Due to the prodigious efforts of 子奇, the complete Alexandrian Remix of Dragon Heist is now available in a Chinese translation.

I can’t read a word of it (more’s the pity!), but I am simply blown away by the stupendous effort which went into this project.

子奇 – 的龙金劫
Alexandrian Remix – Chinese Version

In Night’s Black Agents, the PCs are considered to be operating under one of three levels of funding:

• Insufficient Funds
• Steady Funds
• Excessive Funds

As described on p. 95 of the Night’s Black Agents rulebook, their level of funding determines what types of supplies they can easily obtain. (For example, agents with Steady funds can buy same-day plane reservations, while those with Insufficient funds can’t. If you’ve got Excessive funds, on the other hand, you can just charter a plane.)

If you don’t have the funds for the op you’re trying to put together, then you’ll need to figure out some way around your constrained funds. (And the game gives you plenty of tools for doing this, ranging from hitting up the black market, reaching out to friendly contacts, making it for yourself, or stealing it.) You can also, of course, try to figure out how to improve your funding, which usually means doing some sort of job.

(You can also find details on this in the Night’s Black Agents system cheat sheet.)

The great thing is that all of this encourages the players to dig in: Whether it’s stealing what they need, sourcing from a black market dealer (who may betray them to the conspiracy), or taking an iffy job that pays well enough to keep them swimming in silver bullets for a few months, all of it fuels the complexity, paranoia, and tough choices at the heart of the espionage genre.

As I’ve been running Night’s Black Agents, though, I’ve found myself wanting a little more structure for tracking and making rulings on the PCs’ current funding status. Partly for my own sake, but also because I think having some structure will help the players feel in control… which will drive further strategic decision-making and create interesting choices and dilemmas in play.

PATRONAGE

If the PCs are supported by a patron — an intelligence agency, occult billionaire, etc. — the patron will provide either Steady or Excessive funds.

This funding will only change if their patronage is endangered (e.g., their patron is killed or the PCs are blacklisted).

Note: If you don’t want to worry about fluctuating funding, just give the PCs some form of the patronage. If you don’t necessarily want it to come with a string (or even a face attached), consider some sort of trust fund. I would generally recommend having patrons offer Steady funding, thus encouraging the PCs to occasionally have to figure out how to get their hands on Excessive funding when the occasion calls for it.

STRAINED FUNDING

If the PCs are providing their own funding, then they begin each op with a Funding pool of 5 points.

Each time the PCs make a significant purchase, they have to spend one point from this pool. The GM ultimately decides what constitutes a significant purchase, but they should remember that Funds should still effortlessly cover regular expenses and typical lifestyle. (And, of course, they should try to be consistent in these rulings.)

Tip: I’ve found hotels to be a useful way to think about this. A group with Steady funds, according to the rulebook, can stay in a normal hotel. So if they want to book a four-star hotel? Or simultaneously rent rooms at multiple hotels? Those are probably significant expenses.

On the other hand, a group with Excessive funds can regularly stay in four-star hotels, so that wouldn’t be a significant expense for them. If they want to rent a $10 million mansion, on the other hand? Spend a point of Funds.

The group with Steady funds, however, couldn’t rent the $10 million mansion from Funds. (If they need such a mansion, they’ll either need to improve their funding or they’ll need to create a bespoke solution for using the mansion.)

If the group needs to make a significant purchase, but they don’t have a Funding point to spend, then the op has strained their Funds. They can continue making significant purchases, but they will begin their next operation with strained funds.

If the group has strained funds — e.g., Steady (strained) — then they begin each op with a Funding pool of only 3 points. In addition, if a group with strained funds once again needs to make a significant purchase when they don’t have a Funding point to spend, they’ve exhausted their funds and their funding level drops by one level (e.g., a group with strained Steady funds would now have Insufficient funds).

Repairing Strained Funds: If a group has strained funds, they can take action to repair it — e.g., doing a well-paid job or robbing the payroll for a black ops mercenary team. If that happens, simply remove the strained condition from their funds.

Optional Rule — Strong Funding: In addition to strained funding, you could also introduce a class of strong funding — e.g., Steady (strong). This doesn’t increase the group’s Funding pool, but if a group with strong funding strains their funding, they only lose their strong funding status. (So it gives them some protection from strained funds.)

Optional Rule — Out of Cash: There’s no funding level below Insufficient, so if a group with Insufficient (strained) funds runs out of Funding points, they can no longer make significant purchases for the remainder of the op.

Note: This can easily doom an op. They can’t travel, get a car, or even rent a hotel room. In some campaigns, that can easily be a feature (and strongly motivate them to solve the problem). But if that doesn’t sound interesting, just don’t use this optional rule. Insufficient funds are punishing enough all by themselves.

Optional Rule – Insufficient Funding Crisis: Alternatively, if a group with Insufficient (strained) funds strains their funding again, this will trigger a funding crisis: Their car gets repoed. They get kicked out of their hotel room. A source of stability badgers them about unpaid child support (and they can’t use that source of stability to refresh until they solve it).

Note: Remember, there are already rules in the game for improving your current funds.

OPTION: STRAINED PATRONAGE

As another option, even if the PCs have a patron, you can still choose to track funding strain: The agents won’t necessarily find their funding pulled, but they might have to do one or two “budget ops” while their accounts are being audited or deal with some other logistical or bureaucratic consequences for taking advantage of their patron’s generosity / abusing the tax payers’ money.

FURTHER READING
Review: Night’s Black Agents
Review: The Zalozhniy Quartet
Review: The Persephone Extraction
System Cheat Sheet: Night’s Black Agents

I join Seth Skorkowsky and Jon Sumrow for Episode 35 of the Modern Mythos podcast!

We’re chatting about So You Want to Be a Game Master, but with a unique slant through the eyes of Mythos gaming and beyond!

Listen Now!

Go to Table of Contents

Broadly speaking, there are three different types of factions that the PCs could become allied with: the organizations (which the book refers to as factions), the giants, and/or the dragons.

The core organizations are detailed on p. 12 of Storm King’s Thunder:

• Harpers
• Lords’ Alliance
• Emerald Enclave
• Order of the Gauntlet
• Zhentarim
• Kraken Society

In addition to these factions, it’s not hard to imagine PCs opportunistically forging similar alliances with other groups in the campaign. For example, perhaps they could convince the warriors of Citadel Adbar (SKT, p. 78) to march forth to war once more.

The giants, of course, are the primary antagonists of Storm King’s Thunder:

• Grudd Haug (Hill Giants)
• Deadstone Clef (Stone Giants)
• Svardborg (Frost Giants)
• Ironslag (Fire Giants)
• Lyn Armaal (Cloud Giants)
• Maelstrom (Storm Giants)

Additional giant factions could be added by creating new giant lords, several options for which are also described on page 12 of Storm King’s Thunder. (The PCs might even try to seek out these alternatives to the primarily villainous lords found in the campaign, perhaps as viable alternatives for a Path of Conquest or Draconic Crusade.)

Finally, there are the dragons. These are, of course, the ancient foes of the giants, and at least some of the evil dragons have been conspiring to free Tiamat from her prison and return her to the Material Plane, an act which would end the truce forged at the end of the Thousand Year War.

A number of dragons have already been seeded into Storm King’s Thunder:

• Iymrith (p. 225)
• Claugiyliamatar (p. 95)
• Isendraug & Cryovain (p. 155)
• Klauth (p. 95)
• Arauthator (p. 106) & Areivaturace (p. 92, also Rime of the Frostmaiden, p. 105)
• Red Dragons of Tuern (p. 111)

If you wanted to expand the draconic influence in your campaign, a good resource might be the Wyrms of the North, a column that Ed Greenwood wrote for Dragon Magazine from 1996-99. These columns were collected and updated for D&D 3^rd Edition on Wizards of the Coast’s website from 2001-04, and you can peruse that archive here. This included “By Dragons Ruled and Divided,” an overview of the whole series written by Sean K. Reynolds which originally included this map of dragons’ territories:

Each of these potential types of alliances have important distinctions, and we’ll take a closer look at the details of the specific groups later, but all of these alliances can be handled with some common structures that will make it easier for you to streamline and simplify the juggling of so many complicated, intersecting relationships during your campaign.

RECRUITMENT OPPORTUNITY

Since our goal is for the PCs to be able to join — or, at least, ally with — each of our factions, you’ll want to create a recruitment opportunity for each of them. If it’s helpful, you can also think of this more in terms of an introduction to the faction.

This is the big, upfront prep task you have to tackle if you want all of this to work. I would often recommend adhering to the Three Clue Rule when prepping content like this — i.e., seeding three different hooks for each faction into the campaign — but given the number of factions involved in Storm King’s Thunder and the structural function we want them to perform, you can probably get away with just having one recruitment opportunity per faction.

A few things to keep in mind:

• There are a bunch of recruitment opportunities already built into the campaign. (Consider how Darathra’s quest on SKT, p. 60 hooks the PCs up with the Harpers. Or Naxene’s quest on p. 52 leads to the dragons.)
• If a recruitment opportunity is proactive — i.e., it’s an encounter that the PCs could have anywhere in Faerun; or it’s actually aimed at the PCs — then it becomes a lot easier to make sure it reaches the table.
• Once the PCs have started working with a faction, either formally or informally, you can use the antagonism between factions as the opportunity to introduce them to new factions. For example, if the PCs are working for the Zhentarim, maybe a Harper agent targets them.
• On a similar note, don’t be afraid to improvise additional recruitment opportunities that arise naturally from the events of actual play.

When it comes to the giants, in particular, note that the structure of the campaign and the remix have already taken care of this: The hooks are framed in an antagonistic fashion, but there’s nevertheless plenty of material designed to bring the players up to speed on all six giant factions, their goals, and their circumstances.

If you did want to prep some other introductions that would show the less antagonistic side of the giants, that would not be misguided, but in this regard you might get a lot of mileage by looking for opportunities to reincorporate characters like Harshnag or Zephyros.

RELATIONSHIP

The next thing you want for each faction is a way of tracking the PCs’ relationship with them.

There are three broad approaches for doing this.

First, you can make ad hoc rulings. Basically, play it by ear: If the PCs have done something that would seem to piss a faction off, then the faction is pissed off and will take appropriate actions to target or hinder the PCs. If it seems like a faction would feel that the PCs have proven themselves or if the PCs have ingratiated themselves in some way, then the faction will take positive actions towards them.

Second, use a pair of progress clocks: One clock tracking the faction’s Enmity towards the PCs; the other tracking their Favor. (For more info on progress clocks, check out Failure for the Beginning DM, Blades in the Dark, and/or So You Want To Be a Game Master. Progress clock graphics and fonts can be found here.)

I recommend using clocks with 4 segments. You tick a segment of the Favor clock when the PCs’ actions or accomplishments are appealing to the faction. You tick a segment of the Enmity clock when the PCs’ actions oppose the faction’s goals, hurt its members, or otherwise antagonist them. (Note that the PCs don’t necessarily need to be working directly for a faction in order for their factions to gain them Favor with the faction.)

When an Enmity clock fills up, the faction takes a hostile action aimed directly at the PCs and/or their allies. Each time a Favor clock fills up, it unlocks one benefit in a progression:

• Recruit: The organization offers the PC(s) a formal position in their ranks.
• Resource: The faction will respond positively to PC requests for Resources (see below).
• Major Resource: The PCs can request significant resources from the faction (e.g., a large strike force or magic item).
• Leadership: The PCs are given a significant position of leadership within the faction. This presumably isn’t Leader of the Entire Faction, but it likely involves command over other members of the faction and perhaps a voice in the highest counsels of the faction, with access to and the ability to influence the decision-makers.

In other words, when the Favor track fills up for the first time, the faction offers to recruit the PCs. The second time it fills up, the faction will grant access to Resources, and so on.

It is possible to have slots ticked in both a faction’s Enmity and Favor clocks at the same time. If the PCs trip an Enmity clock after having advanced significantly through a faction’s Favor clocks, the “hostile action” is likely akin to busting them back a rank. Mechanically, you might model this by emptying their Favor clock, or even forcing them to restart the previous Favor clock.

Third, you can use a relationship meter. Actions and accomplishments of the PCs that are appealing to the faction will grant them an increase of +1 to +4 points on the meter. Actions that oppose the goal’s of the faction, hurt its members, or otherwise antagonize them will inflict a -2 to -8 penalty. (The disparity is intentional: When you burn your reputation with someone, it’s harder to dig yourself out of the hole.)

In order to gain a faction’s aid (see Resources, below) when using a relationship meter, PCs will need to succeed on social skill checks. Their relationship meter will act as a modifier on these checks, and when setting the DC you should consider:

• The scale and size of the request. (The bigger the ask, the higher the DC.)
• Whether or not the request is consistent with the faction’s ideals and goal. (If the PCs are trying to do something the faction agrees with and wants to do, it should be easier to convince the faction and the DC should go down.)

This means that PCs can succeed at bigger asks if they either (a) choose the appropriate faction to ask, (b) figure out how to convince a faction that the course of action they’re suggesting is a high priority, and/or (c) spend time building a rep and relationship with the faction.

For every 4 negative points, trigger a hostile action (as per the progress clocks described above). When the PCs reach 4 positive points, you’ll probably want to treat that as a trigger for the faction to offer membership to the PCs (if they haven’t already).

Whichever system you choose to use, the ultimate function of tracking Relationship is to know:

• Which factions will be opposed to the PCs and the PCs’ goals.
• Which factions will be willing to ally with the PCs and grant them Resources.

Either way, obviously all of this should be reflected in the narrative and roleplaying of the game: It shouldn’t just be numbers ticking up on a tracker.

Note: The relationship meter is quite similar to the Renown system from the Dungeon Master’s Guide (p. 22). The Renown system, however, comes with a curious mix of vagueness and specificity that creates a lot of baggage which, in my opinion, makes it a poor fit for Storm King’s Thunder. It also lacks the ability to track negative relationships with a faction. If you’d prefer to use the Renown system, you certainly can. Alternatively, you can just use the relationship meter described above and refer to it as Renown if you find that convenient.

RESOURCES

Remember that the structural goal of forming alliances with various factions in Storm King’s Thunder will generally be to gain the resources necessary to wage war against the giants and/or dragons. (In practice, of course, there’ll be lots of other reasons for doing this, ranging from the personal to the idealistic.)

Broadly speaking, we’re going to think of the resources a faction can provide as being divided between minor resources and major resources. (The latter obviously being more difficult to obtain than the former.) Minor resources give the PCs a benefit from forming alliances early in the campaign, while major resources will generally be the stuff that fuels the endgame of the campaign.

Equipment: Minor equipment likely includes any mundane, personal items. (Within reason, and the PCs may also need to justify their need.) Major equipment could include an expensive vehicle (e.g., a ship) or magic item. The faction is likely to consider such items to be on “loan” to the PCs, and are unlikely to grant more than one such item per PC.

Strike Force: As a major resource, the PCs can obtain a small strike force (perhaps 4-6 level-appropriate NPCs; or, alternatively, a large number of less powerful NPCs). A minor equivalent of this might be a single guide or some minor hirelings to accompany the PCs.

Run a Mission: If the PCs need something done (presumably because they’re busy doing something else), a faction may be able to run that mission for them as a major favor. (This mission might be resolved completely off screen using whatever method seems appropriate to you. Alternatively, you could do a spin-off one-shot where the players take on the roles of the NPCs. Or maybe other players you know could run the mission for them!)

Provide Intel: Factions can often provide vital intel to the PCs. Sometimes these will serve as scenario hooks (in which case, the PCs may not need to actually ask for the favor). In other cases, the PCs may need some vital piece of information — e.g., the floorplans of a location they’re planning to target with a heist. (“Many Bothans died to bring us this information…”)

GOALS

It will probably also be valuable to make a short list of each faction’s goals:

• What is their long-term objective?
• What are the immediate, short-term agendas they are currently pursuing?
• Are there any disagreements within the faction over what goals should be pursued and/or should be prioritized?

This will help you understand how the faction (and its members) might react to the actions of the PCs and/or the evolving situation in the campaign.

MISSIONS

Finally, when the PCs join a faction, you’ll want to prep missions that they can ask the PCs to carry out. (Some of these missions might also be recruitment opportunities; i.e., they would be opportunistically offered to the PCs even if the PCs haven’t formally joined the faction yet.)

I wouldn’t recommend preparing these missions for every single faction ahead of time. (That’s likely a lot of wasted prep for all the factions that the PCs don’t end up engaging with.) But once the PCs are engaged, these missions:

• Give a de facto relationship between the faction and the PCs.
• Help establish what the faction’s agenda is (and how the PCs fit into it).
• Give the PCs an opportunity to build Favor with the faction.

The published campaign already features a number of these missions for some of the factions.

Go to Part 5E: Waging War