Factions, Threads & the Living World

The world pushes back, and it does it through two file types: factions for organized power and threads for situations with clocks. Together they turn a region from a map into a place where things are happening with or without the players.

Factions

A faction is any organization with a face: gyms, league bodies, criminal outfits, corporations, research institutes, communities, families, ranger corps, contest halls — the kind enum covers the standard shapes and you can add more.

The engine of grounded play is the gap between the two faces every faction carries:

• publicFace — what they say they are: the friendly gym, the charity, the security firm.
• actualAgenda — what they're actually doing: the gym that's a front, the charity that launders, the firm that strong-arms.

The wider the gap, the more story it generates. A faction with no gap is furniture; a faction with a secret agenda is a season of play.

• leader and members are character references — give the leader a real Character file with a goal and a secret of their own.
• headquarters points at a location, so the faction has a room players can walk into.
• typeAffinity ties them to the type system — the electric gym, the dragon-obsessed syndicate — which colors every fight with them.
• pressurePoints is the builder's cheat sheet: what the faction wants leverage on, what it fears, what it would trade to keep hidden. This is gold for the GM — fill it generously.

Threads

A thread is a situation with a clock on it. The schema is built to be run, not just read:

• stakes — what's actually on the line if this plays out.
• clock — a short note on how much time it has: "three nights", "until the snow", "before the tournament".
• status — the ladder: seeded → active → escalating → stalled → resolved / abandoned. A thread that's ignored escalates; a thread can stall when the parties reach a standstill.
• urgency — low, medium, high, critical. The GM's cue for how hard to push it into scenes.
• whoKnows — who's aware and who's lying about it.
• nextBeat — the single next thing that happens if nobody interferes. This is the most useful field in the type; keep it filled.
• ifIgnored — the consequence. The Player's Handbook promises players the world won't hold still; this field is the receipt.
• involved — the characters tied in. connectedTo — other threads that pull on it. location — where it's playing out.

How to run them

Keep one to three active threads per region the party is in, at mixed urgencies. When a thread is active, put its nextBeat in front of the players as a scene, a rumor, a sight — don't wait for them to ask. When they act, resolve the beat and advance the thread. When they don't, advance it anyway: the missing person stays missing, the deal closes, the clock runs out.

Threads connect to the party through their characters — a rival who's involved, a home town that's threatened, a faction the trainer belongs to. A thread nobody can touch isn't a thread; it's scenery. The best threads are the ones the players helped create, because then ignoring them is a choice, not an accident.