Planar Factions Collected

[Messageboard Golem]

This 128-page book by Ari Marmell presents a dozen different planar factions ready for use in planar campaigns. Each Planar Faction includes the organization’s overall makeup, its resources and base of operations, its history, its goals and methods, its internal laws and customs, and new game mechanics specific to that organization. And because each faction operates on multiple worlds, you can make them a driving force in your own setting, or use them as a means of introducing your PCs to planar adventuring.

 

[Crothian]

Planar Factions

Some books when I get them I flip right to the rules, the feats, the spells, the prestige classes. Other books I have to get comfortable because I know I am going to read them front to back, cover to cover. These are the books that are filled with ideas and not so much on the rules. These are the books that I want to use in my campaign for they contain inspiration and not items to be slapped on a character or an opponent. I like the books that get my creative juices flowing, that show me ideas I did not think of on my own and allow me to use them with ease. Planar Factions is such a book.

Planar Factions is a PDF by Ronin Arts. Ronin Arts is a leader in PDF publishing and the sheer among of items they have out is mind boggling. The book is written by Ari Marmell who is slowly proving that he has talent and is an author to watch in the future.

The PDF comes in a small zip file of less then two megs and even unzipped still does not reach two megs. That is some really good compression for a book that is one hundred and twenty nine pages long. The book is well book marked like I have come to expect from Ronin Arts. The layout is good and simple making it easy to print. There is no art in the book making it packed to the brim, but the layout spaces things out nicely making it easy to read,

Planar Factions is a collection of twelve different factions that span the many worlds. Each faction is also available as an individual PDF so people can buy only the ones they want or get all of them together. The factions are described as existing across many worlds but the worlds are left general enough that to fit anyone’s campaign. This book does not assume any type of cosmology and can work equally well with Manual of the Planes, Book of the Planes, Beyond Countless Doorways, and Edge of Infinity. The DM will need to figure which planes from those books work the best but there is nothing in here that will make it tough for the DM.

Each plane is described with some common features. Each has size, alignment/ purpose, approximate class breakdown, resources, central headquarters, and known enemies. All of these are done well except for size. Population of different worlds and campaigns can vary drastically. One of the factions has size colossal of over a thousand members. To me a thousand people is not colossal in size. I would have preferred instead to just have the words and then briefly talk about what that size should be and let the DM choose exact numbers. Obviously, this is not a very big complaint and is something simple for DMs to change.

The first faction is called the Eternal Flame, and one should expect full spoilers. They are a faction that comes into a world and helps first destroy the evil races and then the evil organizations like thieves guild. They help get rid of corruption in the government and stop the evil gods. They keep expanding what they consider to be evil and wrong until they usurp the government and have their own secret police. The organization is actually evil and patient. They will root out other evils over the course of many years or decades becoming very popular all the while slowly increasing their own power and influence. I like the idea but it seems a simple detect evil will thwart this. To battle this there is a spell that does allow them to mask and fool alignment detection. There is also a spell to trick divine casters into getting their spells from the evil source instead of their own god. It is an interesting idea but it takes advantage of details not covered in the game like if the cleric could tell where their power comes from and the normal black and white nature of detect spells. As a player I might feel a little cheated being fooled like that. So, while they are a very interesting group a DM might want to be careful in using them and to what level they are able to fool the players.

The Gur-Tannan area much more straight forward faction. They worship an old and evil god and quite simple want to conquer everything. They either kill the people they conquer or force them to worship and serve in their armies. While they are military in nature I find it odd that they would be Chaotic Evil. I do not see the type of organization this group needs coming out of that alignment. One of the great things is that this organization is nicely described and can be used just as another church. Their rituals and customs are written about making them easier to use.

The Midnight Dawn braves the age old question: Is it evil to use undead to fight evil? They don’t think so, but it is presented that many others do. Very simply they believe life is too important to risk people fighting evil when one can so easily animate dead bodies to do so. What I really like is there are new spells so these Lawful Good clerics and Paladins can use evil spells to animate the dead and be protected from the negative energy affecting their alignment. The best thing about this is the answer becomes yes it is evil, unless you are part of the Midnight Dawn and has their protections.

The Mythmakers I think have the greatest potential to be used with ease, have a lot of fun with, and cause the players quite a few headaches. Quite simply they make heroes out of people. They record the great deeds people do and spread around the stories. But they do not stop there. They set up attacks on towns so the would be heroes can save people, they cause natural disasters and other problems so the heroes can do the good work and people can see it first hand. And they do it all for a very reasonable price. This is my personal favorite faction of them all.

The Obsidian League is another simple organization. They area merchant guide and they make money hands over fist. They find places where an item is cheap and ship it to a place where it is rare and make money. They are power hungry and driven by one large family. This is a good group that can really have a lot of effect in the background and cause a lot of problems or solve them with money or with importing the right things. They could be a great connection for a rogue or for someone who crafts magical items and needs rare and hard to get items.

The Poison Tide is another simple, yet deadly group. They are the creatures that exist underwater and they want to find a way to make everything underwater. What I like is the author admits straight up the severe limitations of this group and the fact they really have no idea how to actually achieve their final goal. The conduct raids on costal communities and disrupt shipping lanes. They can make a really good annoying and hard to defeat enemy in a campaign. But since they are rather limited to the water they can easily be avoided depending on the terrain of the world.

The Silent Hand and the Risen League are more like two factions in one. They are also a nice behind the scenes faction that are really preparing for something beyond the scope of anyone. They are preparing to stop the final apocalypse. What that will be is not discussed but the current methods are. The Risen League is a mercenary army that spans many worlds and the Silent Hand are trying to gain influence in every court and every nation prepared to use the influence to help when the final battle is upon them. In the means time they area bit power hungry and corrupt using any means to achieve power. I think it would be very interesting to have them preparing to face off in the Blood War personally but there are many interesting scenarios that a DM can think of for what the final apocalypse will be.

The Steadfast Order of the Shapers of the Earthen Splendor are a factions trying to unlock all the mysteries of magic. They hold great power over magic’s that they really have no desire to share with anyone. They are not a secret organization but do keep their methods and discovers very secret. While it is not suggested in the text, they are a great way to introduce some of the less common arcane classes from books like Complete Arcane, Occult Lore, Magic, and any of the other thousand books that has new types of magic in them. The book does suggest that many of the dungeons and underground complexes people explore are built by these guys. There are some cool new feats they have access to; to show the kinds of knowledge they have to offer their members.

The Twice Born is another fun faction that can be a bit of a pain in the butt for PCs. They do not like the idea of extinction no matter what the cause and they will revive a lost race or re introduce a species back into the world that has been extinct for millennia or longer if they can. They do not care what the result of these creatures being placed back into the world may be. I will admit that I have had druids in my own games protect species from extinction but I never took it to this extent. This can be another fun group who the players can befriend or oppose.

The Twilight Empire is a planar spanning thief’s guild. They make a great hidden adversary for they hold grudges, are very secretive, and the players can run into them many times without realizing the connection. One interesting thing is they do not kill for money, a nice yet simple touch to this organization. They will kill to get a job done or to get rid of someone in their way; but do not kill for hire. There is also a really cool idea behind the guild and one that is so secretive, I dare not even print it here. The Twilight Empire is surely reading even this.

The Vault of Souls is another fun organization that the players can be great friends with and then become their worst enemies very easily. They believe in the sanctity of death. They are a great fighter of the undead. But they also hunto down those that have escaped death and been resurrected. There is actually a very similar group in Touched by the Gods and combining both of them into one faction should be highly beneficial.

The Wild Hunt is another good faction that can make for some very interesting encounters. They are hunters and they will hunt anything and anybody. They are great explorers and for the right price will assist in the hinting of anything. They are the smallest faction but can really be encountered anywhere at any time making them very versatile and easy to use.

The twelve factions here are very well described and should be easy to use. They can serve as the major backdrop and plot of a campaign or just an interesting side trek for a party to discover. There are many good plot ideas that a DM can make use of as all the planar organizations have long reaching goals and very ambitious means to get them accomplished.

 

[Mouseferatu]

I very much appreciate your thoughts. I, too, vastly prefer products that inspire me with their ideas, to those that only present mechanics. I'm delighted that you felt Planar Factions did so for you.

In retrospect, I should have included specific definitions for the numbers I was using when describing organization sizes. I'll see about putting something like that together and throwing it up on my web site.

And you're not the first person to comment that the Gur-Tannan maybe shouldn't be Chaotic Evil, so I have to conclude I simply made a mistake on that one. The problem, of course, is that they're very organized as a unit, but very chaotic and violent individually. Perhaps they'd have been better described as a Lawful organization with many Chaotic members...

I'm not certain exactly how many PDFs I'll be doing for Ronin Arts--I have to work them in between larger contracts, and I just got my second WotC gig --but I can promise you I will be doing more. I hope you'll look at them as well, when they become available.

 

[cats_claw]

I had this in my wish list at RPGNow.com. It looks like I'll buy it tonight.

catsclaw

 

[JoeGKushner]

Planar Factions

Planar Factions is written by Ari Marmell and for sale by Ronin Arts. Clocking in at 128 black and white pages, Planar Factions is one of the longest PDF files I’ve seen that contains no art.

The internal layout is a simple two column thing with no borders with good use of white space to save the user’s eyes. The book could’ve probably been cut down in size a bit with a smaller margin and font, but to be honest, I preferred it this way as it made reading the book easier than struggling with tightly packed text.

Planar Factions includes a dozen factions whose origins may not start as in a planar fashion, but whose activities take them across many areas. When I first heard about this, I wondered what crossover there’d be with Phil’s own Dozen Demi-Planes and I’m sad to say, that despite some potential good fits, none of them are worked into the book.

That’s okay though. The book stands on its own.

Planar Factions starts off with the name, a quick theme, a paragraph of idea material, and attributes. The attributes are similar to a town stat block and include the following: Size, Alignment and Purpose, Approximate Class Breakdown, Resources, Central Headquarters, and Known Enemies. Longer sections with more details include: A General Overview, A Brief History of, Inside the, and other bits. Sometimes these other bits are spells, sometimes NPCs, sometimes a PrC.

Instead of spewing out a breakdown of all the guilds, I’ll hit a few I liked. I’ll start with the first one, The Eternal Flame. See, I like this one because it’s really sneaky. It’s a organization focused on doing good and bringing justice to where ever they go, but at it’s heart, it’s an evil organization. It’s a set up by the devil known as Moloch that has a few neat angles going for it.

See, they start off small, wiping out monsters and other outside obvious threats. They then work on doing good deeds for the communities, including getting rid of cults and corrupt leaders, earning the public’s trust. Now many of the people who work for the organization are good, but the closer you get to the center, the more questionable things become and the more efforts are put into protecting those hidden truths. For example, there’s a new spell that the higher ranking officials cast on priests to insure that those priests, even if they commit acts that are questionable by the faith, still receive spells, but only this time, they’re receiving them from Moloch, or at the GM’s option, some other entity allied with Moloch.

This is a great way of working around the whole “Gods are Real” thing that plagues many core D&D settings but wouldn’t be as necessary in others like Iron Kingdoms, Ravenloft or Eberron.

Because of it’s nature, the GM can have a lot of fun with any paladins in his player’s group. I know that some paladin PrCs already push this concept a bit like the Shadowborn Inquisitor from the Complete Adventurer. I’ve also seen many stories where someone thinks that they’re working for the greater good, all the while continuing to compromise their own believes so it is something I could easily role play as a GM.

The problems with the Planar Factions though, show through even in one of my favorite ones. See, because it’s just all text, there are no maps. There are no guild symbols. There is some good solid information to work on, but no adventure seeds. IN this case, when the NPC’s are detailed, apparently none of them have eye color, which is okay as that’s something easy to skip, but what’s worse, is that they have no combat tactics. Why is that bad? Well for me, if someone is going to stat up an NPC, combat and tactics are good things to have because chances are, the entity was written up to be used.

Another favorite organization is the Gur-Tannan. If you’re ever wanted a real reason to use Malhavoc’s Requiem for A God, they’re perfect. See in one plane, the foul deity known as Gur-Tanna overcame his entire pantheon and now goes to alternative prime planes and wipes out the gods of those worlds. Those worlds that he cannot conquer, he destroys with a world crushing engine crafted from the energies of a dead god native to that plane.

I didn’t love everything though. For example, the idea behind the Midnight Dawn isn’t new. It’s good people using necromantic energies, specifically the undead, to fight evil. While I wouldn’t say that the Secret College of Necromancy was filled with heroes, I would say that Hollowfaust for the Scarred Lands, had it’s share of heroes and took a lot of the piss out of being the ‘evil’ necromancer.

Similarly, Wizards of the Coast had a series in the Forgotten Realms that dealt with all of the evil undersea races taking the fight to the surface world. While the Poison Tide isn’t exactly that, it is the first thing I thought of. Useful for someone whose using a lot of water based adventures but by itself, of limited use.

The Mythmakers, while useful, would probably see limited use in most games. This organization makes heroes out of anyone whose got the money to pay their fines. Useful for building something up in the background perhaps but in actual game play? Not saying I can’t see a player actually hiring this organization, but it’s not my play style.

Same issue I have with the Obsidian League. These are merchants who’ve mastered planar travel and due to that, can get the best prices on almost anything and can make huge profits. To me, economics are broke in D&D so having an organization that actively takes advantage of that fault isn’t something I can shout about because it doesn’t do anything in terms of providing any rules for handling trades. What’s worse, there’s another organization, The Silent Hand and the Risen Legion, that probably should be behind the Obsidian League due to it’s own power level.

Same thing for the Vault of Souls. Here we have an organization looking to not only wipe out the undead, but also anyone whose been raised or resurrected. I first recall this idea in Atlas Games Touched by the Gods sourcebook. Now that’s a good thing too though as it’s not a really touched on idea, but it’s not one I’m impressed by. Good for those GMs looking for a way to counter balance how easy it is to come back from the dead in 3rd ed though.

Now for the Silent Hand, they’re ruled by a very ancient race, the Founders, that hail from a dead world and seek to prepare for the end times by recruiting and training the most talented and powerful warriors of the multi-verse. Of course, there’s no saying no to these guys and they use a wide variety of magics to insure that once you’ve been hen pecked, that you stay in the Risen Legion.

The thing I like about this organization, is that it’s similar to well, the real world. The soldiers are there to do a job but in many ways, their leaders, the Silent Hand, is becoming too bureaucratic for it’s own good and may even lose sight of it’s original goals and become nothing more than another group like the Obsidian League, but since they have their own legion and every soldier’s above 10th level, they’d probably wipe them out, which is why in my mind, they’ve already taken control.

But that’s the nice thing about the book. Because there are twelve organizations, each reader may have their own favorites. My comparission to Touched by the Gods by Atlas is a good thing as the book is still in use in my game and the ideas are still sound.

The lack of any art hurts the product. At minimum, each organization should at least have an illustrated symbol. Better yet, each should have a guild hall or at least a popular location illustrated.

The nice thing about the organizations though is that despite their Planar reach, the GM doesn’t have to use them as such. Take the Twilight Empire, a collection of some of the best thieves in the multiverse. Nothing prevents the GM from just using them as a large thieves guild that has branches in almost every city and every place that the player’s go. For those who are running a Planar campaign though, many of them are perfect and can easily be inserted into a Planescape game or one using the Nexus.

Those looking for more options for their games, for allies or enemies for the players, should get this book.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Hey, Joe. Glad you liked the product, overall.

Just some background on the project you might find interesting. It actually wasn't originally written for Ronin Arts. I wrote the first draft a few years ago, under contract for a small D20 company that went belly-up before either payment or publication. I've had it since then, occasionally going back and making changes (and updating to 3.5), until I found a new home for it.

You're right that, in retrospect, tactics might have been a good idea for the NPCs. I'll certainly keep that in mind if/when I do a similar project, should space allow.