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Fire Up Your Factions
20 Plays5 months ago
This week Mark and Ben induct you into the fascinating world of factions within your RPG civilizations. We explore what factions are, and how they play a critical role in driving conflict and drama in your campaigns.
Factions help your characters align their moral compass, and add layers to your story by challenging your players to navigate their agendas. Learn practical strategies for incorporating factions into your campaigns effectively by giving them clear goals that drive your story forward and create depth for both heroes and villains. From secret societies and cults to military organizations and criminal guilds, we’ll explore how factions can create compelling narratives and enhance the stakes of your game.
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Transcript
Introduction: The Greater Good and Factions
00:00:00
Speaker
Well, well, well. I see we have visitors. Sergeant Nicholas Angel, Sanford Police Service. My, he tenacious, isn't he? I'm arresting you under suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder. come, sergeant. You should be ashamed. Calling yourself a community that cares. Oh, but we do care, Nicholas. It's all about the greater good. The greater good. can this be for the greater good? The greater good.
00:00:55
Speaker
Well, I'm ready to tune up now because that's for the greater good, isn't it, Mark? The greater good. The greater good. Oh boy, friends, if we get a good episode for you this week, we're going to talk about what factions are like within these civilizations that we've got. Mark, help me out. What in the world is a faction? How are we going to understand factions in this podcast? I pulled up something from James Madison from The Federalist when he talks about factions.
00:01:22
Speaker
Oh, he's taking that high road mark. That's what I like about you. A high road man. He states, uh, and I'll quote, by a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole who are united and actuated by some common impulse or passion or of interest adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. That's how James Madison kind of defines it.
00:01:51
Speaker
And he defines that in Federalist 10. Yes.
Understanding Factions in Storytelling
00:01:55
Speaker
So factions essentially then are groups within a larger group, right? So there's a parent group. You might say your country or your government or your, you know, your religious institution. There could be lots of different things. Usually power is involved though, right?
00:02:09
Speaker
Yeah, like if you have your high school band, the drum section could very well be its own. actually Okay. So groups within this larger group and these sort of subgroups have their own agendas and goals that maybe aren't shared by everybody, but they want to make sure that those agendas and goals are served and honored in whatever way makes sense.
00:02:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think we're probably used to thinking about factions as negative or as as dark drivers of some kind of story. But I think that's really just because factions are so often a source of conflict and drama. And so they give you a nice kind of counterpoint to your players.
00:02:46
Speaker
We're going to discuss in this podcast all kinds of different factions, the good, the bad, the gray. But let's let's start, as we always do, with the implications for your characters. So factions for your characters are like compass directions for your character's moral journey. ah Mark, how is it that factions function that way?
00:03:05
Speaker
Well, I think factions, because they are kind of pulling characters in ideological directions, whatever their stated purpose is, they're going to present all sorts of interesting ethical and moral dilemmas to your players. I mean, how are they going to respond when they are maybe pulled in ah into a direction that could be a little bit in the gray area. When factions meet your characters, those factions are going to say, are you with us? Are you against us? Will you help us? Will you harm us? Will you do us this favor? And your characters, their responses will frame your character's moral choices. Are we going to help the rogues killed? Are we going to honor the wishes of that paladin's order? There's so many different kinds of choices that could be presented here.
00:03:50
Speaker
They have a lot of tools in which to operate to kind of do that. And it just kind of depends on the type of faction that you want
Factions in Films and Games
00:03:57
Speaker
to present in your game. But they could use, they could tempt you, they could scold you, they could threaten, they could bargain, coerce, seduce, enrich, impoverce. They could do all sorts of things to kind of get you to kind of bend to their will.
00:04:12
Speaker
So it's not just they're going to present choices. They're going to work on your characters to influence your characters to operate those choices. And frankly, friends, remember, we're talking about you, the GM. You're the one that's going to come up with these factions. So you're going to need to think about what is it that these factions are about. We'll talk about how to make the most out of them soon.
00:04:29
Speaker
But it's not all kind of work and input. What's great about factions is they're a resource for you too. They will provide you with all kinds of NPCs, all kinds of great story hooks, all kinds of stuff to supply your story with the things you need to really move it forward. We'll talk more about story in a moment, but ah Mark, I think it's time for us to get into some examples. You had one that you really thought was sort of a signature example. I think it's probably a good example here.
00:04:55
Speaker
Yeah, I was just thinking of Dungeons and Dragons Honor Among Thieves film. Better than I expected. I'm not gonna lie. I've had a great time at that movie. No, it was a lot of fun. Yeah. and Yeah. Um, Tiki, when you go back to the original one back in that, or not the original one, the one back in the nineties that we were subjected to. Oh my God. But anyway, uh, let's not go there. I remember a movie back then. There was no Dungeons and Dragons movie back then. Your therapy worked. So in that film, the lead character, uh, Edwin dar Davis or Darvis, I don't even know what how do you pronounce it?
00:05:30
Speaker
I pronounce it Chris Pine. Okay. Well, Chris Pine, he's playing this character and he's kind of like, if you remember, he was kind of torn between the Harper's agenda and his kind of natural inclination toward Skulduggery, tomfoolery and stealing, essentially.
00:05:49
Speaker
He was a Rogi type character, right? He was a bard technically, um but definitely on the Rogier side of of most bards. You'll notice that that faction provided almost like a moral obstacle in his brain. It's a compass point. Yeah. and He was fighting against this faction, but you know at the end of the film kind of showed that you can reconcile the two. The two got were kind of reconciled in the way that he was able to kind of be who he was, but also serve the Harpers.
00:06:18
Speaker
Very good. No spoilers. We're not going to spoil it for you. But yeah, go watch the movie. It's a good movie. I think of other examples, too. Like, for example, in the Nolan Batman movies, Batman Begins, there's this moment where he goes and he's been training with the League of Shadows and he's right at the end. And is he going to kill this criminal and complete his training? And again, he's got to make an important moral choice, then defines that character. In summary,
00:06:40
Speaker
Factional influences are going to help your players define their characters' values. So giving them a richly detailed set of factions to kind of play off of is going to be really powerful. Now, that's how factions influence characters, and that's some of the stuff we're thinking about there. Let's talk about story. Mark, tell me about how factions help with story.
00:07:00
Speaker
Well, they can potentially drive your story forward, providing support for an opposition to the characters or for the characters. I mean, it just depends on which way the characters want to go. But these are going to be like just going to be drivers of some of these storylines. Once they make those choices, the factions are now aligned and it's going to be Now we've got a bunch of new enemies, or now we've got a bunch of new allies. yeah Just because the characters showed up doesn't mean the factions were waiting for them. It doesn't mean the factions were going to ignore the characters from here on out and then mine some other part of the game world. Factions are going to be pursuing their agendas, whether the players are there or not, and maybe they're going to be competing with the players.
00:07:43
Speaker
And factions are really going to like, when you think about them, they're so ideological driven, they're going to really show the players the stakes of the game. So factions are forward looking in that sense, as you say, and they're going to want to drive forward that agenda and create the world that they value. So one of the interesting things too, then, right, is that those factions are going to color and give flavor to the institutions or the groups that they're part of.
00:08:09
Speaker
This is where we were going to talk about some of the good factions, the bad factions, the grave factions. Let's think of an example of each.
Types and Roles of Factions
00:08:15
Speaker
A good faction, for example, could be, say, a paladin order of especially devoted and righteous paladins within some religious setting, right? It doesn't have to be evil. It could be the guys that are just really dedicated and they're a select group. And that's really cool. Maybe players even want to be a part of that. Obviously, you could have within that same setting some dark clerics who are seeking to subvert this institution as well.
00:08:38
Speaker
And thinking about the push and pull of those two groups before fighting becomes a real thing, that could be a really fascinating basis for a story in a game. Then you could also have just your your classic sinister factions that are just really fun for ah developing your villains or or, you know, maybe some of these big organizations you want to introduce to your game. They're just juicy and you got lots and they got lots to to two to kind of build around.
00:09:06
Speaker
What's cool about that is as you add these nuances and these layers, it's going to put a real interesting human dimension on this stuff. Take this out of the realm of going for an abstract cause, and you're going to realize that that person over there had ah a family member lost to monsters of a certain kind, which is why they've got this fanatical devotion now to exterminating those things now. and they Yeah, you could really have an empathic reaction to their cause, but still be yeah against that cause. like i get I get it. I get why you're upset.
00:09:33
Speaker
I sympathize, man, but you can't be doing this. Yeah. So factions can also be things that help you set up a story. We've talked about world building and history, and you could use a faction as a sort of historical thing. You know, you get some of the kind of the Dan Brown stories and some of these other modern stories where somebody will say, like oh, yes, there was an ancient faction of Templars that did this or that thing in secret. And then, you know, do they exist now? I mean, they don't have to. Maybe they do. but
Factions and Social Dynamics in Games
00:10:01
Speaker
But the point is, is that they are creating the seeds of a story that you're then going to reveal later. And the legacy they leave behind is something that could really be interesting, helpful. So, Ben, how do we make the most of our factions for our game? What are we what are it we going to do to make our games better? The first thing is that we've already talked about giving them some kind of a greater good, giving them some kind of a the greater good goal. Yeah. they
00:10:27
Speaker
Shall we say it together? They're greater. or Good. um So we we have to give them some kind of ah of a goal. It's got to be a clear goal. It's got to be something that's achievable, comprehensible. Give them something to do. And then what's cool is you don't actually have to reveal to that to the players up front. If it's a secret society, especially, or even if it's not a secret society, it may have secrets nonetheless. And there's fascinating opportunities for you to tell stories where that mystery gets revealed.
00:10:56
Speaker
That is a great point. A mystery is a big part of why we play the game, right? Yeah. These are all story generators for you. yeah ah Mark, tell me a bit about factions that characters might be a part of.
00:11:08
Speaker
I mean, they they could very well be a part of a faction. I i think of like the classic one is a like a guild. Maybe that you're playing it with a gnome tinkerers guild or, you know, you got your, of course, criminal guilds. Things that we see in lots of Dungeons and Dragons games are pretty common. Giving your players the opportunity to lead or organize guilds is almost like giving them their own stronghold or base. you know It's giving them a set of followers. It's giving them a way to bring their characters' ideology and perspectives into the world at large. yeah And so there can be really neat things going on there. Fun story elements you can do with those too, Ben. I mean, you could have an NPC in that same guild make a play for leadership or maybe even split the guild. There's all sorts of like things and places you can go in a game where the players are control or running their own guild.
00:11:55
Speaker
What's cool too, right, is that you can then give the players moments where they've got to defend their characters' philosophies and their characters' goals and outlooks on things to the other members of those guilds when the infighting comes up. So there's a lot of really great opportunities there, no less thrilling than having to defend your own stronghold.
00:12:12
Speaker
Oh yeah, this is where all that debate class training in high school is going to pay off then. That's right. Okay, so here's the thing too, right? We talked about how factions help define your characters. Well, guess what? It also helps you define your villains too. And there is such a host of really cool stuff that factions can do for your villains. Mark, why don't you rattle off some of our top choices here?
00:12:34
Speaker
I'm just going to rattle off some of these quickly, man. I'm not going to belabor the point. Factions can amplify the villains, the villainy of your big bad boss. They can just kind of take them up to another notch. You can make a bad guy worse.
00:12:48
Speaker
yeah Exactly. Factions provide followers or resources. And maybe some of those followers or resources, maybe they're plants. Hail Hydra. Again, these are all little seeds you can throw into your game. The factions might have produced a villain. Maybe he split off in that faction. Maybe his ideology was too extreme for a group that already had a pretty extreme ideology. When they kicked that guy out, he must be really bad. Yeah.
00:13:12
Speaker
Also possibly though, right, the faction might be the target that your villain is trying to exploit. It could be that the villain is working on owning a faction and stuff. So remember, it doesn't have to be the villain owns the faction. It has to be that the relationship the villain has the faction, just the way that the relationship that heroes have with factions is something that lets you add layers to that villain and lets you enrich the way that villain interacts then with your players.
00:13:35
Speaker
Let's talk about real quick, um, secret societies and and things of that nature. Classic. I don't know what you're talking about. The classic would be like the Illuminati, you know, that's in our, in our modern society. That's what we think about. But how do these work in in games?
00:13:51
Speaker
One way to think about it is that a secret society is something that exists because you remember when we were talking about factions, we said there's subgroups within this larger group. Well, if that larger group was aware of that smaller group and being aware of it, it would just like crush it. In that case, the faction would have to be secret. right That's how you get secret societies. so Hidden religious cults, um the Illuminati who was secretly pulling the strings of global society, yeah you know pick all these different things.
00:14:18
Speaker
I got one for you, Ben. Did you ever play Dragon Age, the last one, Inquisition? How dare you? You've asked me this question. You know I haven't. Man, you got it. That's a great game, by the way. I gotta catch up. Yeah, that's true. There's a atrocious character by the name of Sarah. Fight me on this, anybody. She's a horrible character. But she had a really interesting faction that she was involved with. She was involved with this group called the Friends of Red Jenny.
00:14:43
Speaker
and even these groups of like imagine the drags of society these are people who work in the dank less jobs these are the the house servant you know this is the the un-danked cook somewhere the underclass types exactly they had this secret group called the the friends red Jenny and basically this this group would do mischief basically or they you know embarrass wealthy you know people who insulted the lower class and in some cases to very extremes they might assassinate somebody basically this group was just set up for revenge from the lower class to the upper class
00:15:18
Speaker
It's a fascinating concept and it it gives a real kind of twist to that thieves guild concept that I think is pretty common. So that's really neat. Again, we've've we've mentioned this before, right Ben, where we've talked about taking things from the headlines. We we don't want to do that with our secret societies. It rips you out of the game.
00:15:35
Speaker
Yeah, I will say this. Secret societies and factions have a tendency, if you're not careful, to become the Mary Sue. Because they are so ideologically motivated, typically, they become a target for the hobby horses of the normal GM, who may want to work out something that they feel passionate about, or they may find something compelling from their current observations of society. I would say just be careful about that.
00:16:00
Speaker
Listen to your players, you guys. you know yeah They'll let you know what they like and what they don't like. And they might have their own ideas about some secrets of size that they want to see in the game that they're playing. So always use your players as a resource. If they want to create for you, that's just less work on your plate.
Geography and Civilization Building
00:16:22
Speaker
Well, OK, I think we're going to get to our tune-up segment now. We have a really interesting, we're going to stand this one on its head a little bit, Mark. Today we're going to tune ourselves up. And what I mean by that is one of our listeners asked us to go into more detail with an example of how we use geography to build civilizations. So in our recent episode on episodes on mapping and civilizations, we talked about how those contribute to each other. And one of our listeners really was just wanting us to say a bit more about that and kind of spin up an example.
00:16:50
Speaker
So what we're going to do now is we're going to actually take some time. We're going to take a little piece of a map that that you and I are familiar with. We'll describe what's on it. We get that this is an audio medium. Just stick with us, friends. Yeah, we're kind of doing this. Just ad lib a little bit. We're going to we've decided we're going to pick a spot on a map. Ben, tell us about the spot that you've chosen on this map.
00:17:10
Speaker
So I'm looking at a spot on this map. This is our ah revised curious map. And we've got this island that is situated south of a desert. I want to say it's a kind of a largish island. I don't know if it's quite the size of Australia. It's probably more like the size of Ireland or something, I'm guessing. And it's got some different biomes on it. It has On the north section of the island, it's got kind of a jungle. The shape of the island looks a little bit like Africa. It's got this kind of peninsula off to the west and on that peninsula is kind of a desert. In the center of this thing, there's a kind of a large, looks like sort of ah a butte or kind of a large, flattened, topped hill of some kind, a rock formation. Yeah, now I'm getting the Australia vibes with that that butte up there. Yeah, it's kind of giving me some Ayers Rock vibes there. And then there's a river that flows out of that southward, down to the sea, and it ends, at the mouth of that river is a small town. There's not a lot of towns in this place. There's also kind of a flat savannah land to the east of that north-south river.
00:18:09
Speaker
Okay, so we we kind of got this place. We've never really developed it, so we're kind of looking at this. It's kind of tied in shape-wise with the the whispering sands to the north that are crossed that are cut across by some some water. So my thought is, Ben, let's just look in at it. It almost looks like it broke off from that land, right? Yeah, I mean, you could tell that story of Pangea, and I may be anticipating the bit where we think about wonders, but maybe this is a good place to even start from is you know If you kind of think of the Whispering Sands area above as a place with long desiccated desert civilizations that kind of maybe remind you a little bit of Egypt, what if there was some great magic, some great revolt, and a lot of those people actually fled south, and then they broke off a piece of the land by some titanic magic? and I'm imagining, Ben, just looking at that, maybe that maybe the chasm, the water between the two, there could be entire civilizations that had sunk in there.
00:19:08
Speaker
Oh yeah, so like that's great. That could be a lot of ref fun underwater adventures to be had there. and So we're kind of looking at maybe some history, maybe there maybe these two land masses were once one. So they have, maybe they have just a lineage with, they they used to be one people, and now they're not. We imagine their history, they may have split off from each other. Do they have the same kind of civilization as those people to the North had? Have they Regressed, have they progressed? like what What do you imagine that life is like if you live there? I mean, if I'm just looking at the map, I can't help but think that they're probably in a much more advantageous situation. They actually have some green land, whereas the Whispering Sands does not. So they have some resources that some of these other places don't have. So I would think they're there're maybe thriving a bit better, living a better life, as you say. Yeah, excellent.
00:19:59
Speaker
So why don't we kind of surmise that these people have developed in accordance to the needs that they they don't need as much. They don't just spend all that time and resources trying to survive. They can actually spend some of that time developing art, culture. So maybe they're a little bit more advanced. I suspect too they might be a little bit more advanced in the way that they organize themselves and their government because If they came from some kind of a tyrannical regime before, they may have a lot of that remembered history that says, you know we're not going to be that way. And our relationships to other cultures are going to be similarly cautious. Maybe they're isolationists. you know I don't want to just kind of like rewrite a version of Wakanda here, but like you know you could imagine them being very careful and not letting people come too far past certain shores. or yeah you know And then that could give rise to interesting stories about smugglers and pirates and things like that.
00:20:51
Speaker
Speaking of smugglers and pirates, I'm and thinking one of the things they could have, you know we talk about like what is their, you think about the culture and what's their technology level and what do they have. Maybe it's not so much that they have like a higher technology or anything like that, but maybe they have some of the old relics and some of the secrets they kind of secreted away when those two societies split. What if they took it with them? Yeah, maybe they took it with them and they have some of that history that's been lost to the North. They actually have some of that knowledge.
00:21:20
Speaker
And knowledge is a convenient, powerful thing. Yeah. So looking at this, one of the things I think could be interesting, too, picking up on that note that you just had about having taken things with them. I wonder, there's this kind of large, swampy, jungly area that is to the north that's kind of on the coast that would have broken off from the Whispering Sands. And I sort of think, I wonder if there's a bunch of lost stuff in there that used to be part of that northern civilization. And maybe even the people in that land, too, don't know all the secrets of that place.
00:21:49
Speaker
Yeah. And certainly some of the, the ruins of cities that have fallen into the ocean could, could also house secrets. So I, you know what, Ben, I think, I think we got kind of a good start, but we're showing what we hope that we can kind of convey to you. The listener is how we can just, we look at a map and we let our imaginations just kind of play with it. You know what I mean? We're, we're, we're exploring the map and we're just letting our imaginations go from there. And remember, one of the things we said when we were talking about civilizations is when you're doing that first pass, don't over detail it.
00:22:19
Speaker
The amount of detail we have right now would be enough to land a player party on that shore and to give them the beginnings of an adventure that they could go. And you can just start writing it from there as you go and adding detail as you need to, but keeping this kind of general, less specific storyline in mind.
00:22:39
Speaker
All right, so Alex, we have done as you requested. We have tuned this up just a little bit more for you. I hope that enlightens a little bit.
Teaser: Upcoming Halloween Episode
00:22:46
Speaker
Well friends, that's our episode for this week. We hope you enjoyed it. We look forward to Halloween episode I think is coming up.
00:22:52
Speaker
So we just did a Halloween interview and we're ready for our own Halloween episode. And I'm excited to work on that, Ben. It's going to be a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to it. You are a horror aficionado, I think, and are better at this kind of stuff than I am. So I suspect I will be pressing you for details. It's going to be a lot of fun. Well, I think that's it for us this week, friends. Until next time, keep those dice rolling.