Recently I talked about Jonah and Tristen Fishel’s Proactive Roleplaying book, which goes into great detail about factions and their impact on the game. I wanted to discuss this in more detail, using Bookhounds of London as an example.
In broad terms, the Fishels use factions as what amounts to a sounding board for PC actions. If the PCs want to do X, the various factions in the game universe will be interested in that action and may react as a response to that action. Similarly, the factions have their own goals with their own timetables and, if the players don’t interfere with those goals, then the faction may succeed.
If this were Night's Black Agents, these are essentially Nodes. The difference being, in NBA Nodes are enemy assets, while here any group, enemy or not, can be a Faction.
What a Faction's success looks like will depend on the nature of the goal and the faction. A band of orcs who want to sack the town will succeed if they sack the town, burning and pillaging. A turncoat in the palace who wants to usurp a political rival may succeed if the rival is kicked out of power. Those two end results look very different, in-universe, but the effect of kicking the rival out of power may end up being far more destructive than an orc raid.
In Pelgrane, this is sometimes referred to as the Icon system. Each Icon represents a power – a faction – within the in-game universe. Each faction has an interest in what the characters are up to. A Heroic Icon, Ambiguous Icon or Villainous Icon will each have its own goals, ambitions, and effect on the in-game universe but, mechanically speaking, they all operate in the same way. Spend points, get stuff. What stuff looks like will depend on whether your character’s relationship with the Icon is positive, conflicted or negative.
OK, so far so familiar. However, most systems like these talk in high fantasy or major conflict terms. Even in Night’s Black Agents, where there is an optional Icon system, it’s talking about the higher echelons of state, or criminal enterprises that could topple governments. The Archmage in 13th Age isn’t interested in helping you improve your chess game, any more than Edom cares whether or not your character wakes up on time to make it to a job interview. They have more important fish to fry.
What changes when the factions are less significant?
Bookhounds of London is a game in which a small group of entrepreneurs stave off financial ruin by selling secrets man was not meant to know. They avoid disaster in the here-and-now by sowing the seeds of future destruction. But while the things they deal in may end up causing death on a grand scale, the forces the Bookhounds contend with are more mundane. The Hounds don’t clash with the Metropolitan Police; they clash with the constable on the beat. They don’t fight off shadowy cabals; they fight off debt collectors. The contests they wage are never recorded in the annals of history. They’d be lucky if they were recorded on the wall of the nearest public toilet.
Ultimately a faction is a group sufficiently powerful enough, and interested enough, to have an effect on your characters. Or, to re-use an old idea, it has:
Power, appropriate to its function within the narrative.
Goals.
Assets, to be used to achieve its goals.
Some factions are going to be obvious, some not. It’s reasonable to say, for example, that every campaign has some kind of authority that handles governmental tasks. Whether this is set in some distant future dystopia or a brooding, unhappy 1930s London, someone is taking out the trash. Or, possibly, failing to take out the trash. Whichever.
In a Bookhounds setting, then, a potential governmental faction could be:
The Local Council: faceless bureaucrats who are doing their best and yet, somehow, not.
For which there are the following Goals:
Make sure all records are current and up-to-date.
Levy fines for non-compliance.
Enforce parking laws.
Add to these minor day-to-day annoyances one major Goal:
Slum Clearance. The Council has been given grants to clear out slum housing and build new. This includes the street the Hounds’ shop is on.
That one will cause some angst.
Some factions will arise as a consequence of the setting. Bookhounds is a little unique in that its core function is retail: the characters are engaged in the sale of books. Which means the characters have to deal with the unwashed masses.
That wants a special faction:
The Book Club: self-satisfied enthusiasts who have never run a business and yet know how to run a business. Specifically, your business.
For which there are the following Goals:
Make sure there’s enough tea & biscuits.
Make sure there’s enough of what we want on the shelves.
Engage speakers on interesting topics to come and lecture on those topics.
Again, sounds perfectly reasonable. Except it’s not going to be the Club paying for the tea & biscuits, is it? That will be coming out of the shop’s limited petty cash. Just because the Book Club wants it doesn’t mean they’ll buy it all, so if the shop stocks the shelves with titles the Club wants it'll be draining the shop’s limited income as this dross rots upon the shelf. As for those speakers, picture the snorefest as some dusty academic puts off paying customers with his blow-by-blow account of something only the Book Club cares about.
Add to these the major Goal:
Hold a Séance. One of the Club members fancies themselves a Madame Blavatsky and wants to hold a spiritualist session. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
Each group is sufficiently powerful enough, and interested enough, to have an effect on the characters. The effect doesn’t have to be some world-shattering contest or a fight atop the Reichenbach Falls. The effect has to be in keeping with the theme of the campaign. That’s it.
Among other things this means the end Goal doesn't have to be a campaign-ending event. It can be a major annoyance. It can create a scenario all on its own. But it doesn't have to be the capstone unless you want it to be.
Slum Clearance, for example, seems like an obvious capstone. It can be one, if you like. Or it can be a catalyst, forcing the Hounds to relocate the shop but not ending their careers. It could also involve some clever scheming to make sure that their street isn't included in the slum clearance scheme. That warrants a scenario, perhaps two, as they reestablish elsewhere. Not a Game Over.
There’s one other thing I want to talk about.
The Fishels mention a mechanic they swiped from Blades in the Dark: the pie chart. It’s simple, visual and works well. Divide the Goal up into a pie chart with four, six, eight segments – as many as necessary. Each time a section of that chart is filled in, the faction is one step closer to its Goal. Fill in all the sections, and the Goal is complete.
Hmmm.
I don’t mind swiping ideas from other systems but that seems like a lot of faff.
Was it me, this is how I’d handle it. Have four markers, one Reaction, as follows:
Marker One
Marker Two
Reaction
Marker Three
Marker Four: Goal Reached.
The Faction is working towards a Goal. If it achieves three of its objectives, its Markers, then number four is the Goal, which in this case is Hold a Séance. The Reaction is there as a floating response to anything the characters might do.
Exactly what these markers are will depend on the faction, but if we were talking about the Book Club, eg, then the markers would be:
Make sure there’s enough tea & biscuits.
Make sure there’s enough of what we want on the shelves.
Engage speakers on interesting topics to come and lecture on those topics.
As time goes by the Book Club works towards its ultimate Goal, and the more successes it has along the way the more likely it is that the ultimate Goal will be achieved. The Reaction is there for when the Book Club feels slighted or threatened by something the characters do.
Are these markers a threat to the characters? No, not necessarily. Getting tea and biscuits is hardly the same thing as a note written in blood. But it is often the case that even people who seem harmless end up doing a lot of damage, whether they mean to or not.
The tea and biscuits are fine. The séance, not so much. But you don’t get to a point where the séance is possible before granting the Book Club a great deal of leeway, which is what will happen if the Club gets what it wants all the time. Like, eg, tea and biscuits on demand.
As for the Reaction, the Club might, if slighted, withdraw its support. For a while. They might go to a rival store, set up shop there. Take their business somewhere else, perhaps even persuade other customers to follow their lead. This, if not prevented, leads to a financial Reversal for the shop, affecting its credit rating and its ability to buy new stock.
Note the ‘if not prevented’ bit. The characters may decide to keep the Club on, but to do that they’ll need to give the Club something it wants. Like, say, put more of what the Club wants on the shelves, or engage speakers on interesting topics to come and lecture on those topics.
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