Faction Tracking
A short post to share a tweak I've made to the way I track factions that's had an immediate positive impact on my game.
I've been running my Mörk Borg campaign for a month now, and I've been making use of the faction tracking procedures in the Mothership Warden's Operation Manual to keep track of what each group and important NPC is up to when they're off screen/between sessions. In brief, it looks like this:
1.Give them a goal 2.Decide how complex that goal is and assign it a number of check boxes. A simple goal might have 3 or 4. A really long term goal might have 10 or more. 3.As part of your prep, roll 2d10 against each goal. On even results they make progress; fill in a check box. On odd results, they hit a setback. Put a cross through a box. Double evens fill in two boxes (big breakthrough), and double odds add a new box (big setback).
That's it, basically. It's functionally clocks, but where a game like Blades In The Dark says "if you make your clock an unsatisfying size, just change it" (i.e. fudge things and make shit up on the fly), here you're encouraged to stick with your initial decisions.
It's been working really well for me, and it's made keeping track of the world very easy.
A very small change I've made to the system as presented in MoSh is deciding the frequency of checking these things and noting that down. I have some goals that are checked daily (e.g. a pair of NPCs trying to get to a specific location), some that are checked weekly (a tyrannical king trying to fill his stores with food stolen from the surrounding countryside), and rare monthly checks (the cult trying to develop a spell to prevent the Miseries). Combining this with my calendar (you're tracking days in your game, right? You're keeping strict time records, right?) has helped me present the players with a world that feels alive immediately.
MoSh recommends having a fairly long downtime between adventures, and in my old megadungeon we'd always assume a week between delves. In those situations this additional level of granularity isn't really needed. For this new campaign, though, I'm tracking time day to day and we pick up right where we left off the previous session. Having some variety to the frequency of goals being updated in this case means that the world can feel alive on a day-to-day basis (for example, I have a group actively hunting/chasing the PCs) while also having some longer term things churning away slowly in the background.
In terms of the book-keeping for all this, I've added a "goal tracker" spread to my campaign notebook. All it contains is the name of the faction or NPC, their goals, the check frequency, and a page reference so I can quickly find their individual entries and update their check boxes during prep. When a goal is complete, I simply cross it out on the goal tracker spread. My prep for this stuff is a simple matter of going down the list, making rolls for each goal that needs to be checked, and updating the pages as required. It takes 5 minutes, if that, and I don't lose track of anything.
Tonight the group recruited some members to their fledgling cult, and one character has the ability to track the movement of one of these NPCs in real time. (i'll explain the specifics of this when I write up the play report, since it's not important for this post.) I had a brief "oh shit" moment when I realised I was now going to have to track this NPC's movement for the rest of the campaign, but actually now that I've prepped for next week I've discovered it's not an issue at all. He has goals, those goals have a check frequency, and I can figure out where he is and what he's doing based entirely on the result of the rolls I make to update his progress toward those goals. Since we're doing a hex-based campaign I can also keep track of which hex he's in, which means that any time the player checks in on him I have all the information I need to hand immediately.
I'm a month into this campaign, it's basically running itself already, and I attribute that in large part to this faction tracking system from Mothership.