So, I’ve kind of been obsessing over a way to do this. Since I read the World of Darkness: Chicago for the chronicles of Darkness line I have been trying to find a way to simulate factions acting against each other in ways that are both subtle and political on one hand, and overt and aggressive on the other. I’ve looked at both fronts from apocalypse world and dungeon world, and factions from Stars Without Number. I am now looking at 2ed Apocalypse world threats. During this research I cam across the Unruly tag which has you create subfactions within the faction and have them periodically make moves against one another. I want to do that in the sprawl. I want to have a group of lower level, city-bound factions act against one another in the background while the player characters do things. What frame work would be good for building small faction moves to not only relate to their attention on the players but each other?
So, I’ve kind of been obsessing over a way to do this.
So, I’ve kind of been obsessing over a way to do this.
Have you tried Urban Shadows?
Moves are usually player facing, not NPC vs NPC. Most background faction stuff in PbtA games is really just fiat based on whatever happened during play.
Basically, I just model factions by giving them some agenda and a plan to achieve it. Between sessions I adjust the plan based on what the PCs did. At least, that’s how I manage factions in Urban Shadows
I haven’t. I am sort of swayed by the swn way of thinking but haven’t boiled it down to an interesting way to keep it cyberpunk and make it work in a way that seems mechanically consistent to pbta.
What about blades in the dark? Faction struggles is a basic part of the system
To piggyback on what Aaron Griffin was saying; In The Sprawl, Check out the MC sheets. The one that has Threats, specifically, has a number of THREAT MOVES. These are awesome. Think outside the box, and you’ll realise many of these can be used by or applied to factions. 😎👍
One of the things that Threats in The Sprawl are explicitly supposed to help you represent are factions within larger organizations, so definitely start there.
If you wanted to mechanize it, SWN could work well. I haven’t managed to play Urban Shadows yet, but from what I know about it, that’s also probably a useful suggestion.
Bought Urban Shadows, and looking it over. My initial reaction was to convert the faction moves into something like the shadowrun etiquette skill as a broad mix of reputation and personal knowledge of a categorizing of people. Also think Debts and Favors would be useful for a game focusing on mafia,and other types of organized crime or other things when cold hard cash won’t do. Drives seem like a useful thing to place on all npcs. MC faction moves seem like a good way to bridge together like-threats or contacts, but the player faction moves don’t seem different from name a contact or hit the streets.