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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8939588" data-attributes="member: 42582">In the post that you quoted, [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] referred to the fact that DW's "tropes and genre will shape play." But whether or not this includes the creatures in the rulebook seems up for grabs. There's no reason that I know of why a DW group is obliged to use those creatures.As far as fronts are concerned, in what way are they "myth" in the relevant sense? Here is AW on fronts (pp 130, 132, 136):Fill up your 1st session worksheet. List the players’ characters in the center circle. Think of the space around them as a map, but with scarcity and lack instead of cardinal directions. As you name NPCs, place them on the map around the PCs, according to the fundamental scarcity that makes them a threat to the PCs. . . . Listing each threat’s available resources will give you insight into who they are, what they need, and what they can do to get it. It’s especially useful to give some threats resources that the PCs need but don’t have. Now go back over it all. Pull it into its pieces. Solidify them into threats, following the rules [for fronts] . . . Take these solid threats and build them up into fronts. . . . A front has some apparently mechanical components, but it’s fundamentally conceptual, not mechanical. The purpose of your prep is to give you interesting things to say. As MC you’re going to be playing your fronts, playing your threats, but that doesn’t mean anything mechanical. It means saying what they do. It means offering opportunities to the players to have their characters do interesting things, and it means responding in interesting ways to what the players have their characters do.DW similarly says that "You’ll make your campaign front and first adventure fronts after your first session" (p 185, emphasis original).So fronts are established out of the play of the first session - they are not "myth" that is brought to the table prior to play. And fronts do not serve the same purpose in framing or resolution as a map-and-key. They are not sources of constraint on framing ("When you turn the corner, you see . . .") and nor are they sources of constraint on resolution ("After searching for 10 minutes, you find . . .").So comparing fronts to the "myth" that [USER=6993955]@Fenris-77[/USER] described - "huge load of pre-written setting stuff" - seems quite misleading to me.I don't think the post you're replying to said anything about Stonetop.I reiterate that fronts are not pre-authored. And as per my discussion just above of map-and-key, there is a fundamental difference between prep that is binding in the way that a Moldvay Basic dungeon is - a source of restrictions on framing and on resolution - and prep of a front in DW or AW. It's not possible to talk about no-myth or low-myth play without having regard to that difference. Referring to "more or less contingent" obscures the difference and fails to illuminate what is going on in no-myth or low-myth play.</blockquote>

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