18 thoughts on “So; Turf.”

  2. My thoughts were things like…Infiltrate a drug ring to sway the operation to your control, assault a smuggler safe house to nab the goods and shut down the route, or even have your Whisper bind a compelled spirit to a corner to ensure only your crew can deal.

  3. Jacob Kent

    Good ideas, but none of those scream ‘thieves’ to me – they all seem like the kinds of things a different kind of criminal organization would get into.

  4. And of course if you have a gang or two loyal to the crew it somewhat expands options for having a more permanent footprint in the neighborhood when they set up shop on your new turf.

  8. You could just go in and bust heads, shaking down protection money or robbing people making it known that you own the place. Then when the other gang that owns that area comes you ambush them and take them down.

    You could also just do a big job for another faction where they give you turf as payment. That’s what the crew did in our game. The job they did for the Forgotten Gods allowed the FGs to expand so they in turn gave them some old turf.

    For more intricate plans of taking turf I recommend watching the show Peaky Blinders

  9. Turf can be a knotty concept. Many game groups (probably most game groups) would be happy to leave it an abstraction, like a smooth blank spot in the surrounding fiction, or a piling under a bridge. I think the easiest way to use it is as an abstraction and currency of influence between gangs.

    I see three useful approaches. One is top-down, where turf is blocks of buildings divided by streets, and criminal influence exerts itself there.

    The second approach is profile, where there are various kinds of business claimed by different crews. You want muscle, you go to the Tophats. You want fencing and chop shops for art, you go to Benny’s Belligerants. You want someone to disappear, or you want to work with smugglers? The Shum (because they can’t pronounce ‘Consortium’) will see to your needs. In that context, your turf represents your fame in managing a kind of villainy and how famous you are for it, and how able you are to discourage competition.

    Then there’s the isometric view, since we’re using map terms. Partly top down, partly profile. Maybe you get a cut from all the fences that operate in Bollivane Court, but you don’t care about who hangs out where or what happens in the alleys as long as it doesn’t affect your business. Another gang hangs out there and manages the traffic and the disorganized crime, and maybe you need to get them on as a gang for fuller control–or maybe they know that your customers are to be given a pass, and you instruct your customers to wear a white tie-pin or hat-pin when doing business.

    (Then there’s going off-road, but that’s a different conversation. I think these ideas can help see ways to use turf as it is.)

  11. You make allies whose territory becomes friendly to you. You shake hands on trade agreements with other scoundrels, so you get preferential treatment in their spheres. You knock down the previous turf holder, and become the default owner until someone knocks you down. You get the nod from someone higher up in the feudal food chain, so you can manage that territory on their behalf.

  13. The ones where allies call in favors could all result in this kind of thing. You could decide you want turf, check out who has it, and either take it by guile or force.

    My default setting is when somebody wants something, then there’s someone else who can get them a step closer to it if they do a probably unrelated favor.

    So, if you want that turf, you check out the crew that currently has it. Turns out they are making Coin by selling drugs supplied by a twitchy violent group. You do a heist to steal their drugs, then they can’t pay the violent group, who chases them off, you take the turf.

    Or, you find out they have that turf as a reward for looking after a safe site on behalf of a bigger crew. You endanger that site with subterfuge as a heist, during the downtime talk to the higher-ups, and then do a favor for the higher ups (another heist) to prove yourselves, and get awarded the turf.

    Et cetera.

  14. Watching Peakey Blinders actually inspired me to do the crew sheet and turf a whole different way, but it does certainly get the creativity flowing for what territory can look like and how it can handle, especially moving up in tiers.

    Another show that is ideal for inspiring heists is Burn Notice. Every season, the main characters are trying to run down a mystery and pin down people who value their privacy and the secrecy of their plans. Step by step the main characters get closer to figuring out the plans and compelling the shadowy figures into view. Watching this play out season after season gives a great view of how micro-missions work towards central goals.

    For example, a mystery bomber wipes out all the pieces that the shadowy organization had in place to conduct an assassination, right before it happened. This includes almost killing Westin with a bomb attached to his door.

    He stalls Management by asking for things he doesn’t need to identify the bomber. Then he gets to work.

    * Steals the hard drive with security camera footage from a company along the route. Gets a picture off that of the bomber, recognizes the outfit.

    * Pulls in favors to get demolitions company records, then pulls a deception plan (“We’re making a calendar of demolition workers”) to get pictures of everyone on crews until they find their guy, and get his address.

    * His house is rigged to blow, so they almost lose a team member there. But he has another place, they stage a raid and capture him alive using specialized gear to prevent a bomb from wiping them all out.

    * They interrogate him for an account number for how he was paid, then ship him out of the country in an illegal arms shipment.

    * Their money man has no luck with the account, nor do the Feds when they get pulled in (attached to other heist stuff, of course.) But the account was monitored and whoever owns it knows they are looking.

    * They try to bribe the account manager, he flies in and they realize he’s an assassin not the account manager; he dies without giving up information.

    And so on and so on. This is a project that needs heists and down time actions to fill clocks, with one mystery solved and the next awaiting, all while other business goes on in the background. That’s the sort of trail you can lay with a mix of down time actions and heists to get control of something or trace a mystery back.

    All this doesn’t have to be planned out in advance, just remember the past pieces in putting new pieces forward. =) These investigations always take an unexpected turn.

    With the Unrecommendables crew, they wanted to take over the Tenpenny Court upstairs network. To do so, they had to use a contact to get close to the guy who runs it. He told them he’d consider working with them if they got rid of his bodyguards (which they did.) He wants to have creative freedom on stage to show off his vision and talent.

    So, they agree to put him on stage. They need to buy a theater, it is haunted, so it is cheap and goes for back taxes. They run a couple heists to get the money together, but run afoul of the bureaucratic process and its leader, a nasty old woman. They can’t buy the theater yet.

    They investigate and get some good blackmail material on the old woman, but hone her animosity and she becomes dangerous. They assault the ghosts in the theater and cleanse it of haunting, so they will be able to move workers in and refurbish it.

    Meanwhile, enemies rob the Tenpenny Court Upstairs Network, kidnapping staff members. It is upsetting to the guy in charge, since he pays the Unrecommendables for protection. They don’t want to cross this new crew, so they spend liberally to replace some of his workers, but then they have to steal some more to get enough money to buy the theater once they sort out other obstacles like the elderly bureaucrat.

    Once they sort her out and buy it, they will get the Tenpenny Court Upstairs Network coin flowing into their operation to help fix it, assuming nothing else goes wrong. Then when they actually start having productions on stage, the theater is turf, as well as the Tenpenny Court being turf, acquired by a series of heists and downtime actions.

  16. But, generally, your Turf doesn’t have to match your crew type. In Brust’s Jhereg, for example, Vlad Taltos is an assassin, but his organization also has gambling dens and extortion rackets as turf.

    Turf claims can also represent your hold over an area. “This is our turf, no one else steals or fences stuff around here.”

  17. So, we need to take this turf from someone else – specifically, the Lampblacks in our fiction.  So I’m assuming they’re going to be the target of our score.  This is our first expansion, and it’s a +1 hold claim, the ‘smallest’ claim type on the claims sheet, so I’m assuming this is going to be a relatively minor chunk of turf.  So, some ideas:

    – We find out the location of some minor operation they’ve got running.  We hit the location.

    – We find out the location and timing of some score they’ve got going.  We show up uninvited to the party, or hit their crew returning from their operation.

    – We find out the timing and route of one of their couriers moving something substantial through what they consider ‘safe’ territory.  We hit the courier.   (Or maybe it’s a series of shakedowns of couriers moving smaller packages through the same general area.)

    Whatever the specifics, assuming we’re successful, they’re already stretched thin with their war with the Red Sash, so they decide to cut their losses and cede the claim to us.

    Or, you know, it all goes sideways. 🙂

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