Faction Design (Jungleland Campaign Prep)

 I stopped updating here last year because of some personal stuff. My old campaign came to a halt partially because of that and I've only recently resumed gaming, running a Mausritter campaign for some colleagues at work (which I shall perhaps discuss on here another time) - and now, a campaign using Knave 2, that I call JUNGLELAND!

 Welcome to Ixal, the sunken continent. Just over a century ago it rose out of the oceans, a mass of sprawling jungles, strange coral forests, and ancient ruins of a long lost civilizations. Since then it has drawn countless explorers - and continues to inspire invention and discovery.

 That was the flavor text I sent my friends to try and get them interested in the campaign. The concept is simple: a strange new tropical continent that housed a highly advanced civilization tens of thousands of years ago, but that is now largely unpopulated (at least not by humans) draws colonists, scholars and religious fanatics, none of whom fully grasp what they're up against. The wilderness would represent "chaos", and humanity (led by a colonial force very loosely based on 17th century Spain) -  "law". But of course I knew I wanted to make things more complex than that in practice.

After coming up with a very simple baseline idea -  I spent sometime designing a hexmap for it. I told myself this is just a starting area, but wound up creating a 12X10 hex space, with 10km per hex (so 1000 square kilometers), so there's a good chance the entire campaign will be confined to this area. 

 After keying about half the map, I ran my first session, and afterwards - decided to add details to every hex, and to better organize the factions in this world, so as to make it feel more alive and make the random encounter table more engaging, as the ones I came up with at first felt disjointed and not great.

Here's what I've come up with, drawing on some of my own ideas and some of others' - and using the help of ChatGPT to organize things ago (don't lynch me please).

 These are the 

Major Events in Ixal's Past

• The Age of Opulence (100,000 years ago): The Ixalan Kingdoms reached unparalleled heights of magic and technology, aided by their connection to Paradise, Earth’s divine twin planet. Great temples and divine tethers allowed chosen mortals to ascend to Paradise and communicate with the gods.
• The Age of Decadence (90,000 years ago): A single empire conquered most of Ixal, ruling with iron and decadence. Over time, the rulers became increasingly corrupt and lethargic, allowing decay to take hold.
• The Slave Queen’s Rebellion (89,000 years ago): A slavewoman led a revolt that shattered one of the divine tethers, causing the Fertility Goddess Taranisi to fall to Earth. Her death triggered an earthquake, helping the rebellion succeed and establish a new kingdom. 
• The Zyrakhet Invasion (85,000 years ago): The Zyrakhet, monstrous centipede-bodied invaders, swept across Ixal, conquering vast territories. After discovering Taranisi’s corpse, they broke the remaining tethers, severing Earth from Paradise and causing Ixal to sink beneath the sea.  
• Ixal Rises (160 years ago): The sunken continent returns, and is quickly discovered. Explorers and settlers flock from the Empire of Galt and other places. Most settlers cease to contact their home nation soon after settling.

I decided to make these tethers central to my campaign only after finishing my hex-key. These tethers were quasi-intelligent emissaries of the gods. Once broken, they shattered, and with them, divine memories scattered across the land. Some splintered into millions of pieces, embedding themselves in the jungle itself. But the heart-cores of some of these tethers may still be recoverable - and perhaps rebuilt. 

 

Major Factions in South-Eastern Ixal

1. Galtan Empire: Decadent, haughty conquistadors.

• Motives: Colonize, exploit resources, expand influence; maintain order
• Allies: Tentatively friendly with most factions
• Enemies: Custodians of the Quiet Bloom (viewed as monsters), Jungle (viewed as wilderness to be tamed)
• Terrain Prominence: Coastal regions, Roads, Settlements

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2. Custodians of the Quiet Bloom: Fungal undead, with a mock-chivalrous order, called forth by the Dead Goddess's dreams, which whisper in mushrooms and mold. Build "antennae" of sorts to amplify Taranisi's whispers, in the form of Mycellial structures that look like castles.

• Motives: Propagate their fungus, expand influence of their ever-rotting deity’s whispers. Protect the “antennae” network.
• Allies: Tentatively aligned with jungle (fungus is part of it) - but can anger it if they become too dominant
• Enemies: Humans (seen as a useful source of husks to self-propagate), Church of the Unborn God (interferes with rot)
• Terrain Prominence: Marshlands; fungal growth clusters

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3. Church of the Unborn God: Monotheistic mystics convinced the only true divine being is a fetus living inside the planet Paradise as though it were a womb. Hope to reattach earth to help it be born.

• Motives: Rebuild tethers to Paradise; “cleanse” remnants of humanity inside Custodians.
• Allies: Tentative cooperation with Galtans and other human factions.
• Enemies: Custodians (an abomination), Zyrakhet (interferes with rebuilding efforts
• Terrain Prominence: Ruined temples, memory-shard hotspots, highlands for ritual sites

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4. Living Jungle: An inscrutable superintelligence that pulses throughout the land, born out of the divine memory-fragments that splintered from the broken tethers. A sort a vague "program" following disjointed (sometimes conflicting) guidelines from fragmented code. "Communicates" through the flight pattern of birds, through the swarming of insects, through the growth of vines. 

• Motives: Preserve and cultivate memory-shards;  observe all activity and write new memories; occasionally predatory if memory-shards or recordings are threatened.
• Allies: Tentative alliance with Custodians
• Enemies: Galtan efforts to "tame" it may cause it to react violently; Occasionally hostile to Church efforts to rebuild tethers
• Terrain Prominence: virtually omnipresent; most noticeable in dense jungles.

I came up with Galt and the Church very early on, before building the hex map.

The "Custodians" came out of a single random swamp hex I rolled with Wilderness Hexplore. I rolled a castle full of ghouls, but I already have a hex dedicated to Emil Bovien's Lair of the Gobbler, which features salamander swamp creatures who use paralyzing poison very similar to the standard old school ghoul ability. So I decided to vary it up, and turned them into fungaloid undead instead, and made them have noble orders and fungal skeleton steeds because of the castle. I placed the Taranisi's corpse right next to them by chance, and decided to connect the two. Soon they became a group I wanted to have major influence in the region.

Once I had the first three factions, I felt something was missing, but I always like the idea of living geographical places. So decided to make the jungle a full-fledged faction, the most powerful one in fact. It felt very on theme, and once I came up with the "tethers" being built of divine intelligence, everything fell into place.

 There are a few more minor factions that came out of rolling randomly for the hexmap, or of pre-written adventures I know I'm going to drop in here and there:

Last of the Zyrakhet: Essentially gorgons with the lower bodies of centipedes and centipedes instead of serpents for their hair. Instead of being petrified victims are encased in amber and then used to fertilize eggs. [These are partially based on a vague recollection I have of something somebody told me about Yoon-Suin, but I've never read that myself so I may be totally misremembering things]

Free College of the Occult: Scholars and experimenters who probe ancient magic and technology, valuing knowledge above all else.

Sultanate of Usted: Shrewd rulers focused on controlling artifacts, ancient tech, and vital trade routes. [Originally meant to be competition against Galt for settling Ixal, but decided to make them a minor faction. I may just merge these with the college to simplify things]

Cultists of the Old Gods: Fanatics devoted to reviving ancient deities and undermining human power wherever possible.

Tinykin: 1cm tall riverfolk who ride dragonflies and who defend their waterways from human exploitation and rival factions. Wield powerful magic. Spawn by feeding their queen coins.

Croak Company: Militarized, bipedal frogs who wear livery and wield tiny muskets. Dominate rivers and profit from controlling waterways. Engaged in constant war with Tinykin.

One of the things I loved about Mausritter is how it gamifies faction play with assets and goals, so will add those rules (may make a separate post about that). For example - the Church is probably seeking to build a cathedral, and the Custodians are probably seeking to build a second fungal "antenna". 

I'm not yet done with the hex-key (and in the course of coming up with the factions had ideas for changing it, so will likely change up some former ideas; and will draw in the borders of territories perhaps). That may be my next post. Or maybe I'll talk about random encounters - or a dungeon. Who knows. In any case hope this was interesting and glad to be back.