubly echo the countdown clock, which is based on the nuclear alerts in America from the 1980s (see page 293). All these similarities give the game a pleasing graphic and thematic consistency.