The Island - Playing with Fate - Faction Affiliation Part One

Well, I'm afraid today's post may not end up with anything solid in regards to the topic. I'm mostly going to just freeflow thoughts on the topic as they come to me. I suppose that it's possible that by the end of this I'll have laid out how the Franchise Affilition mechanic is going to work, but I'm not holding my breath. Anyway, without further ado, here goes!

Faction Affiliations
The Island isn't just filled with wildlife. It has had hundreds of years for the various convicts to form their own societies, stake their own claims to parts of the island. If a group is going to survive in the longterm, they are going to have to make some sort of alliances somewhere along the way, at least while it's convenient. Unfortunately, there are limited supplies for an always-growing population. This leads to strive amongst the various subcultures of the island. With this in mind, I am creating a new mechanic for the game called the Faction Affiliation System.

Each faction upon the island will be created as part of the collaborative world-building session. In the final product I will be including some of the bigger players on the island, although specific GMs can use or not use any particular faction as they desire. Each faction is going to be an entity in its own right. Every faction will have a name, an Aspect and skills. In addition, I am thinking of including Aspects and/or Stunts that are specific to each faction that characters with a certain level of Faction Affiliation can make use of.

Factions
Each faction in the game will made up of the following (for sure):
Name:
Aspect
Emotional Offense
Mental Offense
Physical Offense
Social Offense
Emotional Defense
Mental Defense
Physical Defense
Social Defense
Trade (specific profession)

When designing a faction, my first instinct is to have the group allot 20 levels amongst all nine of the skills listed, with any given skill maxing out (initially) at +4 (Great). If split evenly, that would give each skill a rating of +2 (Fair) with two skills a rating of +3 (Good).

I'm also planning on including levels in the factions with various stunts/aspects/benefits for characters that have an equal lefel in their Faction Affiliation Rating. I'm not sure specifically what they are yet, but I'll have more to talk about tomorrow.

The last thing I want to mention in this post is that I am going to adapt the Franchise Mechanics from Time Heroes of Fate to work with the Island, with some additions to add more depth to the system and to give some control to the players (and also potentially pit them against each other in secret). Come back tomorrow and I'll have more in detail. It seems to me that as I am detailing this from the top of my head, I'm quite liking the route it is going. I have a pretty good idea of where I'll be going with tomorrow's post.

Stay tuned and thanks for following along!