A faction is how a citizen reaches the council. It is founded by one character, owned like property, and it outlives them: a faction passes down your line with the rest of your estate, exactly as a company does.
Belonging to one is a different thing entirely, and it does not pass. Your membership ends when your character does, and your next character begins belonging to nothing.
a company founded for a fee a faction founded for a fee
holds a treasury holds a treasury
owned by a character owned by a character
PROPERTY, so it passes PROPERTY, so it passes
a job a relationship membership a relationship
ends with you ends with you
So a family keeps the machine across generations while a political career has to be rebuilt each life. The institution outlives the person; the standing does not.
Everything to do with factions is under Realm → Factions, which is a page for one faction: the one you belong to, or, reached from the Rankings by its name, any other in the world.
Joining, leaving and voting are in the card's header. There is no table of factions here: the Rankings are the directory, and every faction in the world is there with its kingdom, its president and how many stand for it.
Your account page says which faction you belong to and nothing more: a faction is a political body whose whole point is other people, so what you do with it lives beside the ballot it is for rather than among your possessions.
150 gold. It takes the country of your own citizenship, never the ground you happen to be standing on, and it makes you both its owner and its president. You are a member of it from that moment.
A name is up to fifteen letters, digits and spaces, and no two factions anywhere in the world may share one.
You cannot found a faction while you belong to another. Leave first.
One faction at a time, or none. Belonging to none is perfectly ordinary and costs you nothing except the ability to stand for a seat.
You may only join a faction of the country you are a citizen of. Citizenship is fixed when your character is created and never changes, so a character is locked to their homeland's politics for their whole life. Travelling abroad does not change where you vote.
You can see every country's factions, though, not just your own. Every faction is in the Rankings, and its name there opens its page, whichever kingdom it is of. Only taking part is gated. The 2018 game hid other countries' parties entirely; that is not kept, because a council here already names the faction that seated each of its advisors, and hiding the list would leave you reading a faction's name on one page and unable to find it on another.
Leaving is free and immediate. If you were standing for a seat that term, your candidacy fee is not refunded and your name comes off the list at the count.
A faction holds gold. Its members may donate from their own purses, and the faction is paid 20 gold for every seat it wins.
Gold that goes into a faction never comes out to anybody. There is exactly one thing a treasury can be spent on, an election advertisement, and that burns the gold rather than paying it to a person. Not to the owner, not to the president, not to a member, not ever.
That is deliberate and it is worth knowing before you give: a donation is a contribution to a cause, not an investment. It is also what makes donations safe to allow at all, because a hundred free accounts pooling their starting gold into one treasury buy influence and never wealth.
A faction holds two, and mixing them up is easy because both are lists of its members:
| who is on it | how you get on it | where | |
|---|---|---|---|
| the council list | members who stood for a seat | pay 10 gold, days 1 to 22 | the president's column |
| the presidential ballot | every member | automatically, nothing to pay | the roll on the card |
The council list is ordered by the president and decides who takes the seats the faction wins. The presidential ballot is simply everyone, because there is no enrolment for the office. A faction where nobody has stood for a council seat still has a full presidential ballot; it just cannot be voted for in the council's election.
The president is the founder, and the office does one thing: it decides the order of the council list, which decides who takes the seats the faction wins. That is the whole of a president's power, and it is why a faction is worth owning rather than just joining.
The president also buys its advertisement (50 gold, from the treasury, once a term).
You order the list from the president's column on your faction's page, where each candidate has a button that moves them to the top. Everybody you do not move keeps the order they had, so putting one name first does not disturb the rest.
An owner may hand the presidency to an election, once, and can never take it back. Open your faction and its members choose its president each term.
That election is not the council's, and the two work differently in every way that matters:
| the council | a faction's president | |
|---|---|---|
| who votes | every citizen of the country | that faction's members |
| what you vote for | a faction, never a person | a member, never a faction |
| who may be chosen | whoever the president's list seats | any member, with nothing to enter |
| what it costs to stand | 10 gold | nothing at all |
| when | day 30 | day 23 |
| settled | at the turn | day 24 |
They are held a week apart, and that is deliberate. The presidential ballot is on day 23 and the office is settled on day 24; the council's ballot is on day 30 and the seats are counted when the term turns. Each is one day of voting counted the next, which is exactly the archive's rhythm: day 8 settled day 9, day 15 counted day 16. The week between is what a newly elected president has to order the candidate list before the seats are filled from it.
Most votes wins the presidency; a tie leaves whoever holds the office, which is what stops a two-member faction flipping its leadership every term on one vote each. The owner stays the owner throughout: what moves is the office, not the property.
There is no way to close a faction again. That is the point of it.
You open it from the owner's column on your faction's page, and its members vote from the roll on the same page during the ballot window.
10 gold, and only as a member of a faction. There are no independents, because a ballot names a faction rather than a person.
The fee is burned, not paid to your faction. You may stand once per term, and only during the standing window: days 1 to 22 of the term. When the ballot opens, the lists are closed, so the choice a citizen votes for cannot grow underneath their vote.
A new candidate goes to the back of their faction's list. Where you end up is your president's decision.
Every action that costs gold or cannot be undone asks you to confirm it first, and the question says what it costs and what it means: founding, standing, the advertisement, a donation, and opening your faction to elections. Joining, leaving and voting do not ask, because none of them costs anything and the first two can be undone by doing the other.