Factions
Factions are organized power structures competing for influence over resources, districts, and landmarks. They’re not demographic categories — they’re interpretive lenses that create meaning and conflict at every scale.
In engine terms, factions are the opposite face of People. A person without allegiances is just a name; a faction without members is an abstraction. Every faction node requires at least one person post (a leader, an agent, a structural dissenter), and every significant person node requires at least one faction edge.
Factions are also the primary source of quest nodes. Their goals advance between sessions via clocks — whether players engage or not — and a faction reaching its goal is a world event.
In This Folder
| File | What It Covers |
|---|---|
| Paradigms & Relationships | Generating factions with Ex Novo — paradigm types and relationship structure |
| Goals & Clocks | Giving factions concrete goals and tracking progress between sessions |
| Power & Seat | The token economy, the Seat of Power, and how power shifts |
Factions Operate at Every Scale
This is what earns factions their own section rather than living inside Settlements. A faction isn’t bounded by one town:
- Settlement scale — controls buildings, competes for the Seat of Power
- Geography scale — claims territory, controls routes, has outposts
- People scale — has agents, rivals, and dissenters everywhere the party goes
- Quest scale — pursues goals that generate hooks across the whole campaign
- Lore scale — guards secrets, spreads propaganda, buries history
Every time the party enters a new hex, visits a new settlement, or meets a new NPC — the factions already established are already there, operating at different intensities.
The Adventurers’ Guild
The Guild is a special faction node — persistent across all settlements, with weak posts (weight 0.1) into every player character and every location the campaign touches. It’s background radiation: not strong enough to dominate any collapse, but present enough to bias the world toward consistency across parties and sessions.
Make the Guild one of the two starting factions in any session zero settlement. Add it as a minor presence (1 power token) in every other settlement the party reaches.
Where This Connects
Faction paradigms and relationships come from Settlement generation (Ex Novo). Faction goals and clock mechanics come from Proactive Roleplaying. Faction scale and scope at different tiers is in Faction Scope. The three-faction (good/bad/ugly) political framework is in Mystic Arts Political Factions.