Factions in your sandbox want to be light

Design notes for my system of Threats for 'The Roaring Age'

This is part of a series of design notes on The Roaring Age, a 1920’s Lovecraftian hack of ‘Liminal Horror.’

Investigative mysteries often give a very different vibe than the “dungeon” format. Still, even a mystery taking place across weeks in a modern American metropolis can benefit from feeling like a tightly-bounded environment with moving pieces.

Murkdice

is doing great writing on this lately, like this post on shrinking your sandbox.

One of the best ways we can make a world feel tight, spontaneous, and alive is by bringing in and codifying our factions — I’m calling them “Threats.” Boiling down and reducing our elements helps us run tighter adventure experience, and prep less. Investigative mysteries are often super prep-heavy. We hate this.

And I’m going to put the big discovery up front: Often, when we make a game, we’re tuning up a game just the way we’d like it for ourselves, from our own combined preferences. Some of the design I’ve got coming up, like how I’ll handle Mythos Tomes, or how I dealt with Archival Research for NSR gaming, are fairly original.

But for my faction rules, this one is a greatest hits compilation of my favorite influences from other games.

Myself and

Joseph Krausz

are always blathering about how Mausritter has the perfect factions. This is true! Mausritter factions are the perfect, short length, and I’ve often seen GMs adapt the factions from other glorious sandboxes like Dolmenwood into the Mausritter style. Mausritter’s factions are slightly different than what I need, but they are the primary influence.

My other bucket of influence here fromes from PbtA games like Monster of the Week and Brindlewood Bay. I think each faction has “moves,” and these are fundamentally abstract. Running these games showed me how much juice you can get with a list of in-fiction, essentially… non-mechanical(?) ways of making factions act. The factions on the page are ultimately something to glance at as an improvisational aid.

So, here’s what I end up with! The following section, after some editing, is basically what we’re going to see in The Roaring Age, though there will surely be some editing:

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Threats

Your Threats, which might also be called your factions, are the various power players and interested parties who make the mystery progress alongside your players. They include the main baddies, but also other authorities, instigators, and bothersome folks that want to meddle in the affairs of your investigators. They all have a hand in the mystery.

Your Threats are there to drive your players onward, hurt them, interfere with their investigation, and otherwise make nuisances of themselves. If your players are lost or can’t figure out what’s next, your Threats make moves.

Threats add spontaneity for players and facilitators alike. When a mystery begins, they do simple things like introduce themselves to players, make veiled threats or promises. As the temperature rises, they make harder moves to threaten your investigators directly, bringing the mystery to a crescendo.

Anatomy of a Threat:

Threats have a motive — a single sentence that describes what they’re trying to accomplish for the purpose of your mystery. They might have tons of needs and purposes, but their motivation is the reason they’re coming after your characters.

Threats have resources — This is the stuff the Threats can make use of, the stuff they find valuable or wouldn’t want to jeopardize. This is the stuff that makes them strong, whether it’s social capital, money, real estate holdings, goons, or ancient relics.

Threats have moves — these are a few things your Threats might do to act in the mystery and push things forward. This is a quick list to reference when you need a Threat to act, something that changes the game for the players and pushes the story forward. 

You don’t need to plan move by move what your Threats will do before you run your mystery. Just begin the mystery and, when you need something interesting to happen, look at your Threats list, find something that looks fun, and make that move. Alternatively, if you’re using Arcs to structure your mystery, follow the guidelines for when to make moves with your Threats.

Adding Threats to a mystery

A good number of threats for a mystery is three, including the main monster or baddie. A single-session mystery for an hour or two of fun might have just two, a longer Arc¹ meant to span many sessions might have four. Try not to have so many that players feel overwhelmed, which can happen quite easily.

You can add a Threat or two as your players make new enemies. Investigators might even ally with a certain Threat for a time, but don’t rush to take a group off your list of Threats so quickly. Your Threats are loyal to their Motive above all else.

If you’re converting a classic mystery that appears to have only one Threat, try adding one or two extra for a more active, spontaneous experience. Often, this is one of the best things you can do to amplify the dynamism of a fairly straightforward classic. Even a single individual might be a Threat.

Write your own Threats by picking a name, a motive, a couple of resources, and three or so moves. Go with whatever seems cool, or pick something from this list of sample threats:

City Police
Motive: To close the case, quick and clean
(Public trust, monopoly on violence, archival records)

—Take an ally in for questioning
—Make something investigators want inaccessible, or disappear entirely
—Put investigators on the suspect list

Supernatural Disease/Curse
Motive: To manifest fully in as many bodies as possible
(contaminated alcohol, hip flasks, the spell within the Book of Vile Magicks)

—Spread to someone investigators know
—Cause the closure of a major institution
—Evolve to a new stage of symptoms

Local Mafia
Motive: Expand and solidify their power
(Speakeasies, local tough-guys, piles of disposable cash)

—Abduct a new victim
—Recruit an ally of the investigators
—Buy up a business or bribe an official

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That’s it! The only other thing I will include is about half a dozen more examples to drop into your mystery. Otherwise, this is the complete faction rules, though some more guidance about when to use your Threat Moves will come in the notes on timekeeping.

What you won’t find here is a faction simulation system, for example: projects and infighting you’d see in a game like Stars Without Number. I don’t know about you, but I never can bring myself to use these rules when they’re provided. Anyway, they don’t suit the American 1920’s as well as they do intergalactic space or micro-medieval mouse kingdoms.

I want to make an important note here, and why this post is called “Factions want to be light.” The aforementioned Stars Without Number is one of the games with the most-celebrated, often-cited faction system, with a robust engine for not just creating in-world factions, but fleshing them out with resources and adjudicating conflict amongst themselves as a sort of between-session, behind-the-scenes game for the GM to play on their own. Everyone appears to love these rules. But when casually polled, even the system’s biggest fans appear never to actually use them. I have nothing but pure admiration for Kevin Crawford as a designer, but this is the sort of thing — designing rules that are run to read and fantasize about, but never make it to the table — that I want to avoid here.

It seems, to me, like faction rules should remain as GM aids, rather than systems.

This is the ENTIRE section on factions for Mausritter, half of which is the sample factions. If I can fit all of my factions, rules, and guidance on a single spread like this, I’ll know I’ve done right. Bravo.

I also don’t leave room, at this point, for a list of important NPCs connected to each faction. This is for two important reasons:

1. It should generally be an obvious feature of any NPC in their design, given a short enough cast of characters. The upcoming The Parthenogenesis of Hungry Hollow for Liminal Horror has simple notation relating something like factions — you can always add your own in your notes if you NEED it.

2. Not all NPCs are static in their factions! Even the local mobster might take an interest in the theosophical society, and even the unassuming engineering professor might decide to try his hand at joining in with the local bootleggers. Better if they do!

I’m happy to receive any notes, questions, feedback, or even challenges in the comments.

1. An Arc is a different mechanical structure I’ve created for The Roaring Age. The current draft says: “Arcs are a timekeeping tool, and a simple way of describing the total scope of either a mystery, or a simple self-contained chapter of a longer campaign. An Arc usually takes place over the period of a few days, and can last as long as a single game session, or many sessions that tell the story of a single major threat or investigation.” More later on Arcs!