Designing Factions

You likely have had several ideas for guilds, criminal organizations, militia groups, and similar factions already as you have begun charting out your settlement. While your adventurers may not interact directly with each of the factions in your settlement, it can be useful to have a few notes prepared about each faction. Even if your adventurers do not interact with a guild or faction, its activity might impact the adventurers in some way.

Faction Interests

What are the interests of a faction? In other words, what spheres do they influence or have a stake in? A historians guild might pursue the means to build a museum or hire out archaeologists to recover ancient artifacts. That same guild might simultaneously employ researchers to translate ancient texts. A thieves guild, by contrast, would seek to avoid being brought to legal account while expanding their influence and wealth. A thieves guild might publicly present itself as an artisans guild or some other legitimate business, helping it to avoid detection from the authorities.

Faction Representatives

Whether a faction is run in authoritarian fashion by a single individual, or administered collaboratively by an elected or self-selected council, a faction is likely to have one or two public representatives. You can think of these individuals as anyone from a notable politician that represents the faction in the town hall to a receptionist who knows the ins and outs of a guild’s activities, or anyone in between so long as they serve as some form of intermediary between the faction and the public. Go ahead and flesh out these NPCs, as they will likely be the first point of contact if your adventurers seek to get in touch with a faction.

Faction Goals and Timelines

Every faction has a goal. Faction goals can range wildly from altruistic (such as securing fair wages for the common folk) to nefarious (such as finding enough dirt to indefinitely blackmail the monarch). You can keep track of these goals by keeping a progress timeline for any or all of your factions. Don’t overcomplicate these timelines if this feels intimidating: you do not need to think about individual heists that a thieves guild might pull as they prepare a larger scam. Rather, you pick one major goal that the faction wants to achieve and break it down into three to five major milestones.

Over the course of your campaign or adventure arc, each time your adventurers return to the region, consider how much time has passed in your world. In that span of time, how many milestones will the faction have realistically achieved? If the adventurers were only gone for a week, then it’s unlikely that the faction’s goals have advanced at all. But if they have been gone for a year or more, then the faction might have attained significantly more power (or lost it) in comparison to the other guilds in the area.

Note that some extremely noteworthy factions, such as fiend-worshiping cultists, might have goals that tremendously change the world if achieved. If these factions are central to your campaign, then their goals should be quite hard to prevent, but relatively easy to delay. By continually thwarting a cult’s attempts to gather humanoid sacrifices or rare gemstones for rituals, the adventurers can delay that faction’s efforts to reach certain milestones in their ongoing attempts to achieve some greater goal.

Faction Adventure Hooks

Factions can be a valuable resource for quickly investing your adventurers in the world. The representative of a guild or faction might approach your adventurers with a quest in exchange for wealth, access, status, or simply membership in their faction. The historians guild might task adventurers with going into the great chasm to recover lost artifacts, while the artisans guild might ask the adventurers to help clean up the guild’s reputation after the thieves guild framed them for something.

Supporting Characters

In addition to faction representatives and governing officials, your adventurers will meet all manner of supporting characters in a settlement. From the barkeep to the general storekeeper to the mysterious potato merchant, the pestersome-yet-endearing child to the shady informant, you will quickly populate your settlement with numerous characters.

Some MCs prefer to prepare all of their NPCs in great depth, while others are more improvisational and feel comfortable making up NPCs on the fly. Whatever your methodology, your adventurers are likely to throw you for the loop from time to time, and you will find yourself needing to play an NPC that you did not prepare. You can use the NPC Roll Tables to quickly improvise such an NPC.

Recurring NPCs

Faction representatives, rulers, benefactors, and adversaries are likely to show up multiple times throughout an adventure arc, and especially throughout an ongoing campaign. Keep note of your adventurers’ interactions with such key individuals, as their shared history will inform these characters’ attitudes towards the adventuring party.

An adversary might eventually become so embittered by the heroes that they become a fanatical villain, pursuing any means available to bring the heroes to shame... or worse. Conversely, if the heroes prove their mettle to a wealthy benefactor, then that character might become a powerful ally to the heroes, granting them wealth and access to elite society. Whatever the case, allowing these relationships to progress at a reasonably steady rate will help your world come to life.