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. 

Interesting Guys, Theory Of, Examples Of

    The reason why dwarves have had such an amazing tenure in fantasy roleplaying games is the same as that which explains their (relatively) rapid disappearance from fantasy literature. Namely: all dwarves are pretty much the same. RPGs are very low-bandwidth by their nature. We start with a large group (not two people communicating, or even a crowd of three, but often as many as five or eight or, in the olden days, twenty), who all must more-or-less understand every part of a nonexistent scenario to the same degree, and who are only organized for a very limited time. In a fantasy roleplaying game, originality is not a universal good. If I create a setting where honungaleisant erdocans go around mimeteing thrinths by elsandele and irri-iwi, then it might speak to the true nature of the human condition, but I'm going to have a bugger of a time getting players to understand what the Hell is going on. "Thrinths are basically elfs, and mimetea is basically magic" is a powerful and useful phrase. Obviously, we want to have interesting characters: obviously, we are going to need to make our characters interesting in a way that is concise and easily communicated.

    Enter the humble dwarf — no, semiurge, stop, that was just stage direction, not an instruction. A normal PC gets maybe two or three details: this one is swaggering and nosy, this one is gluttonous and uncouth. Add a job title (e.g. "Fighter") and we've got as much of a character as we can possibly handle. But by relying on a pre-bundled set of tropes, we get to cheat this system. If one of our character traits is "dwarf" then, by golly, we actually get a dozen other character traits totally for free. What does Bob the Fighter do in town? No one knows and no one will remember. What does Bobgrund the Dwarf do in town? Spends all his money on booze, easy. What does Bobgrund do in the dungeon? Sniffs around for gold. The party is hit with a fireball; Bobgrund pats out his beard. The party encounters an elf; Bobgrund advises immediate execution. The party encounters an orc: Bobgrund advises immediate execution. The party encounters a goblin; &c &c.

Source: Dwarf Warfare Cover Art by wraithdt

    "All of this is immediately obviously true," you say? "We agree with you implicitly"? "You are very wise"? Thank you. But that's just the prelude to the actual reason I have written this essay and long list of guys. Longtime friend of the blog Phlox writes to us of "monsters of intuition", those which "have striking concepts, even when they lack total coherence". It's a good post with interesting examples, go and read it.



    Now that you have returned from reading Phlox' post I can introduce you to the Interesting Fucking Guys. For a few months, just to keep my hand in, I have been writing down short descriptions of Peoples, Species and Races as they come to me. They follow a simple pattern:

1. They are Interesting. They come with a set of behavioral expectations; there are ways in which a member of their people/species/race would behave in various situations which aren't the ways a generic Fantasy Human would behave. They are Interesting in that being one of them is a character trait. No exotic hairdos, simple latex prosthetics or goofy accents (i mean they can still have them but that's not their sum total).
2. They are Guys. By this I do not necessarily mean that they are from some kind of Star Trek all-male planet serving to illustrate an interesting point about gender relations this week. I mean that they aren't so exotic as to be useful only as something to read about in a blogpost. You could make your PC one of them. Your party could find a town full of them, and not be shocked that nobody told you about the next town on the road. They are Guys in that medieval bestiary sense, where they might have heads in the middle of their chests, but they still pay taxes and believe in Jesus Christ.

    Below, please find some Interesting Fucking Guys. 

    The Haraks. Ugly hairless apes (not in the same way as humans, humans have noses and eyebrows and chins). Harakan sleighs are pulled by a uniquely-harakan breed of enormous wolfhounds, who share their masters' bug-out black eyes, self-replacing shark teeth, and wheezing voices. Can't sweat, so stay out of the sun. Commonly raid human settlements for horsemeat (haraks obsessively hate/fear horses, also bees and wolves). Harakan ingenuity is responsible for most of history's wind-up holy men, clockwork birds that really fly, and self-resetting poison dart traps. Never touch iron if they can help it — the stuff stains them shiny red.

    The Garsk. Like Chewbacca but with catfish barbs instead of fur. Speak mostly in depressing warbles and blubs. Perilous strong. Can hit 30 miles an hour belly-crawling through shallow water. National instrument is an enormous brass horn shaped like a coiling snake. National holiday is to find the ugliest tree in the swamp, dance around it, sing, and drink hooch. Unwelcome in restaurants and hospitals (slimy, noisome). 

    The Gnostiche. Like a man, but with a long ribbon-trunk for a face with little wet eyes where one would expect nostrils and the nose and mouth at the end. Always wearing black robes. Instinctive understanding of horrible Frankenstein medical procedures. Can not hang. Sickened by smoke of any kind. Respond poorly to jokes about "do you smell that" or whatever. 

    The Uthiers. Crown of horns, aposematic coloring, jewel-bright eyes. Gay and warlike, love to play dulcimers and sing. Male uthiers have one side dramatically overdeveloped, with a longer leg, denser horns and burlier arm. Fond of saying "the limp makes the man" — that is, the greater the asymmetry, the more masculine an uthier is perceived to be. Most of males have a large left-side; right-sided uthiers (about one in ten) are generally believed to be talented liars, disappointing musicians, and ambitious politicians (which is true). Carry large, heavy canes with them at all times to settle scores. 

    The Angbards. Pale and ghoulishly thin, but uncommonly strong. Renowned for wisdom and long memories. Live as small bands of itinerant seers/architects/librarians. Angbards have sight so powerful they can see (in monochrome) thru closed eyes. If they open their eyes, their vision burns everything it touches; if they accidentally lock gazes with another angbard, or with the sun, they can't close their eyes again and will die if they can't quickly step behind something solid enough to hold back the flames. Don't know their own eye color, and are eager for you to tell them. 

    The Nimbads. Ridiculously tall, muscular, reptilian, like if a kobold made a fake dating profile. Murderously enraged by jokes. All nimbads make their living by card sharping, pool sharking, Three Card Monty, and various carnival games that no one else can ever win. Instead of eyes, they have pilot lights, and must wear smoked sunglasses indoors. 

    The Harpisch. There are no male harpies. Harpies reproduce by rape and murder of lone male travelers. Their daughters are true harpies, while their sons are killed and devoured as a rule. But sometimes, a soft-hearted harpy may expose a boy-child instead, and sometimes, before the wolves find him, the child is taken in by some peasant family. Over long generations, in communities near harpy-infested mountains, the demon-blooded harpisch appear: men and women with sooty eyes and yellow teeth, swift and silent and cunning. Not truly evil, but tending towards cruelty, and with unquiet souls which doom them to a life of danger and adventure. 

    The Halforcs. Orcs are made in the Mills of Arezura by master-craftsman Orcus. The first thing he does is drain your blood. While it boils, he skins you, taking care not to put holes in your hide. He blows the skin up like a balloon and lets it dry while he delicately removes your muscles (to later be sewn with iron thread by his apprentices). He washes your brain with rare alcohols. Your bones he kneads with a putty that makes them malleable; your spine he bends, your arms he lengthens, your skull he molds into some terrible image that pleases only him. When the demon-lord puts you together again you are empty and ugly and colorless, and you wait in jars that line his walls. Then someone buys you, to be dyed with their tinctures and dominated by their will. But if someone loved you very much, if someone led a daring raid on that mountain workshop, if someone freed you from your jar — ah, even then, you would live a halflife only, a halforc waiting to be filled with someone else's passions. 

    The Kissans. Flopsy ears and sniffling nose like a bunny. Velvety brindled coat. Lanky bowlegs twice as long as needed. Skilled excavators and woodcutters, who habitually clear and level land as their nomadic camps pass through. They squat down between their ridiculous legs while they work, and rise up 10' tall to sprint from danger. Capable of breathing in while speaking, singing, or just whistling loudly (kissans hate silence). 

    The River Nellies. Similar to aquatic mammals, with dense muscle, thick fat, sleek silhouettes, prehensile nostrils and ears to close off water. Nellie towns, miles long, can facilitate the building of docks and bridges — or tear them down and block access. A hostile nellie river is a more impassable frontier than any desert or mountain. Their cousins, the ocean nellies, are so large they cannot ever walk on land, but river nellies often tend to flooded paddies. Also they make weapons-grade glass and the only honorable death for a nellie male is to have his throat slit by his daughter using his own knife and if he only has sons one of them needs to take the pink pill and kill him. 

Essay: Firearms in Dungeon Crawls

    Hello. I have many names, but most of you know me as G. R. Michael. I come before you, the fantasy roleplaying community, with a brief plea. Once again I am begging you to include early firearms in your games. I am feeling very alone in this world... as if I am the only person who has black-powder pistols in their D&D games...

    "But Michael," I hear you croon, venom and phlegm dripping from the thousand-thousand teeth of your thousand mouths, "fantasy games shouldn't have guns in them. After all, it would be unrealistic, and ahistorical". False I name thee; Deceiver I name thee. Dueling pistols are older than dueling rapiers. Europeans had cannons before they had "plate armor". Shields were still in use when the first grenades were thrown from city ramparts upon besieging armies (I've been challenged on this point, and have softened my original claim of "shields were used against grenades" because of a lack of historical sources thereupon. Please see this painting for a depiction of the British Grenadiers fighting Highlanders equipped with targes, though sadly it doesn't depict the Highlanders being grenaded. If anyone has a source for a man with a shield getting blowed up with a grenade, I would be grateful if you left that in a comment). There could be nothing more historical than a Fighting-Man with a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other.

    "But Michael," I hear you rasp, tomb-voice emerging from somewhere in your eyeless face, "guns are inappropriate for my fantasy D&D-alike because they are too lethal and overpowered". Counterfeiter! Liar! I know for a fact you aren't doing a Dwarf Fortress-style modeling of nerves and arteries and internal organs. I know you're rolling 1d6 for the damage of a one-handed sword. That a ball from a .70 caliber musket might cause a more terrible wound than a blow from a saber I'll grant you, but I deny that there's such a magnitude of difference that they can't be modeled in the same system. If you've got a troll that swings a 2d6 big-ass club, you can handle a handgonne.

    "But Michael, but Michael..." you hiss, dying, melting in the light of my logic like that little monster dude at the end of that Christmas horror movie from the eighties, "I can't think of another objection. I'm so weak..." That's right. Weak and pitiable. Go back beyond the leaden gates, dissembler.

Source: Historically Accurate Gaston by Wickfield

    The one-handed firearm (a pistol, par exemple) is like a one-handed sword, except it deals double damage. If your one-handed sword deals 1d6, your pistol deals 2d6. A two-handed firearm (a musket, if you'll allow) is like a two-handed sword, except it deals double damage. If your &c deals 1d8, your &c &c 2d8. Muzzle-loaders cannot reasonably be reloaded during the close-quarters skirmishes common in D&D-alikes — for argument's sake, let's say it takes one minute (or ten 6-second rounds) to reload such a gun. A Fighting-Man with multiple attacks will need to wear a brace of pistols (which is a good idea for anyone, really). Most firearm-wielders have a bayonet to stick in their musket for the 2nd round of combat onwards, converting the weapon into a short spear.

    Powder itself is a bit pricy, and not available in huge amounts in rural areas. Cities and markets where one can buy healing potions, lamp oil, mirrors and other high-quality goods are where you go to buy powder. You can also buy lead shot there, or you can buy a little mold and a bar of lead and simply cast your own balls over the campfire each night, which is practical and adventuresome. Don't need any complicated rules for it either. It's lead. You heat it up and it melts, it's not rocket science. "Hey DM, while the cleric is propitiating his god and the wizard is examining that goblin spellbook, I'll tend to my gear and prepare some more bullets."

    A gun will blow open the lock of a chest or door, though this (obviously) makes a loud BANG! and will provoke a roll on the Wandering Monster Table. Firing guns in combat may provoke morale checks from wild animals, or attract intelligent creatures' allies from neighboring rooms, depending on the nature of the current dungeon. Normal people can't reload a gun while at a dead sprint away from 30–300 kobolds.

    Smoothbore muzzle-loaders aren't as accurate as modern rifles, obviously, but they aren't totally hopeless. You can hit a man-sized target at twenty or thirty yards with a little training. Whatever rules you use for the ranges of your "shortbow" or other common, non-insane-specialist ranged weapons (not warbows or arbalests) will be fine.

    And there you have it, my friends. That was every rule you need to add basic firearms to your game. To those of you for whom that satisfies: go with G_d. The post is now over.





    But... what if, like me, you're a pervert? What if you want more rules? I've written down every Gygax-style rule I could think of in a few hours. Feel free to use or ignore as many of these as you want.

Fouling

    Before the advent of modern propellants, guns were a messy business. The residue from early gunpowder (mostly soot and unburned powder) is called "fouling". The thick, chalky layers of this mildly corrosive fouling renders a gun less accurate, and if left on the metal will quickly (as in, over the course of hours in a humid environment, and no longer than a few days in any human-breathable environment) draw water which will permanently damage the barrel.
    It's essential to clean and maintain your firearms. Properly cleaning a muzzle-loader might take as long as an hour, so most adventurers will want to leave that  chore until they make camp at night. Every time a gun is fired between cleanings, it suffers a -1 penalty to further attacks made with it that day.
    Lubrication or grease (this gentleman recommends two part lamb's tallow to one part beeswax, or if you're too cheap or lazy for that one part beeswax to one part olive oil, but absolutely never Crisco) keeps the fouling more "sludge and slime", less "carbonized substance on a grill", so it can more easily be swabbed out. Gunmen who take a little extra time in the loading can thus reduce or ignore the accuracy penalty.

Projectile

    For most of history there wasn't really a distinct category of "shotgun". If you don't want to put one big lead ball in your muzzle-loader, you could put in a couple of smaller ones, or a lot of tiny ones in a little wad of paper, or some goodly rocks. A real, cast lead bullet, which the shooter has filed the lumps off of so it's almost round, is a piece of masterwork ammunition. Most people are assumed to be loading their guns with sand and twigs and bits of birdsnest.
    In modern firearms, silver bullets are entirely the wrong density, and will tumble and keyhole badly. This isn't a concern with a round ball fired out of a smooth bore. Go ham with the silver bullets, I won't stop you. They cost about 2sp each (which is to say, if you melt down two silver coins you'll have one silver musket ball).

Propellant

    Most historical firearms use a "black powder" (not called so at the time, I think, it was just "gunpowder" because it was the only one that was around) made out of six parts saltpeter, one part fine charcoal, and one part sulfur, or thereabouts. But this is a fantasy game, not historical fiction. We can use other propellants if we want. The most common alternative in my games is "red powder", a gritty crystalline alchemical substance which can ignite when wet, produces brilliant red light but no sound or visible smoke, and (being slightly less powerful) imposes a -2 penalty to damage. "How can it fire when wet? The ignition system of the gun is the same, so unless it's a dangerously reactive substance the water is still going to put out the spark or match. And how can an explosive be silent? And if red powder is less powerful, why don't people just load their guns with slightly more of it?" Shut the Hell up. Shut your fucking mouth.

Mechanism

    So far, everything I have described has been assuming guns that use what is called a "flintlock" ignition mechanism. In such a mechanism, a spring-loaded hammer holds a piece of flint over a pan which contains a small amount of powder and has a tiny hole into the back of the barrel where the propellant and projectile sit. The pan has a steel cover, called a "frizzen", which keeps the priming charge from just... blowing away. When the trigger is pulled, the hammer falls, which strikes the flint against the frizzen, which both lifts the frizzen off the pan and strikes sparks, which ignite the small priming charge, which in turn ignites the propellant. Wikipedia has some cool gifs of this.
    An immediate precursor to this is the "matchlock", where instead of all that complicated (and difficult to manufacture with hand-tools in a blacksmith's shop) business with a frizzen and a flint and what-have-you, your ignition system is a piece of slow-burning fuse. When the trigger is pulled, the spring-loaded hammer falls, which touches the "match" to the priming charge, which in turn ignites the propellant. This system is vulnerable to rain, or fog, or wind, or being jostled, or the gun coming into contact with the ground or someone's hand or a wall or something, or bad luck. Slow matches burn about an inch a minute, so you also have to worry about lighting it before the fighting starts, but not so long before the fighting starts that you burn all your fuse without a chance to fire your gun. Also, the ignition of the priming charge will sometimes blow out your match, so you need to keep both ends lit to re-light the business end, which doubles your burn rate... really, if guns weren't so effective, they'd be too much of a pain in the ass to use. The matchlock was more-or-less the default for about five hundred years of firearm development in most of the world. For a simple rule: keeping your matchlock combat-ready has a direct monetary cost. Let's say that an hour of slow match costs as much as an hour of lamp oil, just to have a number. More importantly, slow matches are immediately doused by any amount of water, and go out on a 2-in-6 when in the presence of strong wind, heavy mist, and any sort of magical blast of ghost bullshit. Real pain in the neck. And don't forget that, obviously, you cannot conceal a matchlock underneath your coat or in a boot.
    The immediate successor to the flintlock was the "caplock", in which the touch-hole juts out of the gun and is capped with a little metal hat that contains some fulminant (a material that explodes when jostled), and the spring-loaded hammer strikes the cap, which &c &c &c. This has two enormous advantages: you don't need to worry about your stupid pan (if you've heard of "flash in the pan", that comes from pre-cap firearms when it would be possible for the priming charge to go off but not set the actual propellant off. Big disappointment. Also you're going to die now), and you... actually, every second reason I was going to give basically stems directly from that first one. Pans and ignition systems are so terrible, and caps are so much better. So much more reliable. So much faster to load. You can carry a caplock derringer in your purse, and the powder won't spill everywhere, and the match won't go out, and the stupid flint won't fall out. It's superior in every way. Buy yourself a capgun, my adventuresome friend.

Smoke

    Go watch this video. It's less than seven minutes long, you attentionspanless zoomer fuck. Do you notice that, before a gun goes off, you can see the gun, and then after a gun goes off there's a giant impenetrable cloud of white smoke? Do you notice that by the end of the battle you can't see dogshit because the whole field is covered in a giant impenetrable cloud of white smoke? And all of this is happening in an open field in broad daylight Have you ever set off a firework in a 10' wide, 10' high stone corridor? How's the air circulation on Level 4 of Egregorius' Pit of Despair? "Not excellent," you say. I see. How about the lighting? "I've gone and set a stick on fire and am now holding it around the height of my belly-button in my wavering off-hand as I run," you say. Maybe you shouldn't have brought that firearm to this dungeon crawl.




    Well, that's about all I have to say. Go read the gunman class, and check out G24 in the sidebar, and hit "like" and "subscribe", and wash your vegetables before you cook with them. You don't know where they've been. Goodnight.