Quick Faction Relationships
My weekly Mörk Borg game is currently transitioning from a wilderness hex crawl to a city-based urban campaign, which means I've been building out a city as part of my prep. Last week instead of playing Mörk Borg we played Beak, Feather, and Bone, which meant I offloaded some of the prep onto the players. I gave them a city map, they picked factions, and they identified buildings that were important to those factions and defined what purpose they actually serve in the city.
Part of Beak, Feather, & Bone involves generating rivals, but we didn't draw many face cards during our game and the players themselves didn't really build many links between factions into what they built. Part of running a good sandbox is having a web of relationships - both rivalries and alliances - to draw on and for the players to plunge headlong into, and I want to ensure that those things exist before we play tonight.
So today I've been figuring out what the faction rivalries and alliances look like, and I came up with a very quick way to generate them on the fly using just a pair of d6s. First, make a numbered list of your factions in any order:
- Thieves
- Hunters
- Church
- Mages
- Farmers
- Soldiers
- Strangers
If you have a lot of factions it probably helps to use a die of a similar size, but I don't think it will matter all that much.
The next step is to start at the top of the list and roll your dice. Assign one die to "Rivalries" and one to "Alliances". Roll your dice then count down the list starting at the faction you're currently rolling for, looping around to the start if you go past the end. Whichever faction you land on becomes a Rival or an Ally, respectively.
An example:
I'm rolling for the Farmers. I roll 2d6, with a result of 1 and 4 for Rivals and Allies respectively. Counting down 1 from Farmers gives me a rivalry with the Soldiers. Counting down 4 takes me back to the start of the list and down to the Hunters, giving me an alliance with them.
That's it. As you move further down the line you'll find that some results might not make sense, but as with all tools you simply ignore those things or else find a way to make them work. If a faction has both a rivalry and and alliance with the same faction you could simply reroll one of them, or maybe you decide that one of those things represents the public perception put about by both groups while the other represents the truth. My web of alliances and rivalries looks like this:
| Faction | Rivalries | Alliances |
|---|---|---|
| Thieves | Mages | Church |
| Soldiers | Church + Farmers | Hunters |
| Strangers | Mages + Soldiers | Farmers |
| Hunters | Farmers | Church |
| Church | Strangers | Mages |
| Mages | Thieves | Hunters |
| Farmers | Soldiers | Thieves |
Some of these have multiple rivals because the group defined those rivalries during our Beak, Feather, & Bone game.
The exact nature of these rivalries and alliances isn't important right now. The details will emerge during play - this is just raw material to help me improvise. I can make use of details like the fact that the Thieves rolled an rivalry with the Mages and the Mages rolled a rivalry with the Thieves to help determine that that rivalry is particularly heated in a way that the others aren't.
This took me about 60 seconds of prep. It took longer to explain it in this post than to actually do the work. Now all I need to do is grab a few NPCs and drop the players into this network of relationships and I'm good to go.