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 :
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.
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!