Threats and Themes in Your Games

[devonapple]

How many GMs are getting the opportunity to turn some of their City's Themes into Threats?
Do you generally burn through a few Threats before targeting one of the Themes?

I started out with Two Themes and a Threat: the Threat got handled (or at the very least, decisively put off for awhile), so now I'm looking to add a new Threat, or make one of those Themes into a Threat.

[devonapple]

Goodness, I would have imagined a little more traffic on this question. Just in case, I will bump it this once and then allow it to fade into obscurity if that is The Plan.

[zenten]

As a GM I've had a lot of trouble turning the threats and themes we created at city creation into plotlines that the players are interested in.  If I were to write up the threats and themes that seem relevant to play now after a major milestone they would be totally different.

[sinker]

One of my friends who runs has a tendency to burn through threats really fast as he likes to pit us directly against these foes in epic battles. He's remarkably good though at creating a fully fleshed world so that our actions have consequences and then the threats naturally evolve.

Myself on the other hand I tend towards a lot of things caused indirectly by the themes and threats and rarely have the party actually find a reason to directly effect one of the threats. I also tend towards more nebulous threats. Concepts that can't be attacked directly (like the veil being thin and a lot of people trying to exploit that, or a greater rate of development and growth leading to a host of other things).

[devonapple]

We ran a postmortem at the conclusion of our first scenario, in which a corrupt Masonic cabal was summoning an Outsider, and one of the players commented that for a first scenario, the stakes were pretty high - higher than they were expecting. Not that they weren't up for it - it just seemed that a much greater Bad was going to happen than, for example, "Storm Front" and, in fact, many of the subsequent cases. At least, that was the impression the players got.

[sinker]

Was the masonic cabal your threat? If so you could always keep the aspect and just play them as surviving members gone to ground and with an axe to grind for the players.

[devonapple]

Was the masonic cabal your threat? If so you could always keep the aspect and just play them as surviving members gone to ground and with an axe to grind for the players.

I am definitely keeping them in my back pocket, for laters.

[sinker]

Or that brings to mind the whole evil estate sale idea that came up a while back. What happens when bits of their power (both mystical and mundane) find a way into other hands?