9.4 Creating a Faction

In order to create a faction, you need to have an idea of what kind of organization you are creating. Is it an order of templars, a political party, or a group of benevolent healers? Is the faction multi-faceted, with a variety of subgroups?

Related to the nature of the faction is its mission. You should be able to express in one sentence why the faction was founded and/or what it pursues. Example missions are:

• To protect the realm from demons
• To hunt down and kill any blasphemers
• To prevent the coming of the apocalypse
• To bring about the apocalypse
• To bring balance to the universe
• To make money for its members through mercenary contracts
• To gain control of the city

The mission may or may not be publicly known. If the faction has a secret mission, it usually has a fake public one to mislead others. Sometimes a faction may change (or become corrupt), and its public and/or secret mission changes accordingly.

After you develop an idea of the nature and mission of the faction, you determine its core. Name one or more characters who are running the faction. The fate of these characters is directly intertwined with the fate of the faction. PCs are the core of a faction they found.

If the GM allows this, the PCs could separately create their own factions (as in, one PC founds a warrior order, another a criminal organization). In such cases, when faction dice are to be earned, there needs to be an agreement or a conflict about whose faction benefits. Engagement dice can sometimes be earned for both (“You uncover a weakness in the defenses of Faction A that both of your factions can exploit”) or have to be split up (“You gain a dozen anti-demon mortar rounds worth a total of 2 engagement dice”).

After you flesh out the nature, core, and mission, you spend faction dice to create pillars for the faction. If this is a PC-run faction, the GM will determine the number of faction dice with which you start out. NPC factions are created at the GM’s discretion, but the GM should keep track of an NPC faction’s earnings and expenditures according to some guidelines about their income and story developments for consistency’s sake.

When creating pillars, you can spend 5 faction dice to do one of the following:

1. Create a new pillar with defense 1, competence 1, and 1 wound circle.
2. Raise a pillar’s defense by 1 (to a maximum of 5).
3. Raise a pillar’s competence by 1 (to a maximum of 5).
4. Add a wound circle to a pillar (to a maximum of 5).
5. Add a boon to a pillar (to a maximum of 5 boons per pillar).

The GM can impose limits on things like the number of allowed pillars for each faction, according to the story and the fun requirement (too many pillars might bring the game to a crawl and trade spontaneous fun for involved bookkeeping).