Sleeper's Artifice

The Sleeper’s Ledgers · No. 4

The Faction Ledger

Up to six factions each take a turn between sessions, so the world has moved a little by the time the table sits back down.

Printable PDF · instant download from Etsy

Cover of The Faction Ledger: six rival emissaries moving tokens across a city map on a round table, each lit by their own banner's color

Three of the book’s 9 pages. The rest is in the PDF.

Run Six Factions Between Sessions

If a guild takes the party's money in session two, it ought to have spent it by session five, and the party ought to be able to find out on what. The Faction Ledger keeps up to six groups like that moving.

Between sessions you pull out the Turn sheet and move each active faction once. For all six that's about ten minutes, and by the next game the board has shifted. It runs under any system. The Villain Ledger covers the single enemy sitting above all of them, and the Party Ledger keeps the party's own records.

Every faction gets a page for who speaks for it, who does the actual work, what it wants this season and what it won't say out loud. The Web is a six-by-six grid with one word in each cell, read from row to column, so two factions can feel differently about each other. That gap is usually where a plot starts. On the Turn, each active faction rolls once, and every move leaves something behind for the party to notice. Standing is six ladders running from Sworn down to Hunted, tracking where the party sits with each faction based on what they actually did.

Two d66 tables drive it. Moves Between Sessions has 36 things a faction does while the party is looking elsewhere. The Price of Their Help has 36 things a faction asks for when the party comes calling, and Standing tilts that roll, so warm factions ask for errands and cold ones ask for oaths. One entry as printed:

36. The bribe that worked. A person the party trusted took money this week and gave something for it. What they gave was small. It was a test.

WHAT'S INSIDE

  • 4 campaign sheets: the Faction Page, the Web, the Turn, and Standing.
  • 72 d66 entries, 36 between-session moves and 36 prices of help.
  • A turn of one roll per faction, with a worked example, about ten minutes for a full board of six.
  • Bookmarked PDFs with no lock on them. System-agnostic. No rules text.

THE FILES

  • SA-Faction-Ledger-Screen.pdf (the Moonvellum screen edition)
  • SA-Faction-Ledger-Print.pdf (plain white, printer-friendly)
  • SA-Faction-Ledger-Tables.txt (all 72 entries as plain text for VTT decks and house tools)

We'll Pick Up Next Week, the free letter: sleepersartifice.substack.com

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