Faction Game

The Faction Turn

At the local-level (dungeon, village, town, city district), a Faction turn is 1 week.
At the end of the turn, each Faction distributes their Power between furthering their Current Agenda, stopping another Factions’ Current Agendas, or helping another Factions’ Current Agendas.
Remember that Divine Factions can only help or hinder mortal factions so they can add or subtract their Power from a roll.
After all the points are distributed, for each Current Agenda, roll a d20! + the Power assigned to help it vs a d20! + the Power assigned to hinder it.
If the difference between the two totals is 0, the Current Agenda moves forward but isn’t complete.
If the Current Agenda gets a higher total that means it was successfully completed. Why was it successful? What was the fallout?
If the Current Agenda gets a lower total that means it was unsuccessful. Why was it unsuccessful? What’s the fallout?
Unsuccessful Current Agendas can be carried over to the next turn or abandoned, however, abandoning a Current Agenda causes the Faction to lose 1 Power. Any Faction that helped an abandoned Current Agenda that turn also loses a Power.
Successful Agendas will need to be replaced with new ones and give their Faction an additional point of Power. Remember that the max Power a Faction can have is 10. Any Faction that helped a successful Current Agenda that turn also gains a Power.

Replacing/Modifying an Agenda

As the Faction game progresses, a Faction’s Current Agent will be replaced or modified. Remember that, regardless of what you do, it should follow this template:

[Faction] wants [objective] however [obstacle] therefore [scheme]

See the Current Agenda section in Step 9 for guidelines on creating solid Agendas.
Building off Old Agendas Another option is to build the new Agenda off of one of the Faction’s previous Agendas, taking another step towards completing its Motivations. Alternatively, you can set its Agenda in response to another Faction’s current or previous Agenda.
This creates a natural evolution and back-and-forth among Factions that makes things really dynamic.
So, let’s say that this Agenda succeeded:
The Ashborn Acolytes want to stop the latest shipment of gold from the mine; however, only the foremen know when the shipments are going to go out; therefore, they’re trying to convert one of the foremen.
This means that we can assume that the Acolytes can routinely use the foreman as a way of consistently stopping shipments from the mine now: they don’t have to keep repeating this Agenda, so they move on to a new Agenda, maybe something like:
The Ashborn Acolytes want to stop information about the town going back to the baron; however, the baron uses a magical form of communication between two wizards, one in the town, and one back at the barony’s capital; therefore, the Acolytes are trying to perform a ritual that will make magical communication impossible.
While the Mint now has a problem to deal with: their gold shipments are barely getting through so they might drop their current Agenda and create a new one:
The Mint wants to re-establish their shipments of gold from the mines so they’re consistent again; however, they don’t know that it’s a mole leaking the information; therefore, they’re sending auditors to the mines to diagnose the problem and report back.
Note that the success of this Agenda doesn’t mean that the Mint automatically know that the foreman is to blame: they might only know that there’s a mole in the organization and their next Agenda might be tracking down that mole and adding in checks to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
What you’re doing with Factions, the Faction Turn, and Agendas is changing and establishing the status quo as you go, which helps you flesh things out about the organization, the people, and the setting and how they work.
The first status quo, which we implicitly established, was that the shipments from the mine were consistent and that the knowledge was only told to the foremen.
We then changed the status quo: the shipments from the mine were barely getting through and the Acolytes know when they’re going out. The final Agenda, if successful, would change it again: the shipments from the mine are inconsistent, the Acolytes know when they’re going out and the Mint knows the Acolytes know but they don’t have specifics.

News of the Week

Now how do we get this information to the players? How do we integrate it into play?
Through something I like to call “News of the Week”.
This is simply taking an outcome from the Faction turn and figuring out a way to communicate it to the players through the dungeon: either in changes directly to a room or location, or through NPC actions.
At no point should you feel obligated to explain what’s going on or that these events are linked: that’s completely on the players. If they’re not interested, move on.
If you have a list of what your players want to accomplish in the next session, it becomes easy to scan that list and figure out what News of the Week the players would be exposed to just by what they plan on doing.
But you can also integrate them in Wandering Monster results or just add the hints to a room and then move on: maybe they’ll go to that room, maybe not.
Don’t feel the need to go out of your way: some information is just not going to be readily available to your players.
For instance, if they’re not actively watching the goblin encampment, what the goblins accomplish that week won’t be obvious and probably won’t come up naturally, and that’s fine.

Faction Death

A Faction is considered destroyed when they reach 0 Power since they have no way to enact their will anymore.
In this case, if there are less than 3 Factions, the failing Faction might split into 2 or more due to irreconcilable differences in leadership. When there’s only 1 Faction left, if the players haven’t moved on from the dungeon, you’ll definitely want to split them.
A Faction from another area could also move in and try to gain a foothold in the area.

Divine Factions

If a Divine Faction reaches 0, that means that the people have lost faith in that god's power and so will stop visiting the temple and supporting the priesthood and both will wither away and die. It doesn't mean that the divine or ancestoral linege is completely abandoned: the gods' influence is still felt through the Minor Divines Faction but they are just one of many.
After a period of time, based on what things are going on in the Faction Game, another Divine will arise, a temple will be built and a priesthood will be established. This can be a slow growth or a sudden explosion due to a perceived miracle: it's up to you, but remember that gods never die.

Translating These Rules

Because this is a light framework, some translation will be required. These rules will give you the broad actors, their strengths and weaknesses, their goals, and major events and their outcomes.
These should then be translated into rumors and adventures. A Faction collapses a tunnel that prevents the players from leaving the dungeon? Now they have to figure how to get out before their food, water, and light runs out.
There’s a war that erupts between the goblins and the lizardfolk? Looks like the players will find a lot of dead bodies with a lot of easy loot but also higher and more heavily armed patrols.
A manticore has entered the dungeon? The party now finds the rest of the Factions moving territories and rooms being repurposed for their new inhabitants; perhaps even traps where there weren’t any before.
Factions and their turns move a little slower than the players, hence the timing being in weeks and days rather than hours or seconds.
This makes it so the GM only really needs to go through these rules maybe once every 3 or 4 sessions.

Player Influence on the Factions

The way things are set up, the Faction game should always be at a level that the players can influence it, and they should.
Players can also change Factions, changing their Traits through the use of persuasion. This is handled like a Confrontation, though, if the players aren’t doing it knowingly, it’ll probably be something you do as part of the Faction turn.
Players should see their actions having an effect on not only the game world’s physical space, but also on the NPCs that inhabit it.

Faction Game vs Timelines

So, you have two tools provided for you to help you make adventures and campaigns: Faction Game & Timeline Templates. When should you use one or the other?
Well, you can use both. The Faction Game provides a more organic and slowly-paced change. It has the huge benefit of suprising you with how things resolve. Timelines, on the other hand, tend to have each Step really make an impact so they're more in your face. Additionally, they have a defined end point and will only be stopped via player intervention, which gives them a chance to be Big Damn Heroes.
So, you can use both to create a living world that slow changes but also has periods of high adventure with big changes. As such, both will be provided throughout the Welgryf Sagas.