Bureaucracy

Watch Yes Minister.

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>>52425375
Check out The Laundry, either the games or the Novels.

http://cubicle7.co.uk/our-games/the-laundry/

Yes Minister
The Sandbaggers
The Night Manager
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

And the original House of Cards. Maybe the new one too, afterwards.

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>>52425375
>>52425447
After that, build factions. Take a blank sheet of paper. Name 5 factions.

Draw arrows connecting them. What faction needs the others? What faction is weak? Strong? Insane? What do they require? When do they collaborate?

Or just nick a plot from, say, the last days of the pre-revolution French monarchy and their parliaments. That's always a goldmine. Or vatican intrigues.

Actually, maybe add The Young Pope to your watchlist.

>>52425375

One idea I had is a bureaucracy that's staffed entirely by specially grown clones. They have a kind of limited reincarnation as they're programmed with a personality and relevant experiences. The idea is they can be trusted to be absolutely apolitical, totally incorruptible, and as efficient as it is possible for something made of meat to be.

Your players can shoot them. Another clone will pop up with an itemized bill for the cost of the clone, the cost of disposal, a fine for littering, discharging a weapon, and I'll need you to fill out appropriate paperwork about the incident. It's part of our feedback program, to try and reduce clone loss and end-user frustration.

I find the idea of having to fight polite friendly (allthough gradually more heavily armed and armored as casualties mount) identical functionaries as they keep from drowning in red tape of amusing.

But that may just be me.

>>52425447

You have excellent taste.

>>52425375

A good summary of the behavioral view of the firm would help. It codifies the craziness of large organizations and helps you get them acting realistically and in a plot-positive way.

Kissinger's book Diplomacy is also excellent because you see how complicated relationships between even a small number of backward nation's can be hideously complicated.

Also try >>52425475 for the arrow trick, which is helpful. Also, a history that goes back with some interesting twists and turns is helpful, because often organizations do weird things that make no sense until you realize that they're artifacts of a faction's past.

>>52425475

I actually have five already, kind of.

Background: FTL in this game is a series of interconnected wormholes created by the Titans, Jack Kirby-esque space gods. Long, long ago some idiot shoved a star down the slipstreams and killed trillions of people. After this Great Cataclysm, the Titans were gone, and their hegemonic rule over the galaxy was disrupted. In the aftermath, the remnants of their descendants/slaves (it's not really clear which) created the Olympian Empire, who tried to rebuild the ancient glories. With time and distance, however, other groups were able to accumulate power. The Cormire were the most prolific, and when their empire fell they sent out huge ark ships to the far reaches of space. The Olympians attempted to control the entire galaxy in the name of their absent gods, but this time people were able to fight back. After that war ended in ANOTHER Cataclysm (people just don't learn, huh?), the four biggest factions created the Slipstream Regulatory Authority (SRA) to ensure the slipstreams were kept safe from future weapons of mass destruction. Over time, the SRA morphed from the space-DOT to the space-UN, although the difference between their purpose and their practical function remain a point of contention to this day.

SRA - this counts as a kind of ur-faction, the framework in which all the others operate to varying degrees. They're supposed to just maintain the slipstreams and prevent people from using wormhole-based WMDs, but they've morphed into a sort of United Nations thing, if only because they're the only group with the infrastructure to deal with problems across the other four (or five?) factions.

The Inheritors of the Titans - the remnants of the Olympian Empire, to varying degrees of saltiness about it. A parliamentary republic, some people think the SRA is a great arbiter for trade and transportation, while others think they should return to the Good Old Days of conquest and expansion, if not in so many words (cont)

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>>52425707
Don't care, wrong kind of faction.

I meant people the PCs are actually dealing with, not your backstory.

Internal Affairs. Resource Procurement. Weapons Development. The Council of Six. Operations. Counteroperations. and Finance.

What do these guys want from the PCs, and each other?

>>52425707

The Gweles-Audomar Coalition for Free Space: one of the bastions of the Cormire, this was the main faction to rise against the Olympians before the Second Cataclysm. Now a loosely-affiliated band of organizations, something like a cyberpunk space NATO. They constantly bicker and fight amongst themselves, but try to present a strong united front and distrust the Inheritors.

Lemn Fleet: Another group of Cormire, these guys don't have a home planet, preferring to remain in space. New systems are added to their power when they arrive and, locust-like, devour planets and asteroids for resources to keep their hodge-podge ships afloat. New life forms are constantly added to the fleet in mass abductions, much to the chagrin of those aliens who didn't expect to be forced into the spacefaring life. A great deal of civil unrest plagues them, but due to strange cultural ideas of what constitutes "ownership," these issues are unlikely to be resolved neatly any time soon. Generations in space have made them excellent slipstream engineers.

Yrroro Protectorates: A group of "independent" systems under the control of the Yrroro, who have a strong "prime directive" kind of deal called the "Doctrine of Non-Interference." Strict rules about the sanctity of civilizational development lead them to give a large amount of leeway to those aliens under their protection, which runs into problems when you have species with few qualms about genocide. They're not fond of the Lemn Fleet, for obvious reasons.

Unaligned Worlds: A smattering of other planets who aren't affiliated with any of the four main factions.

>>52425785

Aaah, I see. Well, the PCs are part of the Deep Space Exploration Administration (exactly what it says on the tin) and are currently using a ship with a joint rent-to-buy lease. They're supposed to be finding new worlds for the SRA in various parts of deep space, unexplored or lost. If they can't find stuff the interest racks up, so lucrative jobs are a big deal - but this gets complicated when they're in sectors of space that certain factions lay unequivocal claim to.

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>>52425840
Well then this isn't a bureaucracy game at all. This is just standard space opera with factions. The material in this thread is not useful to you.

Check out Eclipse Phase and Serenity.

>>52425865

I said right off the bat I wanted bureaucracy between factions. The SRA has standards for how space should be explored and navigated, and the sub-factions all have their own rules, and I want them to conflict in interesting ways beyond just "The Inheritors and the Protectorates are gonna go to war over this system." Preferably in a way that can be enforced mechanically.

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>>52425375
The last mini-boss before you get to the BBEG is a secretary. To fight the BBEG, the party will have to provide:
>Birth certificates, in duplo
>Proof of graduation from any relevant mage academies, seminars, knightly orders et cetera
>At least five eyewitness reports confirming that they fulfilled the prophecy
>Evidence that the other 7 minibosses have been slain by the PC's hands
>Written documents confirming their alignments
>Evidence that they have passed the required fitness tests to fight the BBEG
If they can provide all of that, she'll contact them in three to five workdays. If she approves of your request, she'll just let you pass without having to fight her. Now ain't that nice of her?

Back before White Dwarf became GW only in content, they had an article on beurocracy in Traveller.
Highlights included :
having to actually write on physical forms with pens ( not the normal e-forms expected in a high tech environment), with the problem of trying to fill out requisition form for a pen when you don't have one;
Currency exchange from e-credit to physical cash ( at bad exchange rates! );
Non-rejuve / no life extension planets refusing to accept existence of people over an arbitrary age limit (and trying to maintain this by executing visitors over that limit!).

Basically, red tape the red tape. Have each department that might conceivably be involved in a decision have forms to fill in in triplicate, with different forms depending on the order each department is dealt with.
And forms explaining why you filled out the wrong ones and now need the correct ones, etc.
Ad infinitum, ad nauseum!