Some might say that factions don't belong here. But I think that the background of the faction does count as a story. That, and the fact they usually don't last long, so the main value they have is the story behind them.
This one is probably my favourite. It started off when a friend found out about GRI having their own ID, and no other faction using it. For the first few weeks, we were just flying around without any identity whatsoever. Eventually, from various pieces (such as "His word is law", a catchphrase that I think I borrowed from the old GRN), the faction's lore grew. I also came to the idea that Gallia, being "the villain" of the mod, needs a compelling motivation for their actions, apart from old grudges from Sol or a plain lack of resources. Compelling motivation is an important aspect of les Révélateurs and their RP. In a way, the faction itself is a character.
The lore of les Révélateurs has two layers. On the surface, it's what you see in the description: just a small GRI battlegroup, not much different from any other Gallic faction. However, there is the second layer, which I call the twist. Hints and clues about the twist are spread all over my post related to les Révélateurs. They are everywhere: in the faction description, roster, my posts in the stories, some of my MDs, and even answers in the recruitment thread. When put together, those hints might help you find the twist. Should you do that (very few people actually bothered), you'll look at the story from an entirely different angle, and start seeing all the hints.
In fact, the faction writeup by itself is a complete story at this point, with a few mysteries to figure out. It's much like how Dark Souls handles its lore: you collect its bits from item descriptions or pieces of dialogues, and a bigger picture slowly forms. Still, not all questions are answered.
And I haven't even mentioned an array of potential activities in the game. At this moment (with the war against Bretonia, Liberty, Crayterians, Outcasts, Coalition, and the Council going on), GRI have a variety of places to fly to and factions to fight. If that gets too challenging, Dublin gold also technically belongs to the King, so there's an opportunity to "liberate" the Crown's "stolen" property. Being an intelligence faction, GRI can in theory do shady deals with the less reputable factions, but we haven't tackled that route as of yet.
My first attempt at creating a faction. The name and the backstory are a reference to +LE+, a GRN-faction-turned-Brigands. I joined them back in 2010, and despite the faction being frowned upon at that time (mainly due to being seen as unbrigandish), I still had some great moments with +LE+. When I was creating Les Damnés, I tried to add some Brigand feel to it (and I was inspired by the Saints Row series at the time).
The faction ended up being mostly me and Decktare, a good friend of mine, and it didn't last too long. Still, despite the general lack activity in Gallia at that time, we managed to get our share of fun encounters, particularly with Radion's GRP and the Order|.
There was a fun story arc: we once planned a 2vs2 event with GRP in Ile-de-France. Once we were there, it coincided with one of the admins (I think it was Alley, but I may be wrong) to spawn some Nomad Marduks in various places around the sector and announce it as "increased Nomad activity". Naturally, a Nomad patrol appeared once we were about to have a fight with GRP. Instead the Brigands ended up having to join forces with the Police to bring down those "weird purple things".
It didn't stop at that: after the fight the Brigands managed to tractor some of the Nomad remains, and that resulted in a chase, because the GRP wanted the stuff for themselves. Once they secured these unknown materials, they tried to find buyers, and the Order were willing to meet in Rishiri to negotiate. However, the deal didn't work; Brigands wanted tech or something that was worth more than a few million credits that the Order were willing to pay. So it resulted in a nice battle with SNACs, exploding gunboats and bombers, etc.
In the end it died down because I kind of lost interest in Disco at that point and just disappeared (I apologize to those who were affected by that). Still, I have fond memories of the time when Les Damnés were rolling around and doing things. At least there was some fun in the Le Chat Noir club.
My second attempt at creating a faction. It is still mostly a draft, and it may never take off, but I enjoyed writing it. Kudos to Stolt for bringing up that idea, or I probably would've just left it as an out-of-game thing to explain what my LSF Director character was up to after being reassigned from the LSF.
It also tied up nicely with the trade run I did in my Freelancer Serenity (tungsten from planet Harris to Planet Sprague, and something else back to Harris). I tried to provide an RP reason for that (the character being a blockade runner trying to haul as much stuff off Harris to Sprague before the Gauls occupied it), and later came up with an idea of some power standing behind that blockade runner. That's how the concept of Ajax was created. I even tried to recruit Dave Synk into hauling stuff with me (back when there weren't even thoughts of a faction), but it didn't go farther than one trading session and an excuse for doing that route.
When I discussed the idea of a faction with Stolt, we ended up deciding on the LSF ID. Back in the day (2010-2011) people used to complain about =LSF= being "same Navy/Police, different IFF". Kingvaillant tried to rectify it by making LSF work mostly in the Independent Worlds (Magellan, Cortez, Bering, Texas, Galileo, and Kepler). That ended up with LSF losing some of the things to do, but maybe we should've just taken the idea further. So I thought it'd be good to try and make use of LSF ID's ability to fight enemies of Liberty outside of Liberty, and give an LSF faction an entirely different list of things to do (or at least different places to do those things at).
That being said, I'm still not sure if it'll work. I haven't been too active in game lately (mostly because I have more on my plate than I can chew in terms of games and even RP stuff going on Disco). Still, I thought this little project deserves a mention, if only for the background lore.