I'm conflicted and barely comfortable with a 2 start rating for this. This product just gives more factions to join and not much support to make them really useful. I thought (maybe didn't read through the description?) that it would help me flesh out the factions presented in teh book. I wanted different ranks, faction quests and didn't get what I wanted (doesn't mean I didn't get what I paid for though)

Great in theory, mechanically it's shakey.

So you get faction benefits (as you would expect) for belonging to a faction. This comes in the form of discounts, favors, or items. Likewise, you can earn the anger of a faction, and suffer punishments from said factions in the form of markups, targeted harassments, and so on.

This is fine. I particularly enjoyed the results of being targeted by a faction.

My only real problem is that while the Zhentarim are in here, that's the only default faction. And while I can understand wanting to draw from lore and expand the factions, it was all filled with factions from the author's game. It would be arbitrary to map these to existing factions (either from 5e or earlier) but it is a bit of a disappointment.

I read this as inspiration for how I would run my own West Marches style campaign. The book is pretty good, it has some good factions and some cool rewards and downsides that I have now stolen :)

I think this product is really interesting and has some great ideas, but it wasn't presented in an easy to ingest way and I think the system presented is actually too complicated. At least for me, I think some people would love this and I get that. But it wasn't for me. This gives you factions to place in your city and a way to track their realtionships with your players, though in a way I felt was a bit too complicated. Still a very good product with some great inspiration :)