War of the Roses style game: An Echo Resounding?

[Magic Myrmidon]

Hi, everyone. I plan on starting a PbP War of the Roses- style game with some friends soon, and I kinda want a way to play out the conflict of the various factions in the background of the PCs. Or at the very least, a way to help generate interesting npcs and factions for the players to deal with.

I was looking at An Echo Resounding to help deal with this. Seems like a really good tool for this sort of thing. My main worry though, is that I think it's mainly built for actual kingdoms in conflict, not factions within a kingdom. Is this accurate? For those who have used it, do you think it could work for factions inside of a kingdom, without using other, neighboring kingdoms?

If it comes to it, is it possible to add other kingdoms on later?

I'd be happy to get advice regarding War of the Roses games in general, too.

Thanks!

[snowblizz]

I would point out that any internal conflict is probably going to start involving outside parties, as did the War of Roses itself. The civil war was partly fuelled by the English-French conflict and a Burgundian-French conflict. Powerful noble houses tend to have international contacts and they'll tend to try and use outside troubles for their own gains. The 100YW (and going into the WoR) is one long litany of such manouvres.

[BWR]

There's always this (https://greenronin.com/sifrp/)game.

Legend of the Five Rings has lots of politics, strict factions and history, and lends itself well to this sort of game. Canonically, similar situations to the WotR have happened.

Ars Magica has the benefit of having all of RL European history as its setting, with a coat of magic over everything, so you could literally play the WotR if you wished (you'd have to update the setting a bit but the mechanics should be the same).

While all of these are rather lacking in the actual mechanics department for determining large scale political movement and have to varying success attempted social combat, they all have well-established settings, a ton of NPCs and allegiances and relationships to work with, and are easy enough to use to create more specific stuff for their setting.

[Magic Myrmidon]

The game will be in a preestablished setting that I've run for the group for a while, so unfortunately, I can't really switch that up with L5R or the like. I still want the campaign to be relatively adventure-focused, but for the backdrop to be political maneuvering and scheming.

I do kinda expect some other factions to get involved in one way or another. But this campaign is taking place at the same time as other campaigns I've run for the group. And previous campaigns mean other factions are pretty busy with their own wars and issues. So they are likely to be a bit slow on the uptake.

Definitely good advice, though. I like those other systems.