The Secret to Running Political Campaigns transcript

If you're a DM and you watched Game of Thrones thinking how much you wanted to do those kinds of politics in Dn D, let me tell you a secret. It's actually really easy. Creating a political situation isn't complicated. But unraveling a political situation you didn't create can seem delightfully, impossibly detailed. It'll suck your players into your world and make it feel real. And I use the same format every time, and my players haven't noticed.

Every political situation can be presented with three factions, good, bad, and ugly. And then I make it complex by messing around with the factions until they no longer recognize the format. I create subfactions, fractal factions, layered factions, or factions within factions and beyond them. It's a faction verse. There's a billion variants, and none of them are complicated to make, but they are complicated to unravel.

And when you're done with this video, you'll make your own with the three faction rule. Welcome to Mystic Arts, where I once again remind you that I love the West Wing, in case you forgot. My name is Di. I'm a professional writer and director, and I've been DMing for over 10 years. You can make your factions be morally complex, and we'll talk about that in a few minutes. But let's start with the basics. Let's say you've got three factions because everything's better in threes.

And let's say we're in a sort of medieval classic fantasy setting with swords and sorcery. and then we will spin our yarn. We are going to right now make a political landscape in six quick steps. The conflict, the factions, the characters, the ideology, the methods, and the twist. Since we're running an adventure, we've got to start by creating some kind of conflict. I want to prove to you that it doesn't need to be wholly original or deeply complicated.

We're just going to take a simple adventure premise. The hobgoblins are attacking civilization. That's it. The hobgoblins want the lands that civilization has, and the civilization wants to be not conquered by hobgoblins. Easy. All that required was looking at a monster manual. Plus, this way, we can use the hobgoblin stat blocks we created a few weeks ago. They are insanely fun to run. At this rate, by the end of this video, we will have made a whole adventure.

Now, let's make the conflict real by creating some factions. We are going to add political complexity by layering factions in threes. Let's start simple. From our premise, we know there is civilization and there's hobgoblins, but let's add a third faction that's neutral. I like the idea of a wizard faction as our ugly faction. They're a good candidate for it because ugly to me says that it doesn't fit into either good or bad.

It's this sort of messy, innately human in between. It's complex by nature. It's a fine shortorthhand for our neutral faction. Then I like to give them all fancy names so that it sounds a little evocative. The kingdom is actually the duche of Riverfell. It implies there's a king, but also there is different feudal hierarchies within counts, parents, knights, peasants, etc. The hobgoblins are actually called the pale fist.

It's evocative of that sort of white hand from Lord of the Rings or the red hand from Dn D. Very militaristic, very evocative. So, pale fist. Let's call our wizards something a little bit funky. How about Eldrich order? They're somehow orderly. Good, but they're Eldrich. Bad. Ugly. Maybe they make bargains with higher powers. It implies secrecy and mystique. Sounds to me like a secret society that prays to a god we probably don't want to empower.

What's important about the three faction structure is that the third faction is somehow the tipping point. You know, the Pale Fist will succeed in conquering Riverfell unless Riverfell can make a deal with the Eldrich order. If you want the hobgoblins to be the good guys, you make them need the Eldrich order to conquer Riverfell. The reason we do this is because the players are the good guys and their side should be struggling.

If the factions are even, there is no adventure. If you start the adventure with two major sides evenly matched, you're sort of communicating that the adventure hasn't started yet. and an inciting incident later will start the conflict. The reason the good guys should be on the back foot is because then they need the adventurers to write the ship and give them a fighting chance. Now, these are just empty factions. We need to give them character.

Players can't interact with factions. They can only interact with NPCs. So, when you're running a political campaign, you got to remember that a faction's NPCs is how the faction is perceived. With Riverfell, we want to continue making them be on the back foot because if it's full of epic heroic characters, then why are the player characters important? Your players are the hero of the story. So, when we're casting the Duchy of Riverfell, we cast it with relatively incompetent people.

In charge of Riverfell is the Duke, an old and ineffective nobleman. His name is Ronan Brine. He's in his 80s, and he won't be much use in this coming conflict. I mean, he was a legend in his younger days, but now even his memory is failing him. His son and heir is no warrior. He's no good at much really. He's basically like Kendall Roy from Succession. And with a pale fist, we're going to create a hobgoblin general called Varsuk, a ruthless warrior, brilliant strategic mind, and charismatic speaker capable of whipping armies of hobgoblins into a fervor of conquest.

With the Eldidge Order is a creepy wizard. Let's call him mouthless. A human whose mouth is sewn shut through life extending magic. Suddenly, I feel like each faction is rendered with sharp personality. There shouldn't be any way to miss what they are about. Then you render these NPCs and make them feel especially realistic. We can now make these factions have some sort of ideology, a worldview that binds all the characters within the faction together.

Ideology may seem like a $10 word here, and it may be where you trip up thinking it has to be about, you know, political policy or something, but it doesn't. It's Dn D. You can lean on simple broad strokes here when it comes to how these factions see the world. It should be dead easy. We've done so much work already. Let's say Riverfell believes in, you know, laws, roads, taxes, trade, safety, peace. They are a civilization of normal, somewhat historically accurate human people.

Palefist may be lawful, but they believe that might makes right. Conquest is fair game, and following orders is an unequivocal good. Naturally, those two factions would come into conflict. That is the basis of this political system. The Eldridge order is the odd one out. They are neutral, so they're not naturally in this conflict. They believe in the wisdom of the unspeaking god and that the conflicts of men and hobgoblins will pass and then one day the world will be consumed in the grave fog and the war will end.

What does any of that mean? I don't know. I just said it. You could just make it be whatever Eldrich stuff you want to imagine. That would be fun for like a 15th level epilog adventure in case this campaign you're planning goes exceptionally well. That way you have a sort of bonus chapter that you've lined up like how Vox Machina was suddenly chasing after the whispered one. Next methods. This should be easy for a running example, too.

Riverfell passes laws to mandate change, usually by way of trade agreements and summits with allies, public policy, or other slow methods that we tend to associate with republics or democracies. They're probably actually like a constitutional monarchy. Basically, the Duke isn't an autocrat. He's got a lot of executive power, but in reality, he's checked by his adviserss. When a place like that comes into conflict, they have to deliberate on how best to respond.

The advisers might be nervous to hand war powers to the 80-year-old duke. It would be best if they could bargain with the hobgoblins. Maybe some form of appeasement. Palefist, however, is a military autocracy. Basically, the entire tribe is bound to whatever Barzuk call wants them to do, and failure to follow orders lands you in the goolag. When Pailfist comes into conflict, they choose a direct and bloody method, death and war.

The Aldridge order, meanwhile, isn't interested in this war. But if they were, they'd make rituals to summon powerful creatures, agents of their strange god to fight whichever side they end up joining. And yeah, they might join Riverfell, but they might also join Pailfist. Whichever way the order goes, that may be the way the war goes. You're seeing the problem by now. I hope the order will swing the war, but the duche won't go talk to them.

How could they? They're so Eldrichy. Pailfist, however, he'll make allies with anyone. Palefist may not need the order to win the war, but if Varzuk Khal secures an alliance with the order, the Duke can't. And now this is starting to feel a little bit like politics, right? Will the Duke reach out to the order? Could they maybe just get the order to remain out of the whole deal? You know, swear to sit the thing out? Will that be enough?

Is the risk worth it? Is working with them worth it? Different characters will have different opinions on this. That's politics. Which brings me to the twist because we're not done. We've just built the foundation. Now, we really crack on. Here's the amazing thing about working with three factions. With this sort of three faction rule, you can do so much more than just this. You nest them, layer them, and fracture them.

Each faction can have three factions in it and three factions beyond it. above. The three-faction rule is a lens you can use to turn any simple two-sided situation into a more interesting and complex three or more sided political situation. Let me elaborate. We're going to be spending the time in the good guy lands. So, we will get to know them a lot better. We'll have to develop it further. Remember our video on world building like fractals?

This is the same principle. Every fraction has fractals of other factions in it. Within the Duchy of Riverfell, you might find the military operation. Here you'll find strong knights and commanders, loyal men and women defending the nation. They'll want to fight the hobgoblins, and they know they are outmatched. I mean, they're going to be busy mounting defenses and leading the army meant to defend the capital in Duggala.

So, they can't solve the adventure for the players. But, there is more to Riverfell than one army. There are a load of adviserss here. maybe let's call them the provincial league of electors who create policy and they don't think the hobgoblins can take on the Riverfell army and therefore they think the hobgoblins won't even try and if they do no harm would come of it anyway. So the advisers aren't doing anything. So what's our ugly faction in Riverfell?

The third faction that makes things interesting. It's the go-between. It's the one who's supposed to make the army and the advisers agree. The Duke, he's brilliant. he would be able to reconcile this, but he's asleep most of the time. He's old and barely lucid, and he doesn't take a stance on anything. And his son is worse. He believes Riverfell should march its weak army at the hobgoblins and meet them in open field.

But the Duke's daughter knows the situation inside and out, and she wants to help. But she has no legal authority or power over the situation. So, she'll fund the player characters and beg them to help because without them, Riverfell will collapse. Hang on. Do you see what I did with the kids there? The Duke and the kids. Ugly. Bad. Good. Hell, the daughter's even on the back foot. In the army, there's a commander who agrees with the Duke's heir.

Bad. A commander who wants to spend resources on building siege towers to be ready when the hobgoblins come. Good. And a general who wants to do what's best, but he's dealing with both of these commanders. And really, he's just waiting on his best friend, the Duke's son, to give him a command. Ugly. The advisers want to do nothing bad. Some of them want to be more proactive. Good. Some of them want to be proactive, but they don't want to step out of the line because they're afraid of political repercussions.

Ugly. You cook up these endless spirals of complexity like there's strings of complex spaghetti. Spaghetti. Spaghetti westerns. You know, Sergi Leone, the the good, the bad, and the ugly. You get it? You can do this wherever your attention goes. What about Vzuk? Well, he's in charge of the military. Good from his perspective. He's helped by his creepy cabal of steel mages. Bad. Creepy. And he's even gotten a group of loyal hill giants on side.

Ugly. Just looking at them. Oh. And official settings do this all the time. Once you know this structure and you're aware of it, I bet you you're going to start seeing it everywhere. There's this new Kickstarter. It's like MadMax post-apocalyptic D and D with cars and gas masks and all kinds of dope It's called Scorched Basin and it's made by the creators of the Wandering Tavern and Sky Sephers, the sponsors of today's video.

And they are doing the same thing. Five factions actually, but two of them are small factions. And then there is big three. They're the Kai, the Raiders, and the Unsettled. In brief, Kai are like rich folks who live in the walls of the basin, but they have crazy technology and only care about creative innovation and their social standing within their own hierarchy. Raiders are crazy speed freaks that love driving fast.

They follow a pseudo religion called the speed state. Unsettled are nomads that roam the basin trying to maintain natural balance. They inhale these magical crystals in the basin and gain insane magical abilities, which by the way is a whole new magic system. And I voiced one of these. They asked me to be one of the kind knights, so I put on my best cop voice and gave it my all. You should check them out. The Kickstarter just went live.

And if you back them after using the link in the description or the pin comment, then you are also supporting this channel directly. If you're running a long campaign, you can make it possible for players to remove a faction. And then you could add one, have it fill up the power vacuum. You can have the players actions fracture a faction into its subfactions. Or you could have them shrink or grow in power. And if you want to have morally complex factions, you can make every faction be the bad one.

But because playing Grim Dark can be really exhausting, players, they need hope, something to be fighting for. What you do is inside every bad faction, there's a good subfaction, something that could be used to replace the current bad leadership, you know, with a better leadership. And then all factions are bad, but you know, there's something good within. That's your hope. You could have all the factions be ugly with good and bad subfactions, or all factions good with individual bad actors that make them seem bad from the outside.

Maybe these three factions in the adventure are all subordinates to a bunch of bigger international bad factions. Once you've got this lens, three factions, good, bad, and ugly, you can really start to play around with this. And you will never run out of arrangements for these factions. And this is kind of like the five room dungeon of political play. And you can use it forever. If you do, you can always just add one into the mix or remove one.

Have more or fewer subfactions. Go with three uglies in a baddy, which sounds like a night out. You can play around forever. I mean, of course, you don't have to. I'm certain you'll go into the comments and tell me about other ways to structure political adventures. And please do. I am certain looking through those suggestions will be a blast. But I've been running political campaigns for a decade now, and my players are still having incredible fun with this formula.

That's it. Three factions, good, bad, and ugly. You create a conflict, factions, characters, ideology, methods, and then twist it by adding subfactions, uber factions, factional, fractional factions, complex NPC relationships, or romance, or whatever else you want. You build story after story and it'll be dead easy for you to understand, but your players will feel like the right kind of lost in the political forest of the intricate world you created on a whim over a weekend.

They will believe in your world and that's where we'll pick it up next time. Thanks so much for watching this video. This channel is run by me and my girlfriend. And if you want to support us directly, oh bottle, please consider joining our Patreon where we're gearing up to start a zen in October. And if you want to join this Patreon before we start the Zen, we're offering 30% off of annual Adept subscriptions with a coupon code Zen at checkout until September 28th.

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