The Isles are a state in mid-collapse – it might even have collapsed already, depending on how high you set your standards. In recent memory the Isles had an empire and industry; it had pride. But first it ripened, then it began to rot.

The four factions of the Isles are the people in charge of the ruins. Not everyone is in a faction, and not all the factions are formal organisations. Even so, it’s impossible to avoid their influence – even for Hunters.

It’s easier to start with what a faction isn’t. It’s not a membership organisation or a corporation with an agenda and a plan. It’s not even a particularly neat definition: there’s no tight, clearly drawn delineation of who is and isn’t in one. Some factions are more concrete and easier to map than others (which is why we’ll be starting our series of faction-related blog posts with the Crown) but really, what a “faction” is, is a description of what kind of power someone holds or is beholden to.

The Crown and its institutions hold constitutional and military power. The Conclave holds both academic and occult power. The Temple is a religion and exercises that power to define what is taboo and what is expected, what is sacred and what is profane. Oh, and tithes. There’s quite a bit of tithing. Finally, the House – a complicated set of affiliations between industrialists, landowners, and politicians – wields the power of money, manpower, and the legal code.

The people who benefit from membership want to uphold that element of the status quo. The Conclave needs arcane studies to be under its control so they don’t create rivals. The Crown needs people to keep believing aristocrats serve a purpose and that empire and expansion are the Isles’s right.

People in the faction who aren’t benefiting from it are trapped there. They’re bound by contracts, bloodlines, oaths or belief and they either can’t break free or are too institutionalised to try. 

Nothing’s ever so black and white, of course. Years of military service – an association with the Crown – might have ruined your body and rattled your mind, leaving you fit for nothing else but continuing the same nightmare career… but wearing your old medals still gets you respect and gives you the right to order around people with even less power. Plus, one day you might get to be one of the people in charge.

It’s helpful to think of factions in terms of specific groups or manifestations, rather than mighty, towering pillars of society. A group of Hunters probably doesn’t think of themselves as working for the Conclave but for a university; not the Crown but the Fitzclair family; not the House but parliament or an industrialist’s staff.

Because factions are so murky, it’s hard to definitively say who is and isn’t in one. We can say, however, that millions of people in the Isles derive no benefit from the factions’ existence. Factory workers labour in dangerous conditions, farmers toil on exhausted soil, and the wrong sorts of people are shunned or exploited.

In practical terms what faction a Hunter is associated with shapes their experiences before they became Hunters. It defines your ORIGIN and your SEED. 

Your Origin is who you are – or were. You might have been (and still be, when you’re not lancing pustulent quasi-realities) a blue-blood noble, a knight-alchemist, a holy gardener, or a member of parliament. Or you might be less fortunate: cannon fodder in a Crown army, an escaped lab experiment, a sinner, or a worker on a factory line.

Your Seed is what made you a Hunter: the thing you did, or that was done to you, that made a gash in your soul for a Malignancy to get in. Your Origin suggests some likely tendencies. In the Crown, family politics end in bloodshed, nobles abuse their servants, and soldiers do unspeakable things in the name of Crown and country. The House’s ambition creates criminals and class traitors. You don’t have to choose a pre-written Seed for your character, but the factions provide a plethora of possibilities that both make sense and tell you something about the Isles.

Factions have less of a hold over Hunters inside a Hollow and someone’s origins, whether they’re high or low, only matter if you let them. In these rotten little pockets, power resides in a Hunter and their Weapons. Whether you were born in a palace or a workhouse, the Seed inside you and the Weapons you wield make you an unstoppable force, glorious and mighty until the rot in you blossoms and you become something else.

On the other hand, your Seed becomes more important with every Hollow you breach and destroy. The more corrupted you become, the more that Seed echoes and pulses, manifesting itself in those private worlds you invade and piling more dangers atop the Hollow’s own.

You can never escape your past.