Every campaign deserves factions. A faction is, broadly speaking, a group of people connected by a shared belief or opinion within a larger group. In terms of the roleplaying campaign, factions are the spice that lifts your game from individual encounters linked only by the player characters towards being a story driven by the rivalries of different ideas and agendas.
Let’s use the Dark Reich setting as an example – which will also allow me to develop some initial factions for my own gaming. The setting is an alternate history World War II with added magick and weirdness.
Start with three basic factions
- The player character group is the first faction. Their agenda is important, if not central, to the whole campaign.
- The biggest group that the player character faction opposes should be the next faction.
- The biggest group that might support the player character faction should be the third faction.
My campaign in Dark Reich is going to centre around a small team of highly-trained soldiers who initially serve the German Army. They will be recruited into a larger conspiracy to oppose the Nazi Party. The group that they will become allied to is Admiral Canaris’ “Brandenburg X”. We have our first three factions… and we can already begin to imagine some stories that might flow from those alone.
Give the three basic factions three subfactions
Variety is the spice of life, however, and so I’d challenge the GM to go a step further: factionalise the factions. We all know that most organisations, especially large ones, are internally divided by the opinions of the people within them. Essentially, big factions will have groups within them who are competing for power and influence. The only exception to this general rule, I would suggest, should be the player character party: the heroic code would seem to indicate that they are strongest, and will ultimately prevail over their opponents, because they remain united in their cause.
The Nazi Party is pretty simple to factionalise. To be honest, the problem at first will be to limit the factions so that we can focus on building some details and stories. My gut feeling is that the most fun subfactions for Nazism would be the SS, the Inner Circle (by which I mean Hitler and his immediate supporters), and the Reich’s own archaeological service which needs a cool name. This means that I can think about stories involving slightly more military and subversive goals aimed at the SS, targetted threats from Hitler himself, and clandestine quests for items of mystical significance pitted against the archaeological service.
Brandenburg X is a different matter, partly because it is already a made up organisation. My idea is that Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr (the German Foriegn Secret Service), sets up a secretly funded subgroup under the banner of the elite Brandenburg Kommando forces. Brandenburg X is a home for the mystical secrets that those who oppose Hitler have uncovered. It recruits soldiers who have witnessed high strangeness and survived with the memories, or those who have talent of the magickal, psychic or otherwise odd. My subfactions are going to be the Abwehr Command, an inner circle of Magi who need a cool name, and an inner circle of loyalist soldiers who want to see Germany succeed militarily but who want to do so free of “that damned Corporal from Austria”. This sets up tension between those with and without magickal skills, gives us a patron Command structure for player missions, and suggests that even within those who oppose Hitler there are those who seek glory for Germany – a moral and ethical dilemma for the players to explore.
As a bonus, I am going to set up the meta-factions of each major nation involved in my stories: Germany, Poland, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. I am also going to count the anti-Nazi Conspiracy as a larger faction because it allows me to suggest that Canaris is not the head of the whole shebang.
Create a key non-player character for each faction
Give these initial factions a key NPC that you can introduce to the players. This sets up either the “big bads” of your campaign or the immediate contacts with whom your players can interact. Here’s a quick list of mine:
- Admiral Canaris (patron)
- Adolf Hitler (big bad, “The Dark Lord”)
- An SS commander who needs a cool name
- A leading German nationalistic card-carrying Nazi archaeologist
- A talented but perhaps over-ambitious Mage who holds much support from aspiring Magi
- A cautious and nationalistic German Kommando Major who is revered for his heroism
And that’s before we even get to thinking about the Polish and the invasion which will be the backdrop of the initial campaign action.
Phew – does that get your juices flowing?
Great stuff, afraid my creative juices r not flowin, not for lack of inspiration tho.
It would be tempting to pick an appropriate german word for achaeology and just slap Korps on the end of it for that particular subfaction, but somehow they need something a little more glamourous. I have a feeling they’ll be run by an officer elite, most often with monetary wealth in their families, so they’d try to sound as far from military as possible, despite the armed support that would likely troop round with them and provide manpower for excavation etc where local lackeys are not available.