Adapting Threats, Institutions and Factions
Prepare adversaries, creatures, moon-affected beings, navies, churches, and networks as pressure sources, not stat blocks.
Use this page when
- You are preparing an adversary, creature, or moon-affected being.
- You need a Fortera anomaly or Éterlumin hazard that is not a stat block.
- You are describing a navy, church, company, or criminal network.
- You want your factions to act between sessions instead of waiting to be visited.
Threats and factions should not be defined only by combat statistics. Combat is one possible interaction with them, and often not the most interesting one. Build the fiction first, then let the target system express it however it can.
The threat questionnaire
Every threat entry, whether one paragraph or several pages, should answer these seven questions.
- 1.What does it want?
- 2.What can it do?
- 3.What makes it dangerous?
- 4.What pressure does it create?
- 5.What warning signs appear first?
- 6.What happens if nobody intervenes?
- 7.What changes if it is defeated, exposed, negotiated with, or ignored?
Types of threat covered
- Individual adversaries
- Creatures
- Moon-affected beings
- Fortera anomalies
- Military units
- Naval forces
- Churches
- Governments
- Trading companies
- Intelligence networks
- Criminal organisations
- Revolutionary movements
For creatures, moon-affected beings, and Fortera anomalies, remember that they are natural phenomena of Aeon: strange, dangerous, and not yet fully understood. See the next chapter for the canon framing.
Faction template
Use the same nine fields for every institution: navies, churches, governments, trading companies, intelligence networks, criminal organisations, and revolutionary movements. Consistency lets you play factions against each other later.
- Reach
- How far its arm extends across a city, coast, or ocean.
- Resources
- What it has to spend, materially, socially, or politically.
- Authority
- Who obeys it, and under what pretext of legitimacy.
- Internal divisions
- The rivals, factions, or reformers who could split it under pressure.
- Current objective
- The single goal driving its actions this season.
- Methods
- How it prefers to act: paperwork, violence, favours, silence.
- Public reputation
- What common people believe about it, true or not.
- Hidden vulnerability
- The pressure point that would hurt it if exposed or exploited.
- Escalation path
- What it does when frustrated, threatened, or humiliated.
Short example: a coastal customs office
Reach: one province of harbour and coast. Resources: patrol cutters, seals, and a warehouse of confiscated cargo. Authority: royal licence, enforced through the local garrison. Internal divisions: the veteran inspectors distrust the new political appointees. Current objective: to make a quota of seizures before the season audit. Methods: paperwork first, cutter and boarding second, quiet arrangements last. Public reputation: honest but slow. Hidden vulnerability: the head inspector owes a shipping house a debt nobody has called in. Escalation path: if pressured, invites naval support and treats every crew as suspects.
Before you finish
- Have you answered all seven threat questions?
- Is the pressure this threat creates distinct from your other threats?
- Does the faction have a current objective and an escalation path?
- Is there a hidden vulnerability the players can find with work?
- Have you avoided reducing anything meaningful to a single stat line?