Creating Fantastic RPG Factions: How to Use Groups, Guilds, Criminals, Guards, and More Organizations in Your TTRPG Campaigns

3 Wise DMs

Every good campaign — whether it’s Dungeons and Dragons 5E, Call of Cthulhu, Marvel FASERIP, or any other system — has multiple factions for PCs to interact with. You may only need to flesh out criminals and guards, or you could build a world with dozens of competing factions all looking to use the PCs to their advantage. Whatever role factions play in your campaign, how do you build them out?

In this episode, an old friend of the show brings a new question to Thorin, Tony and Dave: How do you build and use factions? We go deep into the factions in our games, how we created or adopted them, and the different roles factions can play in your TTRPG.

2:00 A listener question: Jared is back and asking about how we build and use factions

9:00 Start with the role you want the faction to play

19:00 Different kinds of factions we use and how we use them to add depth to the game

22:00 Making your factions more than just another group of quest givers

34:00 How we create factions and the people in them

45:00 Final thoughts