Low Prep Faction Play
Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky. Group of Children [Russian Empire]. 1909.
A friend asked me for some advice on developing a hexcrawl. I am honestly not an expert on that subject, but in conversation it turns out I had some thoughts on how to organize factions for your sandbox game that might be worth setting to paper.
Why have factions?
Every game has what I think of as an attention bubble, a sphere of locations, characters, threats, and opportunities that the players are aware of and actively care about. We play for a limited amount of time each week and the players (mostly) only perceive what is in their direct field of view. We sometimes simulate events ticking away in the background via restocking procedures, encounter tables, or Dungeon World-esque fronts, but those events don't really happen in the same way the rest of the game does.
Others have written about the Law of the Conservation of NPCs, intentionally compressing the number of NPCs so that a) you don't have to keep track of as much and b) the characters form lasting bonds with those characters.
Factions are this writ large. They provide the tenuous thread that link the stuff inside the attention bubble with the fictive landscape outside. They provide context for dungeon crawls, stakes for successes or failures, and a cast of characters primed with motivations. They also compress all that information into trackable headings that a GM (or attentive player) can note in their binder.
Towards that end, I prefer having about 3-4 factions at play in a typical sandbox game. Too many and they can't all fit in the attention bubble. Too few and it starts get monotonous. See Skyrim's Civil War plotline for a faction game with too few actors.
What makes a faction?
In very practical terms, I ask for three things from factions:
- Characters for the PCs to interact with.
- Resources the faction has at their disposal.
- Goals the faction is working towards.
You may recognize two of these as key features of the faction system from Mausritter (p. 30 in the free rules PDF). This is also not so far from Among Cats and Books' Dolmenwood Factions content. They add more detail than I usually bother developing in advance of contact with the players.
Let's build out an example faction:
The Iron Dukes are a loose affiliation of bandit clans that live in the mountains to the north of town.
Characters
Characters are the juice of factions - people that the PCs can meet, befriend, or battle. It's very important to me that characters are not just their faction incarnate. They are individuals who happen to align with a group, whether that is out of pure loyalty or common interest. Multiple characters gives you the opportunity for intra-faction infighting and a release valve if a friendly faction needs to take an action against the players - "Oh, that was Karl's doing. He hated you guys, but thankfully you took care of him."
For the Iron Dukes, I make note of:
- Carlos Wordeater - A small man with big ears, famously humiliated in a major boasting match and constantly striving to live it down. He is the de jure leader of the Iron Dukes as he is broadly considered inoffensive by the individual clan leaders.
- Big Hilde - Runs a roadside inn on the Bleak Road. Feeds information to the Iron Dukes and arranges for proper funerals when they die.
Note that I have not inventoried the various bandit clan leaders. We can meet them in play, when the players encounter random bandits on the road or if they go to an adventuring location that features bandits.
Resources
Resources are what the faction uses to get things done - outposts, magic items, goons, bribed officials, etc. You could mechanize these (as Mausritter does), but just having a list is critical. When the characters attack a faction, they'll be contesting a resource. When the characters work for a faction, they'll be helping to establish a new resource or pry an existing one away from a rival faction.
For the Iron Dukes, I write down:
- The Dead Horse, Big Hilde's inn.
- Six bandit clans.
- A secret access tunnel hidden in the town sewers.
We can imagine how each of these might be attacked, reinforced, or used as part of a scheme. The best resources are ones that the players might want to make use of too.
Goals
Goals are what a faction is trying to achieve. I like to have three - two near term goals and a long term one. When the players encounter members of a faction out in the world, they should be materially working towards the factions shortest term goal. When the PCs spend long periods of time training, recovering from injury, or otherwise, you can advance their goals.
For the Iron Dukes, let's say:
- Consolidate leadership under Carlos.
- Bribe or assassinate the captain of the town guard.
- Loot and pillage the town.
So, if we meet Iron Dukes members early in the campaign, it might be Carlos judging a dispute between two clan leaders or a group of rogue bandits who have decided they have have had enough of the chief throwing his weight around. Later in the campaign, we might meet them hauling treasure out of the dungeon for a bribe or trying to commission a vampire to take the captain out in the night. If that all goes off without a hitch, they might attack the town. Will the party side with the townsfolk or aid Carlos? What does Big Hilde think of all this?
Draw maps, leave blank spaces
The critical thing is that none of this is set in stone. I intentionally avoid descriptions any more detailed than this until the players have actually made contact with the faction in question. Goals change, resources come and go, characters change sides or (more frequently) die.
In between sessions, conduct a quick audit of each faction:
- Update their resources and goals based on the players' actions or passing time.
- Make a shortlist of characters, resources, and goals that could reasonably appear next session.
- Prep as you normally would. If you make heavy use of stat blocks and other specifics, pull the ones relevant to your shortlist.
Sometimes the players will disrupt a faction so badly that they cease to function. At that point, let them float out of the attention bubble. Keep characters around and fold them into the active plot.
Sometimes the players will meet a local group at an adventuring site and really take to them. Maybe that group gets elevated to faction status thanks to the player's intervention. Or perhaps they are a resource for another group, forming an unlikely alliance.
Importantly, sometimes the events of the campaign have nothing to do with the factions. If every time the players turn over a rock, they discover a faction working towards a goal, then it can start to feel like a quantum ogre situation. Pepper in some unrelated action, some bit players, some lost ruins that are actually lost.
I don't think any of what I have written here is revolutionary. At best it's a coherent description of the system agnostic system that I actually use at the table. This feels like the bones of a more nuanced post, but I hope it provides a useful framework through which you can consider your own practice.