Chapter 34 — Faction Play
The Shore has no government that spans it (Chapter 30), but every settled corner of it is contested. Corporations warm the tunnels and hold the debts; gangs run the docks the corporations won't; planetary councils, heritage movements, unions, and creeds all reach for what they can hold. Factions are these powers — the off-screen forces whose ambitions give a campaign its weather. This chapter does two things: it helps you generate factions of any kind, not just corporations, and it gives you a light procedure for running them between sessions so the sector feels alive whether or not the Wanderers are looking.
A faction is not an adversary (Chapter 40) and not a Contact (Chapter 35), though it spawns both. It's larger than any one person — a tide rather than a swimmer — and it moves on its own schedule, slowly, the way everything moves across the jumps.
Index§
- What a faction is, mechanically
- The faction turn
- How the crew moves a clock
- Generating a faction
- Corporations: a ready roster
- A region in play
What a faction is, mechanically§
As with adversaries and NPCs, Wanderstar asks for fiction, not a stat block. A faction needs only three things written down, and none of them is a numeric track the players roll against.
- An agenda. The one thing it's trying to achieve right now. Concrete enough to succeed or fail at — "control the dock authority before the next arrival year," not "be powerful."
- A reach. What it can actually do, and where that ends — money, muscle, votes, faith, information; one system, one world, one district. Reach is what makes a faction a credible patron and a credible threat (Chapter 38).
- An influence clock. A progress clock (Chapter 33) of 4, 6, or 8 segments measuring how close the agenda is to done. Bigger or slower ambitions get more segments. When it fills, the faction gets what it wanted — and the sector changes.
That's the whole sheet. Track three or four factions this way and a region runs itself.
Standing, not a loyalty score§
How a faction regards the crew reuses the disposition spectrum from Contacts (Chapter 35) — Ally, Contact, Rival, Enemy — applied to a whole organization. A faction that owes the crew opens doors across its entire reach; one the crew has crossed brings that reach to bear against them. Standing shifts as fiction, exactly as a Contact's does, and a single dramatic act can move it. There is no reputation number; there is only a relationship that is better or worse than it was last session.
The faction turn§
Between sessions — or during a jump week, when the crew is sealed away and the galaxy keeps turning (Chapter 27) — take a few minutes to move the factions. This is the engine that makes the sector feel like it exists without the Wanderers.
For each faction the crew isn't actively holding in check, ask: did anything this session help or hinder its agenda?
- The crew advanced it, ignored it, or it simply had a good stretch → tick the clock forward one segment (two if they directly served it or the fiction clearly calls for it).
- The crew worked against it, or a rival faction landed a blow → tick it back one, or stall it.
- Nothing touched it → it still creeps forward one segment on its own, because ambition doesn't sleep. A faction that never advances isn't a faction; it's set dressing.
When a clock fills, resolve it: the faction achieves its agenda, the world changes to match, and you set its next one (often larger, now that it's stronger). A filled clock is rarely a disaster handed to the players — it's a new situation, and usually a new job (Chapter 38).
The players see results, not moves. Because no word outruns a ship (Chapter 27), the crew learns what a faction did only when they arrive somewhere and find it already done — the dock under new management, the rival vanished, the price of water doubled. This lag is a gift: it lets you spring consequences that couldn't have been prevented and keeps the players acting on stale maps. Drop the evidence into rumors (Chapter 33) and let them piece it together.
How the crew moves a clock§
Players don't roll "against the faction." They act in the fiction — pull a job, burn a Contact, win a world's sympathy, sabotage a rig — and you translate that into ticks. A clean, decisive action moves a clock a segment or two; a sustained campaign against a faction is several sessions of such actions. Because the dice belong to the players (Chapter 40), faction conflict resolves through ordinary tests against 8, scene by scene; the clock is just the scoreboard you keep between them.
Standing and clocks interact. Raise your standing with one faction and you can usually borrow its reach to push against another's clock — which is how the crew ends up a piece on a board far larger than themselves, and how a campaign's politics (the undertow, Chapter 33) catch fire.
Generating a faction§
Roll D66 for what kind of power it is, then D66 each for its agenda, its methods, and its pressure point. Read the four together and make a force of them. For a corporation specifically, pull a name and product from the corporations roster below and let that suggest the agenda. Name the faction, set its standing toward the crew (default Contact — most powers are merely transactional until you give them a reason), and draw its first clock.
What kind of power (D66)§
| D66 | Faction |
|---|---|
| 11 | A corporation — a branch or subsidiary of a firm from the roster below |
| 12 | A corporate cartel — several firms colluding behind one front |
| 13 | A company town's management, which is the local law |
| 14 | A dockside crime syndicate running cargo, bodies, and protection |
| 15 | A street gang on the rise, hungry and overreaching |
| 16 | A smuggling ring with a route nobody else can fly |
| 21 | A planetary or station council — elected, and only as clean as its last election |
| 22 | A governor's office holding a frontier world by force and favor |
| 23 | A breakaway settlement declaring its own sovereignty |
| 24 | A political bloc or movement fighting for a single cause |
| 25 | A garrison or fleet detachment far from any authority that pays it |
| 26 | A mercenary company between contracts, looking for the next |
| 31 | A Companion-rights organization with safehouses across the sector (Chapter 31) |
| 32 | A heritage league for one of the four peoples, guarding its own |
| 33 | A creed or church whose congregation crosses every world |
| 34 | A prophetic or doomsday movement certain the crossing isn't over |
| 35 | A guild controlling a trade — pilots, drive-techs, surgeons, brokers |
| 36 | A labor union strong enough to stop a port with a word |
| 41 | A salvage consortium racing rivals to the lost arks (Chapter 38) |
| 42 | A terraforming combine that owns a world's very air |
| 43 | A cryo-trust managing the fortunes — and votes — of the still-frozen |
| 44 | A data-broker network that deals only in what people hide |
| 45 | A bank or creditors' syndicate holding half the system's debt |
| 46 | A pirate confederation taxing a stretch of fringe space |
| 51 | A scientific or survey institute with grants, secrets, and rivals |
| 52 | A media conglomerate that decides what a sector believes |
| 53 | A revival-and-resettlement charity, beloved and not what it seems |
| 54 | An old-world remnant — Sleepers organized around a lost nation or claim |
| 55 | A frontier militia that started as neighbors and grew teeth |
| 56 | A free-port authority selling neutrality to anyone who pays |
| 61 | A dynasty — a merchant-prince's family and everyone who serves it |
| 62 | A secret society threaded through other institutions |
| 63 | A rogue AI or automated estate still executing dead orders |
| 64 | A coalition of small operators banding against a larger power |
| 65 | A faction in collapse, dangerous in its desperation |
| 66 | A power that shouldn't exist yet — define it with the table |
What they want (D66)§
| D66 | Agenda |
|---|---|
| 11 | Corner a market — water, fuel, medicine, passage |
| 12 | Seize control of a dock, port, or jump-beacon |
| 13 | Win the next election, succession, or council vote |
| 14 | Drive a rival faction out of the system entirely |
| 15 | Absorb a smaller faction by debt, marriage, or force |
| 16 | Collect a debt large enough to break the debtor |
| 21 | Reach and strip a derelict before anyone else (Chapter 38) |
| 22 | Lay claim to a newly found or newly habitable world |
| 23 | Break a strike — or win one |
| 24 | Pass, or kill, a law that reshapes who counts as a person (Chapter 31) |
| 25 | Free, or re-bind, a population of Companions |
| 26 | Wake — or keep frozen — a particular Sleeper who matters |
| 31 | Hide a crime, a body, or a catastrophic failure |
| 32 | Expose a rival's crime and ride the fallout |
| 33 | Acquire a piece of technology, data, or genestock |
| 34 | Establish a route, beacon, or chart they alone control |
| 35 | Convert, recruit, or radicalize a world's population |
| 36 | Survive — keep the lights on through a crisis closing in |
| 41 | Avenge a betrayal that the sector has half-forgotten |
| 42 | Legitimize themselves — turn power into recognized authority |
| 43 | Default on, or escape, an obligation that's strangling them |
| 44 | Build a weapon, fleet, or force no rival can match |
| 45 | Find a person who's hiding — and they may be near the crew |
| 46 | Buy up every available hull, rig, or specialist in the system |
| 51 | Restore something lost — a claim, a homeland, an old order |
| 52 | Prevent a truth from reaching a population (Chapter 27) |
| 53 | Provoke a war between two other factions |
| 54 | Secede, and make the secession stick |
| 55 | Crown a leader — or remove one |
| 56 | Achieve a thing only they believe in, and act on it regardless |
| 61 | Install a puppet in a rival's seat of power |
| 62 | Silence the one witness who could undo them |
| 63 | Expand into a neighboring system before a rival does |
| 64 | Convert a debt owed them into outright control of the debtor |
| 65 | Recover a leader, heir, or asset that was taken from them |
| 66 | Bring about the end they actually serve — the one they'd never admit |
How they operate (D66)§
| D66 | Methods & reach |
|---|---|
| 11 | Money — they buy what they need and own who they can't buy |
| 12 | Debt — they lend, then call the note at the worst moment |
| 13 | Muscle — open force, and the threat of it |
| 14 | Quiet violence — accidents, disappearances, nothing provable |
| 15 | Law — courts, contracts, permits, and the people who issue them |
| 16 | Bribery — a hand in every official pocket |
| 21 | Blackmail — they keep everyone's secrets for a reason |
| 22 | Information — they know first and sell what they know |
| 23 | Propaganda — they shape what a world believes |
| 24 | Faith — devotion does what coercion can't |
| 25 | Numbers — a membership too large to ignore |
| 26 | Solidarity — they protect their own without fail |
| 31 | Logistics — they move things, and can stop things from moving |
| 32 | Sabotage — they break what they can't take |
| 33 | Infiltration — their people are already inside yours |
| 34 | Patronage — favors given become favors owed (Chapter 35) |
| 35 | Monopoly — they hold the one thing everyone needs |
| 36 | Speed — they act before anyone can respond |
| 41 | Patience — they wait out every rival |
| 42 | Reputation — their name alone opens or closes doors |
| 43 | Territory — they hold ground and tax all who cross it |
| 44 | Specialists — a few people no one else can replace |
| 45 | Fleets — hulls enough to project force across jumps |
| 46 | Deniability — they always work through someone else |
| 51 | Hostages — leverage held over the people who matter |
| 52 | Tradition — old ties and obligations no one questions |
| 53 | Technology — an edge their rivals can't match |
| 54 | Charisma — one leader the whole faction orbits |
| 55 | Corruption — rot spread so wide it can't be cut out |
| 56 | Ruthlessness — a willingness to pay any price |
| 61 | Networks — a contact in every port (Chapter 35) |
| 62 | Secrecy — no one's even sure they exist |
| 63 | Legitimacy — they are, on paper, the rightful authority |
| 64 | Desperation — nothing left to lose makes them unpredictable |
| 65 | Improvisation — broke and scrappy, they make do |
| 66 | All of the above, on a scale that should frighten you |
Their pressure point (D66)§
The lever the Wanderers can pull — a weakness, a rival, a fracture. Every faction has one; finding it is half the campaign.
| D66 | The way in |
|---|---|
| 11 | A rival faction that would pay to see them fall (roll again) |
| 12 | A leader whose grip is slipping |
| 13 | A succession dispute waiting to erupt |
| 14 | A debt they can't service much longer |
| 15 | A secret that would ruin them if it surfaced |
| 16 | A crime the wrong person could prove |
| 21 | A faction within the faction, ready to split |
| 22 | A key specialist who could be turned or taken |
| 23 | A supply line with a single choke point |
| 24 | A patron whose support is conditional |
| 25 | A betrayed former member who knows everything |
| 26 | A legal technicality that voids their claim |
| 31 | A populace that fears them and would rise if given cover |
| 32 | A rival heir, claimant, or prophet with a better story |
| 33 | A dependence on one piece of failing infrastructure |
| 34 | A reputation they cannot afford to tarnish |
| 35 | An enemy they don't yet know they have |
| 36 | A deadline — an arrival year, a vote, a payment — they must hit |
| 41 | A hostage or asset that, freed, breaks their leverage |
| 42 | A creed that forbids them a winning move |
| 43 | A pride that makes them overreach |
| 44 | A founder's promise they've quietly betrayed |
| 45 | A ledger that names everyone they've paid |
| 46 | A loyal lieutenant who's reached their limit |
| 51 | A rival's spy already in place — find them first |
| 52 | A dependence on the very crew you're playing |
| 53 | A schism over the agenda itself |
| 54 | A protected person whose safety constrains them |
| 55 | A single bad season from collapse |
| 56 | A truth about their origin they've buried |
| 61 | An ally who'd abandon them at the first sign of weakness |
| 62 | A weapon or asset that could be turned against them |
| 63 | A grudge that makes their leader reckless |
| 64 | A clock of their own, almost full, that you can reset |
| 65 | Nothing obvious — the lever must be made, over several sessions |
| 66 | Their pressure point is another faction's agenda — they rise or fall together |
Corporations: a ready roster§
The most common faction a crew brushes against is a corporation — the firms that build the ships, warm the tunnels, feed the worlds, and hold the fortunes of the still-frozen, some with logos old enough to have ridden the arks out of Earth. They are employers, creditors, rivals, and patrons at once. Roll D66 for one, then run it as a faction using the model above. Each entry notes what the firm is best known for, which tells you what work, salvage, or trouble it generates; many are the makers behind the branded gear in Chapter 24, so a corporation is also a thread you can pull from a piece of equipment back to the people who made it. Reskin freely — these are touchstones, not a fixed political map.
| D66 | Corporation | Best known for |
|---|---|---|
| 11 | Umbral Coring & Heat | Radiothermal taps and core-heat exchangers — the deep-drilling rigs that warmed the first Wanderstar tunnels. Their gear still keeps half the frontier from freezing. |
| 12 | Sòrensen Ark-Hulls | Heavy ballistic ark frames and reentry shielding. A Sleeper might have crossed 160,000 light-years inside one of their hulls. |
| 13 | Yumeno Cryonics K.K. | Cold-sleep pods and revival suites. "You'll wake. We promise." The pods kept the promise more often than the company kept its other ones. |
| 14 | Thresh-Ember Freightworks | Companion-founded hauling cooperative; rugged cargo tugs and loader exoframes built for hands of any shape. |
| 15 | Al-Rashid Atmospherics | Terraforming gas plants and weather seeding. They sell you an atmosphere on installment and bill you forever. |
| 16 | NULL | A shell holding company that owns hundreds of subsidiaries and admits to none. Rumored to predate the Ejection. Files no address. |
| 21 | Hollowsong Acoustics | Wanderborn echolocation rigs, sonar mapping, and tunnel-survey gear. Their handhelds "sing" the shape of a cavern back to you. |
| 22 | Brightwell Suns | Artificial sun arrays and grow-light cathedrals. Lit the underground farms; now lights orbital habitats that never see a real star. |
| 23 | Voskhod Drive Bureau | FTL drive cores and jump calculators. Old Seeder-Vanguard engineering house; conservative, expensive, almost never explodes. |
| 24 | Okonkwo & Daughters | Family hydroponics outfit; tunnel-farm seed stock, nutrient gels, and the famous drought-proof tuber lines. |
| 25 | Pale Verge Optics | Low-light and large-aperture eyewear, originally for Wanderborn eyes, now a luxury brand for everyone who works in the dark. |
| 26 | GANYMEDE SALVAGE | Derelict-ark breaking and reclaimed-alloy resale. Where dead arks go. Where some Sleepers wish they hadn't. |
| 31 | Lindqvist Cryo-Logistics | Cold-chain shipping and the cryo-pod recovery fleets that chase down arks still arriving from the deep dark. |
| 32 | Sabarmati Looms | Smart textiles, pressure suits, and self-mending frontier clothing woven from recycled hull fiber. |
| 33 | Kettle & Crane | Mining drones, tunnel-borers, and the ubiquitous "Crane" loader arm found on every dock in the Shore. |
| 34 | Dunmaren Hard-Light Co. | Holographic displays, projected signage, and the spectral "ghost suns" used to fake daylight in cramped habs. |
| 35 | Warren Mutual | Companion-run insurance and burrow-housing collective. Cheap premiums, fierce solidarity, long memories. |
| 36 | Tian-Lu Orbital | Station rings, docking spars, and the modular hab-cans that bolt new neighborhoods onto old stations overnight. |
| 41 | Greaves Powder & Tool | Mining explosives, cutting charges, and hand tools. Their motto is older than most worlds: "It'll move." |
| 42 | Aoede Sound & Story | Entertainment conglomerate — sense-dramas, voyage operas, and the most-pirated music in the Shore. |
| 43 | Bint Salim Hydrometals | Asteroid-water cracking and rare-metal refining. Sells the oxygen you breathe and the iron in your walls. |
| 44 | Korhonen Bio-Adapt | Low-g medical implants, bone-density therapies, and the gene-tweaks that let groundborn settlers survive a Wanderborn world. |
| 45 | The Sable Line | Companion-pride apparel, heritage goods, and Sable Thresh-Ember memorabilia of wildly varying authenticity. |
| 46 | Mwangi Seedbank | Curated agricultural and ecological gene-vaults — the living memory of Earth's biosphere, leased by the strain. |
| 51 | Drozdov Munitions | Personal arms, ship-defense turrets, and the cheap, reliable sidearm in every Drifter's pack. |
| 52 | Lumen Sleeper Trust | Estate management and "legacy banking" for the still-frozen — holding fortunes for clients who haven't woken yet. |
| 53 | Hakkō Microfoundry | Printed electronics, drive-by-wire chips, and field-fabricators that build a part from a spec and a bucket of scrap. |
| 54 | Greatpaw Logistics | Hound-lineage courier and security firm; bonded runners who deliver across hostile space and never lose a parcel. |
| 55 | Espinoza Reclamation | Atmosphere scrubbers, waste-to-water plants, and the recyclers that make a sealed hab livable for a century. |
| 56 | VEKTOR DEEPWORKS | Submersibles and pressure habitats for the drowned worlds — ocean moons no one else will colonize. |
| 61 | Nordvik Provisions | Ration bars, ferment-vats, and the canned voyage-stew that tastes like every childhood underground. |
| 62 | Rajan Wayfind | Navigation beacons, star-charts of the Shore, and the open jump-network that competes with Voskhod's locked one. |
| 63 | Cinderhall Refractories | Heat-shielding ceramics and reactor liners — the stuff between you and a core tap that wants to kill you. |
| 64 | Mirelle & Vance | Boutique cybernetics and prosthetics; expensive, beautiful, and quietly the best limbs money can buy. |
| 65 | Underroot Collective | Wanderborn tunnel-engineering cooperative; bore-mapping, structural sealing, and "we dig where others won't." |
| 66 | Helios Vanguard Heavy Industries | The colossus. FTL drives, ark-scale construction, atmospheric processors, weapons — the oldest Seeder megacorp, and it owns a piece of nearly everything else on this table. |
Turning a corporation into a hook§
Any entry above is a campaign seed once you ask one of three questions about the Wanderers:
- Who do they owe? A creditor is the most reliable engine in the game — Lumen Sleeper Trust holding a debt against a frozen relative's estate, a Voskhod note on the ship's drive, Warren Mutual calling in the solidarity it extended. The mortgage in Chapter 28 is one such hook; a corporation is its face.
- Who wants something done quietly? Corporations generate work that doesn't fit a manifest: GANYMEDE Salvage wants a derelict surveyed before a rival reaches it; NULL wants a package moved with no questions; Helios Vanguard wants a frontier problem to disappear before it reaches the core.
- Who did they cross? A rival, a former employer, or a firm whose product failed at the worst moment is an antagonist with reach. A corporation with a grudge can find the crew across jumps, slowly, the way everything moves in the Shore.
Because no authority spans the whole Shore (Chapter 30), corporations are often the closest thing to law a frontier world has — which makes them patron and threat at once. A firm that warms the tunnels can also turn the heat off.
A region in play§
Two factions, one dock world. The Greatpaw runners (a Hound courier guild, methods: logistics; agenda: win exclusive rights to the system's jump-beacon traffic; 6-segment clock) and the Vance dock authority (a dynasty, methods: law; agenda: tax every hull that berths, including Greatpaw's; 4-segment clock). They are Rivals to each other and Contacts to the crew.
The Wanderers take a Greatpaw job (Chapter 38), running a parcel past a Vance inspection. They succeed — Greatpaw's clock ticks forward one. Off-screen during the next jump, Vance leans on the council and ticks its own clock forward too. The crew arrives two weeks later to find berthing fees doubled (Vance's clock filled: it got its tax) and Greatpaw furious — now an Ally, offering the crew a bigger job to break the new authority. The board moved while the players were sealed in jumpspace, and the consequences became the next adventure. No one rolled against a faction; the crew just acted, and the GM kept the clocks.