Orion wrote:For most civic functions they included at most one faction who gave a shit about performing it. The results are shitty and dystopian, but they don't actually give anything to fight over.
This right here. If you're going to do a political thing, you need defined areas of conflict. "We don't like their negative attitude" may be reason enough for the Signers and the Bleakers to not get along, but they need to have an actual conflict space to conduct their conflicts
in and
about.
Conflicts in the political sphere come both in terms of
policy and in
leadership. People want to move tax, spending, and regulatory dials around, but they also want to be in charge of things they care about. A major issue, probably the
most major issue is that as you said there is almost no overlap between factions on what they want to lead, but there's a similar problem where no one seems to give a second shit about the policies that other factions are interested in. If the Bleakers want to increase the number of food distribution centers, they just
do that - not only do they have executive control over that branch of government, they are the only group that seems to care one way or the other what the city's food security systems even are.
The only thing that isn't like that in official Sigil is Criminal Justice. The Mercy Killers want to do law enforcement and they want to do sentencing, and there is thus administrative conflict between them and the Guvners and Hard Heads. That's fine. That's cool even. In fact, factions should be like that about fucking everything. There should be rival firefighting companies brawling it out in the street like Gangs of New York.
But there should also be
locations that people struggle over. Right now the Transcendental Order hangs out at the Gymnasium, and the Sensates and Heartless don't give an actual fuck
because they have their own gymnasiums. Should be like Junta, where there are important feng shui sites around town that are struggled over. In Junta the "objective locations" for a coup are the Presidential Palace, the Chamber of Deputies, the Central Bank, the Train Station, and the Broadcasting Tower. I think it's pretty telling that while equivalents of those things exist, only one of them (the Chamber of Deputies) actually has any claimants. That's both weird and lame.
It's definitely true that Alpha Centauri has more interesting and more plausible factions, and that Junta has a more interesting and more comprehensible setup for struggling over control of a city. And you could definitely reform Sigil into something that was better by taking more elements from those sources. But I can't help wondering if it might be better to just start with a different planar metropolis with less baggage. Say Union or Finality instead.
The official plotline scraps all the factions and only writes up 3 replacements. And of those replacements, only one of them gets much a writeup anywhere (the Sons of Mercy). If you wanted to continue into the future, you'd need to writeup new factions mostly from scratch and that would offend Planescape loyalists. You seriously only have two years of game time to work with between the Factol's Manifesto and Faction War. I don't think there's a thing you can do with the city that isn't going to piss off the people who are also your target audience. And you're still stuck with all that Lady of Pain baggage, which is like Elministration on steroids. There's
no way to sort that out without pissing on the cheerios of the setting's mouth breathing fans.
But if you started with Finality or Union, you could do whatever the fuck you wanted. Those places don't have their political factions written up in exhaustive detail. You could set it up so that there were a number of institutions that were "owned" by individual factions, and other institutions which were "contested" by multiple factions. You could have concrete policy sliders that different factions had different opinions about. You could have different precincts that had different ascendant factions in them and noticeably different policies. You could have different factions provide different competing services. You could go the whole way. And you wouldn't have to come up with a convoluted explanation of how your version of the Xaositects
weren't annoying trolls whose reason for existence was to disrupt the game with Fishmalk behaviors. Because you could just
not write anything like that in the first place.
If there's interest, I might even contribute to such a project.
-Username17
