“Why?”, a curious reader may ask. “What’s the point of factions?” And to be pithy, the answer is “life”. But read on, anyways, because I made a free module for you that comes at the end of this rambling.
While running a sandbox campaign last March, I had made a goal out of trying to make the world feel alive. It’s all very well and good to have a sandbox world full of things to go and dig up and examine, but if things aren’t happening outside the players’ control, then they notice. And it doesn’t feel great.
But what makes your sandbox feel alive?
Things happening. Life happening. So many things that players can’t keep up with it all. The world is turning, it’s turning whether you’re there or not. It’s not about freedom. That’s Minecraft. Minecraft is freedom without dynamism, where nothing happens unless you do it. No player in their right mind would want to role-play in a world literally resembling the absent dynamism of Minecraft.
Non-party actors doing things is adventure fuel. I think from what little I’ve grasped of the BrOSR’s work that this is the most important underlining characteristic of their Braunsteins — many chaotic actors fighting each other. They sell their games as “factional”. You can react to another faction. You can fight factions. More importantly, they can fight back. They can surprise you.
How do you do factions as a singular GM, in a traditional game?
My naive initial method was to just try to wing it. I think this is what most GMs do when they run sandbox games; they’ll lay out their campaign’s groups and they’ll say, “okay, these guys want to protect this thing, and they’ll help fund the king so he can stop this invading horde.” And then they might run into a handful of roadblocks:
It’s tricky to dredge up the motives of dozens of actors & envision their goals on-the-spot. There’s massive mental load to computing a large number of independent actors, especially when there’s no resolution mechanisms for any of the many forms of conflict all but guaranteed to arise from the endeavors of the actors.
With no resolution mechanism, GMs are left adrift figuring out when & how factions should choose goals, act upon them, and succeed/fail at them.
There’s a question of fairness intrinsic to the exercise if the GM has no consistent method for dealing with the decisions & activities of NPCs — specifically, fairness to the players, to who the GM (in theory) owes a consistent world. If the GM can simply make things up for how other problems are handled … can the judgement be said to be consistent & reliable?
But here, I think, is by far the most important point. By default, almost no system has:
A systemic method for handling factions & their actions;
That’s convenient & fast enough for a GM to use behind-the-scenes for more than a handful of factions at a time.
Now, many games have a faction system. I believe my readers are familiar with OSR titles, and have probably heard of Kevin Crawford’s works1, almost every single one of which features a faction system tailored to the system’s topic. Other systems include faction tools too, such as the delightful Mausritter. But the critical flaw I find with Kevin’s works as well as the other handful of systems I’m aware of is that they fall afoul of the second part of the statement. Take Stars Without Number as an example. In order to manage a single faction, you need to record, track, and manipulate their Force, Cunning, Wealth, their owned quantities of each of those values, their HP & maximum HP, their Income, their current Balance, and their EXP — and that’s just statistics! I discount the obvious need for goals, relationships, home base, the like.
The way I see it, most faction systems that people write up look an awful lot like they were mostly made for player-facing shenanigans. Players who want to tweak and build their faction like it was a second player character sheet. If you wanted to try to use the system as a GM to describe the world beyond the players, you’d need a spreadsheet (which appears to be the recommended method) and you’d still burn yourself out trying it (speaking from experience). Can you juggle a dozen PC sheets as well as the rest of the game world?
There’s just too many numbers. It’s annoying to have to keep track of everyone’s wealth and cunning. It often doesn’t even make sense if you cut the systems down to a small scale; systems tend to be built to assume that factions have, at the very least, hundreds of characters, and so are built to emulate faceless mass organizational dynamics rather than leader-based dynamics.
So factions are a critical thing. But we don’t have GM tools to handle them with. What do we do?
(We subscribe, that’s what we do.)
A quick jog down Taylor Lane
Taylor Lane2 is a brilliant lunatic & acquaintance/friend of mine. I genuinely cannot think of anyone who produces such interesting creations & so readily as he (although maybe he’s just more inclined to post it publicly). From mechanisms for revolutions to an undead campaign engine for almost any OSR title, most of his works are at least thought-provoking and more often than not excellent additions to your elf-games. It was around last March that I ended up in a very productive and meandering conversation with him, and in that talk some mutual agreements & several new surprises came to light:
Speed is more important than anything. It’s very hard to use the faction systems of Worlds Without Number or Stars Without Number for anything other than the PCs’ own factions because you need dozens for a “real” living world, and if each faction is as complicated as a PC sheet, you can only manage a couple at most. Three stats per faction at most is probably a good upper limit; remember that every faction has tons of textual data that needs to be tracked as well.
As an aside, this might be why most node-based campaign management methods I see usually only focus on a handful of notable villains at a time.
Faction systems should be scalable. I’m not quite sure who raised this point first because I know I was working on this problem beforehand, but factions can be as big as an empire or as small as a three-man adventuring party or mercenary lance. The chosen faction simulator should be capable of handling all possible scales, because even if you have no tiny factions, the PCs count as one and so often do their minions as well, and they will certainly be interacting with factions. The corollary to this is that…
Factions should be interoperable with other characters. Many an occasion rises when a singular character should be able to have an impact upon a larger group, or vice versa — which means that factional interaction with other characters ought to be damned near mechanically identical to character interaction. To be specific, you need a way as a system to take your faction’s attributes, whatever they are & however they’re structured, and have that directly interface with your game’s core resolution mechanic(s) — the thing that all other notable character interactions are filtered through. If you’ve got opposed checks, your faction should be able to take its Size or Population or whatever and use it to make opposed checks when useful. Otherwise, you’ll be swimming in edge cases all day long. This is especially important because…
Factions don’t exist. They are a mirage. Factions are socioeconomic relationships between NPCs (& sometimes PCs). Every faction taking an action is a leaderordering the action and its memberscarrying out that action. Rather than describing the structure (i.e. “this faction is a Republic”), you should be describing the relationships between the characters who make decisions (i.e. “this NPC leader de facto rules the Whig Party, and this one is the Prime Minister & leads the Bonnet Party”). This because there is always someone behind the mask, and someone is always ultimately making the decisions. (Even if you want to bicker whether this is the case in real life, it certainly makes for better drama, which means a better story, which is a better game. Humans build narratives intuitively. That’s what these role-playing games are.)
Taylor generously provided me a couple of sample faction systems he had built for his own home-brewed games. And the thing that most strongly struck me about them was that they were really simple. But the second thing was that they were entirely GM-facing. They could afford to be simple because the operation of a faction behind-the-scenes aren’t things that players see! Even for player-owned organizations, as far as Taylor was concerned, managing a faction should be like managing a real organization in real life: speak to people, get info from them, order them to their face. Real-world factionalism is always just a game in juggling a web of hierarchies. The leaders (& specifically their interests) are arguably more important than their ideological character or the mass group they represent.
Sidebar regarding simplicity: You don’t need to track money, cunning, or military force independently. They’re the same thing: power, derived from supporters of varying colors. Different flavors of power, sure; elites are tinged by the character of where they derive their power from. But this isn’t a substantive reason to categorize them differently. In certain circumstances, it’s an overriding factor. But here’s the thing: you don’t need to simulate that directly because players don’t see it. You aren’t simulating all the nitty-gritty. It’s not like combat, you don’t need to track every single swing & blow that goes into The Hero’s Village’s efforts to construct their new church. You can simplify it dramatically. Taylor built a system where each faction only had a single stat: Goal Progress. Roll 1d100. If you get under Progress, add your roll to Progress. At 100%+, the faction achieves their goal. And it worked. Ask him.
That one-stat Goal Progress thing isn’t the core of a faction system I’d recommend putting in just any game. It’s an explosive system. It’s designed to create rapid ramping-up that explodes at the end. It’s designed for a Weird Wide World where everyone’s a magical mini-cult working havoc upon reality. But the key is that it’s so simple that a GM can run dozens and dozens of factions simultaneously using it, and if you follow the other rules that play off that singular stat and your textual & narrative comprehension of the world & faction motives, you don’t need more than that.
The final point to make is this: factions are actually motivated random event generators. We’re not really interested in the minutia of factional behavior. The players can’t see or benefit from the vast majority of it. What we’re interested in is the chain of cause-effect events that change the world in their passage & thereby create “things that happen” for your players to engage with. Every villain plot, every advice to “prep situations, not scenes” — autonomous factions are the apex of that. A good faction engine & appropriate population of a world with factions naturally creates the situations that things like node-based scenario design are meant to artificially replicate. And the two methods are powerfully complementary if put together.
Every faction system is personalized
The discussion I had was long and rambling, and I had to take a while to absorb it. And then I had to test it myself. In three campaigns now (Masks of Nyarlathotep, Mausritter, and a test campaign for a homebrewed system I hope to soon release) I have employed a tailored custom faction system, and the results are remarkable.
The core of each system is simple, although I varied the implementation based on the characteristics of the campaign. Each system had the following elements attached to each faction:
Population: A means of distinguishing faction scope/scale/area/supporters. This merges the concepts of both “supporters” (i.e. collaborators & enablers who are not directly involved in factional action) and "soldiers” (i.e. active participants who do the metaphorical dirty work) together, because nearly every organization has a similar ratio of approximately 8:1 to 10:1 supporters to soldiers. The US Army’s own numbers will tell you this, and it applies outside of the military, too. Think of how many family members, businesses, and associates were needed to support a single Made Man. My favorite method was by logarithmic scale; each doubling or quadrupling of population added +1 to the stat, and you can convey that directly into an easily-scaling comparative bonus when factions or PCs fight each other.
Aspects: Some of you would probably hate this, but I found the best possible way to clearly differentiate notable faction distinctions was to just slap a few FATE-style words or even a phrase down and have it apply like dis/advantage when necessary. Mausritter would call these your faction’s Resources, while Godbound calls them Features.
A charismatic leader with a distinct agenda: Charismatic people rule the world, and they make for better stories (& more easily-remembered friends & foes) when they have interesting qualities. More to the point, charisma usually includes ambition, which means the character wants to change the world somehow, which is the only reason you’re bothering to pay attention to them, and an agenda means you can reason out why anyone would bother siding with them in the first place; their supporters agree with them.
Goals & a progress stat: Your factions have to do things. When they max out their progress bar, they do things, automatically. No save-or-fail. They just achieve it. Even if that means something as dramatic & world-shifting as “they kill the king”.
That’s it. That’s four critical elements, only two of which are stats.
Each faction system also had a similar chassis for resolving problems in conflicts. Guidelines about how to choose goals. Recommended intervals for faction event checks. But the most important element is that each had an event generator: Every time a faction makes progress towards their goal, an event happens. Flat-out. The players hear about it, guaranteed. It’s a rumor. It’s in the newspapers. They see or meet people affected by it; they’re directly impacted by it. Something to make them notice.
Sidebar regarding Mausritter: Mausritter is two steps ahead of the other faction systems I know & it has this little note in its faction rules:
This is hinting at the same idea. This is, I feel, the real purpose of factions. But Mausritter doesn’t go far enough. I firmly believe an explicit rule as to when events happen is beneficial & I integrated such a thing into every system variation I tested. This whole system exists to generate events so that players know that the world is moving. I’d triply underline it if I could.
So when implemented, how did these systems turn out? Wonderfully, actually.
I could trivially simulate with less than 5 minutes of faction turn work per session nearly 20 factions per campaign. I feel like this is on the low end of what’s possible. 50 is actually within reach, if you wanted to take 15 to 20 minutes between sessions.
Players could not, in fact, keep up with the pace of events. The local cat killed the cornsnake! But there’s also missing children! The rats have kidnapped the baker’s son! This was a good thing. It made the game more interesting & tense that they were forced to choose between what to pursue as they hadn’t the time to deal with all the world’s chaos.
It actually gave me a better grasp of all the moving parts of the world. Because every faction ‘turn’ required that I step through everyone’s motivations & current actions, I continually refreshed my mind on where they were at and how it was going!
The method isn’t entirely without flaws. The weakest implementation was in my still-ongoing Masks of Nyarlathotep excursion. MoN is already a lengthy world-spanning sandbox and most of it is set up as a “node-based” campaign sandbox for investigation. Retooling the factions as ‘mobile actors’ is more difficult than it seems, and rephrasing the fixed campaign timeline for more flexible faction-based actions was so much trouble that I felt limited to mostly adding additional actors or converting side stories or supportive characters into actors that worked alongside the main events of the campaign.
I also experimented with treating weather as factions. Winter plots to summon a blizzard! It didn’t strike me as a great execution the way I tried it, but if you really wanted to personify facets of the world as entities who are always acting within it, I feel like it could be done with a bit more tweaking than what I accomplished. I might have to publish a toolkit for that soon.
A Free d20 Faction System
I made a two-page faction system. It fits on one double-sided U.S. Letter sheet. I am giving it to you. It’s free on DriveThruRPG right now. It’s called The Faction Machine.
It’s probably compatible with anything. It uses a d20 die, but it doesn’t assume anything about the system you bolt it onto. That makes it sub-optimal in that you’ll have to adapt it to whatever you’re using, but flexible enough that you can probably use it no matter what. It’s just an example. Something to get you thinking. But it works — I know this because it’s a tweaked version of what I used.
I’m actually genuinely excited about this thing. It’s one of the best improvements I’ve ever made to my own game, integrating a system like this. If you try it out, I want to know how it goes for you. Tell me how it goes! Hell, even just make a faction or two & think about how it works. Whatever you choose, I hope it works for you like it has for me.
Renaming the Blog & A Preview
Now that I’ve finally come out of hibernation, I’m also shaking up something else. The blog’s been renamed! Nothing dramatic. We’re dropping the “Compact” in favor of simply being the Cyclopean Blog. In fact, I’ve already seen to it!
You might ask why, and the reason is that I’m preparing for a relaunch of my tabletop games projects as a proper business. I used to make battle-maps for tactical RPGs (i.e. D&D) as Miscellanea Maps; I’m resurrecting that as DnDungeon Maps and planning on much more. Cyclopean will be a company under which I hope to publish most of my backlog: Games, tools, modules, perhaps software. We’ll see how it goes. But stay tuned, more on that soon! In the meantime, go check out Taylor’s works. That’s an order. He deserves it. Do it for Taylor.
