Last time on our faction system walkthrough, we showed you what the Wealth Skill can do and how you can dip into that collective fund in game.

This time we’re showing off faction specialisations, which is all about using your faction and faction members in game.

From Skills to Specialisations

Much like with characters in the Sigil System, Specialisations are focused form of a Skill that is used in a specific and particular way. What differs in the Brotherhood faction system is that the Skills are what makes up the faction, while the Specialisations are how the faction (particularly) the faction members interact with the world in all its various ways in game. There are ten Specialisations, but before we get there, let’s start at creating the Specialisations.

Faction Generation

During faction generation, after you have rolled your Skill Levels, and after the historical events have added or subtracted from those levels, have a look a the list of Specialisations below and assign to each Specialisation the Skill Level of the listed Skill. In effect, the Skill Levels become the Specialisations

Athletics: Might
Combat: Might
Craft: Wealth
Drive: Notoriety
Mental: Wealth
Perception: Treachery
Negotiate: Reputation
Special: Reputation
Stealth: Treachery
Coercion: Notoriety

This is the only time that the parent Skills and daughter Specialisations will be connected. After this point, if the parent Skill Levels go up or down, the Specialisation won’t be affected, and vice versa. In this way, the faction’s Might can go up or down, but its Athletics or Combat will stay the same.

Using the Specialisations

The Specialisations serve two main purposes in game. The first and most important is that they can form the “Skills” of your faction members. You can always go through the whole Sigil System character creation process for each faction member, but this is only really practical if you have a handful of members. No one wants to go through fifty-odd character sheets to find the one member they are looking for, and it will be even more difficult to remember who is good at what. Instead, you can simply use the Specialisations to act as the character sheet for all your members. You only need to remember ten levels and that’s it. When we get into the members next time, we’ll show you how you can do a little customisation to make each member feel unique, but even this won’t change the fact that if you need a member to go do something, you won’t have to worry about which of the dozens of members you have is the only one that can get it done. All that bookkeeping can go away and you can just use the Specialisations.

The other main use for Specialisations is to abstractly portray the way your entire faction does something. If you have a faction vs faction battle going on, rather than trying to manage a combat encounter with possibly a hundred people in it, you can simply use each faction’s Combat Specialisation, and the damage inflicted will be shown by the Might Skill’s number of Wounds. Or if you want to send most (or all) of your faction out on a stealth mission, rather than rolling Stealth two dozen times for each member on the mission, just roll once. Or if you have a building project you want your faction to undertake, or a research project, just roll Craft or Mental (respectively) and it gets done.

High Level or Drill Down

In the uses for the Specialisations above, you can see that the Specialisations allow you the flexibility to abstract the details when you need to, or if you don’t want to do the bookkeeping; but they can also step out of the way if you do want to have a character sheet for all your members, or want to have those mass battles or group crafting sessions. They are what you need them to be.

The Righteous Prophets.

Throughout this walkthrough we’ve been rolling for the Prophets’ Skills, and this is what we got:

Reputation: 10
Notoriety: 50
Treachery: 40
Might: 30
Wealth: 30

This means that their Specialisations look like this:

Athletics: 30
Combat: 30
Craft: 30
Drive: 50
Mental: 30
Perception: 40
Negotiate: 10
Special: 10
Stealth: 40
Coercion: 50

It’s not too bad, although not too good. In fact, the average for this is 32 which makes it completely average for a character and that in turn means it will do exactly what we need it to do. With 22 members, we can confidently use the Specialisations in lieu of character sheets and we won’t be giving ourselves too much of a disadvantage. Looking at the Specialisations we can also see what our faction will be good at. Drive and Coercion is at the top, which makes sense for a smuggling ring, and Perception and Stealth is tied for second place. For the type of people the Prophets are, this is exactly what we are looking for. We can send them on stealth missions and smuggling missions without worrying too much about them, and we can bully our way out of a fair bit should it come to that. All in all, quite pleased with how the Prophets’ Specs turned out.

And that’s it for the Specialisations. Tell us how your faction stacks up and how you plan to use them in game.

Next time we’ll show you how to recruit faction members and how they will shape your faction simply by being there.

———-

Remember that you get to choose what we work on after the Faction System has been made, so CLICK HERE to vote!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.