Countdown Clocks

A countdown clock is a reminder to you as MC that your threats have impulse, direction, plans, intentions, the will to sustain action and to respond coherently to others’. When you create a threat, if you have a vision of its future, give it a countdown clock. You can also add countdown clocks to threats you’ve already created.

Around the clock, note some things that’ll happen:

• Before 9:00, that thing’s coming, but preventable. What are the clues? What are the triggers? What are the steps?
• Between 9:00 and 12:00, that thing is inevitable, but there’s still time to brace for impact. What signifies it?
• At 12:00, the threat gets its full, active expression. What is it?

As you play, advance the clocks, each at their own pace, by marking their segments. Countdown clocks are both descriptive and prescriptive.

Descriptive: when something you’ve listed happens, advance the clock to that point.

Prescriptive: when you advance the clock otherwise, it causes the things you’ve listed. Furthermore, countdown clocks can be derailed: when something happens that changes circumstances so that the countdown no longer makes sense, just scribble it out. A

For the most part, list things that are beyond the players’ characters’ control: NPCs’ decisions and actions, conditions in a population or a landscape, off-screen relations between rival compounds, the instability of a window into the world’s psychic maelstrom.

When you list something within the players’ characters’ control, always list it with an “if,” implied or explicit: “if Bish goes out into the ruins,” not “Bish goes out into the ruins.”

Prep circumstances, pressures, developing NPC actions, not (and again, I’m not fucking around here) NOT future scenes you intend to lead the PCs to.