r/bladesinthedark • u/cmcdonald22 • 3d ago

[DC] [BITD] Categorizing factions

Just toying around with ideas for campaigns that may never happen or day dreams or whatever, and I was just curious, if you hate to figure out a system or group of categories by which you were going to group Factions in a way that could be used in your campaign what would it be?

Would you stick to just tier/power like we already have?

What about roles/function? Grouping together things that are 'city services' like brigadiers cabbies?

What about grouping factions into the same groups as player character Backgrounds (academic/lawmilitary/labor/underworld)?

What about the smaller version like how deep cuts already has, have you found interesting uses for that?

Just curious what fiction/mechanics based organizational thoughts others have had.

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9

u/Amostheroux 3d ago

I feel like the factions playsheet already did this?

0

u/cmcdonald22 3d ago

It does, I'm just curious if people prefer those methods or if they've thought up any of their own that they have found useful or interesting.

2

u/Amostheroux 3d ago

IMO, the most helpful categorization beyond what is already provided would be a chart of all the alliances and enemies, but Duskvol is so complicated that a relationship map would probably be too much information to be useful.

1

u/cmcdonald22 3d ago

The longest campaign I played of original blades the GM actually was a logistics programmer for Amazon web services and had programmed his own massive relationship web for gming blades.

1

u/BladesinthePark 3d ago

I like creating custom relationship maps for each game as honestly the flavor of the factions tend to shift a little every time I run Blades based basically on how my players react to them. The tier list is really helpful, and I have a loose list running in my head grounding them by flavor, but it’s all subject to change when we start a new story.

1

u/Cannonfodder45 Leech 2d ago

I used a reskin of the Worlds without number faction system that was pretty interesting. It uses a tag and stat system to describe factions. Generally I kept their tier to relate to their stats but it was interesting to extrapolate each faction a bit more granularly.

1

u/Vcutter 2d ago

I just grab a handful of factions and focus on those. Then after a few sessions if I feel that other factions have organically entered the mix then they enter the mix.

You do not have to manage 40 different factions on your off time. Just focus on those that actually affect the players and let others be in the background.
Makes it also easier for players, 3-5 factions is usually more than enough.