In the coming weeks 5 Years Left will be ending. Its been a fun and creatively rejuvenating game, but after nearly two years I’m ready to shift focus. I want to delve back into On a Red World Alone. Play a game with more substantial factions, where players have more opportunity to make world-altering plans. Before I can get things started back on mars, though, I’ve got to develop some tools for myself. Part of the reason I took a break from this game was my fatigue with trying to support a style of play I’d never experienced before. I didn’t know how to referee a satisfying domain game. Worse, I didn’t even know what it was I needed to learn, and never had the time or energy to figure it out. Now I do.

When ORWA returns, the players will be governing a major faction. Major factions can’t be challenged with pit traps or goblins. They need to be challenged by other factions. Groups with their own idea of how the dome ought to be governed, and the power to manifest that government. These other factions can’t be finite challenges the way a typical dungeon or dragon is. If a faction can be cleared in 2-4 sessions of play, then the game won’t last long. Additionally, I’d really like to introduce some new factions to the game, without abandoning the ones my older players will have gotten to know over ORWA’s previous half-decade-long run. But because this game takes place within the confined space of a city-sized bio-dome on mars, there’s not a lot of room for new factions to exist in.

These are problems that will require a variety of solutions. Some of the less interesting old factions have merged together. Other factions that the old party effectively defeated no longer hold any territory at all, and if they still exist have reorganized into religious institutions, mercenary gangs, merchant corporations, etc. Some factions are able to exist outside the dome, underground, or up in space. The least typical sort of faction, and the one I’d like to work through here, is a secret society. It solves two of my issues right off the bat: secret societies don’t openly hold territory, and so I don’t need any extra space to fit them in. They also defy being a finite challenge, since players can struggle against them without knowing who’s in charge. They don’t have anyone to negotiate with or assassinate.

On a Red World Alone has a long tradition of secret society factions. For the majority of the original campaign the players were agents of a mysterious organization known as “The Internet.” One of the culminating events of that campaign was the players destroying that organization, scattering its resources to the wind, and even hunting down the most powerful remnants of its leadership. They leveraged the tools and secrets they stole from it to build their own faction in the shadows, sharing technology and building alliances until they were powerful enough that I didn’t know how to run the game anymore. It seems fitting that secret societies remain a part of the world. Perhaps, just to give my players an eerie sense of déjà vu, some of their own agents are capable-yet-unorthodox upstarts with secret plans to overthrow their masters.

Let’s imagine a theoretical faction that definitely won’t exist in ORWA: the Cult of the Sleeping God. Their goal is to wake their lazy god up. Every faction needs a goal beyond simply seeking more power. Power-seeking is in the nature of big factions, but each has a certain form or flavor of power they value. This is a religious faction, so they’re seeking power in the form of making their god more powerful.

To awaken their god, the cult needs 3 things: cosmic smelling salts (requiring many rare, expensive, difficult-to-acquire ingredients); access to the dimension in which their god sleeps (they’ll need to learn the secret of how to get there); and to kill the traitor who put their god to sleep in the first place (one of the party’s allies!). Whenever it comes time for this faction to act, they’ll do something in pursuit of one of these things.

For any faction to work as an interesting part of the game the players must, at minimum, know the faction exists. So the Cult of the Sleeping God will have a sigil they paint or carve whenever they take action. Something to bless their efforts, and celebrate their victories. It’s not a very good way to keep a secret, but if the faction were too good at keeping secrets then I’d be the only one who knew about them. I’ve done stuff like that before, and every time it’s just me on my own doing extra work the players never see, and which doesn’t improve the play of the game.

By their very nature, secret societies should show up in places where a normal faction would not. For example, while any faction might place spies to gain information, a secret society could build an entire network within the party’s own faction. So as the party is recruiting specialists—diplomats, scientists, architects, etc.—there’s some chance they may be plants working for the Cult of the Sleeping God. Leeching the player’s resources, building back-doors into everything they do. As another example, players will make rolls occasionally to check the health of their faction. Are the needs of their citizens being met, are their supply lines secure, is there civil unrest? If something is going wrong there’s no reason the Cult of the Sleeping God couldn’t occasionally and obviously be behind it.

I haven’t fully settled on the form domain play will take yet, but part of the procedure of the “Domain Turn” is going to be a phase when a number of other factions get to make ‘moves.’ I won’t have every faction move during every session, since moves are big things that presumably took careful planning. Also it would be tedious. I’d rather players have 2-3 moves to react to during a session. The factions that move are also going to be somewhat randomized. So another way the Cult of the Sleeping God could show up where it’s not supposed to be would be to have them on the the faction table twice. One entry would be the cult acting somewhat obviously on its own behalf. Enough that the player’s information networks can confidently inform them that the cult was responsible. The other entry would call for a re-roll on the faction table, and whatever faction the dice landed on will make a move that has been influenced by members of the Cult that have infiltrated its hierarchy.

This is all very rough. Restarting ORWA is a large project, and like most large projects there’s no clear place to start. Every piece is contingent on some other piece that doesn’t yet exist. The only way to get it done is to start putting things in place, building off them, then coming back around and revising that first stuff once I’ve got a better idea of how the rest of the structure fits together. I don’t yet know exactly what the domain turn looks like, or what elements make up the player’s “domain character sheet,” but the idea of introducing a secret society appealed to me. And now I’ve got an idea about how a secret society might want to attack the party, which has forced me to think about the sorts of resources the party might have, which gives me something to tinker on next, and so on until the game is ready.