Factions and Influence

Influence is a measure of how much sway your character has over an NPC organisation or category of people. 

Influence only ever pertains to NPC-lead organisations. There is no stat or background for influencing PC-lead organisations, this must be handled through roleplay. Influence can be negative as well as positive; if your character has historically been on bad terms with a group, or if someone has been spreading nasty tales about how your character has sabotaged something the faction cares about, your character’s influence will drop. This can result in the faction having a negative opinion of them.

Your character’s influence with a faction will generally go up or down based on the actions of characters in the game. These actions might include things like:

• Performing a favour for a faction (+)

• Giving an appropriate gift to the faction (+)

• Speaking well of the faction to increase their prestige with others (+)

• Making use of the faction’s facilities (-)

• Using the faction’s members to support an activity (-)

• Negatively influencing the faction’s regard for somebody else (-)

The sole exception to this is during a long time-jump, when influence may degrade or be lost due to changes within factions.

Types of Faction

The amount of influence one can hold, and what kind of reputation, benefits or drawbacks this gives, varies by faction. Gaining significant influence with a small organisation will generally be easier than making gains with a larger one. After all, donating books to a local monastery might earn you some favour on a local level, but it would be barely noticed by the Catholic Church as a whole.

Factions come in three sizes or types. Local factions are limited in scope to Bavaria and perhaps some adjacent duchies. Regional factions are spread more widely across Europe, while Global factions are exactly what they sound like. 

A full list of factions can be found here.

Influence Ratings

Your character’s influence rating with a faction will be abstracted. By this, we mean that you will never know their exact influence value with a faction. You will know roughly how well or poorly they regard your character, but you will never be in a position to know ‘my character has 3.124 influence with…’ any faction.

As the game unfolds over years, factions will come and go. The long-running nature of the game means that some will fade to irrelevance and others will come to prominence, only to themselves fade a century later. A global organisation may dwindle to a local one, become entirely defunct, or change nature and focus over the years. 

Influence built up in a faction which has become irrelevant will in most cases be wasted. If a successor faction grows in their place, this may be carried over to some degree, at the discretion of the STs. Likewise if a new faction appears which is opposed to one your character has influence with, you may start with a disadvantage in dealing with them.

It is important to note that while many of our in-game factions are loosely based on historical organisations from the real world, this does not mean their fortunes in-game will mirror those from outside of it. One may rise far higher than it did in real life, or crash and burn much earlier, have a different focus or goal, or never come about at all.

Possible Influence Levels