Rota Fortunae Retrospective (Handling Active Faction Sandboxes)

Before entering the agonizing labyrinth and struggling forever I ran Rota Fortunae, an 11-session superhero game in the Las Vegas suburb of Considerata. There isn't much retrospecting to do - Rota Fortunae didn't have a long list of campaign goals, it was just "ha, Go Away was pretty fun. Let's do Go Away again." 

There is one thing, though - unlike Go Away (which lived in a dissociated cloud of Obsidian pages because I wanted to try Obsidian (I don't find any benefit from Obsidian)) Rota Fortunae was safely contained in its "Whole Prep Document", a spreadsheet. This was another attempt to figure out a simple way to structure active faction sandboxes (after Go Away, which had basically no structure, and Owe My Soul to the Company Store, which was written for other people to use and thus looked nothing like personal prep).

 

The core of the spreadsheet that handled faction moves.

The generic faction system I was taught to use focuses, roughly, on what factions have, what they want, and what their problems are (look at Elmcat's excellent writeups of the Dolmenwood factions for an example of this). From there, the GM is expected to determine the factions' actions. In Rota Fortunae, the factions were instead ticking clocks to their supervillain(ish) schemes. Each downtime turn (after the end of an adventure) I threw 2d4 on the faction table and had those two make their next move.

The factions were:

• Pawns, power-armored supersoldier monarchs from the narrowly-avoided Bleak Future. There used to be a supervillain, Spider Eater - little street-level moron, shot Rays at people out of his hands. In the future he became much more powerful somehow, ruled the world with an iron fist, and then had a change of heart, built a time machine, and blasted his past self to death with Rays in broad daylight. The good future one, "Spider Eater II", is still, somehow, around. The Pawns ruled continents in the Bleak Future of the evil Spider Eater, and hope to bring him back from the dead, kill his future self, and set the timeline back on that path.
• Working Group TYPHON, a US government agency building a targeted chemical weapon to introduce into the water supply to tamp down water theft in the drought-stricken Southwest. (There was also Working Group RADIOSONDE, who was attempting to divine future technology from their communications with the Bleak Future, but they don't count as a faction because they just sat at the bottom of an evil lab.)
• The Mob, who are the Mob. At the start of the campaign there were only like 10 of them left, due to their prior conflict with...
• Hermes Trismegistus, self-professed "yes actually that Hermes Trismegistus", thousands-of-years-old divine alchemist. Threw the Mob out of Las Vegas to rule the city as Magister Ludi for some esoteric wizard reason until the Army got him to go home into his platinum-iridium palace in the old nuclear test site.

Hermes's events track is blank because I never actually figured out what to put there, never rolled for Hermes to move, and then suddenly rolled two 4s (I also never had a policy for what happens if you roll doubles) and decided "welp, I guess he's trying to take over Las Vegas again" and crashed him into the Mob.  

This structure worked! Superhero stuff is a naturally more reactive medium (the NPCs act and the PCs respond), so the players weren't bothered by every session being a couple new disastrous events. I would say that I ran Rota Fortunae with a lot of improv - things to keep in mind are:

1. Each faction should have an associated base or something for the players to break into. I built these as I needed them, so the only one I have is Working Group TYPHON's. I roughly, kind of, used Marcia B.'s bite-sized dungeons, ish.
2. Each one of those rolled events is An Adventure for the players to involve themselves with - when the Pawns rolled "steal Spider Eater's body" the PCs got a job offer to deliver Spider Eater's body to a concrete pit in the middle of the desert. Roll the events secretly at the end of a session so you have time to prep those adventures.
3. When something Happens it might change those tracks - when the PCs slammed a minigun-armed SUV through the TYPHON lab, their next move became "put out a doctored video of the PCs slamming a minigun-armed SUV through the local hospital", and when Hermes Trismegistus woke up it turned to "dose him with the secret assassination gun that shoots slivers of frozen poison".
4. You might actually want a plan for rolling doubles because I didn't have one. Two actions at once? A special move? An attack on another faction? 

Around the core were some supplementary things - to the right was a list of statblocks for local capes, sorted by the Σ-ratings deus ex parabola uses. At the start of the campaign this was 6 at 1Σ (matched to player characters), 4 at 2Σ, 2 at 3Σ, and Hermes Trimegistus, whose power was "instantly turn any material in his line of sight into any other material" and who nobody wanted to insult by ranking. These were all public figures - people like "No Time", the mind-controlled super-assassin TYPHON had, didn't live on the list because I came up with them after writing the list and forgot to ever update the list.

Below was a random minor events generator for "Son of Cancer is threatening to crush the Considerata Nuclear Test Range & Archaeological Museum with his 'unearthly capacities'" stuff. This got basically no use at all - with two major events going off every session, the PCs tended to ignore the Considerata Nuclear Test Range & Archaeological Museum. You could slow down the speed of major events, or you could just ditch the minor events generator - I'm not sure which would be better. 

The minor events generator did include a table of "where are you fighting", divided by neighborhood - this is worth keeping to add some tactical options. Our last fight and eventual TPK was held in Summerlin, the cul-de-sac suburbs, where the PCs tried to outrun a rocket-jumping mech as it obliterated family homes. Looked a lot different than the fight with the Pawns in the cramped vertical alleyway, or the fight with the Pawns on the open highway, or the fight with the Pawns in one of the PCs' apartments (I rolled Pawns a lot).

 

Next time I run one of these I'm going to keep the same structure - I haven't found any striking flaws with it yet, and it's convenient to run one of these games when you know what you need is "plug in 4 moves for each faction, write 12-ish capes, come up with a couple places". Nice low-stress gaming.

I'll probably keep the same rules, too - the G20-derived Go Away player doc is here, and for Rota Fortunae I added a couple changes to make high stat bonuses better (attacks crit on any roll of 20+ instead of only natural 20s, and if you rolled more than 20 on your initiative you took a turn at init 20 and a turn at the remainder). I do need to rewrite them, though; the downtime procedure, what powers look like, those Rota Fortunae changes, and a couple other rules bits live in the collective knowledge of the players instead of on the actual page.

Or deus ex parabola will finish his superhero rules PDF and I'll just start using that instead. Who knows.