The Traveler’s Guide to Factions : A Review

Screenshot of the cover page of Traveler’s Guide to Factions, taken from promo video.

On a Sunday morning, I was doing my own things on X-Twitter app making myself known doing #SelfPromoSaturday (even though it wasn’t Saturday anymore over here in Indonesia). I put my self promo for a review I did on this blog on a space provided by The Tabletop Journeys Podcast and when I got back to my phone, I saw this :

Tweet from Tabletop Journeys Podcast

They want to me to review their book? MY review? To be honest I was happy and perplexed at the same time. Should I take it? Am I qualify for it? I was thinking for about half an hour on whether I should take this offer or not. But in the end I thought to myself, “I want to make this type of content for this blog in the future and this could be a priceless experience for me”, so I spent another half an hour composing a reply for them. Long story short, they replied with their materials and I started doing my thing and listened to their podcast episode about the Kickstarter project and here’s my review!

Overview of the Project

The Traveler’s Guide to Factions is new Kickstarter project from The Tabletop Journey Podcast for a setting supplement book written by them. The team consist of the main hosts of the podcast : A. Lewanika Miller, Glen Myers, Jr. , and Josh Newton, and many more people involved in the project.

This is not their first foray into book and supplement writing. They’ve written some awesome book to enrich your world like Heroic Subclasses of the Multiverse, Traveler’s Guide to Multiverse and others that you can check here!

The Kickstarter campaign for Traveler’s Guide to Factions launched on September 28, 2023 which you can check for yourself right away. This supplement offers another depth to your world building for your campaign by adding factions and their intricacies like history, politics, relationships, etc. into it. They brought all the tools to make your next role LEGENDARY.

There are 9 factions available, fully designed and deep in lore. To explain it in their own words, “Each faction is going to have lore detailing the inception, driving goals, and key players involved. You will learn how the faction has been shaped throughout time so that you can drop them into any campaign. Each faction will include tips for making them playable characters, patrons for your party, allies that they meet along the way, or foes hellbent on your party’s destruction. Each faction will also come with tiered stat blocks based on the Fifth Edition SRD by Wizards of the Coast.”

While they include stat blocks that compatible with Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, in essence, it is designed to be system agnostic. These factions are portable and plug-and-play, meaning you can easily customize and integrate parts or all of the faction/s in any setting regardless of campaign, time-period, genres and RPG systems : high fantasy, low fantasy, medieval, renaissance, cyberpunk, space opera, you name it! More contents will be added as stretch goals, which we’ll touch upon later.

If you visit their Kickstarter page, you’ll find a promotional video giving brief description of the 9 factions. They also talk about them a bit more depth on their podcast. You can check for yourself later but here’s a super brief summary of them :

• The Commonwealth Records : A faction of bards, scholars, and historians dedicated to exploring, recording and preserving the music and folklore of every culture they encounter.
• The Soul Society : The members of this faction is akin to archeologist who seek and preserve ancient text and artifacts of bygone era, and protect them from the wrong hands.
• The Emberweavers : A group of machinist, alchemist, physicist, and engineers (basically technomages) specialized in creating large and independent automatons.
• The Hands of Providence : A conclave of aasimar, soothe sayers, and other seers that share a common vision for the future or serve a patron whose future they believe in, making sure their desired future unfolds by any means necessary.
• The Thundersworn : a mysterious band of heroes who goes across the lands providing help, security and guidance to sould who need it without requiring any payments.
• The order of the Ivory Compass : Rise the anchor! Hoist the sail! This factions are a collection of buccaneers, privateers and mariners who begins as protectors and enforcers of merchant sea lanes throughout the known world.
• The Guardians of the Grave : A cadre of viciously dedicated undead hunters that seek out and destroy undeath in all of it’s form, even those who’ve been magically revived or resurrected as well.
• The Outriders League : Remnants of a fallen empire, military force that lives on in the form of mercenary companies for hire, dealing with scouting, pathfinding, trailblazing and espionage.
• The Warp and Weft : A multiverse-spanning organization of spies and fixers run by an incredibly ancient hag, some say the first hag, known only as Gran-Gran. They’re behind 90% of the espionage organization across the multiverse, though most of them don’t know who they really work for.

“Each Faction comes with a custom sigil from one of our incredibly talented artists”, The Tabletop Journeys Podcast

Talk about badges, they also include beautiful and fascinating artworks to be spread on the books, hand drawn by talented artist.

Like mentioned before, all 9 factions are portable and plug-and-play into your campaign. But if you think those 9 don’t really fit to your setting, don’t worry! The team dedicated a whole chapter focusing on how to build and create a faction. They provide some tools to help you : a template that offers a coherent structure to your faction lore, and sets of questions and sub-questions / prompts to guide you on the details. They also plan to add more useful tools like their experience and thought process when building theirs, a reading list of research they do ahead of time, and possibly some random tables to spice things up.

As mentioned above, the Kickstarter launched at September 28, 2023 with a goal of $3000 (by the time this review is written they have reached 50% of their goal!). The book will be distributed in a 120 page digital PDF format and this time they will also produce physical books with hardcover! For the details of rewards you’ll get if you pledge to back them and the stretch goals, I recommend you check out their Kickstarter page (and pledge too!). Here some overview of the stretch goals :

• Characters potrait
• Backgrounds and feats
• Lineages and heritages
• Adventure starters, and
• Custom maps

We’re hoping that they can achieve all of the stretch goals so this book can reach its full potential.

Thoughts and Opinions

This is some of the first thought I had when I read the provided materials.

“I can use this for my next solo actual play!”. My main foray in the TTRPG hobby is to record solo RPG plays on my YouTube channel. One game that I have been wanting to play is a rules-lite vampire solo RPG inspired by Ironsworn and Vampire : The Masquerade called Elegy, available here. One of the espionage related faction (The Weft or The League) could be integrated into the world in addition to the available faction on the default setting. I’m eager to learn about these factions once the book is out and you too can do the same if you pledge to back the project up on Kickstarter.

“Crossovers between the factions will be interesting”. Another thing I noticed when I listened to their podcast episode is there are some overlapping traits on some of these factions. For example, I mentioned both The Warp and The Weft and The Outriders League has espionage trait, just one is more focused than the others. And The Commonwealth Record and The Soul Society are both a collections of smart people. I can’t help but imagine the relationships, dynamics and politics between factions the the plot hooks, scenarios and shenanigans that could come out of it. How fascinating!

Out of curiosity I contacted the team with Xwitter’s DM asking whether the overlaps were intentional or not.

“There are some similarities just by nature, but when you peel back the covers they are all distinct”. “I wouldn’t necessarily say it was intentional… but it also wasn’t avoided, if that makes any sense. I think it more comes down to the fact that we like to tell certain types of stories, and we are inspired by specific things”, that is the answers they gave me.

They also mentioned that if they can reach the Adventure Starter tier stretch goal it could open a lot of cross-faction interest. I always love my crossovers in media and the prospect of making my own is very appealing.

Overall, I can see a lot of potential in this project. We’re hoping that the team could reach the goal and possibly all the stretch goal set by them. I can’t wait to enter these factions and utilize them for our world!

FPS One Page Solo RPG : Review

After I started with recording Ironsworn and find 6X6 Tales, I threw myself into the rabbit hole of affordable solo RPG on Itch.io with free / Pay What You Want (PWYW) tags. In my journey I found many interesting systems that I downloaded, both rule-lite and full game, but this one immediately catch my attention.

FPS, a one page solo RPG

FPS A One Page Solo RPG is, like it said, a solo RPG module with one page ruleset created by Logen Nein, a TTRPG content creator who mainly make maps for any systems and adventures for many titles like Dragonbane and CY_BORG among others. He’s also making his own systems, mostly one page / rule-lite ones.

FPS was created for his participation in the One Page RPG Jam 2022. And as I’m sure you notice, it doesn’t stand for First Person Shooter, but rather shortened for the main 3 stats on the game which is Fight, Persuade and Survival. The game itself currently has one page ruleset and another page for a world setting called The Irradiated Wasteland, more settings to come in the future, or you can use it as a guideline to make your own setting.

A snippet of the available setting

To play this game you’ll need a handful of d6 dice, a deck of standard playing card Joker included, and pen and paper to track your progress and draw map (square or hex).

This is a d6 dice pool system, which means you roll many d6s and count the successes to pass an encounter. The cards then divided into some smaller decks for deciding encounters, tracking loots and character progression. Each encounter will require you to succeed challenges on Fight, Persuade or Survival depending on the encounter (sometimes the encounters give you choice of what stat you want to roll). Each stat have difficulty represented by a number of checkboxes called Hit Box, the more it has the more difficult it is.

This is also a roll-under system which means to succeed you must roll equal or under your stat. For example if you have 3 on Fight, to pass a Fight challenges with 3 Hit Boxes you need at least 3 dice with result of 3 or under.

A snippet from the main page

On character creation you roll a d6 for each stats of Fight, Persuade and Survival. On a 6, define a Knack which usually a positive traits of your character that could help with challenges by adding an additional Luck die, then roll again until you get 1-5.

Luck, which starts and maxed at 10, is the number of d6s you roll to face a challenge. It represent you stamina and health so if it goes to 0, you die. You roll all your luck dice and discard all failures (results more than your stat) for each encounter. If you fail to check all of the Hit Boxes, roll again the rest of your dice until you succeed or run out of dice and die. Knacks and Loots add into the dice pool to increase your chance of success. And you can also restore your luck by resting, acquiring loots or passing encounters.

And finally Grit, which starts at 0, is your “EXP” that you can spend to your benefit like restoring Luck or adding stat (max stat is 5). You get Grit mostly by passing encounters, and use it while resting.

At the beginning of the campaign you roll for a mission or two on the mission table then add Joker(s) into the encounter deck in corespondent to the number of mission you’ve taken. Then you roll on the starting point table and go from there.

Encounters are divided into 2 categories : Obstacles, which is caused by nature like sinkhole, ash storm or hunger, and Antagonist instigated by creatures like rad ghasts, mad dogs or himan mercenaries. All of the encounter cards + the Joker that represents the mission objectieves are combined into one deck which then shuffled and drawn at random. When you draw a Joker, your mission is complete. For more than one missions add corresponding number of Joker card. When a deck is empty, immediately reshuffle the deck and you can continue to draw from it.

The gameplay is done in turns. Each turn is a day spent exploring an area represented by a square / hex. When you explore a new area you roll on the terrain table to decide what encounter you get, then draw on the encounter deck if you got one. There is a discussion about going back to a previous area but I guess you can decide for yourself what to do in that situation (it’s your own game after all). You can also spent a day staying in the area and resting, which you’ll need to do a lot. And again, when you draw a Joker, you complete the mission.

The rules are simple and concise, although there were some unclear thing (at least for me) like the condition for success and failure, and defining Knack, that I had to ask Logen himself for clarity (well, he only have 1 page to explain everything so it’s understandable if theres some misses, and he is a nice guy, BTW) and I’ve written my explanation above from my understanding after our conversation.

One nitpick that bothers me a little is the balance of the encounters. On the currently available setting (Irradiated Wasteland) the proportion of encounters that require you to succeed Survive challenges is way too much. Even in the Antagonist Encounters there are many encounters that gives the option of making Survive challenge instead of Fight or Persuade. This makes having high Survive the META for this setting. The author triesnto mitigate this by giving less reward if they choose Survive. I admit that more Survival is the most logical things to do in this setting but maybe some other setting can offer something more balanced. Now I’m interested to make one…

Also, for dramatic effect, when I draw Joker I don’t immediately end the game and created some “final challenges” my PC has to overcome. It felt more satisfying than just drawing Joker and end it there (except maybe if there’s multiple mission)

Final thought, this is an engaging solo RPG which light in rules but fun and challenging. It got me interested to play it on camera (which hasn’t happened yet at the time of writing this review) and I did a playtest on my own as I learn about the system. Did some journaling to add story and flavor into each encounter. I will put the replay on this blog sometime in the future.

Thank you Logen Nein for this simple yet fascinating game you’ve created. Check out his page in his itch.io page if you want to experience it for yourself.

Music Genre

What is your favorite genre of music?

I love listening to something with good meaning or good story behind it. Classical music to metal, you name it. My recent favorite is Bury The Light by Casey Edwards featuring vocalist Victor Borba. This is a theme from the game Devil May Cry 5, theme of the character Vergil.

How SamAkechi came about

What’s the story behind your nickname?

Years ago, when PlayStation 2 still the best video game console ever existed, there is this one game that I fell in love with called Onimusha : Warlords.

The cover of Onimusha : Warlords for PlayStation 2

The main character was Samanosuke Akechi, and his face was traced from a real life Japanese actor, Takeshi Kaneshiro.

The game tell a story about a Samurai given a magical gauntlet by the Oni gods to become Onimusha (Oni warrior) and fights demon. Main antagonist of this game is Nobunaga Oda, the Japanese real infamous warlord who almost unite Japan in Sengoku Period.

Samanosuke quickly become my favorite character and the power of Onimusha become my favorite power. Then I started to play online game on PC (it was Ragnarok Online and O2Jam at that time) and when they asked to create character and give it a name I was about to give it Samanosuke but somebody already took it so SamAkechi it is. And it stuck until I grew up.

I also have a follow-up to that name. SamAkechi d’WongJowo because I am a Javanese.

Being Becisive in Your Table

What could you let go of, for the sake of harmony?

I read and heard a lot of TTRPG “horror” story, not a ghost, demon or anything but more like tale of disgrace from bad GMs, bad players, dan experiences and many more. And in some of them there are stories about “that” kind of player who makes everyone on the table uncomfortable but for one reason or another they won’t let that person go from their table.

This is just my opinion, but if it was me, even though I feel bad, I have to at least have a talk. Like staying near smoke tooling is not good for our lungs, you need to do something about the bad environment around you, for your mental health. At least if I have the talk I will know their sode of the story and discuss how he wanna play and stay and how far do they want to adjust with the rest of the players.

But that is just my thoughts, I have never encountered someone like that yet, mostly because I played solo hahaha.

White eraser

This is a used eraser, and it’s white. Why? Coz I just used it recently. To erase an entire episode of Ironsworn Sheila I did last night. Not because of bad rolls (there’s barely any rolls) but I’m not happy with where it goes and how I presented the episode. And coming up with plot on the spot is hard, even though I managed to think of some branching plot after that… Anyway, back to the drawing board! #ttrpg #ironsworn #dnd #solo

Japan

Describe your most memorable vacation.

Osaka Castle Japan

Visiting Japan right before my marriage is gonna be the one I won’t forget for my lifetime, except maybe if I go there again (lol). Together with my younger brother and his friends, I treated this trip as my bachelor party.

We spent 5 days in Japan, visiting Asakusa, Akihabara, Shibuya, Universal Studios Japan, Osaka Castle, Fuji Q in Kawaguchi Lake, before going back to Asakusa for our free day.

It was super tiring, but a worthwhile trip. I can’t wait to go back there, this time with my family.

The Joy of becoming a Game Master

On what subject(s) are you an authority?

The highest authority on a TTRPG session is the Game Master (GM). All ruling eventually will follow the GM’s decisions. And I find it fun to give players something to entertain them. Here’s an example of my experience:

GM (me) : “So you want to survey the palace, what will you do?”

Rogue (my friend) : “I use my skill to disguise myself”

GM : (expecting him to disguise as a soldier, I boldly ask) “Sure, what do you want to disguise yourself as?”

Rogue : “… An apprentice chef!”

Other players: “Ooh, nice2”

GM : (taken aback a bit) “Oo…kay. Sure why not. So what do you do?”

Rogue: “I walk to the entrance and talk to the guards, umm, excuse me. I am an apprentice chef for this palace. I need to go and meet my master for dinner soon”.

GM : “The guards looks at each other and talk among themselves, do our chefs have apprenticeship? Yes we have… After a while they turn back to you and ask : who’s apprentice are you?”

Rogue : “Oh, what? Umm.. he-his name is, umm, Jay… Yes Chef Jay.”

GM : *smirk* “Roll me deception”

Rogue : “Oh crap” *rolling* “Damn, failed” *everyone laughing*

GM : “The guards checked their ledger for that name… And they say to you there’s no Jay, but there’s James”

Rogue : “Oh yeah, it’s James! Yeah it’s him!”

GM : “Unfortunately Chef James don’t have any apprentice. Now who are you again?”

Rogue : “Uh… I… Umm… Oh, ouch! My stomach! Sorry, gotta go! Then I run away from them and use stealth”

GM : “Hey! Come back here! They shouted and chase but you’re already gone… Well done, you survived that”

I love being a GM

What is Considered Romantic?

What’s your definition of romantic?

To be honest, I don’t know.

Well, from films, movies and social medias romantic always portrayed as being good with flir- words, jazz, fine dining, roses, slow dance, holiday to exotic locations, etc. But me and my wife find things like that to be cringy and bothersome afterwards… and expensive.

But I guess being able to cuddle and kiss my wife, being intimate with her after our daughter asleep is my take on romantic. It’s a moment that we can’t have everyday nowadays and I treasure each and every moment we have.

Expressing Gratitude

How do you express your gratitude?

Well, at the very least I say thank you. If needed / I want to I can bring them some gifts, or take them to lunch or dinner. And my policy if to be ready if they need my help if I can. But that thank you is a must.

“Thank you” is a powerful words, one of the 3 magic words that we need to master (the others are “please”, and “sorry”). It can make people feel appreciated even though some of them won’t show it. Always give thanks to any help you received. Appreciate them for spending their time and going out of their ways to help you reach your goals, because they won’t get their time spent on helping you back.