Character sheets for Organizations and Powers in a Roleplaying or Wargame Campaign

 I found some old notes about a side project on quantifying and generating groups like governments, religions, thieves guilds, cults, and the like. So capturing them now to the blog.

This was inspired by various sources. Tony Bath's book "Setting Up a Wargames Campaign" is the biggest influence. It's still available as part of "Tony Bath's Ancient Wargaming" on Amazon for a reasonable price and worth getting.

The iteration of the idea that I am looking at today has the following attributes with a note to roll 2D6 for each or set them to values to model a specific idea. The idea was to stat out a variety of clashing organizations and then at time intervals roll to see what they do in a Monte Carlo campaign simulator backdrop to a roleplaying campaign. The rolls would generate & resolve actions that would be fleshed out descriptively to give some life to the campaign world. There was also an idea of fractally defining larger and smaller groups that are nested, a guild in a city in a county in a country, or a squad in a platoon in a company in a regiment in an army for examples.

The attributes list:

Size: Might be land area or numbers in membership. Might be split if both of those should be distinctly captured

Wealth: Can they buy what or who they want? High wealth and low power might mean they are more a target than an actor, or that most of their wealth is committed in ways that make it less useful as a tool for group to group interactions.

Power: If they take action, how much power can they bring to bear? Should correlate somewhat with wealth but some organizations will have other forms of power. This is probably the main stat for conflict resolution.

Cohesion: How unified in mindset and purpose is the group? A low cohesion group is more likely to have internal faction fighting or break up into separate, possibly rival groups.

Aggressiveness: How likely is the group to try to expand  & attack other groups

Activity: How fast is the group to take action to seize an opportunity or react to a threat?

Scruples: Will the leadership of the group tend to honor agreements? Can they be trusted to deal honestly?

Centralization: The higher it is, the fewer people need to be in agreement on actions

Alliances: Does the group have relationships with other groups that might assist it or call upon it for assistance?

Infiltration: How much of the group has outside loyalties that conflict with their loyalty to the group? Probably covaries with Cohesion

Example Group:

Knights of the Flame

Size 5

Wealth 10

Power 8

Cohesion 7

Aggro 4

Activity 4

Scruples 9

Central 7

Allies 10

Infil 8

Once an active military order, the Knights of the Flame have become a body of elder statesmen and councilors of the King. They are very well connected in society, wealthy, and honorable, not prone to act in haste or indeed at all in many cases.