Rules for organizations?

Frey

Mongoose
Hi! I'm new to the forums although I've been playing Traveller for a couple of years. Now we're planning to start a new campaign and I have a question.

Is there any book with rules for organizations? I'm thinking about something similar to REIGN's companies or even Ars Magica's covenants. A kind of meta-character.

Thanks.
 
Not sure about the games that you listed, but Supplement 12: Dynasty is a fantastic book that lets one create organizations and use them like characters. They can also create PCs from those organizations that are more powerful than regular PCs.
 
Agreed on Dynasty. It's set up very well for a group of players each representing a noble house, or mercenary company, or whatever.

The Prime Dynasty PCs aren't actually that much more powerful unless the dynasty's attributes verge on the ridiculous themselves. But their main ability is and always will be to beat any opposition into submission with the resources of the dynasty itself. If you have access to BCr 100 in untraceable slush funds, the Persuade+INT check becomes somewhat redundant....
 
Or look at free RPG Stars Without Number, which is very Traveller-esque, and has rules for handling organizations and their conflicts.

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=86467&
 
What about the Mercenary or Scoundrel books? Are there rules for a group of thieves or mercenaries? Tracking their influence, resources and so on.
 
You can set up dynastic organizations which model mercenary groups and underworld organizations; those are two of the archetypes. The problem is the two scales (personal and organizational) don't map very well to each other: dynasties play out through time in 30-year increments (smaller actions tend to resolve in months and years), and their access to resources is fairly glossed over. How much money does a dynasty have access to? Um, lots? How many people can it muster? Er, again, lots?

Dynasties are useful tools for driving a character-level campaign, or playing out a campaign on their own level, but they aren't particularly useful for accomplishing specific actions on the individual level: they're just focused at too high a level to really pay close attention to the low-level stuff. Yes, a dynasty can swat an individual character; it'll probably do it by sending out a couple of operatives or offering a contract and letting the lower echelons deal with the issue.

Now, one immediate use I saw for Dynasties was resolving an age-old debate in the Traveller community: if the Imperial Navy is there, why does piracy still exist? Answer: there are criminal organizations, very powerful criminal organizations, supporting and organizing it. Organizations which can be modeled with the underworld dynasty rules... If the pirate-supporting group is on a similar power level as the Navy, or even locally more powerful, then the pirates have a fighting chance... as long as they don't step out from under that protective umbrella.
 
Surprised no one's mentioned the megacorp rules in Merchant Prince... create an Entity and watch it grow. Or fail... each Entity has a selection of traits that help it succeed, and it can improve those traits over time.

Obviously the Merchant Prince rules are geared towards commerce and making money, but it's easy enough to tweak 'Service Industry Type' from, say... 'Workforce Management' to 'Insurgent Training' for a merc org... or 'Asteroid Belt Security' for a pirate org... or 'Information Collation' for a spy org...
 
You'll find material covering syndicate membership in Scoundrel, membership of law enforcement and other agencies - including bounty hunter organisations - in Agent, and businesses, corporations and megacorps as metacharacters in Merchant Prince.

Also check out Dynasty*, the latest supplement - that covers organisations as metacharacters with, presumably, a generational scope.

*Subject to availability.
 
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