Wow! Long-time player/GM, (since v.1.0), but the mileage isn’t that great and we usually had to use new playbook-sheets when the next session arrived for our Cults-game. Thanks for making this game, John Harper and everyone involved, including the wonderful G+ crew!
Now I’m running a summer-ditto, with three sessions so far, and I also played in a one-on-one rules test, and a few questions have propped up:
(Please excuse any confusing, as I have one or two games in most iterations.)
1) How big-ish is Duskwall supposed to be? (I seem to recollect it being a million, but it would seem that 2000-3000 thousand Skovlanders are a really small minority then.
As the crew went to Silkshore to broker a deal in the distribution of Yellow Lotus I’ve/we’ve made a triad of three tier 2 factions (Crimson Lace, Black Velvet and Purple Rain), and they met Madame Salùt who entagled them into a demonic notice. I was trying the “Little [Not-exactly-China-but-rather-a-fantasy-version-amalgate, with inspirations from an old fantasy game I ran]”
2) I was wondering how much room there is for new factions? I always thought the game was settled in Crow’s Foot and one would expand when needed, but then I noticed the Crows (tier 2) had operations in Crow’s Foot as well as the Docks. I know this is decided around the table, but I guess there’s reasons to only involve things the table is really interested in, and I could remake them to a tier 2 or even tier 3 faction: The Triad?
3) Have you made factions that added to the Game?
4) Fortune rolls, I think I finally grocked them tonight, after the game. Pluralis and some different stakes and watch for effect? (I really like them, and the engagement-roll, as I like to disclaim dcicion making in games were there’s such a complicated matrix.)
Make factions as needed, I say. I’ve expanded on the Cyphers and the Ink Rakes in the book, making both into full blown Tier II factions with NPCs and agendas and everything. I’ve whole-cloth created the “Nightmarket Corsairs” because I needed a crime family to “run” Nightmarket, but I realized none of the canon factions seemed appropriate. I also created a Crew called the “Carrion Hounds” to give context to one of the PC’s “corpse thief” enemy. I make whatever factions I need to give the world around the PCs life.
Our game has more factions we made up than ones from the books at this point. One came about because all three times the crew has encountered a demon, we’ve randomly generated the same one, so we pretty much had to create a secret society dedicated to that Demon to explain why he’s everywhere. Another one is the Charterhall Bastards, basically an organization for all the illegitimate children of the nobles that have taken it upon themselves to cash in on Charterhall. There’s a few more, but yeah, the game feels more personal if you do it that way.