How are you expected to fictionally describe a Faction? When someone shows up and a character wants to Put a Name to a Face, how do you inform them what Faction to roll? If the players chase someone into a building that seems ominous, and they want to Investigate a Place of Power, how do they know what to roll if the owner is currently unknown?
I think this is a thing I’ve been doing wrong, so I’d like to hear what others do.
In our game I don’t think we’ve ever hidden (at least from the player) which faction a person or place is associated with. Because even just knowing “roll with Night” doesn’t tell you if the house is haunted by a ghost, or owned by vampires, or whatever and those can mean very different things.
And as a reminder, people/places are not always in the faction you’d expect because it is possible for factions to change. For example an alchemist would normally be in Power, but if they were enslaved by a group of vampires as a pet minion, then they might be Night instead. So just knowing what faction to roll might lead to the wrong conclusions on a failed roll.
Interesting, so in your alchemist example, if a player says “okay cool an alchemist, so I’ll roll with Power” and you respond with “oh no, roll with Wild”, does discussion ever ensue?
I have a mental disconnect with the reality of that situation. Almost like their should be some ability to roll with the wrong faction? “I roll with Power, 11” / “he’s not a member of Power, he’s beholden to the nature spirits of this plot of land” or something… I dunno
They could interact with the alchemist first to try and learn about him. Since failure is not a bad thing (more fiction, just not fiction that you benefit from), then whether they roll with one or the other should not matter. The discussion should be “I want to roll Power to Put a Name…”, “Nope, sorry, he is Wild, roll them dice”. Telling them the faction itself might lead to other worrying or knowledge, as they now know that this guy is beholden to Wild.
There is no reason to roll with the wrong faction because Face to Name isn’t rolling about what they physically are it is instead learning about who they interact with. In the Wild Alchemist example you tell the player to roll with Wild. If they succeed, then part of what they learn is probably why they are in a non-typical faction. If they fail, then they are left wondering. “Normally I’d expect to have heard about this guy because I’m well connected with Power, but I guess he has been avoiding other practitioners or is an outcast”
I consider the four Factions purely as part of the system. Not as part of the fiction. The name is basically wrong: It’s not about affiliation. There is no King of Night or President of Mortality.
+Charlie Collins “it is instead learning about who they interact with” is a good way to put it, but it does sort of embolden me to suggest a roll with either faction like +Steve Moore suggests – changing what sort of information you get out of it. “Alchemist, eh? Sounds like Power, I’ll Put a Name to a Face with Power” vs “Hmm, alchemist but everything here seems to be made out of trees and leaves? Sounds like Wild to me. I’ll Put A Face to a Name with Wild” – both could produce good stuff.
Announcing someone’s faction seems a little bit like just saying “oh the baker is a Level 6 Fighter”, and it’s not sitting well with me.
Factions should be identifiable as “Other” to other factions. That “otherness” can be from diverse backgrounds, but also their relationship to power.
Mortals are the masses. They must rely on their own power and nothing else. Their power players are fringe elements aware of the other factions. Existing in a transitive space, likely to be sucked deeper into the power games.
Night operates in illicit space. Their space is carved out without permission. This could be crime families, gangs, or just homeless people. Their power is not recognized as legitimate or real.
Power are institutions. With the weight of visibility and history behind them. Universities, police, or government bodies.
Wild owed fealty to power that is foreign or alien. Migrants, tourists, or corporate speculators.
The other side of the coin is that Urban Shadows is suppose to be a game about intersectionality. The politics of diverse communities interacting.
So you might have a homeless gay latino Wolf, squatting out in some abandon warehouses, trying to carve out a space for them and theirs. A corporate white lesbian Tainted, starting a reality/soul speculation scheme. Her place of power is a secluded pent suite with alien ritual markings. A straight white councilman Oracle trying to advert disaster. His crystal ball is hidden underneath his desk at town hall. And then a black social worker Aware trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. The community health center they work at, has a strength of community spirit, but its fragile and doesn’t have any support.
The faction moves are about people and place’s of consequence. Otherwise they wouldn’t have a reputation. Identifying that person or place’s relationship to power is an easy signafier and perhaps requirement to roll these faction moves. This could be a chicken or egg problem similar to moves like read a sitch.
“I wanna get a read of the room.” – PC
“Is this a charged situation?” -GM
“It is now.” -PC
So if you investigate a place of power at a suburban home, don’t be upset when it turns out to be the club house of a Watcher’s society.
Enjoying reading these responses. I’ll second this one: nobody’s faction is ever secret in my game. We do actually refer to factions by name in-character.
This is easy with “put a face to a name” because anybody who’s enough of a mover and shaker to trigger this move is out in the open enough for their faction to be widely known. And even if their faction is a secret – a vampire secretly working for the wizards in Power, say – I’d still have you roll with Night because that’s more likely where you heard of them from.
I think the big question with “investigate a place of power” in a place that’s actively hidden is whether the PCs legitimately trigger the move. You can’t just say “I investigate a place of power” for every building you walk into until the MC says “fine, jeez, you found the vampire hideout.” Rather, when you poke around in the vampire hideout, the MC tells you to investigate a place of power and roll with Night. Even a tiny bit of poking around will likely tip off that it’s a vampire hideout – even on a miss – but maybe not much more than that. At least, that’s how I run it.
I would say, in the case of the alchemist, that they have the special move:
Make your player roll/mark Wild or Power, depending on whether they’re indagating their old associates, their new associates or their supernatural abilities.
This is an interesting point that hadn’t occurred to me before. I think there are a couple of additional options.
First, unless they already just know, they are going to have to ask around and in that case they need to target a specific faction. If you see someone going in to the vampires favourite restaurant for a meeting do you ask your contacts in night or in mortality who they might be? That’s up to the player. You might give them some clue as to what faction the person is really in though, the guy has a very expensive suit and a Harvard tie pin (maybe he’s mortality), the guy has a haircut that looks like he did it himself and a tribal tattoo peeking out from under the shirt that he doesn’t seem comfortable wearing (maybe he’s wild).
Second, maybe you can ask the player to roll two dice and tell you what factions that got a hit with. If the guy is a wizard who arrived in town a few months ago and is working purely for the local vampire lord then maybe on a 7+ with night you tell them that much, on a 10+ with power you tell them the mystery person is known as a magic merc who hires out to do body guard jobs for people who think they are under magical threat. They player might get one, both or neither of those bits of info off one roll and if they miss they haven’t been told anything about the factions the mystery person is with.
If the factions are a specific tangible thing in the campaign, one can also make the stat depend on what turf your in. The alchemist might belong to wild but you roll power since you’re in their neighbourhood. That way you might not only figure out things about the alchemist but also stuff with the two factions that are now linked.
To the question about whether faction “reveals too much,” I have a couple responses.
1) In the game I run, “faction” is a very general term. There are always multiple, conflicting groups of each archetype, so knowing that someone is aligned with Night isn’t that useful to the information the player wants to know, which is, “who is this guy?”
2) The number of times you “put a name to a face” for a character whose faction isn’t somehow otherwise made clear should be a pretty rare occurrence.
If you look at the game rules for NPC faction moves, NPC characters act in starkly different ways based on faction. Fae are not supposed to react to situations the way Vamps do. So, unless the NPC is specifically “under cover,” by interaction alone the players should be able to get a sense of faction; Wild will act erratic and weird, Night will be impulsive and aggressive, etc.
I’d take the spirit of these rules a step further; because each faction acts so different, the odds are that members of these factions are observably different. A character who travels among factions (like the players) will, unless there’s a disguise or misdirection going on, always be able to detect the weirdness of Wild versus the contemplative crackle of Power in the way the NPCs look, sound, and possibly even smell.
3) Don’t have NPCs be limited to the power sets player archetypes are!
With the alchemist example, it might be obvious that this alchemist is Wild-aligned because of the way he looks/acts, but that doesn’t tell you what he can do; it may not be at all like the powers on the Fae archetype.
Even if an NPC is clearly a Fae/Wizard/Vamp/etc., they don’t need to be limited by the powers on the archetype sheet. They don’t need to be more powerful, but it’s not bad to be different.