Adventures in Ancient Sigil?

Ran the game today. The party didn't interact as much as I expected with ancient Sigil, though they did get mistaken for escapees from the Gatehouse by expansionist troops in the Clerk's Ward and messed around with the ancient Guvners a bit, one of them introducing the idea of having a registered list of factions. They also tormented a poor Dabus by asking after Fell. They ended up being on-site when the Keepers were ordered to 'make sure no one knows where you came from' (and one of them has the notes on the process). They also fed the A'kin of the time (not quite as friendly during that era) some info about the future and invested a few thousand gold pieces into one of Sigil's financial institutions (at 1% per year interest... do the math).

Since this was pretty much the last game of the campaign, I don't really mind that they're now all millionaires. I'm sure the Fated don't mind either once they get their cut.

In case anyone is interested, I ran this during -874H. The Expansionists were in the middle of their attempted conquest of Sigil and had just recently made a deal with the Baatezu for military support in exchange for access to Sigil's portals in the areas they controlled.

I had the Expansionists controlling:

30% of the Ward of Masks (Lady's Ward). There were barricades and constant battles between the Expansionists and the population of the Lady's Ward at the interfaces.

100% of the Clerk's Ward (their HQ was a building called the Collegium, but they ended up capturing the Bank of Keys which contained a library of rare portal keys for various portals in Sigil... basically, a huge opportunity for the Expansionists to access pretty much anywhere)

0% of the Hive (interesting that the nickname for the Communals was the Hivers, so I decided to make that the origin of the name of that Ward). They formed a fairly strong defense against the Expansionists.

The other wards I left undecided.

The Guvners (previously the Historians, but split a few thousand years before) ended up in charge of most of the allocation of resources in the defense of the Lady's Ward (so the party found a much more practical incarnation of the Guvners with many of the side-trappings of bureacracy streamlined).

I saw the Incantifiers as having a tower in the Lady's Ward, but being fairly standoffish in the conflict. When the events of -873H came about, I imagine them having experienced a breach of their defenses despite their arcane abilities, and thus needing to get involved.

As far as the events with the Keepers, I had the current Guvner factol as the particular Guvner who summoned them (thus, since he was killed by the Keepers during -874H the Guvners acquired a new factol soon after, who pressed for the cooperation of the factions leading to the combined pleas at the founding site of the 12 Factols).

Instead of the Gleaners and Regulators, I had the Guvners and Communals involved in the 12 Factols events, but otherwise the list was as Rip's post.

There were a few other now-defunct factions that I ended up developing slightly but I didn't end up using. The Masters of War as a sort of precursor to the Believers of the Source, Doomguard, and Expansionists (well, I should say that the Foundry's previous occupants were there to provide weapons to the Masters of War). The Historians as precursors to the Guvners. The Balancers (truth of the multiverse is balance), Traders (all things have a price and a value), Brotherhood of the Touched (planetouched organization), Oratorium (true power is by manipulating language), and Seekers of the Purpose (first to recognize that factions seem to gravitate around the question 'what is the meaning of life?').

I don't know if any of this'll be useful to anyone, but figured I might as well post the details now that the game has been run.

If you're going strictly by canon, there seems to be a quite limited amount of information to go by. But if you're flexible about adding stuff, its definitely possible to imagine a rich setting at that time. The big issues you'd have to answer for your game:

1. What NPCs were still around back then and where were they/what were they doing? There are some very long-lived NPCs who could very well have still been in Sigil back then, but one'd imagine they'd be somewhat less advanced in their plans (maybe Zadara is still being worshipped on Rublia and hasn't come to Sigil yet, maybe A'kin/Shemeska/etc are still somewhere on the Lower Planes or even not yet promoted to Arcanoloths, maybe Alluvius Ruskin is an open member of the Incantifiers since they haven't been eliminated yet, or maybe she comes in later, etc). I'd have to do the math but I wouldn't be surprised if one or more of Darkwood's incarnations were around during the time, which might be an interesting angle to play.

Since the ranks of NPCs will be thinned out, one'd want to have some substitutes to keep things moving in Sigil and have a lot of personalities to interact with. For my one game, I didn't really run into the problem since the players didn't go shopping for hooks (I just needed a random Guvner bureaucrat).

2. Are the players native to the era or are they going to be messing with time?

If the players are native to the era, I'd suggest basically disregard everything you know about modern Sigil as far as ensuring that things happen the same way as before. If the players want to convince the Expansionists to back down so they don't become Mazed, etc, then go with it, otherwise the game will seem very rigid in nature.

If they're from the future, you've got a bit of a thorny decision on your hands, since you have to not only figure out how things change immediately in response to their actions but also what changes that creates in modern Sigil (or go with a 'everything is fated to happen that way/you can't change it' which has the problem of player's actions not influencing the world).

3. How to make it feel different?

To really make the game stand out, you want the feel of ancient Sigil to be really different than modern Sigil. I had the Expansionists fighting an open war in Sigil's streets, resulting in a bit of a war torn/limited movement feeling, but some might not think that makes sense (why doesn't the Lady just end it... well, we know she does a year later). As a result, it was hard to get between certain wards without sneaking past the fighting forces (using Undersigil, short-range teleportation magic like dimension door, invisibility, ...). It's harder to engage in commerce in such an environment, and everything is a lot more serious, with the other factions coming into alignment against the Expansionists (so you'd get a bit less of the Kriegstanz).

On the other hand, if you wanted a game that had more of the varied faction interactions and something a little more open, you could run the game in the days before the Great Upheaval, with the 50ish factions of the time.

Another thing to do would be to try to dial back some of the discoveries and 'advancements'. Maybe the Planewalker's Society hasn't yet been kicked out of Sigil and has just started to explore the Prime in an organized fashion. Law and order in Sigil will be very different without the Harmonium around (though you still have the Sodkillers around), so on-site executions are more common than actual trial.

More later.