Threats

There are 7 kinds of threat. When you create a threat, first choose:

• Warlord
• Grotesque
• Affliction
• Brutes
• Landscape
• Terrain
• Vehicle

Creating a threat

To create a threat:

• Choose its kind, name it, and copy over its impulse. Describe it and list its cast, if any.
• Place it on the threat map. If it’s in motion, mark its direction with an arrow.
• List its stakes questions, if any.
• If it’s connected to other threats, list them.
• If it calls for a custom move or a countdown, create it.

Warlords

A warlord threat consists of the warlord, plus the gang and other people under the warlord’s control. Choose which kind of warlord:

• Slaver (impulse: to own and sell people)
• Hive queen (impulse: to consume and swarm)
• Prophet (impulse: to denounce and overthrow)
• Dictator (impulse: to control)
• Collector (impulse: to own)
• Alpha wolf (impulse: to hunt and dominate)

Warlords act primarily through their people, acting directly themselves only when cornered or caught out in the open.

Grotesque

A grotesque is a person—remember fundamentally a person, human, not a monster—whose humanity has been nevertheless somehow crippled. Choose which kind of grotesque:

• Cannibal (impulse: craves satiety and plenty)
• Mutant (impulse: craves restitution, recompense)
• Pain addict (impulse: craves pain, its own or others’)
• Disease vector (impulse: craves contact, intimate and/or anonymous)
• Mindfucker (impulse: craves mastery)
• Perversion of birth (impulse: craves overthrow, chaos, the ruin of all)

Afflictions

An affliction threat isn’t a person, it’s something threatening that people are doing, or that is happening, or that has come to be. Choose which kind of affliction:

• Disease (impulse: to saturate a population)
• Condition (impulse: to expose people to danger)
• Custom (impulse: to promote and justify violence)
• Delusion (impulse: to dominate people’s choices and actions)
• Sacrifice (impulse: to leave people bereft)
• Barrier (impulse: to impoverish people)

A condition is any bad practical circumstance. e holding’s water filtration breaks down? A bomb-blast weakens the infirmary’s foundation? There’s not enough food to get through the dry season? Conditions.

Brutes

A brutes threat is a group of people, with or without a leader, acting in crude, perhaps provisional, concert. Choose which kind of brutes:

• Hunting pack (impulse: to victimize anyone vulnerable)
• Sybarites (impulse: to consume someone’s resources)
• Enforcers (impulse: to victimize anyone who stands out)
• Cult (impulse: to victimize & incorporate people)
• Mob (impulse: to riot, burn, kill scapegoats)
• Family (impulse: to close ranks, protect their own)

An individual person within a group of brutes might not share the group’s impulse, and might even fight against it. It’s the group’s impulse, not necessarily any person’s.

Landscapes

A landscape threat can be natural or constructed, and whatever size you need. The burn flats, the ruins of Las Uncles, a poison’d canal, the holding’s bustling marketplace, the warrens of a grotesque’s den in its depths.

Choose which kind of landscape:

• Prison (impulse: to contain, to deny egress)
• Breeding pit (impulse: to generate badness)
• Furnace (impulse: to consume things)
• Mirage (impulse: to entice and betray people)
• Maze (impulse: to trap, to frustrate passage)
• Fortress (impulse: to deny access)

Terrain

A terrain threat is a small and immediate piece of a landscape. It’s where the character is right now, what she’s moving through or standing in or trying to get around. Choose which kind of terrain:

• A precipice (impulse: to send someone over)
• A wall (impulse: to bring someone up short)
• An overhang (impulse: to bring danger down upon someone)
• An exposed place (impulse: to expose someone to danger)
• Shifting ground (impulse: to cost someone their bearing)
• Broken ground (impulse: to break what crosses)

Bring terrain threats into play during road wars and moving battles, during exploration and investigations, and whenever the place itself matters.

Vehicles

Any vehicle distinctive enough to describe individually is a vehicle threat. Hooch the chopper’s aggressive, roaring guzzler of a bike; Audrey the driver’s huge, armored, ram-bearing tow truck; Rolfball the warlord’s garish, jacked up, bulletproof limo. Choose which kind of vehicle:

• Relentless (impulse: to keep moving)
• Cagey (impulse: to protect what it carries)
• Wild (impulse: to defy danger)
• Ferocious (impulse: to outrun)
• Vicious (impulse: to kill and destroy)
• Bold (impulse: to dominate the road) Choose: bastard, bitch, devil, fucker, beast

It may seem strange to treat vehicles as though they had autonomy like this. Just remember that when someone’s behind the wheel and they roll a miss, or their move gives you a choice between different options, that’s a moment when they’re out of control of their vehicle and it can, in its way, do what it wants