My home consolidation project my wife and I are undergoing has been moving along at glacial speed. In the meantime, one of my friends is about to start a Stars Without Number RPG (role playing game) campaign.
After rolling-up a PC (player character), I skimmed through the rest of the rules. I became intrigued by the section on factions (Chapter 8, pages 113-128) and after further reading, I decided I'll import this into the Redshift Campaign.
"A faction is any group that you intend to use as an important actor in the sector. In theory, any organization could qualify as a faction; every planetary government, business, religion, or club could be described with the rules given here" (SWoN, page 113).
According to SWoN, each faction has the following characteristics: Hit points (which I'll rename to something like, Disruption Level); along with the following ratings in Force, Cunning and Wealth (in terms of FedCreds). During any given turn (about a month in duration), a faction can conduct one of the several actions, or counteractions listed in the rules. Once a faction's Disruption Level reaches zero, that faction has been neutralized.
So while I'm waiting for the home consolidation process to be completed, hopefully before the end of summer, my "cunning plan" is to set up all the subsector's leading factions. Since this is a pen & paper exercise, I won't have to rummage through stuff that's being primed to move.
There are 16 major star systems within the Shannekam Subsector. Each one will have a planetary government and at least one megacorporation, not to mention a possible criminal organization. I'll go through the faction set up and assign values to each one. Then I'll probably run through a dozen turns or so, to represent the previous year. Most likely the actions taken by each faction will be in the form of building up their resources, so they'll be more robust by the current campaign date (ABY 104-130).
Mongoose Publishing has produced a series of Traveller books under license, including a Hammers Slammers supplement. Chapter 10 Conflict, deals with planetary wars (pgs 175-189). Since SWoN seems to be a blending of D&D and Traveller, I should be able to use this system to play out open warfare at the strategic level.
Like I said, this is my "cunning plan" so far. I figure this would be a quick and simple way to cover the grand strategic aspects of the campaign and gloss over activities happening on the fringes.
We'll see how this pans out...
