Fronts and Factions in Worldbuilding and Plotting (Patreon)

(Now unlocked for everyone for election day distraction)

At the start of the month, I taught a class for Cat Rambo’s Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers. It was called Power and Politics in Worldbuilding: Schemes, Factions, and Culture.

It was a refinement of/iteration on past worldbuilding classes I’d given, all still drawing on my Folklore/Anthropology background.

But this class featured something else a bit more prominently: tabletop rpgs. Specifically, indie rpgs in the Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark tradition. Especially Apocalypse World by Vincent and Megeuy Baker and Blades in the Dark by John Harper.

For this month’s essay, I wanted to share that game-specific section for y’all here as a worldbuilding tool – for writing or tabletop rpgs. The way these games represent threats and factions provide some very useful tools, especially for more complicated plotlines with several moving parts.


Fighting A Plot on Two Fronts

Apocalypse World, by Vincent and Meguey Baker, is a post-apocalyptic rpg heavy on improvisation and role-playing rather than tactical combat. It made huge waves in the rpg design space, but for this essay, I want to focus down on one part of the game - a GM tool called the Fronts system. This is fronts as in storm fronts – threats coming in at the central location of the player characters aka the main characters.

The first big tip from the fronts system is that it’s a good idea for your main characters to have more than one problem. Especially in longer-form narrative like a novella or novel. If you have different types of threats coming at the protagonists from different directions, I find that it makes it easier to maintain pacing and round out both your characterization and your worldbuilding.

If there’s a physical external threat (a marauding gang coming for the protagonist’s town), you can complement that with an internal social/political threat (a nascent religious movement challenging local leadership)

This becomes especially useful if you have multiple protagonists – maybe one PoV character is a military leader, and so dealing directly with the gang – but she still has to worry about the religious movement. But she doesn’t have the time to tackle both, and trusts the other PoV character, the mayor, to handle that. Both fronts/threats impact both characters, but each PoV can be primarily focused on one threat and then show how the two overlap and intersect.

Here’s how clocks work in practice. Every threat has an analogue clock – with markings for 3, 6, 9, 10, 11, and midnight. Each marked spot on the clock has a corresponding beat of what will happen if the protagonists don’t intervene.





If a front is halted before the clock strikes 9, the impacts will not be as keenly felt. But once the 9pm move occurs, things snowball – as seen by the fact that the slices of the pie are much smaller after 9pm – 1-hour intervals instead of 3-hour intervals. Once a front reaches 9pm, it will leave substantial marks on the community/area/group it impacts.


Here’s an example clock and its corresponding beats in the Marauding Gang front:


Marauders 

3pm – A gang of marauders strike a convoy bringing supplies to a community of survivors.

6pm – The gang’s leader, a Warlord, sends an infiltrator to bring down the community’s defenses. The infiltrator appears as a merchant with needed goods and earns enough trust to move freely through the community.

9pm- The gang’s infiltrator poisons the community’s guards, leaving the community open for an attack.

10pm - The gang attacks the vulnerable community, convoy crashing through the gates opened by the infiltrator.

11pm – The warlord has the gang kill or rout anyone that could stop him from controlling the community.

Midnight – The Warlord is unchallenged tyrant of the community.


This outline takes the form of “what happens if no one intervenes”. For a fiction plot, if you’re planning on some characters to intervene, what this provides is a clear internal sense of the gang’s motivations and plans.

If the gang’s actions are largely taking place out-of-view for the narrative, having the beats can make it easier to pace out the plot while developing and using your outline. Keeping track of how far the gang’s plan has advanced will let you signal the upcoming danger to the reader even if the PoV characters aren’t aware of what’s happening.

If you’re using multiple fronts to keep track of forces of threat, it can also be useful to see how various plots might overlap. What happens if the infiltrator catches the attention of the religious movement? Will the religious leader try to convert the infiltrator? Will they succeed? What will the religious leader do if the gang makes a move on the community?

My suggestion is to write out the entire arc of the front and then decide when it may clash with something else in the plot. This can be especially useful for more organic writers, where less is planned ahead and more is decided in the process of writing the first draft.

I also like the fronts system because it encourages the GM (or author, in this case) to use different types of antagonism to deploy in order to challenge the protagonists along different axes and keep the story from being too repetitive/two-dimensional (if all of your threats are external, martial threats, you might have a flat story, even in an action-focused narrative).

This framework is also useful for making the antagonist feel like the protagonist of their own story, though it’s likely the protagonist and antagonist will be one another’s greatest challenges. How would other forces/systems get in the antagonist’s way even if the protagonist does not? In the example above, would the religious leader want to get word to the Warlord and team up? Would the Warlord take the alliance?


The Enemy of my Enemy Is Another Jerk I Will End Up Fighting

Blades in the Dark is set in the industrial fantasy city of Duskwall, where you play as a brand-new gang trying to carve out territory, get rich, or die trying. Because every block, every alley, every storefront is claimed as someone’s turf, your gang can’t advance without stealing turf from other factions. This means that faction relationships are very important. Here’s some ways the game mechanizes this that I think can be stolen and implemented.

Rather than detailing every member of a faction, you write a 1-2 sentence of the faction’s identity/their deal, their relative size/power in the overall faction web (expressed as Tier, ranging 1 (the smallest) to 5 (the largest), you give them an immediate/top priority and how complicated it is, and then you detail a leader or front-person character that represents what the faction is about. 

As you build your faction list, you also note faction alliances, including relationships up and down the city’s hierarchy (small gangs allied against bigger gangs, etc.)


Here’s an example faction:


The Forgotten    Tier I

The last five survivors of an Imperial battalion betrayed by the Immortal Emperor in the last days of the conquest of Skovlan.


Goals: 

Interrogate Baron VanTaeb (8 steps)

Locate other betrayed veterans and recruit them (6 steps)

Turf: A flophouse frequented by veterans down on their luck, a dingy bar in a flooded cellar.

NPC: Ring Dalmore (they/them), a sergeant haunted by the memory of their fallen squadron. (determined, connected, compassionate)

Notable Assets: Several braces of rifles, military-grade ghost-hunting gear (gas masks, lightning hooks, spirit charms), gas grenades, trenching tools, maps of Skovlan.

Quirks: Several of them are undocumented, listed as killed in action. Most are literally haunted by ghosts that returned to the city with them when they smuggled themselves back into the city. They’re all skilled fighters, more than a match one-on-one for most soldiers.

Allies: The Strange Friends are allies of Ring’s, The Red Sashes count many veterans in their number and respect the Forgotten’s martial prowess.

Enemies: Ulf Irnborn seeks vengeance for their crimes against Skovlan during the war.

Situation: The Forgotten have procured the blueprints for the mansion of Braon VanTaeb, who gave the order that obliterated the battalion. The Forgotten are planning to break in and interrogate the Baron for evidence and/or a confession. But first, they need to swell their ranks to the point where they can overcome the Baron’s sizable house guard.

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In between missions, the GM is encouraged to think about the Faction Turn – looking over the faction list and thinking about what each faction is doing in that same time. Are they working to undermine another faction’s control over trade? Are they preparing their plan to kidnap a rival gang leader? Or are they licking their wounds after a rumble and now vulnerable to a faction that had previously been unwilling to risk taking an aggressive move?

As you play, your gang will gain and lose status with other factions, which will then move against or assist your player faction. The waves and ripples caused by your player gang will re-shape the landscape and interconnected web of faction relationships.

An active, savvy protagonist will do much the same.

In a political story, this type of efficient but interconnected faction design can help move the story along and/or help generate and structure side-plots. And the faction structure can be adjusted for any number of settings – down to the personal level for a Regency story of manners, to high school cliques in a YA novel, to various squadrons/units in a war story, and so on.

Rather than feeling like you need to detail every member of a faction, sketch out every line of their ledger, Blades provides tools for building a spare but functional web of interconnected factions with competing agendas who can help you tell a rich and sophisticated political story of alliances, betrayals, and opportunistic bids for power.

Depending on the scale of your story, it may only take a handful of factions to give your story the thickly-interwoven web of allegiance and antagonism needed to keep your story rolling.

I especially recommend thinking about factions and their moves in response to the protagonist and/or antagonists’ plans during the middle of a story, where many authors sometimes stall out trying to figure out what happens before an Act II reversal or the last twist that sets up the story’s climax.