Creating Dangers

Not every element of your game will warrant a danger—traps, some roving monsters, and other bits of ephemera may just be there to add context but aren’t important enough to warrant inclusion. That’s okay. Fronts are here to keep you apprised of the bigger picture. Dangers are divided into a handful of categories, each with its own name and impulse.

Every danger has a crucial motivation that drives it called its impulse. The impulse exists to help you understand that danger. What pushes it to fulfill its impending doom? Impulses can help you translate the danger into action.

When creating dangers for your front, think about how each one interacts as a facet of the front as a whole. Keep in mind the people, places, and things that might be a part of the threat to the world that the front represents. How does each danger contribute to the front?

Let’s say we have an idea for a front—an ancient portal has been discovered in the icy north. We’ll call our front “The Opening of the White Gate.”

The easiest place to start is with people and monsters. Cultists, ogre chieftains, demonic overlords, and the like are all excellent dangers. These are the creatures that have risen above mere monster status to become serious threats on their own. Groups of monsters can be dangers too—goblin tribes or a rampaging centaur khanate, for example.

For the front we’re creating, we can pick a few different groups or people who might be interested in the gate. The College of Arcanists, perhaps. There’s a golem, too, we’ve decided, that protects the forgotten portal. The golem is just an obstacle, so we won’t make him a danger.

Thinking more broadly, less obvious elements of the world can be dangers. Blasted landscapes, intelligent magical items, ancient spells woven into the fabric of time. These things fulfill the same purposes as a mad necromancer—they’re part of the front, a danger to the world.

For our front, we’ll add the gate itself as a danger.

Lastly, if we think ahead, we can include some overarching dangers. The sorts of things that are in play outside the realm of the obvious—godly patrons, hidden conspiracies and cursed prophecies waiting to be fulfilled.

Perhaps the White Gate was carved in the ancient past, hidden by a race of angels until the Day of Judgement. We’ll add the Argent Seraphim to our front as a new danger.

There’s always more dangers you could add to a front, but limit yourself to 3 at most and leave room for discovery. Like a map, blank spaces can always be filled in later. Leaving room for player contribution and future inspiration means you’ll have freedom to alter the front and make it fit the game. Not every bad thing that could happen deserves to be made into a danger. If you’re uncertain, think about it this way: dangers can always get worse.

A barbarian tribe near the gate, the frozen tundra itself, a band of rival adventurers; all these things could be dangerous elements of the game but they’re not important enough just yet to deserve to be dangers.

Creating dangers is a way to slice up your overall front concept into smaller, easier to manage pieces. Dangers are tools for adding detail to the right parts of the front and for making the front easier to manage in the long run.

Once you’ve named and added a danger to the front you need to choose a type for that danger from the list below. Alternately, you can use the list of types to inspire dangers: with your front in mind, peruse the list and pick one or two that fit.

For our three dangers (The College of Arcanists, The White Gate and the Argent Seraphim) we’ve selected Cabal, Dark Portal and Choir of Angels, respectively.