rpg-front-tracker

RPG Front Tracker (Pathfinder 2e kit — the living-world engine)

What this skill is for

Keep the world moving between sessions. While the players rest, the antagonists advance their plans, clocks tick, and the world earns its next move. This skill bootstraps and advances fronts — the Dungeon World model for how a danger organizes itself into trackable, inevitable doom — and persists them as live vault state via progress clocks.

This is the between-session engine of the gamemaster kit. Loremaster's rpg-faction-creator authors a faction's plan as prose (the "plan in motion", grim portents, impending doom). This skill operationalizes that plan: it reads the authored fiction and turns it into frente and relogio vault entities that advance session to session, until the doom arrives or the players stop it.

The deliverable is a front sheet — the danger's impulse, its grim portents as clock segments, its impending doom, the stakes questions that make it feel like a campaign — and the "what the world did since last session" beat that rpg-session-prep consumes as its strong start.

The core idea — tracking momentum, not authoring fiction

Every other skill in the gamemaster kit prepares or runs a session. This one models time passing off-screen.

The framework: a front is a bundle of one or more dangers, each with an impulse (what it wants, stated as a verb phrase), a list of grim portents (the steps toward disaster, three to five in sequence), and an impending doom (what happens if the players do nothing). The front becomes a progress clock — a segment wheel (4, 6, or 8 segments) that fills as the danger's portents occur. When the clock fills, the doom arrives.

This is the model that makes a campaign feel alive: clocks tick on their own timeline, not just when the PCs show up. The PCs can push back, stall, redirect — but the world presses forward unless they actively stop it.

The bedrock of this skill: the front is not a plot you run — it is a threat you track. Grim portents are not scripted events; they are what happens if the players don't intervene. See references/fronts-and-clocks.md for the full engine.