Factionalism and Tribalism

I find the way factions are talked about in RPGs a bit odd.  In normal usage, a faction is a small, dissenting group.   Sometimes, the hobby does use the term this way.  The problem is when every and any social group is described as a faction.  The peasantry for example, hardly seem to fit the bill.  

Perhaps it’s just that “faction” has a wider application in RPGs than normal usage.  By the term, people really just mean a social group, applicable to both a band of mercenaries and a global empire (as in this post).  The issue then becomes one of oversimplification, when you end up treating every social group the same way.  

For me, this isn’t just semantics because I find that a genuinely factional setting makes for interesting gameplay. But I’ve come to realise, despite the hobby’s talk of faction play, that many old school adventures don’t actually contain that many factions. To explain this requires a bit more clarity about what I think counts as a faction.

 Tribalism and Factionalism 

 

Many Old School adventures feature fragmented settings.  This reflects the type of Sword and Sorcery novels that influenced early D&D.  Jack Vance’s Dying Earth Novels present a civilisation in decline, fragmented into isolated communities and solitary wizard towers.  But a fragmented setting is not necessarily a factional one.  

Factionalism is defined in terms of conflict between small groups within a larger grouping, hence the phrase “factional in-fighting”.  A setting such as Dying Earth is so fragmented that larger groupings are for the most part absent.  There are no overarching societal structures between its settlements, each having their own peculiar customs and means of governance.  

Fragmentation in Old School games is partly a matter of methodology.  Gary Gygax’s famous 1975 advice on world building takes the dungeon as the starting atom of the game world, to which additional elements are added piece by piece.  For a generic fantasy setting, it is hard to later impose a wider political context on groups you have introduced as independent units.  Gygax does not include this as part of his 5-step world building process.  

I’m going to suggest that the social context in many Old School adventures is better thought of as tribalism rather than factionalism.  By tribalism, I mean an insular concern with one’s own community, with few overlapping relationships with those outside it.  There may be conflicts and alliances between groups, without there being a shared political context.  Even where you have commerce, this represents essentially border trade in the absence of a shared economic system.  

Tribalism is overt in early adventures such as The Keep on the Borderlands, which makes no reference to the term faction.  There is a section on managing “tribal alliances and warfare” (p14).

“…they might be able to set tribes to fighting one another, and then the adventurers can take advantage of the weakened state of the feuding humanoids.”

Additionally, some tribe members may temporarily ally themselves with the PCs, in the interests of defeating a mutual enemy.  

At some point in the hobby, it seems that “faction play” became the universal way to describe PC interaction with social groups.  In the Alexandrian’s analysis of Keep on the Borderlands, the term “faction” is used to refer to groups talked of as tribes in the original text.  Thus, patterns of gameplay intended for a tribal context become representative of faction play.  

 

The problem is that such game patterns can be quite limited and repetitive.  In a tribalistic context, there is really only one plane of conflict.  Where factions are the singular social unit, there is no possibility of social groupings that transcend tribal membership. 

Of course, in a tribalistic setting there will still be some factionalism, only this occurs within the tribes instead of between them. The leader of a goblin patrol thinks the tribe’s chief is too peace loving and has ambitions to replace them.  Here you have factionalism in a nutshell, with the tribe as the larger grouping.  It’s exactly the absence of such a political context between orcs and dwarves that prevents them being factional in the same sense. 

 

De facto Tribalism

 

Not all RPG settings are fragmented in the same sense as the Dying Earth novels. A kingdom represents the type of larger grouping that lends itself to genuine factionalism within its borders. This can be undermined though where factions are treated as the sole form of social unit. Without wider groupings that transcend individual factions, such settings can remain essentially tribalistic in practice.

Worlds Without Numbers (WWN) has a treatment of factions that I would argue falls under this heading (with many useful tools for managing this type of conflict). As is common in RPGs, faction is the universal term applicable to any form of social group. “A faction is an organization, government, cabal, gang, tribe, business, religion or any other group you mean to make a significant player in your campaign” (p322).

In WWN, the entire basis on which factions relate to each other is orientated around conflict. Almost all the example faction goals listed involve undermining rival groups, through physical attacks or the use of wealth or cunning. This to the extent that not attacking another faction for 4 turns is considered exceptional enough to be assigned a difficulty rating (p327).

WWN’s system does deal with large groupings such as empires, meaning it is not exclusively intended for fractured settings such as Dying Earth.  Yet there is no sense in which being members of the same larger grouping changes the nature or ferocity of this conflict.  Conflict between groups in the same empire occurs on the same terms as between groups from rival empires.  There is effectively no difference between running factions within an empire as with a mosaic of warring tribes.  

This is not to say that conflict is out of place in a factional context, but just that you might not expect quite such a free for all.  Some groups would likely be similar bed fellows.  An association of usurers and a merchant’s guild might vie for influence over the government.  But this is very different to launching direct assaults on each other.  More often, such groups will share a mutual interest, such as expanding the empire or crushing a peasant revolt.  

Mutual interest may not be the first thing that springs to mind when dealing with factionalism.  Yet implicit in the term is a regression from a more harmonious state.  This is why we have the phrases “descent into factionalism” and “splintered into factions”.  There will be vestiges of this mutual interest in even the most factional context, which is what being part of the same larger grouping effectively amounts to.  

The mutual interest between merchants and usurers is indicative of another category of social grouping that transcends their faction membership.  To get better distinguish this type of groupings, the next section will get more specific about what I think counts as a faction.

  

What is a Faction?

 

My suggestion is reserving the term faction to describe a social group’s means of organisation, rather than the social group itself.  By this, I mean specifically the infrastructure of an organisation rather than the underlying group it proports to represent.  E.g. the UAW union is the faction, with auto workers the social group.  

Factions will have things like leaders, retainers, headquarters, quirky customs and histories.  They are the concrete thing encountered in the game world.  But the faction only expresses collective interests in so far as it successfully represents those of an underlying social group, which it often won’t do very well.  

In representative democracy, we’re not short of examples of political organisations at odds with the interests of those they proport to represent.  In the UK, you can just look to the anti-union positions taken by a certain “Labour” party.  Here, the social group involved are the workers, with the political party its means of organising to influence parliamentary democracy.  

The above example is of an organisation being hijacked by another social group (here a worker’s party by the capitalist class).  In other cases, an organisation can simply become out of step with the group it represents.  This is particularly common during periods of turmoil and change, often driven by underlying economic conditions.  The organisation is then faced with the need to change at risk of being replaced.  

 

Factions and Institutions

 

There remains an important distinction to be made between factions as a means of organisation and institutions.  The term faction should probably be reserved to describe organisations that exist to further the interests of social groups.  An institution however is fundamentally different to this.  

 

The town watch's raison d'etre is to serve a societal function, specifically to enforce the laws of the town.  Similarly, organs of the state such as universities, courts, the church and the army are institutions rather than factions.  This is not to pretend that the state is a neutral arbiter.  It will often serve the interests of a faction at a particular time, but this is not same as existing to represent a particular social group.  

 

Without such a distinction, the management of faction play can easily become muddled.  If we have the “Knights of the Lion” listed as a faction, to what exactly are we referring?  Considering the military asset as the faction can’t be right, because its leaders might easily defect to another side.  Instead, it seems better to consider the institution and the faction that controls it as separate entities (WWN makes a useful distinction between factions and assets along these lines).  

 

The membership makes up of an institution will also be different to that of a faction.  An individual is unlikely to long remain a member of an organisation that goes against its interests.  The army however might be made up largely of peasants, as well as nobles at its higher command posts.  The peasants won’t always be part of the army because it represents their interests, sometimes they will be unwillingly conscripted.  

 

Putting it all together, an encounter with an army unit becomes far more interesting accounting for these dynamics.  On their way to war, the peasants might be swept up with nationalist fervour, identifying with their whole kingdom as a social grouping.  On the way back from defeat, they may instead identify with fellow peasants they were forced to fight.  We could see a mutiny against the imperialist faction in command, with a faction of revolutionaries instead taking charge who better represent the peasantry’s interests.  

 

Putting this in Practice 

It’s not too hard to translate a tribalistic setting into factional one, using the Caves of Chaos as an example.  A tribe of kobolds are working a dangerous mine in one part of the caves; goblins are scavenging ruins for metal at another part.  The leaders of both tribes are enriched by supplying these goods to a nearby empire.  

Whether they are fully aware of it, both of the tribes above are now part of the empire’s economic sphere.  Within the tribes, a faction might emerge to organise against the tribal leaders in the interests of those doing the work.  The workers of both tribes might then unite under a single organisation, to resist the empire’s influence in the area.  The empire might send resources to aid the tribal leaders, for the purposes of buying off the heads of the worker faction.  

The politics in this example might not be your bag and could easily be varied.  It might still be that the PCs manipulate the kobolds to attack the goblins for access to their metal.  The point is that having a distinction between factions and social groups opens up another potential plane of conflict.  This gives players options, which can only enrich your game.  

Conclusion

 

In my previous post, I considered how class conflict could be managed as an extension of faction play, taking module B4 The Lost City as inspiration.  I’ve come to think that the way factions are treated in RPGs is too muddled for this purpose.  The Lost City is better analysed as containing as distinct forms of grouping 1) Factions e.g. The Warrior Maidens of Madarua 2) Social groups e.g. female fighters.  I’ve noticed recently that the Greyhawks setting sometimes makes a similar distinction on this basis.  

The conclusions of this post could be translated into a world building method.  Instead of listing all social groups under the heading of factions, I prefer a breakdown into major social groups, factions and institutions.  There would also be an indication of which major social group the latter two are aligned with (institutions normally being under the sway of the dominant social group).  Unlike B4, I am not a fan of basing social groups on gamified categories such as character class.  The choice of social group would relate to historical analogies for the setting and context of the campaign.