The Snowflake Dungeon Part 5

Time for faction #3. I’ve been creating factions for my Snowflake dungeon. What is a snowflake dungeon? That’s best described in my post, The Snowflake Dungeon Part 1. I came up with the process for making Factions in my post titled Tweaking the Method.

So far I have profiled The Monks of St Saciscous and Lugpopple the Goblin. Today, let’s figure out what these ghouls are all about.

• Name: The Ghouls. I don’t think they have any more self identification than that.
• One Sentence Threat: The Ghouls threaten those in the upper reaches of the ruined temple and the nearby cemeteries.*
• Motivation: To survive and sate their never ending, cold hunger. 
• Goal: To feed on the dead and oust the goblin and mutants who threaten them.
• Conflict: Strange and violent mutants roam the halls of their home now. Though they’re pretty ambivalent about the townsfolk, the citizens do not much care for undead. Strange things have started coming up from the depths of the temple soon after the goblin arrived.
• One Paragraph Threat: The Ghouls lurk in the two nearby cemeteries – one ancient, one new – digging up the corpses there to feast. Presented with a potential threat from the mutants, they have decided to turn them into a new food source – though they are quickly becoming outnumbered and their meat doesn’t sit well in the belly. They have set up rudimentary traps in the section of the temple they dwell in. Though she has the appearance of a child, their leader Francissi is immensely powerful and gains the memories of those she feasts on. Their Ghoul hounds roam the nearby wood at night.**
• One Sentence Backstory: Francissi was born to one of the priests a century ago, cursed at birth, and went on to create the ghouls.***
• Resources: Knowledge of secret passages in the temple, the Holy Symbol of St. Vaciscous (has some magical powers, only good characters can use it, the priests in the below find it abhorrent now), a bunch of ghouls that want to kill mutants, the equivalent of a speak with dead spell if Francissi eats them.

*”Someone has been seen lurking in the mists of the nearby cemetery” sounds like a perfect thing to go onto the towns rumor table.

** Sickly looking wolves in the woods at night? Also another great rumor table entry.

*** Okay, I have a lot more fleshing out to do here, but I wanted to take some notes about other ideas I have. I think maybe it was her birth that caused the split between the priesthood and those that would go on to become the Monks of St. Vaciscous. I think Francissi is going to be the thing that ties it all together.

This one didn’t create toooo much new lore. I think what my big takeaway from it was that a priest had a ghoul baby and it split the congregation. That’s going to be fun to flesh out at some point.