In the Call of Cthulhu LCG, The 8th Faction (The Order of the Silver Twilight) was not released until a few Deluxe expansions into the product launch. It occurs to me that with 3 Runner factions and 4 Corp Factions, There will be a deluxe expansion with no runner faction to pair with the last Corp.
Do you think that FFG will release a 4th Runner Faction (or even a 5th Corp) To balance out the “odd corp out”'s box?
If there was a 4th Runner faction, what would it be? Personally, I would like to see a faction of Government Investigators or Spies from other countries/corps.
Just an idea i’d been kicking around during the holidays!
I’d thought about the possibility of a 4th runner faction as well. The ones that immediately jumped out to me were factions represented in the fiction but not necessarily in game - notably the NAPD and Opticon - but several of the important characters seem to be appearing on their own as resources for either the runners or corp in existing factions (Raymond Flint, Tallie Perrault, Caprice Nisei, etc.). I think an investigative faction would be most appropriate flavor-wise, as it differentiates them from the “art for art’s sake/underground celebrity” Shapers, “gimme that loot” Criminals, and “smash the system rabble rabble rabble” Anarchs.
(Of course, to be fair, even some of those stereotypes are breaking down - Reina clearly fights to dismantle the corps for… well, someone’s freedom anyway, as a freedom fighter - and The Professor isn’t so much an underground celebrity or an artiste tinkerer as he is someone with a good sense of morals fighting back in his own way. So there’s room for faction definitions to expand.)
Alternatively, there’s a number of small organizations in the fiction that fight the corporations strictly due to human workers being replaced by android (bioroid and clone) labor replacement solutions - Humanity Labor and the more radical Human First - although the latter would probably be represented by an Anarch runner.
The problem with a new runner faction is that they’d have a really limited card pool, up against other factions with Core + 3 cycles and a deluxe each. It would have to be really well designed to fulfil the objecives of staying fresh and being competitive, while not providing cards that were so good in isolation that the existing factions would benefit from them just as much.
I think a corporate sabotage runner faction which is a front for smaller companies to plunder the megacorp secrets would be interesting. They would lack a lot of the specialized tools of the other runner factions, but could do odd things like remove advancement counters and steal agendas to grant an econ boon.
Let’s go for something weird. Give the last deluxe pack a “runners united” theme. Split the runner stuff up among the 3 factions, and have casual multiplayer rules for one corp vs three other players, Archenemy style.
I am personally hoping they don’t introduce a new faction. Balancing that is a nightmare.
Yeah, I don’t know why I was thinking about it in terms of either neutral or new faction… the harder thing to control seems to be the runner power, and thus introducing another runner faction would be a pain. Seems a pretty simple solution that since they give us 3 runners per deluxe, that they simply feature all 3 runner factions with 1 runner each in the final boxed set.
Another possibility is that the last box has Anarch, NBN, and Weyland in it.
Seems unlikely, and just another wild guess.
For some reason I feel this might be more likely if they release an NBN id in spin cycle, as they’ve only released Anarch and will be releasing a Weyland. If they do so, then the last deluxe box might still have 6 ids but distributed 2/2/2 instead of 3/3. (However, I remember hearing someone say that spin will only have these two ids?)
I also seem to remember that someone had spoken with FFG guys at a Plugged in Tour that had stated the only ID’s in the spin cycle were going to be GRNDL and Reina.
I suppose another possibility is that they do a Neurtal box to couple with the Last corp. But i personally think that’s a long shot.
I think it’s likely that all runner factions will be included in the last pack, but I do think that a neutral runner that essentially has to use influence for all faction cards could be interesting.
I think we can expect seeing more neutral cards that require influence. So it’s highly likely that we’ll see a neutral runner ID, instead of an entirely new faction.
I doubt they would make a neutral runner, and I hope they don’t. They would need to have lots of influence, and I think that would be very problematic for game balance. The whole game is designed around the influence system, and we’ve seen how careful they are in giving extra influence with custom biotics. I also suspect a neutral runner would also end up feeling like just a collection of good stuff from other factions, rather than having their own feel or theme.