Running political intrigue in TTRPGs

I've recently ran a ~50 hours (11 sessions) intrigue based campaign and here I'd like to share everything I've learned on how to run it. My campaign was unheroic with the player characters starting out as insignificant pawns, and this advice is mostly tailored towards this style of play. Although I believe that most of it can be used in any. I will go over both how to create and run a campaign of intrigue but assume that reader has some knowledge regarding GMing non-intrigue sessions.

Factions

Factions are the most important part of any intrigue campaign. They're groups of individuals (NPCs and sometimes PCs) that do activities towards a common goal. Factions can be official (political parties, labor unions, NGOs) or unofficial (unaffiliated people with power who share the same goal).

While the composition of unofficial factions may be different, a major official organization should have: a name, branding (flag, logo, colors), NPCs (with a possible leader, who may or may not show up on screen) and vibes or values that make them feel unique. Think Great Britain for example. What are the first things that come to your mind when I say that name? Red phone booths, big navy, lords, stoicism. This is what I mean by "vibes".

Factions should have a presence. Every major official faction should have had a big impact on the world before the game has even started. Make sure the players realize that. Pile up the faction branding everywhere they go. Make NPCs talk about faction politics. Shove faction fans in their face. Make the faction architecture unique. When describing a place owned by them, focus not only on the visuals, but how it feels to be there. Tell them how the enormous building dominates the entire city, how it emanates power.

It is important for a major faction to have at least two NPCs the players can talk to. If you include just one, they will become synonymous with the entire organization. Adding one or two more NPCs will help the players to see nuance. Remember that NPCs belonging to the same faction do not agree on everything. For example in a corporation both the CEO and a worker will want to increase company profits, but the employee will give up the moment they're offered a better salary. Similarly, a conservative party may have members who want to upkeep the old order because they benefit from it, but there also may be some that see it as the only way of stopping a bloody revolution.

Factions should never sit idly. Politics are cut-throat. If you want the players to feel the pressure, they can never be the only ones with agency. There are many ways to handle the action economy, but I suggest splitting them between two types: long-term and reactions. Long-term planned actions are those that you (and the faction) have planned in advance. They will slowly but surely execute them, unless something goes wrong. When a faction feels like it's plans are in danger or may be in the future, it will take reactionary measures to keep itself safe and may rewrite the long-term plans. Make sure the PCs know about faction actions as fast as possible. The game is about them after all. For low drama faction actions show them via a newspaper, TV or rumors. If you want to increase drama, feel free to use a bit of "convenient" writing to place the PCs right in the middle of it.

Some Game Masters like to roll for whether a faction managed to progress with their plans, but I feel like this is good only for factions operating in a sandbox environment at a great distance from the PCs. In my games I assume that factions always succeed, unless they're blocked by the PC actions or another faction. For example, Faction A tries to sabotage a negotiation, but their attempts fail because of a Faction B agent. One of the player characters is hired to dispose of said agent, and if they agree and succeed, the negotiations are successfully sabotaged.

Factions fight each other, driving the plot forward. The most common plot hook is that there's a crisis that some factions want to exploit. Player characters end up in the middle of it and have to choose a side, or make their own stance.

NPCs in the gray area

When writing new NPCs for an intrigue game it's imperative to focus on their values first. Write down concepts they value in descending order, usually 2-5 will do. Why is it so important? Because it's the only way to run in-depth negotiations. If an NPC has to compromise, they will let go of their lowest ranked values first. As for how to choose them - when linking an NPC to faction, make sure they share at least some values with that organization. Another thing to note is that most NPCs in an intrigue game should be morally gray, unless you want your campaign to be a full-on political statement, which is fine too I suppose. You do you.

To illustrate we will go through the process of creating an NPC. We need them to be in a revolutionary faction, which is a political group inside of the Great Britain faction. They're part of the British faction name-o-sphere and as such their name will be English. Let's name him John Mallard. He agrees that a revolution is necessary, which is what he shares with the revolutionary faction. However, he is also paranoid about keeping a huge navy as a way to scare off outside enemies, a value he shares with the broader Great Britain faction. Now let's make him a little bit of backstory - let's say that he's a child of a landowner that decided to fight for the poor due to how badly his parents treated their subjects. This is already enough to have his values listed: wants a revolution, wants to help the poor, wants to keep the British navy intact, wants to keep his inherited wealth. Now see that depending on how we order these values we can generate completely different characters! For example:

1. Wants to keep his inherited wealth
2. Wants a revolution
3. Wants to keep the British navy intact
4. Wants to help the poor

This character is a selfish demagogue who wants a revolution to... let's say remove his political enemies and kinda maybe help poor people. At least that's what he's saying to himself. Now look at this:

1. Wants a revolution
2. Wants to help the poor
3. Wants to keep his inherited wealth
4. Wants to keep the British navy intact Just by rearranging the values we made him into someone who desperately wants a revolution and is willing to sacrifice everything for it, and he does it so that he can help the poor, but still cares more about the change of power than their well being.

Once you rearrange the values however you want, all that's left are the usual finishing touches. Describe how he looks like, how he acts like and his mannerisms. Just general TTRPG stuff. One important thing is to try to make these NPCs as memorable as possible. In an intrigue campaign there's gonna be a lot of talking and lot of characters, and it's important that you and the players remember who's who. Making a publicly available list of NPCs with a short description is also a good idea.

Choices and consequences

You will probably spend most of your sessions negotiating and just talking. Choices are what makes the talk meaningful.

While in traditional TTRPGs player choices should be informed, in an intrigue campaign they don't. NPCs should try to coerce the PCs in all ways they can. Buddy up to them, hide information, use vague language, threaten, blackmail. Straight up lying about facts should still be used sparsely, though. If an NPC is negotiating from a bad position, they should almost never lie in fear of consequences. If an NPC has the upper hand they can usually afford not to lie, and just dodge questions instead. Lies are often just unfun, imagine if you negotiated for half an hour to receive guns, and then the great reveal is that... they didn't bring you the guns. If you want to lie, make sure it's fun. Similarly, the players should be discouraged from lying to everyone. Factions in power will not want to cooperate with them after being cheated and possibly retaliate. Cheating on random bums can cause bad reputation to follow the PCs and make people more likely to rat out their misdeeds to the press.

Going back to choices, they will generally revolve around which side in a faction conflict the player characters will want to take. If you made the factions and NPCs convincing enough, it is very likely that the PCs will have differing opinions on who to trust. If such a situation occurs, the party may stay neutral or officially become agents of one of the factions, with some PCs recruited as double agents of the other factions. When the big reveal comes, avoid PvP and make the players talk out their differences. In an intrigue campaign it's a good idea to ban PvP all together. Your PCs will likely never trust each other again if they start fighting, which can derail the entire campaign.

Most choices should be final. If the players can change choices at any time, was it even a choice in the first place? Generally it's a good idea to keep the party factionless for most of the game, but once the PCs join a faction, give them a mission after which they won't be able to deny their allegiance. And then show them the full truth about their employer, with all the worst aspects about them. Now the PCs will have to either continue working with a controversial faction or try their hardest to leave. If they do, everyone still remembers what they did. And conveniently staying neutral is the best way to get attacked from both sides.

Other than which faction to help, players should be bombarded with moral dilemmas. Will they bribe, lie and kill, all for the "greater good"? Or maybe they'll try to stick to their morals, and fall victim to those who didn't? In the grand political scheme, people are merely resources. While the PCs are helping an NPC, they will be treated with friendliness, and maybe even get rewarded. But once they start showing qualms about their jobs they shall be spat out and forgotten near immediately, unless they managed to climb high enough in the faction hierarchy. The "good" news is that all people operate under the same pressure. The PCs can meet others fired by their factions right into poverty, or perhaps faction members who need their help to quit the scheme.

Show the consequences. Political intrigue can and should cause huge consequences. Make sure you show both the big and the small, here are some examples:

• Major changes to the world. Describe how the country has changed after a faction took control. How they fire their enemies and destroy the old monuments, just to replace them with new loyalists and their own propaganda. Show how they finally realize their goals, and how the people react to them. Describe how other factions react - in this moment it's possible for a new balance of powers to be created. People leaving an entering factions left and right, jumping ship.
• Minor faction actions. Show the newspaper boy, people reading all about it and arguing.
• Major player character choices. If they escalated the conflict to violence, their enemies will use violence, and the enemies of their enemies as well. Show the descent into more and more aggression. Both the world, and the PCs perception of it should change. Once started it gets harder and harder not to hurt anyone.
• Minor player character choices. Bring back every NPC they hurt, and every NPC they helped. Show how some of them are barely scraping by, while others are thriving. Even just as a reminder of player actions and a honorable mention.

Inspiration and drama

Drama is an important part of most campaigns. While most of what I described before can be used for generating drama, here I will give a little inspiration on how to built dramatic political scenes. I take most of mine from history. Why? Because history is as dramatic as fantasy, but no one knows history in detail! While your players may have watched House of Cards, they sure as hell don't know anything much about real life. What parts of history are of interest to us then? You should look for historical countries that 1) have a parliament and are at least partially democratic 2) are somewhat well documented 3) have faced a crisis that the parliament attempted to solve. I highly recommend the interbellum, antiquity and the victorian era. Some more specific events and countries I used are as follows:

• Roman Republic and it's fall
• Free City of Danzing
• Second Polish Republic parliamentary instability and the May Coup
• Opium Wars
• Partitions of Poland-Lithuania
• Fall of the Byzantine Empire

Conclusion

Now that you've got your factions and know how to play with them, all you have to do is make a breathing world for them to live in, a plot hook and the player characters. All of these things should be a derivative of the major factions. A world was shaped by them and the PCs were shaped by the world. A plot hook can be a conflict between the factions, or an issue they'll soon try to use in their advantage. Unleash your creativity, and most importantly, have fun!

Appendix: Mechanics for Negotiation

There are many systems that offer mechanics for negotiations, however I am yet to see one that doesn't make them flat and boring as hell. With that said, I did try my go at writing mechanics for handling negotiations using d6s. It's intended mostly for sparing combat opponents and haggling, but could theoretically be used in most situations. If you need a quick and easy way to handle simple negotiations, feel free to use it. It is intended for my own unreleased TTRPG system, but can be easily homebrewed into any.

1. Think of an argument

The PC has to think of an argument and roleplay talking about it with the opponent. This action is assigned a score of 0-10 by the GM.

Argument rating

An argument is assigned 0 score in the following situations:

• target can’t hear or understand you
• target doesn’t wish to spare you under any circumstances, e.g. because too many people already died during combat or because you hurt them
• target is in a very bad state of mind, e.g. is crazy or very drunk

An argument of 1-3 score may be a weak threat, a plea for life or an argument that doesn’t quite work on the target. Arguments between 4-8 score are strong threats or meritoric/emotional arguments that adhere to the values of your enemy. These would include telling a family man that their close ones wouldn’t be happy with their wrong doing or reminding a former idealist of their now forgotten moral values. Arguments of 9-10 score are arguments that make it clear that your opponents doesn’t have a reason to fight. For example, they may be wrongly thinking you have something they want or did something they don’t like. If you’re able to make it clear that their goals can’t be achieved through combat, they will lower their weapons pretty quick. If an argument is good enough to coerce someone in one go (e.g. showing a killer that they’ve got the wrong guy) the GM can skip the score part altogether and end the combat immediately.

2. Back it up with a skill

If the player wishes so, they may back the argument up with a skill. If they choose the right skill for a situation (e.g. using Reassurance on someone who wrongly considers you a threat) this can yield you an additional +2 points. However, choosing a very wrong skill (like Intimidation on someone who clearly isn’t afraid of you) lowers your score by -2. An argument with a score of 0 is always worth 0 no matter the modifiers.

3. Subtract a die

The player rolls a d6 and subtracts the result from their final score. This roll is supposed to indicate how much an opponent is willing to listen to you at the moment.

4. Lower opponent’s Willpower

Each opponent has a Willpower stat which determines how very much they wish to fight you. The enemy team has a group Willpower which is used when negotiating with the entirety of it. After you finish an Argument, subtract the final score from enemy’s Willpower.

Lowering enemy Willpower has the following effects:

• Less than 100%: Enemy is less likely to attack the person negotiating with them
• Less than 50%: All enemy attack Tests have their Difficulty increased by 1
• Less than 25%: If you can present a good argument to do so, the enemy may use their turns for negotiation
• 0% Negotiation goal is achieved