Although I still remain of the conviction that my first attempt at factions is sound, there are some points I want to clarify, correct and improve. After spending some more time and reading some more material I propose this refined factions system.

The easiest way to demonstrate the new faction system is with an example. Let's imagine a simple Orc Horde, that is currently rampaging through a region and is a big problem. This can be represented as a faction as such:

It is very simple and fits on an index card. But should still offer enough depth to provide conflict and inspiration during the game. Let's have a look at the individual components.

Things that stayed the same ...

The core remains the same as the first version. A faction should have a name of course. Either a proper name or some descriptor like the Orc Horde above. The Type also remained.

What also stayed is the Stability and Status. Stability is a measure on how well the faction can organize itself and, to some extend, loyal its members are. The status represents how the faction feels about the player characters. This can either be friendly (+3) or at war (-3) or anything between this two values.

... and things that changed

Stability and Status is very much like Hold and Status from Blades in the Dark. It is of no coincidence then, that I also incorporated the Tier into the faction. It represents wealth, influence and scale of a faction. Gone are age and members, this has been incorporated into the tier. We will see later, that we can use Tier for many other things. Tier is measured in roman numerals from I to V.

Second thing that I removed is the approach and changed it to Traits. These are like aspects in FATE. Short description of how the faction acts or is seen by the people. The amount of traits is linked to the Tier. The higher the Tier, the more Traits they have. Because people are more aware and members of such a big faction can act very differently.

You can see, that in the end this is very similar to approaches, but can be used more freely whenever you need to decide on how a faction (or its members) should react to a certain situation. It can also inform you how their goals might look like.

Speaking of.

Identity, Goals and Obstacles

Next to the goal that we had so far, I put two additional characteristics to the faction: Identity, Goals and Obstacles. Traits is something how the outside sees the faction and these three characteristics is what drives the faction from the inside.

The Identity defines on who their members are and how they can be recognized by others (either members or not). Goal is obvious and is only opposed by an Obstacle that the faction faces.

Previously we made the Goal of a faction their secret. But we can apply Landmark, Hidden, Secret to these characteristics to make it more interesting. As a refresher: Landmarks are information easily known (think public knowledge) whereas Hidden and Secret is information that is not readily available. Hidden information just needs some time to gather, whereas Secret information can even be missed completely.

Identity for example can be very public, in the case of a city guard. They all have their uniforms and such. Whereas a Thieves Guild might have a Secret handshake so that members can recognize each other. They probably don't want to go out in the world and shout: "Hey, I'm a thief!". Similarly, the goal of the Thieves Guild can be probably guessed with information and time - what is their next big score. Their obstacle is pretty clear on the other hand: The Authorities.

So how a faction handles these characteristics is very personal. So we assign to each of the characteristics if it is a landmark, hidden or secret. With a handy table you can randomize this information.

	1	2	3	4	5	6
Identity	L	S	H	S	H	L
Goal	H	L	S	H	L	S
Obstacle	S	H	L	L	S	H

Gameplay wise, you can now interact with these characteristics and try to find out what is hidden or a secret. For a secret, you create a goal with an appropriate progress track and spend threads to get behind the dark secret of a faction. The hidden information is just a simple thread (no need for a complex goal).

The Faction Game

A point that I glossed over last time is the actual faction play. With progress tracks we can now implement a simple system. The Goal of a faction is such a track. Its rank is determined by the factions Tier. The higher the Tier, the more difficult it gets - as the goals tend to get more and more complicated.

Tier	Goal Rank
0	Trivial
I	Easy
II	Normal
III	Hard
IV	Extreme
V	-

Faction Turn

But when do we increase this progress? After every session (or at the beginning of the next), we roll some dice to determine if the faction work on their goal or not. We do this very similar to Mausritter (or its inspiration Cairn).

You roll 2d6 and add/subtract some modifiers to it. If you are unstable or the Obstacle is affecting the faction, subtract 1. If there agents currently out in the world working for the goal, then add 1.

When the roll is greater or equal to 7, progress is made towards the goal. On an unmodified roll of a 2, the faction is destabilized and vice versa, on an unmodified roll of 12, the faction is stabilized.

Should the goal be completed, the faction increases in Tier if they are stable and gain a new trait (and subsequently a new goal). If they were unstable, they just stabilize again.

Player Interaction

The player can interact with this of course. They can direct action into destabilizing the faction (via a goal and threads) and even decrease the Tier (if the faction is unstable). You can do this for example by pushing on their Obstacle (if you know it of course). This works double-time, since when you work on it, the roll also gets worse during the Faction Turn.

A faction that is Tier 0 is basically non-existent and disbanded. When a faction looses a Tier, they also loose a Trait.

Or they can even help the faction with their goals, progressing the track "outside" of the faction turn between sessions. As gratitude you increase in status with the faction.

Example

Remember the Orc Horde at the beginning?

In the Faction Turn you would roll to see how much progress the horde has made in their goal. Basically how much pillaging they did and how this might have affected the region. If the roll is greater or equal 7, they would gain 1d8 (or 4) points on their progress score (since Tier I goals are of rank Easy).

As players you could start working against them. First you would make them unstable. The characters goal would be Destabilize Orc Horde. You can now come up with some threads how to achieve that. Once you reach your goal, they become unstable. The next step would then to decrease (and thus completely dismantle the horde). Again you formulate a new goal and so forth. Once you succeed, the Tier becomes 0 and the horde is defeated.

If you are too slow though, the Horde achieves their goal and gets more powerful. They start to settle in the region and now you have to invest even more time and resources to get rid of them. You work against some sort of clock here.

Company

The nice thing is, that these rules can also be applied to a faction under the players control. I call this the Company. It is a very stripped down version. You only need to keep track of the tier, stability and goals (everything else is made up by the players anyway).

The company starts at Tier 0 - completely unknown and not really a faction yet. When they complete some goals they will increase in Tier. Goals are similarly ranked according to their Tier - although they can also have some goals that are more long-term and bigger. They should never be lower then their Tier though.

There is now some things we can do with this. Different Tiers can give benefits to the players, as they gain more influence in the world.

Tier	Benefits
0
I
II	Hirelings
III	Stronghold
IV	Warbands
V

The Tier also reflects on what loot they might get or what monster they might face. You make strong enemies when you're famous and you're not working for free. This helps specifically in solo sessions, when you need to figure out, what an appropriate reward might be.

Limit Yourself

As I have mentioned last time, the maximum number of factions active on a region should be kept to a minimum. Three is good. You can have more factions in the world, but at a time focus on a limited number.

There's this video game called The King is Watching. The main mechanic of this game is, that you have to select a few tiles on a grid. Only in these tiles, stuff will be produced and in the others it is halted.

Similarly you should work with factions. Only interact with a select few and let the others rest. The players don't need to know about what happens to them. You can still advance them between sessions, but they are not mentioned or interact in any way in the current region.

The thing is, factions may overlap regions, the same way as you select the area in the game were stuff is advancing. So actions of players will still have some impact in the world, because suddenly a factions territory got smaller, because the players decided to destabilize them.

Inter-Faction Conflict

I have not yet found a definitive answer on how to handle conflict between factions. At least not in a mechanical way. This is something very interpretational. Especially in a solo gaming experience, where certain aspects are hidden completely.

The easiest way I have found is to create goals for faction that are inherently conflicting between factions. One faction wants to preserve a holy site, whereas another wants to steal a specific artifact from the same location. This is reflected by some modifiers in the roll for example. Should one faction succeed before the other, the loosing faction could destabilize and loose a Tier as well.

Summary

To create a new faction, just note down the following

• Name
• Stability (Stable or Unstable)
• Tier
• Status (starts at 0)
• Traits (one for each Tier)
• Identity
• Goal (that starts with score 0)
• Obstacle

This should fit on an index card and most of it can be randomized with some tables as well. Determine on Landmark, Hidden, Secret for Identity, Goal and Obstacle. For solo play, only fill out the characteristic that is a Landmark. Similarly you can tell this characteristic to the players.

Between every session (Faction Turn), roll 2d6 for each faction

• add 1 if Tier is greater or equal III
• add 1 if someone acted on their behalf in advancing their goal
• subtract 1 if Unstable
• subtract 1 if they were affected by their Obstacle in the last session

If the roll is greater or equal 7 advance the progress on the goal. If the track reaches 20

• If Stable: Increase Tier by 1 and gain a new trait
• If Unstable: become Stable

Then decide on a new goal and reset progress score to 0.

I've created a simple sheet to track the factions for you.

Download Sheet