How to Set Up Factions So They Can Be Toppled

    I've been waffling on the intro to this post for a while. In the interest of ever actually getting it onto the blog, I'll hit you with a couple of bullet points about yourself:

• You are the dunga master for a group of dunga and darga or similar.
• You want a recurring enemy faction in the game. After all, recurring motifs are one of the fundamental principles of worldbuilding, arguably the most fundamental (though this is a topic for a different essay).
• You are unsatisfied with the standard fiver approach to "factions". A couple of scripted fights and the big bad getting away each time until they finally catch up to have a big scripted fight? What happens if the party kills him early, does his cult just collapse? Is the whole adventure over right there?
• You have come to me now, in desperation. "Help me, Michael," you're saying. "You're my only hope..." Your eyelids are fluttering. You're leaning in for a kiss... "I'll do anything you say, Michael" you're contractually obliging.

    Assuming that you agree with every point, read on, and I'll walk you through the steps to make a faction that can stick around for a while providing continual engagement, support or harassment to the party, but can also be defeated over the course of several sessions (with a hard floor on the number of sessions required to knock them down) if the players so choose.

    The aim of the game here is "temporal gating". The degenerate case is that the players just go to the single main bad guy's house and kill him. "They can't do that, he has guards," you say, with your stupid, kissable lips a little wet with drool because you're fucking stupid. Obviously the party just kills the guards. "They can't kill the guards, the guards are stronger than them." Then why didn't the bad guy send his guards to whack the players before they whacked him? Close your mouth, you'll catch flies.

    Start with three guys. That's the essential germ of the idea. Let's say your game is set in some sort of Chandleresque hellhole and the enemy faction is some kind of mafia. Your three guys are:

• Scorsese, wealthy patriarch of the central family.
• Affleck, the weird accountant guy who handles the financials.
• Gandolfini, the big ugly bastard who's a hitman and all his friends are hitmen and/or cops. 

    That's a good start. Now that you have three guys, think up the relationships each has with the other two, what they think of them, how they treat them:

• Scorsese thinks that Affleck's a useless nancy, and that Gandolfini is a precocious scamp and boys will be murderous boys.
• Affleck thinks that Scorsese is the coolest person in the world, and that Gandolfini is a cockroach.
• Gandolfini thinks Scorsese is a washup, and that Affleck's a thief and probably a spy.

    Now, the players can go and talk to these three guys. They can run into their minions on the street while they're solving Chandleresque crimes, they can have conversations, they can run errands, they can make threats. But why do these guys have seemingly unlimited numbers of gun-toting mafiosos serving under them? Well, give each one three sources of legitimacy.

Scorsese has:

• THE PERSONAL LOYALTY OF MOST OF THE MOB'S CAPTAINS. They are his sons and daughters, his nieces and nephews. They know he has their back, and they know he'll always put blood first, so they do as he say, and their own respective minions follow suit.
• A STUPID BIG HOUSE. It's the physical embodiment of the decades of work he's done. Forty bedrooms, twenty baths, an east and west ballroom, acres of land just outside the city. You can go to one of his frequent parties and see what your future might be like, if you work hard.
• HIS FATHER'S BLESSING. Scorsese Sr. (r.i.p.) started all this, way back in the day, practically fresh off the boat. He handpicked his third son to be his successor, and Scorsese Jr. has never let down the old man's memory.

Affleck has:

• ALL THE MONEY. It's insane how much money he can conjure up in unmarked bills given a week's headstart. Technically the finances are spread out over a hundred businesses and a thousand accounts, and technically it all belongs to the Family, but Affleck's the one holding the keys to the vault.
• THE EYE OF THE DON'S DAUGHTER. She's a beauty and Scorsese dotes on her. If the two get hitched, Affleck's a shoe-in to run the business after Scorsese's gone.
• A CARDBOARD BOX FILLED WITH HORRIBLE PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE. His insurance policy, occasionally vaguely hinted at to keep the hooligans in line.

Gandolfini has

• THE CAPACITY TO KILL ANYONE. He is, personally, a badass; he's killed people with every kind of weapon that exists; he knows four kinds of kungfu. Beyond that, with a phonecall Gandolfini could have a dozen hardened murderers arrive anywhere in the city within ten minutes. The most dangerous members of the mob report to him even before the don.
• A FRIEND ON THE FORCE. He's drinking buddies with a chief inspector, who keeps him up to date on any official trouble coming down the pipeline, and might be able to deflect an investigation towards someone else or even bury it entirely. Gandolfini's been saving up his favors in case he needs to get away with something serious — "bomb a subway station" serious. Speaking of,
• ENOUGH TNT TO LEVEL A BLOCK. He brags about it. Nobody's quite sure where he has it hidden, but it's definitely real. Gandolfini's a dangerous nutcase and not above causing a few hundred casualties in order to send a message that needs sending.

    Note that this is all generic bullshit I thought up as fast as I could type it. But already you can see all the ways that a party could fuck with these guys without ever even fighting them. Force Scorsese to sacrifice a nephew to save his own skin, burn his beautiful house down, find or forge a letter showing that the old man actually favored his first son because Scorsese is so useless; one or two of these would shake him, three of them take him out of the game entirely. Or cut off Affleck's control of the money somehow, or break him up with his girlfriend, or destroy or publicize the box of evidence — the mob will whack him for you. Dodge Gandolfini's goons a few times and make a fool of him, blackmail his cop connection with the threat of discovery, steal his bombs. Now he's not the mob's Angel of Death any more, he's just some thug in a suit that people are scared of in the same way they're scared of wild dogs, and he'll be dealt with as perfunctorily.

    And if the players don't want to do things subtly, if they instead want to just kill these dumbasses, well... at least you have three guys to fight instead of one. The first can be ambushed or assassinated, but the second will be forewarned and forearmed, while the third will be hunkered down somewhere and sending all the soldiers he has to stop the party. That's a natural tempo that a good DM can make last three sessions and a great DM could stretch fifteen.



    Now real quick here at the end I've got a little challenge for you. Scroll back up to the top and highlight the last bullet point. That's right, fucker, I've got you dead to rights. Think up a faction (it can be for one of your settings or it can be off the dome), give it three guys (or more!), give each guy three sources of legitimacy (I think three is really the sweet spot, so don't do more than that unless you feel like it or think it would be funny), and post it to your blog. Ciao.