Planning a Campaign: Faction Building

Two weeks ago, we talked about developing the setting and the premise for a campaign. This week, we're going to take that setting and start populating it with the movers and shakers of the city: our keystone factions and their supporting NPCs.

Establishing Our Factions

Thematic Conflicts

Our first step in building out factions to populate our city and drive our campaign forward is to figure out the themes of the campaign and the conflicts that derive from that theme. I talked a lot more about thematic conflicts in my article on lessons from Frostpunk 2, so go through that article if you want more detail... but the main takeaway is to go beyond "good vs evil" and pick two opposing qualities that both have good elements to them.

Frostpunk has a system of three of these axes, with three primary factions developing with a stance on each axis. But while trying to write up my factions and themes, I found that the factions that I knew I wanted didn't necessarily each fit three core ideologies. So, I drew from the AngryGM's advice, which I also drew from in my Frostpunk article: 5 conflicts, with each faction taking a stance on two of the five to create a sort of "star" pattern.

The core question then becomes "what thematic conflicts do I want?"

A major theme of my world, present in a number of my campaigns, is the idea of arcane magic vs divine magic. Especially since that cataclysmic war referenced two weeks ago, the Zombie War, was driven by a conflict between forces of the arcane (pro-zombie) vs forces of religion (anti-zombie), it felt like that was an essential theme to bring back, purely based on the setting. I typically let this conflict represent the argument of Community vs Individuality – is it more important to protect yourself (the arcane), or to care about those around you (divine)? Where do you draw the line against working to help your neighbors if it starts to demand more than you have to give? So that is an easy theme to bring back.

My second core theme is one that I think is essential for a "journalism" campaign. I knew that truth vs sensationalism was something I wanted to explore, a driving reason that I wanted to run this campaign in the first place as I discussed two weeks ago. But while we all might be willing to read sensationalist articles or live in our own echo chambers as real people, I don't think there's very many people who would argue 'sensationalism' is a good thing. So I had to come up with a word to encapsulate the good of sensationalism, what sensationalism offers that is appealing. My answer was advocacy – a push for what you believe is right, something that we can all get behind. It is a reframing of the idea, certainly, but that makes it a more interesting one. So this is my second theme: truth/objectivity vs advocacy.

Another journalistic theme I wanted to include was about the way in which the press investigates people. Being a celebrity seems like a curse, in some ways, as everything you do becomes subject to public scrutiny. On the other hand, holding powerful people accountable is a key role of a free press. So, privacy vs accountability is another key thematic conflict for the campaign that is driven by the campaign's premise around journalistic ethics.

Last time, I also talked about some of the historical research that I did for the campaign, and history is a key part of all of my campaigns. So, drawing from real conflicts in my sort of pre-industrial, poised for social change world, I also included the conflict of innovation vs tradition for my campaign. Innovations can be uplifting, but it can also be socially ruinous – that was the driving conflict behind the Luddite movement.

That's 4 conflicts, and so I wanted to find one more. I knew that I wanted a religious faction (for my "community" side of the conflict), and I knew that I wanted that religious group to be zealous and discriminatory against the "evil", pro-necromancy arcane, but also to be genuinely interested in social welfare. Charity would be a good theme for them, so I started trying to think of a good opposite to charity that was still a positive word. Merit was one option, but I'd done a sort of merit vs equality theme in a previous campaign and felt like that was played out. So instead, I put a twist on the idea of charity as a second chance, and picked justice vs mercy as my fifth conflict.

Making Factions

The way the five-faction "star" works is by drawing out your conflicts in poles, so that each point of the star has a pair of traits. I like starting with one or two conflicts, naming a faction, and then thinking of factions that would logically oppose them (since factions often do form as resistance to changes), and using that to dictate how I arrange my pairs.

I'll start with my "zealous" religious faction, since I know from my setting work that Jetsam has a huge, world-famous cathedral in the vein of the Hagia Sofia, which means that they should have an important religious group. My Zealous faction is focused on Mercy and Community – those ideas work well together – and creates a very charitable type of religious identity that I want for my campaigns.

Zooming in on "individuality", then, I want a faction that represents individuality (and the Arcane) and would be opposed to the religiously zealous faction. I can't just do wizards, since ardent followers of the arcane that were willing to fight sided against the government during the Zombie War and so are largely expunged or powerless. But a key historical group during the real-world eras that I'm drawing historical inspiration from was student radicals. Often anti-church, student radicals in my world might have once been students at an arcane academy before the Zombie War, or just more "mundane" scholars.

And what other conflict should my students align with? I'm thinking innovation – they're young and they want change.

What faction then should represent tradition, opposing the students? I'm thinking the Guilds. They like having their old privileges, they like underpaying their apprentices (who might have more in common with the students), and they like the system being the way that it already is, thank you. They don't want to see major technological innovation that disrupts their livelihood!

Ok, what other conflict do the Guilds line up with? My options are Privacy vs Accountability and Objectivity vs Advocacy. I think either advocacy or privacy could be poles for the guilds, but I'm going to go for privacy – they like having control over their own system, their own cryptic and hidden rites (like how the Freemasons got their origin as a guild), and don't want people looking too into their affairs. They protect their own, and so don't want public accountability.

Does it make sense how this is coming together? It means that the Zealous and the Guilds are potential allies, since they have no direct sources of conflict, but the Guilds also could align with whatever faction ends up being linked to justice--who the Zealous oppose. This serves as a natural balance of power, because if the Zealous make an alliance, there's now three natural enemies of that pairing. But if the three become too strong, the internal conflict within that group of three can fracture and break up the alliance.

Ok, so we now need a group that stands for accountability, opposing the desire for privacy from the guilds. And, by process of elimination, that final conflict axis needs to be objectivity vs advocacy. I think accountability and objectivity align the best here, better than accountability and advocacy. We've also created a situation where "accountability" and "justice" are not in the same faction, which I think is... interesting.

One faction left is then Objectivity + Accountability. I see that as a sort of "information broker" role. They seek out the truth, even if it is ugly, and don't really care if that information is supposed to be secret. The other is Advocacy (which we said involved sensationalism, to an extent) and Justice.

Advocacy and Justice feels essentially like politically-motivated persecution. We're not being super merciful in our justice, and we're allowing bias and, well, advocacy for what we think is right to run our decisions. To me, that feels like the nobility... or, more generally, the rich and famous in town. They're happy to support gossip, living very much in their own world (advocacy), and they control the justice system. There's corruption here, absolutely, and a perversion of justice. We're straying a bit from our original understanding of the theme of justice, but that's ok if it makes for a good story.

And then, who are our information brokers that oppose the guilds and the corrupt and out-of-town aristocrats and celebrities? I think that is our most "criminal" faction. They're Robin Hood-esque, fighting the corrupt government and the entrenched secrets of the guilds. But also, they're bloody and cutthroat, and a potential thorn in the side of our party because they're totally willing to resort to violence if they don't like a story that the party runs (especially if it is "untrue", advancing an agenda).

Could those two have been flipped? Absolutely. A noble, truth-seeking aristocracy or judicial system, dedicated to holding everyone accountable, versus criminals with a zero-tolerance sort of justice and pushing a narrative. But I think that my former is more of an interesting story to tell, personally. It helps keep the "good guys" out of power, which gives me more fodder for conflict.

So then, these are my factions:

Picking Faces

I talked in both my article about Frostpunk and in a later article about the game Suzerain about the importance of having "faces" for your factions: key NPCs that represent the faction's interests to your party, add in personality to an otherwise amorphous interest group, and who are memorable. In the Suzerain article specifically, I talked about how having two faces was actually really helpful in emphasizing the alliances between components of each faction.

It would be easy to simply have a face representing each of the component "conflicts" in the faction: a noble who supports harsh justice, and another representing a desire to have an echo chamber and to "do right". But I think that is less interesting than the other option for a pair of faces! Part of this method of building factions is the synergy, even if it is at first not apparent, between the two parts of the faction's motivating force. A nobility that is passionate about their beliefs and willing to use and even abuse the justice system is more interesting than dividing the faction along that line.

So instead, I want my two faces to be the "pulls" in either direction. Each group has two natural allies that they don't have any conflicts with, so let those pulling relationships be the two factions. One celebrity who supports the students, the other who supports the guilds.

Now, I'm not going to give away everything – a number of my players do read this blog, and I want some of the NPCs to be surprises. But the important part is that I'm generating ten "keystone" NPCs, two per faction, each of which is somewhat aligned with a neighbor. I'm going to provide one faction as an example, something that will be very obvious and therefore not be a spoiler for any players because these guys are going to be very overt in their loyalties:

The Guilds, Pro-Noble: A candidate for leadership of the Baker's Guild (important because of the Bread Shortage I talked about last time), who wants to focus on keeping high standards, "artistry," and enforcing their monopoly on unlicensed bakers.

The Guilds, Pro-Zealous: A rival candidate for leadership of the Baker's Guild, who wants to add fillers to their sparse flour, lower prices, and help provide something to fill the hungry stomachs of the people.

These faces are then going to get fleshed out: personalities, backstories, the whole nine yards. They're key NPCs, central to the story. Ideally, I'll work with some PCs to help weave these NPCs into their backstories, for an even more personal connection. But most important is that, even though these NPCs can and should disagree, they're two sides of the same faction. They have far more in common than they disagree on. My two bakers, for example, both need to care more than anything about upholding the traditions of the baker's guild and keeping their internal guild discussions private. They are allies more than they are rivals, and their rivalry will be primarily exposed if the Guilds seem like they're leaning towards allying with a neighboring faction too much.

Conclusion

I hope that this walkthrough was helpful, as I laid out my process for designing factions and their faces! This series is focused on my process, how I work the various things that I've talked about on this blog into the actual framework for a campaign, so that some of the more vague concepts can seem a bit more concrete. Be sure to subscribe to keep seeing how this whole campaign comes together!