We're currently on day 4/7 with SriK in the Master of Heroes Tutorial, and very soon the option will open up for him and the other players who'll join on day 8 to sign up with various Golarion organizations starting with the Pathfinder Society. Which means it's time to set down some rules on how these memberships work and how to manage them.
Now, I have previously expressed my desire to open to player characters/heroes more Golarion organizations for membership besides the Pathfinder Society. Those plans however had been vague, and many questions remained unanswered before I could start implementing them. The main question was what to do about scenarios? The Pathfinder Society has hundreds of them, but the other Golarion organizations have next to nothing. Secondary questions were how do you join and leave organizations, how many of them you can join at a time, and what are the entry requirements, etc.
Well, now with the above book that I just found, pretty much all the secondary questions are answered, and that has motivated me to get to solving the primary one as well. And I believe I've solved it, and solved it masterfully.
So first off, the book is mistitled, which is why I never bothered looking into it before. It's not an "Adventurer's Guide" (which would imply yet more character options like feats and such, or generic setting info), it's an Organization Guide. If Paizo had named the book better, I would have looked into it ages ago. Anyway, we didn't really need these mechanics before, but we could use them now with the swarm of heroes that Master of Heroes is about to unleash on our world, so I found it at just the right time, as usual.
The book is rather large, 192 pages. And yet, the affiliation mechanics that it's based on—and which solve pretty much all our secondary issues—comprise merely three pages. Here they are (P.S. We'll be using the Limited Access and Discovery methods):
The rest of the book details 18 organizations: what they're about, how to join them, and what advantages and responsibilities they bestow. Among these advantages are archetypes, which we haven't used or discussed before because they're introduced in the "Advanced Player's Guide" that we haven't tackled yet. Well now we're tackling it, or at least its archetypes section, and I'll be giving access to that soon. All this to say that by joining one of these 18 organizations and rising in their ranks, your characters and/or heroes can gain, among other things, cool subclasses called archetypes that open up further customization. For example, one of the three archetypes offered by the Pathfinder Society is "student of war". Here’s merely one of the cool perks this archetype bestows:
If you know anything about D&D, you know how insane this advantage would be for ranged classes that lack dexterity but have significant intelligence. I won't spoil anything more, this is merely ONE of the benefits conferred by merely ONE of the archetypes in this book that has almost 200 pages of them. In addition to new archetypes, each organization also gives a new prestige class (these are advanced classes that the regular classes can specialize into at higher levels, see "Core Rulebook" 374), new class options, feats and items (magic or regular ones).
The end result is that now Battlegrounds players have 200 new pages of rules and lore to track down and explore in the game, and it will take countless hours of play by dozens of players to slowly discover all this information, and for each player to customize his forces accordingly. SriK and the starting MoH players will come face to face with this complexity very soon, when they first encounter the famous Pathfinder Society.
But it doesn't end there. Because another Paizo product, the "Faction Guide", picks up where the "Adventurer's Guide" ends and takes it from there.
Whereas the "Adventurer's Guide" merely offered the affiliation mechanics that determine how many organizations one could join, the "Faction Guide" introduces prestige mechanics which determine how far and fast one can rise within a faction, and what the corresponding benefits are to this rise, or fall. In essence it introduces a new type of "gold pieces" or "hit points" called "prestige awards" (PA) that can be traded in for boons. It's a fascinating system and it links up beautifully with the affiliation mechanics, and beyond. Check it out, the following four pages are all there is to it, for a total of seven pages with the earlier ones (I blanked out the box on the third page because it offers "Sample Faction Missions" that I intend to use).
Fascinating rules, no? I especially liked this one: "It is possible for a player to spend his character's PA even if the PC is dead; in essence, this represents the PC having made prior arrangements with his faction to perform certain actions on his behalf, such as recovering his dead body and returning it to a specific location or having it raised."
Genius game design. No programmer would ever think of this, or even merely allow it to be used in his game.
Interestingly, the organizations presented in the first book aren't identical with the factions in the second. A couple are in both (Pathfinder Society, Red Mantis), but mostly each book details different ones. For example in the second book you can join the Ulfen Guard of northern warriors that guards Taldor's emperor that has already been introduced in War for the Crown, but my ambition is to make EVERY organization/faction in Golarion and beyond joinable and playable. For the ones that haven't yet received dedicated chapters in books like the above, I will simply fill in their blanks based on the templates in these books. And if the organization/faction is small and obscure, so much the better perhaps: it'll be that much easier to rise quickly in its ranks and perhaps take it over (same way that small settlements will be easier to take over than larger ones, as I'll be explaining at length soon). At any rate this book gives players another 60+ pages of deep lore surrounding factions to explore and evaluate for possible alignment with them, or opposition.
So as you can see if you've taken the trouble to read the above rules, pretty much all secondary considerations regarding affiliations have already been solved by Paizo. The major issue, however, hasn't, and this is that they only make scenarios for the Pathfinder Society. So I've thought long and hard about how to provide scenarios for other factions as well.
1) A quick and easy and very exciting option is to simply HAND OVER CONTROL of the opposing faction in a Pathfinder Society Scenario to a player who has joined it. So if the scenario pits the Pathfinders against the Aspis Consortium, I simply hand over the NPCs during battles at least (but maybe also during exploration/roleplaying?) to a player whose character or hero has risen significantly in the Consortium. This not only gives that player something to do when another player is playing a scenario, but it's also legitimate PVP, which is hard to come by in such a huge world when you only have a handful of players and parties roaming around in it. Suddenly the scenario becomes deadlier, the stakes rise for everyone concerned (because one way or another, one player is coming out of the scenario defeated), other players and followers of the game get a much more interesting scenario and battles to watch, it's win-win all around. And note that this amazing solution is only available in my game with its multiple teams and over a dozen players; a GM who only has 4 or 5 players can't really use this. It's an Ultimate Edition multigroup massively-multiplayer design through and through.
However, not every scenario pits the Pathfinders against established factions. Often it's against one-off enemies, or just monsters. To be honest, I don't know what percentage of the scenarios can be used in this way, there's just too many of them and I haven't had time or reason to go through many of them carefully, I've merely skimmed a few. But at any rate, this is one quick and thrilling solution that can get us started.
2) Another solution I thought, more elaborate this one and requiring more work, is to repurpose a percentage of Pathfinder Society Scenarios to replace the Pathfinders with another faction, altering as needed the scenario's enemies and goals. This is way easier than me writing new scenarios from scratch, and also it makes completing the massive two-decade scenario backlog much more manageable because now you have ALL players contributing, instead of only those who chose to align themselves with the Pathfinder Society. If instead I make my own scenarios from scratch, those will be ADDED to the two-decade backlog, while the original backlog itself will be left to a far smaller percentage of our players.
3) Another solution I can think of is to adapt the ADDITIONAL scenarios I will introduce to the game from other, smaller games and the third-party market to work as alternate faction scenarios. There are tons of cool little scenarios (called one-shots) that can be repurposed from other games or third-party authors, and that, again, is much easier than writing my own scenarios from scratch.
4) And finally, I can simply write my own scenarios from scratch, and I will do this with a view to leveraging the events of the 4X layer. Put simply, I will be inspired by what the players are doing in the 4X layer to craft brief scenarios for them further exploring and reinforcing the themes and situations that they themselves are pursuing in the world. This again will be far easier than writing brand-new situations of my own invention from scratch, and it will feel much more immersive to the players if, when they engage with the 4X layer, I turn their own machinations into further scenarios for them to plunge into and explore.
In sum, the issue of providing scenarios for all factions instead of merely the Pathfinder Society may seem daunting at first given how many years and how many authors and time and money Paizo has poured into developing their Organized Play program that centers around the Pathfinder Society, but with my four solutions of progressively increasing complexity that I outlined above I believe I can get the job done, and done well, effecting an explosion of possibilities and interactivity in the game that Paizo's organizers and convention players will envy us for when they get wind of it. And here's a fifth option that will blow your mind:
5) Once a player has risen high enough in a faction, he gets TO SET THE GOALS OF THE FACTION'S SCENARIOS HIMSELF. So he basically writes the missions, and they pop up on the overworld, and it's up to lower-ranked members to pursue them, or even the player himself in control of lower-ranked units. Now THAT is true 100% no-bullshit interactivity, and it could only have come from the genius behind the design of Alex Kierkegaard's Ultimate Edition.
Finally, note how beautifully all this links up with the faction-BUILDING mechanics in Legendary's Ultimate Kingdoms 159-178. So whether you want to join lore-rich existing factions and rise in their ranks, or build your own and ally with or challenge them, everything is possible in Alex Kiergkegaard's Battlegrounds: The Only Game In Which Everything Is Possible™.
P.S. In the two books above Paizo can't seem to make up their mind if they want to use the term "organization" or "faction", but in "Ultimate Campaign" and "Ultimate Kingdoms" the two terms have very specific and very different definitions and THOSE are the ones that we'll be using.
