I have a question about Factions. As my group built the Supernatural Background of Detroit, things didn’t quite end up working along the traditional Faction lines:
Fae are trying to push for a green energy revolution, but are stymied by entrenched demonic forces in the auto industry.
Vampires have two factions, the Old Guard, which has largely been wiped out by The Brood, new, young, feral vamps that don’t give a shit about The Way It’s Always Been.
Wizards are dealing with internal strife, as the Freemasons turned against and started systematically hunting and killing other Wizards.
In each of these cases, these conflicts are WITHIN a faction. Is this going to mess up Faction Moves? If I have a +2 Night, is that +2 with The Brood, or The Old Guard? How can we tell?
Very cool. Lots of potential for playing them off against each other.
Christopher Meid Thanks, I like it too, I just don’t quite know how it’s going to interact with the faction mechanics.
No, that’s totally normal. In fact, Factions are communities of people who share similar viewpoints; it’s almost more likely that they will directly conflict.
For example, why would a wizard care who controls a street corner? It’s the vampires and werewolf who care about territory. 😀
Dont see the problem.
Factions are from similar kind of creatures, not necesarily same interests.
Night is for creatures of the night, but is usual that vampires and werewolves are raging each other.
This happens in almost every game I’ve played or run. There are always internal fractures and competitions within each faction.
I’ve played in at least one campaign where the MC changed the faction names and meanings. If you can keep it to five factions, what would that do for your game? Do you have room for any PCs who don’t fit one of the groups you described?
If you don’t want to hack the game, then faction scores should just work for everyone in the faction because of the PCs reputation. If they take a side, you might limit some of their options for some faction moves based on who they’ve pissed off.
Also, you might shepherd the players during the first set of opening session moves to create more strife between different factions, just to balance things.
To expand on everyone’s thoughts above, think about it this way: your Faction value isn’t how liked you are within that community, it is how IMMERSED you are in it. So a high Night might mean that you can put names to werewolf faces because you pal around with them, but you can put names to vampire faces because you’ve been fighting them and know your enemy.
The same holds true (perhaps even more clearly) with Investigate a Place of Power, since a high Night means you are good at making sense of the territorial disputes of monsters, while a high Power means you are good at noticing when things have mystical power or meaning, regardless of whether that is a wizard’s workshop or some ley-lines in a park.
Charlie Collins That really helps, thanks!
My understanding is that having a high score with a Faction means you understand how that Faction works, including internecine conflicts. You may have aligned with a side, but you know your enemy, too.
Very neat. I was wondering how people were possibly going to remix and shift factions from the moment I saw those rules, but I figured I might just be contrarian 🙂