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Ravenchild
developer
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Joined:Sat Sep 04, 2010 19:21
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Re: Shadow Guild

Post by Ravenchild » Mon Dec 12, 2011 20:40

jojo wrote: The Shadow Guild could be about knowledge, secrets and fraternity. That is: the members are seeking knowledge- including arcane knowledge; they deal in secrets and are formed as a hierarchical secret society, and they hold great loyalty to their fellow members. They are sometimes perceived as the evil faction because they fund their research by plundering others, and their search for knowledge is stronger than their moral considerations (ends justify the means sort of thing). Sound good?
Sounds like the thing I tried to describe. So I'm okay with that. But I'm also okay with further discussions and refinements.
a) "tribes" is always associated by the players with something primitive. It does not correlate to the sophistication of mages, magic or anything remotley associated with a secret society like the illuminati or even a crime syndicate like cosa nostra. This reason alone makes it, I believe, necessary to depart from the tribe-idea.
I don't think that there is a real contradiction. But you are probably right that most people will indeed misunderstand the role of tribes in the Shadowguild. So we should stick to a decentralized faction, where the significant majority of members live in the cities. Exceptions to this are scholars who investigate the secrets of the world and therefore need to travel.
c) The focus on magic & mages: This is an art design decision that has to be made before it is too late. Luckily there is no rush, and the decision will be made as soon as the story is nailed. I personally never intended the Shadowguild to be caster/mage-centric. For me the mages were sparse and used to summon skeleton armies as cheap cannon fodder in conflicts. The original idea was to just put all that looked sinister and evil in the faction and also throw in the random monsters in there. All that is however hard to unify somehow and turn into a faction of anything else except chaos... lol.
Monsters could always have been casted by someone from the Shadowguild. We can explain things this way, even though we don't have many caster cards (or at least art for them at the moment). I mean: Just because we don't have enough art, we shouldn't limit our storytelling on the set of cards we actually have. Even Mtg doesn't do that when you consider the background story.
Back on topic though: What I have said all along from the start is that we should avoid creating just yet another "evil" faction that is braindead and all out evil with no real reason.
Which is definitely not the case for the current design of the Shadowguild. Or in which regard do you think the Shadowguild is too stereotypical?
We'd want to give them more character and personality than that, more likeability even though they have a _few_ skeletons and a few dark mages in their ranks. How what and where does all this fit in though?
The Shadowguild is a very tolerant society when it comes to their own members. That's why it's okay to pursue the black arts which are frowned upon elsewhere. A consequence of this is also that members of the Shadowguild can be very different.
In my opinion having just a "crime syndicate" is just not deep enough. Therefore I think that (black) mages should play a role in this faction but it doesn't need to be a prominent one.
I don't agree on x or y making a story deeper or not. Calling x mages or kings or thieves doesn't necessarily make the story richer or deeper.
True. But just a crime syndicate is also nothing deep by itself. The faction needs to be attractive to players. And I'm not sure if a crime syndicate without magic support is interesting enough. But let's see how things develop...
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