NaGaDeMon / Rolevember 2019 - Factions

There used to be four character classes in D&D...

Fighters - who hit stuff

Rogues - who avoided stuff

Magic User - who cast magical effects at stuff

Clerics - who prayed to stuff, and healed you when you got hit by stuff

Then there were a bunch of hybrids between those four (yes, I'm massively oversimplifying here)

Fighter / Rogue - Someone who moves quickly to avoid stuff, and hits stuff from a distance (Ranger)

Rogue / Magic User - A sneaky mage who doesn't need books or ingredients (Sorceror)

Fighter / Cleric - Someone who prays and hits stuff (Paladin)

Fight/Rogue/Magic-User - A jack of all trades (Bard)

etc.

In most of the groups I've played with over the years, this has basically meant that every player has a type of character that suits their style of play. The same can be seen in other game designs. 

Vampire the Masquerade began with...

Brujah - who are angry about stuff and hit stuff

Gangrel - who know wilderness stuff and change into stuff

Malkavian - who are insightful about stuff and suffer from stuff

Nosferatu - who hide from stuff and know about stuff

Toreador - who see stuff and talk about stuff

Tremere - who cast magical effects at stuff using their blood

Ventrue - who own stuff and lord over stuff

...then added...

Assamites - who silently killed stuff

Giovanni - who brought stuff back from the dead

Ravnos - who made you see stuff

Setites - who were bitter about stuff most others had forgotten

...then...

Lasombra - who made stuff dark and got broody about stuff

Tzimisce - who put stuff together in way they shouldn't

and a bunch of bloodlines - who specialised in obscure stuff.

Again, a range of character options so that everyone would have a type of character that balanced the type of gameplay and story they wanted, with the needs of the setting. 

The same could generally be applied to most games. Back in the days of The Forge, this was generally considered related to the concept of "Niche Protection". A character choosing a certain class or background type will be assumed better in a way that matches the stereotypes associated with the class or background.

When I created Ukiyo Zoshi with my late 90s collaborator, Dave Chandraratnam, we came up with a few factions who existed in a city derived from ideas in Planescape and Kaballah. We gave them each a colour that marked their territories and outfits, a special area that they derived their powers from, and a couple of alliances or enmities with the other groups. The city itself was basically desiged as the legendary inspiration for the Tower of Babel myth, where most people were cast out when the tower fell, but some folks were trapped inside. The whole storyline began when the gateways between worlds were opened up again, reopening connections across the entire multiverse with the city of Ukiyo (the floating world) as the hub (alas, the link is now dead) 

Dionysians (Purple) - Drawing from the mytholgy surrounding the Spice in Dune, and the Cult of Ecstasy in Mage: the Ascension; this group developed purple eyes rather than blue, as they awakened their consciousness.    

Gatekeepers (White) - The Gatekeepers were basically inspired by the Technocracy in Mage: the Ascension, they were controllers of any technology of electronic level or greater. As customs offcers for the city   

Junta (Red) - A secretive paramilitary group who are more interested in controlling territories outside the city, they are inspired by legends of ninjas, assassins, and thugees, often working to drive paramilitary groups to extremism in other planes of existence.   

Oneiromancers (Green) - Shamans deriving their powers from dreams and the spirits who have lingered on the edges of reality, this group is a fusion of the Dreamspeakers in Mage: the Ascension, and a cult of transhumanist shamans. 

Patriarchs (Grey) - Lawyers who use writing and communication to bind and manipulate the universe, inspired by Judaic traditions, and hermetic magic.  (It was probably "peak 90s" to name a secretive cabal of social manipulators "patriarchs")

Silver Oracles (Silver) - Awakened psychics who percieve the future and past, this group were caught in flux between the city and the outside world, exposed to aeons of temporal energies. Their children retain this power genetically. The Oracles try to remain neutral in all things, but some are know to offer their services to the highest bidder.   

Xenophobes (Blue) - Controlling the police and the military of the city, the xenophobes believe that the gateways should be closed again. They don't want to once again incur the wrath of the angels who collapsed the city aeons ago.

(Note that I found the links to the old website while writing this blog post and haven't read through the old pages, so any duscrepancies between here and there are simply my forgetfulness after not looking at those pages much in 20 years)

The whole idea was to create seven groups where each would offer a certain logical play style, and each would have built in attitudes to the other groups in the setting. I feel that decent number of factions all able to play off against one another is good, in the old days I tried to make sure that there were always an odd number of evenly powered factions, so that any conflict wouldn't result in a deadlock when factions lined up on either side against one another. 

These days I'm less enamoured of that idea. I prefer a wider variety of factions, of varying power, where some might be allies of convenience against a more powerful foe, while some factions are also quite limited in their scope rather than global conspiracies with agents everywhere. 

For this new project, the dea of the Dionysians works well, so too do the Junta (but probably ith a name change), the Patriarchs (definitely with a name change), the Oneiromancers and the Silver Oracles. That's five factions, almost pre written for me, but I'll need to engage in some adaption to turn the setting from a mysterious metropolis outside time and space, to a modern urban magic premise. The Xenophobes and the Gatekeepers don't really work at all. 

I'll also need to adapt all these concepts so that one of their primary sources of mystical potential is the familiar spirits at the centre of the game, and link a few books into them.