“You know the BROSR isn’t doing anything that hasn’t been done by others before.”
Greg Stolze released REIGN in 2007, a clunky attempt to turn RPG organizations something more than background scenery. Most roleplaying games treated kingdoms, guilds, churches, and conspiracies as vague and arbitrary entities that the GM managed behind the scenes. REIGN asked: what if you gave those organizations their own statistics, resources, strengths, weaknesses, and conflicts, and treated them as pieces in a larger game? What if a company, nation, or movement could be treated as a character? What if the only person who played that game was the GM, and the players just kind of noodled around the feet of those giants? Wouldn’t that be great?
The dearth of after-action or actual-play reports suggests the answer to the last question is…not really. At least it wouldn’t produce the kind of games that players would brag about.
Stolze’s idea was ambitious. The Company rules gave players and GMs a language for talking about power on a scale larger than individual adventurers. The world could change because of organizational decisions, and subjecting those decisions to die rolls meant that the GM could be surprised by outcomes “behind the scenes” in the same way everyone could be during table play.
There was just one little fly in the ointment. REIGN provided a powerful framework for faction play, but couldn’t break free of the mainstream prejudice that assumed a GM-mediated world. The GM still cock-blocked players from running the competing powers driving the major action of the setting. The factions were tools for creating adventures in the GM’s spare time rather than fully independent forces controlled by opposing players.
Greg got close, but he never dared to ask the right question: What happens if the faction role and the character role are deliberately allowed to diverge?
That is a wildly unexplored design space. But you can’t fault Greg for not seeing it. None of the guys pumping out RPG rulebooks for the last four decades had the intellectual firepower necessary to ask that question, let alone the drive to do the years of hard work necessary to actually provide an answer.
Luckily, God sent the BROSR to show the world that what happens is a whole lot of fun!
Modern Braunstein-inspired approaches, including the work explored through Primeval Patterns, embrace this idea by empowering two levels of play at once.
Players do not simply control adventurers moving through a world. They participate in the creation of the world’s conflicts by taking on larger roles: factions, patrons, institutions, and competing interests.
At the same time, the personal layer remains meaningful. A player can be responsible for a faction while also portraying an individual character whose loyalties, knowledge, and goals are not identical to those of the faction they represent.
That creates a different kind of roleplaying tension.
This is where the two levels of play reinforce each other. Faction actions create situations: a disputed border, a secret alliance, a missing envoy, a scouting party that encounters an enemy expedition. Those situations can then become traditional roleplaying scenarios. The dungeon delve still exists. The wilderness expedition still exists. The negotiation scene still exists. But now they emerge from the actions of competing powers rather than appearing as disconnected episodes.
REIGN is probably one of the closest frameworks for this kind of campaign, and give Greg props for trying, but it assumes a GM-mediated world rather than players simultaneously owning opposing powers. The Braunstein approach pushes further by making those conflicts player-driven. In that sense, this style of play may actually be closer to the game REIGN was gesturing toward than the way most people ended up using it. The BROSR provides the tools that fulfill REIGN’s broken promises.
In the past, faction play meant the choice between being a ruler and being an adventurer. Now we recognize that question as a false dichotomy. Now we know that the most interesting stories happen when those identities collide.