My vision for the world of CRAWL-thulhu, is that it resembles our world in the 1920s and 30s, though obviously with some more menacing elements.
I imagine a world that never had a Great War, but is still roiled by factionalism and the looming threat of mass violence. There are sensitive people, I think, who can detect psychic vibrations or spiritual echoes or astral resonances, who know that their world is overdue for catastrophe and rebirth. This is a world of dreamers, and everyone's dream is to remake the world with their philosophy, their ideology ascendant, and all their competitors ground to dust. A thousand dystopian futures wait just beyond the horizon. Too few people want peace, too few appreciate the benefits of stability. Everyone wants the apocalypse to happen so that their preferred post-apocalyptic scenario can be the one to become reality.
Factions in CRAWL-thulhu serve two purposes, one pragmatic, the other thematic. At a practical level, I want adventures in CRAWL-thulhu to revolve around solving mysteries, and factions provide a gameable way to supply suspects. Each suspect represents a group, a faction, and it is their membership in the faction that makes them suspicious. I'm not interested - in this game at least - in mysteries that revolve around family relationships or inheritance or romantic infidelity. I don't want mysteries that are solved by blood or love or money. I want mysteries that revolve around a conflict between irreconcilable ideas and incompatible goals, and factions provide a way to make those conflicts larger than just the individual combatants. If everyone is a representative, everyone is an agent, then the personal becomes political, and solving the mystery, resolving the conflict, becomes a way to influence the future of the setting.
That is the thematic purpose of factions, as I see it. They provide a bridge that links the grandiose ideas, the apocalyptic plans, the dystopian ambitions that define the setting, on the one hand, and the player characters as individuals who are mostly interacting with a handful of NPCs in a relatively constrained space, on the other. Factions mean that the suspects are suspicious because of what they think, what they want to do, what they would do if they could, and catching the culprit means pushing doomsday a few minutes further off into the future.
The guilty faction in CRAWL-thulhu mysteries should, I think, be chosen randomly. A lot of people are both players and referees, and I want them to be able to have fun too. If I picked a single guilty party and wrote that down, then it would be possible to spoil the mystery. Either someone played this one before, or someone saw it when they were leafing through their copy of the zine, or some reviewer gave the solution away on the blog, or whatever. If I picked the answer, it would be possible for the players to know it without actually solving the mystery. But if the answer is selected at random from a list of possibilities, then it must be a surprise, and something that has to be solved.
One mystery I'm working on involves a series of lavish, luxurious house parties that span America. I know I want one in Gotham (my stand-in for Chicago) and another in Metropolis (my replacement for New York). I'm still deciding on some of the others. The house parties are mostly full of the rich, the famous, the people who control America's military and political and cultural power.
There should be obvious factions among them. Hollywood, Wall Street, the Ivory Tower. I also want there to be secret societies. These aren't announced. To recognize them, you have to talk to people, hear about the terrible, beautiful things they would do to the world if their faction were ascendant over all the others, and recognize an eerie sense of deja vu that tells you that in addition to whoever they say they're working for, they also serve another master. That seems more difficult for me to accomplish as a writer, and more difficult for the players to determine as part of their investigation, but hopefully more rewarding as well.
As an example, imagine a spy organization, mirroring the real world CIA, who has successfully bought the loyalties of Abstract Expressionist painters and Literary Fiction writers, who have a plan remake the ideology of the middle and upper classes by smuggling it to them via their most vaunted and elite artists and authors. That would be quite a thing to uncover, if you could recognize what you were seeing, if you could remember where you heard that turn of phrase before, if you could sus out the true loyalty of the people who say they belong to one group, but really owe their allegiance to another.
