With Faction Gaming in the Empire, the author of munkipox adds another layer to the evil overlord concept introduced here on TT: attributes for the various factions.
Here’s an excerpt: “Faction attributes are rated from 1-10, and represent the resources and skills that a faction has to bring to bear on a situation. Faction attributes may change by +/- 1 from turn to turn in response to in-game events.”
All factions are ranked in six areas, including Diplomacy and Covert Operations, which sounds specific enough to be useful while remaining general enough to be simple. And just as importantly, each faction’s relationships with the other listed factions are spelled out — that’s a great idea.
The Empire in question is the one in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay’s Old World (one of my favorite RPGs), but the system itself is definitely general enough to be applicable to plenty of other games (and if you play WFRP, now you have six statted-out factions for your campaign!).
Cool implementation, secretive, anonymous munkipox author! just as when Tom ran with the idea to come up with his priority system (as seen in the free evil overlords PDF), it’s really neat to see other GMs taking this concept and running with it.
The Evil Overlords level of the game is starting to sound more and more like the PBEM version of Illuminati.
Note that I do not think that to be a bad thing.
I’m familiar with GURPS Illuminati — do you just mean playing that over email, or is there a specific Illuminati PBEM?
Interesting. Thanks for sharing that — I hadn’t heard of Flying Buffalo’s PbM Illuminati game.
Is it current? I’m surprised anyone still runs snail mail games — it seems so much more clunky than using email, blogs or forums.
Supposedly, it is current. The license with SJG expired, and Flying Buffalo (FBI) were not running it for a few years, until they were able to renegotiate the license. Yes, I said a few years. I suspect SJG was mulling an attempt at their own online Illuminati game, but SJG has had a long run of bad luck with licensing their properties for computer play. So they probably tried and failed, after which they returned to the table with FBI.
FBI appears to be moving more and more toward email for turn input, but thay do still offer snail mail games — when a turn cycle is two weeks long, you can afford to wait for the mail. All of their games are computer moderated, so the move to email turn processing only helps them, but the PBM industry was built on people in out-of-the-way places that do not have other gamers around to play games with, and may not have (reliable) internet access either.
The advantage of a two week turn cycle in Illuminati is that you have that time to plot and scheme, either alone or in communication with other players. Alliances are important, even if they are only temporary.
Good point about the scheming — I can see how having a couple of weeks would make a difference.
For the game I’m an EO in right now, we usually get a week or two. That seems to be a good timeframe.