Factions — Overview
The Factions layer contains organized power structures — guilds, cults, noble houses, criminal syndicates, religious orders. Any group that pursues goals collectively is a faction node.
Factions are the engine’s primary source of opposition and urgency. They advance their goals between sessions via clocks, whether players engage or not.
Opposite Face: People
A faction without members is an abstraction. The People layer is the opposite face — factions are made real by the NPCs who embody them. Every faction node requires at least one person post (a leader, an agent, a dissenter).
The structural dissenter rule lives here: every faction must contain at least one dissenter node, regardless of apparent unity.
The Guild as Special Node
The Adventurers’ Guild is a persistent faction node with weak posts (weight 0.1) into every settlement and every player character. It’s background radiation — a universal weak constraint that gently biases generation toward consistency across parties and sessions.
Node Types
(To be formalized — paradigm types from Ex Novo, relationship types, goal structures, clock mechanics)
Key Relationships
- Posts to People — members, leaders, dissenters, enemies
- Posts to Settlement — buildings the faction controls or contests
- Posts to Geography — territories, routes, resources the faction claims
- Posts to Quests — faction goals that generate quest hooks
- Posts to Lore — secrets the faction guards or pursues
Generation Sources
Faction nodes are seeded by Ex Novo (paradigm + relationship structure), Beak, Feather & Bone (community roles), and the goals framework. Faction goals must overlap with at least one player character goal — that’s what creates collision.