Cut off the head and the body will fight everyone else

A classic aspect of fantasy adventure RPGs is faction play. One assumption of faction play is that factions will follow the logic of balance theory, in which the factions fall into two sides based on the logic of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the friend of my friend is my friend, and the friend of my enemy is my enemy. If everyone follows that logic, factions will tend to form into two big coalitions and even conflict has a certain order.

One familiar example is WW2, where much of the world was divided into Axis vs Allied powers. For instance, Finland just wanted to be left alone but in the face of Soviet aggression, they allied with Germany, the only other major power operating in the Baltic after Germany occupied Britain’s allies Norway and Denmark. Once Russia started winning the war, the Finns signed a treaty putting them in the Soviet sphere of influence and fought Germany. But not every power in WW2 followed balance theory. For instance, the Soviet Union was allied with the United States but didn’t declare war on America’s enemy Japan until after the United States nuked two Japanese cities, which is why during the Cold War there was just “Japan” without Hokkaido being the Democratic People’s Republic of Japan.

Last year, my grad student (and soon to be professor in his own right) Oscar Contreras Velasco published “Unintended consequences of state action: how the kingpin strategy transformed the structure of violence in Mexico’s organized crime” in the journal Trends in Organized Crime. Oscar presents a lot of data and a variety of statistical and network analyses but the gist of it is this:

• The American and Mexican governments have a “decapitation” strategy of targeting cartel kingpins. “Decapitation” can mean extraditing a cartel boss to an American prison (from which it is much harder to run a cartel than a Mexican prison) or killing them in a gunfight with the Mexican state or a rival cartel (neither of whom take a lot of prisoners).
• Following “decapitation,” a cartel is very likely to split into two or more cartels. It’s decapitation in the same way Hercules decapitated Hydra. There are many examples but one important example is that the Guadalajara Cartel, which at one point controlled all the plazas (territories) on the west coast, split into several smaller cartels following the arrest of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo.
• When a cartel splits, the succeeding mini-cartels usually declare war on each other.
• Balance theory is a logical necessity with two actors (eg, Gulf and Guadalajara) and relatively easy to maintain when the number of actors is small (eg, Gulf, Tijuana, Sinaloa, and Juarez), but balance theory breaks down as the number of actors grows large.
• More actors at war and less balance theory to describe their wars creates more theaters of conflict and more death, both for the combatants’ soldiers and for civilian populations.

So with this horrific understanding of the real world in mind, let’s think through what this means for faction play in elf games. The Hot Springs Island GM advice describes the island as a “powder keg” waiting for the PCs to set it off and that seems to be a good way of understanding what assassination in particular would imply.

One implication of the model is that assassinating a leader is likely to create multiple contending factions. You assassinate the king and you will get a war of succession between the king’s brother and the cabal that has declared themselves protectors of the dowager queen and regents of the infant king, long may he reign and soon may he be weaned. You assassinate the head of the thieves’ guild and you will get a civil war between the treasurer who wants to maintain the protection racket and the young upstart who wants to directly rob the treasure vaults of local burghers. You assassinate the great goblin and the earbiter clan will turn their rusty jagged knives against the wolfscrotum clan.

Your players might say, “great, the enemy will kill each other and all we have to do is occasionally stoke the flames, Yojimbo-like, and then wait to loot the bodies.” That might be a nice idea, at least by a murder hobo definition of “nice,” but the experience of the Mexican drug war has been that chaos didn’t just mean sicarios killing each other, like in a John Wick movie, but killing thousands upon thousands of innocent Mexicans. So that war of succession doesn’t just mean taxing and conscripting the peasantry but chevauchée (basically medieval military terrorism). The struggle to control the thieves’ guild means frustrated merchants stop paying protection after getting robbed, which means the treasurer’s faction needs to do a lot more kidnappings to keep protection money flowing, and also the occasional marketplace gets caught in the crossfire of battle mage fireballs. The struggle to control the goblin warrens means the earbiter and wolf scrotum clans reach out for protection from the troll king and ghoul empire, respectively, both of whom demand that the goblins pillage neighboring human settlements to collect tribute, including delicious maidens. Whatever stability people had depended on to order their lives will descend into chaos.

There may be ways that the players can make the chaos into not a bug but a feature. For instance, an assassination on level one of the dungeon will probably have dismal consequences for the lawful folke of the Hartvald but an assassination on level ten of the dungeon, followed by a hasty retreat and some downtime activities, might mostly mean that the player characters find a lot of very fat and happy carrion crawlers and gelatinous cubes and little else when they return to levels 8-12 of the dungeon.

The important thing to remember though is that any social structure, no matter how repellent, carries with it a certain stability and that disrupting that order by assassinating a leader doesn’t mean the faction ceases to exist but that you’ve just let hell out for breakfast. In the real world this usually means unspeakable horror but in elf games it may mean adventure.