Sizing factions

Quick method for figuring out faction sizes

This article contains affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you make purchases using these links, at no cost to you.

We’ve previously looked at the concept of a faction-block. In it you outline a rough hierarchy of levels. But how many members should each level have?

Someone asked me about it on the Mausritter discord and I struggled to articulate my thoughts in a message… so here’s the article.

---

Numbers

There should be one leader in the faction-block. Perhaps they are a one-person faction, but more likely they sit at the top of a hierarchy of other members.

Blades in the Dark names a leader for its factions, and it has always proven helpful.

Factions are like corporations. Being bigger → more levels in the hierarchy.

Small gang: Leader → level 1 (minions).

Bigger gang: Leader → level 1 (lieutenants) → level 2 (minions).

Even bigger: Leader → level 1 (captains) → level 2 (lieutenants) → level 3 (minions).

So how do we generate the number of members for each level?

We roll d6s equal to each level, which increase as we progress down the hierarchy. Let’s use the ‘even bigger’ faction as an example.

Even bigger: 1d6 captains (level 1) who report to the Leader → 2d6 lieutenants (level 2) who are evenly distributed among the captains to command → 3d6 minions (level 3) PER lieutenant to command.

~you could roll the number of minions for each lieutenant or be lazy and assign the same number of minions to every lieutenant so you only have to roll 3d6 once~

---

When to roll member numbers

There’s two approaches. One option is to roll the member numbers during prep sessions in advance.

The other is to use the ‘appearing’ approach - we don’t roll the member numbers, we just note the roll that would be used to calculate it e.g., Minions (appearing 3d6) means that if minions come up there are normally around 3d6 of them.

---

Scale

For the rolling ahead of time approach, you might be thinking “at this rate I’m only going to get up to 4d6 faction members with a 5 tier faction, which is like 16 faction members on average? This is tiny!”

The reason for using d6s is to generate manageable member numbers, and also realistic numbers for one ‘manager’ to be in charge of. One person doesn’t manage 40 people (not normally anyway), they have 4 sub-managers who lead 10 people each.

~also, if you’ve got 10 officers with a squad of 16-ish minions, that’s 160 minions - so things stack up~

“But I want a bigger scale” you say! An easy way to scale the member numbers up is to replace the description of single members with descriptions of groups of members e.g. 3d6 minions could be 3d6 squads of minions instead.

This plays well with Cairn, Mausritter, and Into the Odd - where you have 'detachments’/‘warbands’, which have one statblock but represent 20+ combatants.

---

That’s it. A rough procedure for filling out numbers in your faction hierarchy.

How would you approach getting numbers for your factions? Do you already have a method you use? Come tell me on the Discord server!

---

Recommendations

YouTube: The Shop on the Borderlands (a cool UK based rpg retailer) put out this neat video about some concepts in dungeon design. It looks at not mapping all parts of a dungeon concretely, and only focusing on the interesting bits of the structure. This pairs nicely my pointcrawl dungeon series: part 1, part 2, part 3.

Product: Leyline Press has announced a Salvage Union starter set. Salvage Union is an amazing RPG and this starter set looks sweeeet. Even if you already have the core rulebook (like me), this will have a ton of new content worth grabbing. This is not sponsored I just love Salvage Union.