Invisible Hands - The Book of Factions

Welcome to "Invisible Hands", a collection of factions and groups of NPCs, ready to be dropped into your world!

"Conflict is the driving force of every story. The best conflict comes from a clash between dangerous factions: groups of NPCs that your players will love or love to hate."

Invisible Hands will give you all the tools and support you need to create interesting factions for your very own game. No matter if you are looking for ideas about knight orders, criminal gangs, wizard circles, religious cults, space pirates, ruthless political parties, faceless corporations or alien invasion forces, this book will give you many ideas for each of them!

The first three chapters of this book are all about the creation of factions: what they are, why they are of great importance to all RPGs, how to create them and, most importantly, how to use them in your game and at your table. “Invisible Hands” introduces a number of building blocks that every well fleshed-out faction needs to come truly alive and an important part of your RPG. We also talk about faction theory: the basic ideas behind the very creation of a faction.

The fourth and final chapter of the book introduces twenty fully fleshed out factions that you can directly grab and add to your game. These factions are system and setting agnostic. While they have been created with a fantasy – RPG in mind many of them can be changed swiftly and easily to fit into historical, horror, modern, sci–fi or many other types of games.
Our twenty factions are very diverse: some walk brazenly in the light, displaying their powers. Others hide in the shadows, weaving strings of plot and intrigue. They are religious cults, arcane gatherings, merchant conglomerates, military groups, criminal gangs and much more.
Each of these factions includes a large amount of background information about its history, goals and methods, but it also comes with several NPC members that your players can interact with, rumours about the faction that they can hear about and even several plothooks to drop the faction straight into your game!

Depending on the moralities and decisions of your players all of these factions could become allies, enemies or anything in between. There is of course also the possibility that one or more of your heroes will want to join a faction! We have included ways of doing that as well.

With this strong group of diverse organisations at your disposal and a strong grasp on the tools to create your own factions you will never again need to hesitate! Conflict is coming to your RPG world! Embrace it!

The second book in our faction series has also been released! Pawns in a Greater Game adds a complete set of rules that allows you to play as a whole faction instead of an individual character. Take control of an organization and lead it through peace or war! The book also contains stats and rules for playing as each of the twenty factions presented in "Invisible Hands". Unseen Strings contains another twenty fully detailed factions for your games, plus all the stats and equipment those factions would have according to the rules presented in Pawns in a Greater Game!

Also check out our other publications: The "Thousand Trails" series is a collection of adventure hooks and story seeds, each book focused on adventuring in a specific environment and containing more than one hundred plothooks! "Dark Cities" is focused on urban adventures, "Edge of the Wilds" gives you many rural adventures, "Ocean's Call" is for nautical adventures and "Realm of Leaves" is a collection of forest adventures. "Crown of Winter" focuses on adventures in cold and mountainous areas! "Marshland Mists" focuses on swamps and boglands. More is to come!

Our newest release is "Lost Dice", a simple, narrative RPG system suited for all settings! It is based upon a dicepool mechanic that makes every single roll count even in the long run, and gives the players the chance to decide how much they want to risk for victory!