Dungeon and Sandbox Factions Shape Campaign Arcs

Sopkatok resides in a dungeon in Hot Springs Island
that showcases conflicts between sandbox factions

The word faction gets used to describe two slightly different things in the post-OSR. Factions in the dungeon and factions in the sandbox affect the game differently because of their sizes. There is an exception to this. A megadungeon can be big enough that their factions approach the same size scale as those of a sandbox hex or point crawl setting. I feel like I usually see dungeons written as atomized locations, external to and existing at the margins of the mundane world of the sandbox. It doesn't have to be that way though. Hot Springs Island shows that a sandbox setting can be written so wholistically and with so much attention to detail that each dungeon reflects some microcosm of the greater struggles of the world. I think a campaign arc can be much more rewarding if there is some harmony between at least some of the dungeons internal conflicts and those of the greater world. Just because the two types of factions are different, doesn't mean they shouldn't be connected. On the contrary, especially because they are separate things they should be deliberately tied together. This way the players' characters will be introduced to factions through action, and form strong opinions about and relationships with them. The more players become entangled in the narratives and conflicts of the factions of the world, the more they will be ready to engage in those conflicts on the domain scale of play once they get there. 

John Harper talks about a campaign he ran of the sci-fi OSR game Stars Without Number, which informed his design of Blades in the Dark. One of the tools he developed in this campaign was the Jobs Board, where players had a list of mission options available to them to choose from. They could of course do whatever they wanted, but the Jobs Board provided a lot of the grist for the campaign. These jobs came from the faction mini-game in SWN, which abstracts and simulates large scale actions of and conflicts between factions. So for example if the Midnight Syndicate is deploying cyberninjas to attack Holosphere International's manufactories, one of the jobs can be to defend a manufactory from cyberninjas. Or maybe the other way around, they can be paid to retrieve an encrypted drive from Holosphere and sabotage their infrastructure using advanced tech. The Jobs Board is a great way to gradually draw players into the moving gears of the greater world before they feel ready to make big moves on the domain level. 

I once ran a planar city campaign using a version of the SWN faction system with a jobs board to run the conflicts within the enormous megacity. This led to missions like raiding the tower of a wizard of a rival faction, for which I placed a MacGuffin in the first adventure from the Dungeon Crawl Classics mini-campaign The Sea Queen Escapes. They later raided a caravan I think delivering resources to some battlefront within the city, which I generated using Between The Skies. Eventually, they started sending NPCs and militia units to accomplish missions that they didn't have time for, while doing the most important missions themselves. Finally, as a campaign ending adventure, they attacked the tower of the leader of the main evil faction, Vecna. For this I used the tower of Svarku, the main villain from the aforementioned Hot Springs Island.

I don't know if the Jobs Board and the faction mission based campaign arc can work for all games and settings, but it is possible to ease a party into the world of domain level play by creating missions based on faction conflicts and it can be rewarding giving that "epic" feeling that many crave. When this happens, dungeons are not just delves, they are missions with purpose, containing faction actors who are pursuing their own goals tied to the greater world.