A Faction is a shared Thread woven from many; a collective attempt to impose the order of a single Faith upon the chaos of a Tapestry. It is a living story, an agreement between individuals to interpret reality in the same way, for mutual benefit or shared purpose.

Factions are not mere collections of NPCs; they are emergent social organisms. They are born from a shared Need, animated by a common Belief, and tell themselves a unifying Fiction to justify their existence. A Faction is the macro-level expression of a Psyche, the form a soul takes when it is large enough to house a society.

The Nature of Factions

Every Faction represents a promise and a peril. The promise is security; the consolidation of power to provide for its members, regulate social interaction, and defend against external threats. The peril is dogma; the tendency for a shared belief to ossify, stifling change, marginalizing dissent, and resisting new Facts that challenge its foundational narrative.

Like any living thing, a Faction has emergent needs: the need to preserve its identity, the need to acquire resources, and the need to propagate its core Faith. It is a force of narrative gravity, seeking to pull the disparate threads of individuals into its own grand, coherent pattern.

How Factions Arise

Factions come into being through two primary pathways, reflecting the interplay between emergent simulation and authorial intent.

• Emergent Formation (Bottom-Up):

  • From Shared Need: A group facing a common struggle for Resources, like the survivors in the Botanist scenario, bands together for safety. Their shared Need for survival forges a tight-knit, pragmatic group.
  • From Shared Faith: A charismatic individual can gather followers around a powerful new interpretation of reality, giving rise to cults, new religions, or philosophical movements.
  • From Shared Threat: A community facing a common, persistent Threat; be it a Predatory beast, a hostile Narrative, or an Environmental collapse; will consolidate its power, forming militias or alliances.

• Seeded Formation (Top-Down):

  • By an Eidolon: A player in the Eidolon state can design a new Tapestry with pre-defined Factions, complete with their histories, beliefs, and inherent conflicts.
  • By the Tapestry: Some Tapestries may be generated with “legacy” Factions, ancient powers whose origins are lost to myth but whose influence is an undeniable Fact.

The Internal Life of a Faction

A Faction is not a monolith. It is a complex ecosystem of competing interests, internal politics, and ideological friction.

• Hierarchy and Roles: Factions develop structures. Leaders, enforcers, spiritual guides, and laborers emerge. An agent’s Beliefs and Skills determine their role, creating a constant source of social conflict.

• The Social Genome: Recruitment and Rejection This is where the Anatomy of an individual intersects with the soul of the Faction. A Faction’s core Faith acts as a social and ideological filter, making it naturally receptive or hostile to the Social Tags generated by an Incarnation’s Psyche.

  • A Faction whose Faith is built on the [order] Archetype will be instinctively trusting of Incarnations projecting [social:honorable] or [social:disciplined] tags. They are seen as kindred spirits.
  • Conversely, that same Faction will be deeply suspicious of those projecting [social:chaotic] or [social:defiant]. They are perceived as an inherent threat to the group’s coherence, regardless of their actions.

• The Architecture of Culture: Social Roles A Faction’s core Faith is the direct source of its social architecture. It provides the list of Social Roles that its members are expected to inhabit. This list is the Faction’s culture, defining its norms and expectations for gender, class, family, and profession. A Hegemonic Faction might have rigid, biologically-linked gender roles and a strict class hierarchy. A Faction of The Unchained might have only one meaningful social role: “Liberated,” with no gender or class distinctions whatsoever. To be a member of a Faction is to be subject to its stories about who you are supposed to be.

• The Engines of Change and Decay: A Faction’s unifying Faith is also its greatest vulnerability. When the Faction’s dogma fails to meet the evolving Needs of its members, or when a new Fact contradicts its core narrative, internal pressure can lead to reformation, rebellion, or collapse.

Interacting with Factions

The player, like any agent, is subject to the social realities of the Factions within their Tapestry.

• Joining and Reputation: A player can attempt to join a Faction, but acceptance is a two-fold judgment. The Faction appraises not only your deeds (your reputation) but your very being (your Social Tags). A history of heroic actions may be entirely undermined if your Psyche projects a social aura that the Faction’s Faith finds heretical. A Faction doesn’t just judge what you do; it judges what you are.

• Influence and Subversion: Once inside, a player can attempt to climb the hierarchy or influence the Faction’s direction through Conversation and political maneuvering.

• Factions in Conflict Factions are primary actors within the game’s Conflict system. Their interactions are the source of the grandest stories.

  • Arenas of Conflict: A Factional dispute often begins in the Social Arena, a war of propaganda and influence. If this fails, it may escalate to the Physical Arena, leading to skirmishes or open war.
  • Sources of Conflict:
    • Conflict over Resources: Two factions vying for control of a vital asteroid mining claim.
    • Conflict over Truth: This is the most common source of Factional strife. The Hegemony’s Faith in absolute order is fundamentally incompatible with a rebel group’s Faith in absolute freedom. This ideological war, a struggle for narrative dominance, can be more brutal than any physical one.
    • Conflict over Power: The political struggle for control over a neutral system or the right to set the laws for a region.

Design Priorities

• Factions as Stories: Factions should be treated as living narratives, with their own histories, traumas, and ambitions.
• The Soul of the Collective: Factional mechanics are the macro-level expression of the Psyche. They demonstrate how the generative principles of a single soul, when shared, become political power.
• The Player as Participant: The player should never feel like they are “above” the Factional politics of a Tapestry. They are an agent within the system, subject to its rules, pressures, and consequences, providing a grounded and immersive social simulation.

Macro-Scale Social Dynamics

The above design for Factions in ATET begins the presentation as compelling, emergent social organisms, each defined by a core Faith that shapes its internal politics and external relations.

The Director AI is tasked with overseeing this narrative ecosystem, intervening to prevent stagnation. While this provides a strong conceptual foundation, the system lacks a predictive, mechanical engine to drive long-term, large-scale historical change. The triggers for director intervention are defined abstractly as “symbolic,” and the processes of factional growth, decline, and collapse are not yet grounded in a dynamic simulation.

Research into Societal Dynamics offers a powerful solution to this challenge by presenting a suite of interconnected theories that can be operationalized into a robust simulation layer. The cornerstone of this new layer is the Structural-Demographic Theory (SDT), which posits that major societal crises are the predictable result of quantifiable pressures generated by long-term demographic trends. These pressures are: Popular Immiseration, declining well-being of the masses; Elite Overproduction, an excess of aspirants for a fixed number of elite positions; and State Fiscal Distress, the state’s inability to meet its financial obligations.

This structural model can be populated with behavioral logic drawn from the research on Cultural Evolution. The “12 adaptive traits” of belief systems: such as Proselytizing, Costly Signaling, and Social Ostracism; provide a clear framework for how different Factions will compete, recruit members, and enforce their internal norms within the broader SDT simulation. Finally, the research on Negative Partisanship offers a detailed psychological model for a specific and potent failure state, explaining how the Elite Overproduction pressure can lead to “affective polarization,” political gridlock, and an escalating cycle of animosity that accelerates societal decay.

By integrating these theories, it is possible to create a dynamic, multi-generational simulation that governs the rise and fall of Factions. This transforms the Tapestry from a static stage for the player’s story into a living, evolving ecosystem of competing narratives, where history is an emergent property of the simulation itself.

SDT as a Systemic Driver for the Director AI

The variables of Structural-Demographic Theory provide the concrete, measurable Facts that the Director AI needs to effectively manage the health and vitality of a Tapestry. This integration transforms the Director from a mystical storyteller into a sophisticated simulation manager, making its interventions feel earned, systemic, and comprehensible rather than arbitrary or purely authorial.

The logic for this integration is as follows:

1. The Director AI’s mandate is to prevent narrative stagnation and cultivate a “vital” ecosystem. It requires clear triggers to authorize its interventions.
2. The three core pressures of SDT can be translated into quantifiable, trackable in-game metrics for every major Faction:
   • Popular Immiseration can be modeled as a function of Population Density versus available Resource Nodes and the fulfillment of basic NPC Needs.
   • Elite Overproduction can be modeled as the ratio of NPCs with an [Elite] social tag to the number of available high-status [Leadership] roles within a Faction’s hierarchy.
   • State Fiscal Distress can be modeled by tracking a Faction’s treasury, comparing its resource inflow (from taxes, trade, etc.) to its outflow (for maintenance, military upkeep, etc.).
3. The Director AI’s primary background loop will be to monitor these variables across the Tapestry. These variables can be combined into a single “Instability Score” for each Faction.
4. When a Faction’s Instability Score exceeds a critical threshold, the Director AI is authorized to catalyze a crisis. This is no longer a vague act of “injecting tension,” but a direct, systemic response. For example, high Elite Overproduction could trigger the spawning of a charismatic “counter-elite” NPC who starts a new, heretical Faction. High Popular Immiseration could trigger “bread riot” events or quests. Critical State Fiscal Distress could cause state services to fail, creating zones of lawlessness.
5. This makes the Tapestry a true ecosystem with predictable yet emergent secular cycles of integration and disintegration, driven directly by the simulation of its social and economic Facts.

Cultural Evolution as a Behavioral Framework for Faction AI

While SDT provides the “what” of societal pressure, the research on Cultural Evolution provides the “how” of Faction behavior. The 12 adaptive mechanisms identified in the research are not merely descriptive categories; they can be implemented as a library of AI behavioral routines. Each

Faction can be given a unique “ideological personality” based on which of these traits its core Faith prioritizes, dictating its strategy for survival and expansion within the SDT simulation.

This creates a strategic layer within the simulation:

1. A Faction’s core Faith can be tagged with an affinity for certain adaptive strategies. A militaristic, expansionist Faith might prioritize external Conflict and internal Societal Integration. A proselytizing religion might prioritize Childhood Indoctrination and Proselytizing. An insular, high-commitment cult might prioritize Costly Signaling and Social Ostracism.
2. These priorities will dictate the Faction’s AI behavior and the types of quests it generates. A Faction with a high Proselytizing score will actively dispatch missionary NPCs to convert populations in neutral or contested territories. A Faction with a high Costly Signaling score will generate quests that require the player to perform difficult, self-sacrificial acts to gain reputation. A Faction with a high Social Ostracism score will generate severe, system-wide reputation penalties for members who associate with rival groups or violate core tenets.
3. This allows for diverse and strategically interesting Faction dynamics. An “Evangelical” Faction might expand rapidly through conversion but be vulnerable to internal dissent due to low barriers to entry. A “Monastic” Faction might be small and resource-rich due to the high commitment of its members but struggle to expand its influence. A Faction built on Negative Partisanship will focus its resources on sabotage and propaganda against its rivals, potentially neglecting the well-being of its own populace and accelerating its own Popular Immiseration.

Systemic Integration

This system will run continuously in the background, managed by the Director AI. For each major Faction in a Tapestry, it will track the core SDT variables:

• Popular Well-being: An index based on the ratio of population to available resources, average NPC Need fulfillment, and housing availability. Low scores increase the probability of unrest events.
• Elite Competition: A ratio of elite-class NPCs to available high-status roles within the Faction hierarchy. High scores increase the probability of internal political intrigue, assassination plots, and civil war events.
• State Solvency: The Faction’s treasury balance and net resource income. Low scores can lead to the decay of infrastructure, the inability to pay guards (creating corruption), and the collapse of public services.

These variables will be available for subjective perception by agents: impacting NPC behavior, the availability and nature of generated quests, and the likelihood of large-scale, Tapestry-altering conflict events.