Lessons in Building Factions from Frostpunk 2
Since its release in September, I have been playing a lot of Frostpunk 2, a post-apocalyptic survival city-builder video game... so excuse me while this blog briefly becomes a video game blog. And while Frostpunk is an entirely different genre than most TTRPGs, except maybe The Quiet Year, it still can teach GMs an important lesson about factions and political intrigue--a major theme in Frostpunk 2 that goes beyond the mere survival of Frostpunk 1.
Where Do Factions Come From?
The first lesson that Frostpunk teaches us about factions comes to the GM-as-worldbuilder. The residents of your city in Frostpunk are lumped into big communities, each of which has a central ethos. For example, the Foragers community in your city represents the central ethos of "Adaptation"--that in the frozen tundra of the post-apocalypse, it is humanity that needs to adapt to the requirements of the Frostlands, rather than seeking to use machines to impose human will over the world. This gives us the first part of our first lesson: your factions need to be related to the themes of your world.
Thematic Conflict
Plenty of other GM blogs have talked about the importance of thematic conflict in your worldbuilding. It is something that knits your world together and inspires interesting conflict that is more than just petty grievance or sprawling good vs evil narratives. And while he's sometimes wordy and/or pedantic, a major influence on my thoughts on the matter is the AngryGM in 2018.

Building interesting thematic conflict involves picking two virtues that stand in opposition to one another. Good sources of thematic conflict include things like liberty and security, or--to take directly from Frostpunk 2--merit and equality. The idea is that neither of these is necessarily "good" and the other "evil," but that both have some merits. It makes villains understandable without relying on the old trope of just having some misfortunate past. You can build an enemy purely on ideological grounds, yet who has a coherent ideology.
Let's look at this through the lens of the X-Men franchise and comics.

The distinction between Magneto and Professor X is one about the merits of militarism as a mode of resistance. Our thematic conflict is about assimilation vs independence – should mutants adapt themselves to the human world and find safety by making themselves unobjectionable, or should they set themselves apart and find safety by making sure that humans know that mutants could destroy the human world and its governments if humans try to persecute mutants? This is a tricky, real-world debate; it's the debate of MLK vs Malcolm X, to which Professor X and Magneto are frequently compared.
Both of these ideas are... reasonable, in a lot of ways. Magneto's vision grows more popular and the character is more of a reasonable "hero", as per the tweet that I linked, as the failure of assimilation to end racism in the United States becomes more and more obvious. The conflict works because you can align yourself with Magneto without being obviously "just evil," even as the storyline of the comics often positions Magneto as an antagonist and villain.
You can pick whatever you want for the thematic conflicts in your games. Nature vs Innovation, Fate vs Free Will, or (as in Frostpunk 2) Equality vs Merit. Each of these works because both sides can be seen as good; either taken to extremes can be bad. I wrote months ago about one particular thematic conflict that would have been deeply intrinsic to the real medieval world: the idea of obedience or rejection of the Great Chain of Being. But really, that is just a particular example of this larger idea of building out thematic conflicts for your world, and then using those new poles as a more interesting axis for an alignment chart.
Thematic Conflict, Communities, and Factions
Frostpunk lets us connect these thematic poles to communities in our society. The Foragers favor adaptation (humans adapting to the Frost), while their opponents the Machinists (or New Londoners in the story mode) favor the ideal of Progress--using technology to mold the world in the image of what is needed for humanity. Neither Adaptation nor Progress is inherently bad, and the game is careful to make it clear that both have good and bad elements. Depending on your laws and policies, your society will either lean towards Adaptation or Progress, and you can always see where on that axis you fall.
A faction, in Frostpunk, is an extension of these larger communities. A faction takes place on all three of the Frostpunk 2 axes--Adaptation vs Progress, Equality vs Merit, and Reason (moving beyond the old social order) vs Tradition (preserving concepts like family). So, for example, the Evolvers faction supports Adaptation, Merit, and Reason... and as such, would logically draw supporters from the Foragers (who support adaptation), the Merchants (who support Merit), and the Thinkers (who support Reason). This means that they believe in throwing away the old social order for a "survival of the fittest" mode of society; those who can best adapt to the new frozen landscape should be at the top of society, without the distraction of things like traditional family structures. At the more extreme, if taking a five-year-old and making them start working in the mines is the best way to teach them about the new order of things, the Evolvers support that. If destroying the concept of a family and replacing it with forced sterilization and a government-sponsored breeding program of only the best suited to survival--to be raised by the government bureaucracy--would improve humanity's chances at survival, then so be it.
As there are three axes, there are 6 communities (one for each pole) and 8 factions (one for each unique combination of three ideals)... though not every one will emerge in each game.
Factions Emerge from Changes
How do these communities come together and turn into their more radical form of factions? In Frostpunk 2, the first faction emerges once you have passed a law that addresses each of the three thematic conflict axes. They emerge to support these recent changes to the government that have taken place--essentially, the people you've been favoring with your choice of initial laws.
The second faction forms shortly after, to push back against the first faction on all three axes. But these factions come from resistance to the new policies. And this is something that is backed up by history! As Mike Duncan talks about in his podcast, Revolutions (which I adore), one of the main ways that radical revolutionary upheavals get started is frustration with unwanted reforms:
Many revolutions begin their life in the resistance. The sovereign introduces something new and inflammatory, and inflamed groups organized to resist.... In the American Revolution, the arrival of the Stamp Act, the Navigation Acts, the Intolerable Acts triggered progressively more organized resistance efforts, mostly in the form of protests and boycotts and petitions. In pre-Revolutionary France, crown ministers... introduced revenue and administrative reforms that ran afoul of the parlements, who believed, not incorrectly, that the crown was attempting to grow its power at their expense. So the build up to 1789 was about resistance to innovations from the crown. We even see this in Haiti, because remember, before the real revolution got going in 1791, the Big Whites of Saint-Domingue were getting annoyed at attempts by the crown to control their activities in the colonies, like new policies handed down from on high demanding they be not quite so brutal in the treatment of their slaves. -Mike Duncan, Revolutions, Appendix 3
So instead of thinking about why your factions formed because of the society that they are in, think instead of the ways in which they want to oppose or support new changes to the social order. One will be a more revolutionary faction (those who have seen the government move away from what they want, while the other will be more loyalist). In either case, it is the movement of government policy that gives the factions cause to form out of their component communities.
How To Use Factions
Monolithic Factions
Frostpunk 2 does not have every member of the faction fleshed out. In fact, while the game often features haunting personal vignettes of life in your city, you can mostly play the game without ever thinking about an individual person. You are dealing with the Evolvers; not with this evolver and that evolver. The struggle is between Evolvers and Faithkeepers, not niche contests between different subfactions of the Evolvers.
And that's good advice! Let your factions be monolithic, at least to start, and at least in your mind. Want to run a campaign about the crumbling unity of a triumphal revolutionary front? Break apart that old faction of the Revolution and think about what the factions within the Revolution were... and then think of those as factions for the purposes of the rest of my advice. But you should only do that once the revolution is won, and when the narrative is meant to center around that breakdown of unity. If the outside old regime is still present, and your campaign is about the struggle between Revolution and Old Regime, making your revolutionary group too disparate will muddle the story you're trying to tell.
And to represent this monolithic faction, you should have one core NPC. Not a faceless mob, like in Frostpunk, because that works best in a city-builder video game. In a TTRPG, at the table, you want a character, someone with personality, who will be more memorable to your players. But this NPC has to represent the faction and all its monolithicness. To borrow from the AngryGM again:
The Face of the organization is a character that represents the purest expression of the Faction. The Face is utterly loyal to the Faction and shares its goals utterly. In short, that person is an embodiment of the Faction. While other members might waiver in their loyalty or question the Faction or turn traitor or they might have their own unique way of doing things within the Faction, the Face cannot do any of those things. The Face must represent the Faction utterly and completely. -AngryGM
And that's because your faction needs to be somewhat monolithic unless the point of the narrative is about them dissolving (in which case, you actually have multiple factions inside one bigger umbrella faction--and it is those multiple focal point factions that each need to be monolithic and have a face). Having too many points of view from different NPCs about the faction, having the face be a traitor to the faction, or even just having the face be a force of skepticism in the faction, means that there are factions within factions. And while that's accurate to real life, it makes for an incredibly confusing RPG experience. Even in a political intrigue game, give your faction a point person, and have them be devoted to the beliefs of their faction.
Interacting with Factions
The last lesson from Frostpunk about factions is that sometimes, factions just do what you want them to do. In Frostpunk 2, to enact a new law, it needs to be passed by the Council, where all your factions come together and vote. You can negotiate with them, promising to introduce some future law or a promise to research something or build something.
But sometimes, they'll just vote in favor because what you want aligns with what they want. Not everything needs to be a negotiation, particularly when you have two factions in opposition. One of them, presumably, just wants the same thing you do.
In a TTRPG where the players aren't introducing legislation, this can and should still be the dynamic. Sometimes, when the players want the town Blacksmiths' Guild (which represents the common folk of the town) to give them weapons, the guild should tell them that they have to go defeat the kobolds who occupied a key mine that once belonged to the blacksmiths. That's classic quest-giver stuff. But sometimes, if the party says "we want to rob the Mayor's house, but we need new armor to feel confident in doing that," the blacksmiths should give them armor for free. No quest is needed; the party is already, independently choosing to further the agenda of the faction, so why put an additional demand on it. Sometimes, negotiating with the Duke to send troops to help defend a town from a goblin warband, should be as simple as informing the Duke of the warband, because the Duke shares an interest in keeping the village safe.
It can sometimes feel weird to just give your players a perk, with no dice roll or bartering or quest-offering necessary. But it helps cement the idea that furthering the agenda of the faction is good and helpful, without needing an explicit quest. It gives players autonomy, and it endears the faction to them.
Conclusion
Good factions rely on all of these--a point person, connection and a stance to the themes of the story and world, something to oppose, and occasionally just being nice to the party when the party independently furthers the faction's agenda.
I hope that everyone enjoyed this delve into using factions in general, and about the lessons to take from Frostpunk 2 regarding factions more specifically.
If you want more content like this, be sure to subscribe to the blog to have it delivered to your inbox weekly or monthly as a roundup email. You can also share this post around to others and help spread the word. You can check out the last sort of "media review" I did, where I talked about lessons for RPGs from Percy Jackson. You can check out the D&D 5e-compatible faction I wrote on DriveThruRPG, modeling the historical Luddite movement (which opposed technological changes disrupting traditional economic structures), or check out all my products here. And you can make a donation here to help me pay for the website's hosting costs. Any support helps keep the website going!
This article may include affiliate links, which allows me to get a small portion of the price you pay, at no extra cost to you or the creator.