So, my players are thinking about selecting Smugglers crew. I am not so sure how this kind of crew would work in this setting.
Do they smuggle something into the Doskvol (independently) or are those crews mostly intracity crews?
What their turf represent? Their warehouses?
I would think that smugglers mostly sell their products to other gangs like hawkers or to some select wealthy individuals rather than sell them at street corners.
Any ideas how this would work? Thanks!
This may be of interest.
https://plus.google.com/+MaxPerman/posts/a2Ys8CA7P62
The smugglers crew has historically been the hardest for people to wrap their heads around. I’d offer advice, but our group never conquered it. We just switched to Breakers like a bunch of cowards.
I’ve been running a game for a crew of Smugglers for some months now. They’ve done all their jobs inside Doskvol itself except this latest one, which has taken them into the Deathlands(but not very far).
Their lair is a barge with a carriage house on it, and their turf(so far) is a bolt-hole/dead drop hidden inside a library above a goat/carriage rental place. They use it as a place to lay low, hide goods, pick up goods, and as a starting point for jobs inside the city sometimes.
They haven’t really been selling product themselves, they’re more middle-men — their first job involved acquiring and transporting some illicit goods to the Crows to help them reestablish control of Crow’s Foot(the goods turned out to be explosives).
They’ve got work opportunities coming up with a City Council member whom they accidentally outed as dabbling in arcane substances with ladies of the night… when one of the crew members burned down a brothel in revenge upon someone who gave him bad information. The councilman wants them to smuggle his substances(and possibly ladies) for him as recompense. 😛
And they don’t have to actively smuggle something on every job; a crew of smugglers can still run scores acquiring contacts, turf, taking out rivals, etc.
I agree that it’s easier if they don’t necessarily have to worry about selling their goods themselves – they’re not Hawkers, after all. They’re more likely to move things that someone pays them to move. That said, that makes them maybe a little more dependent on being “hired” than some crews.
May I suggest a possibly unusual way of looking at both playbooks and crews?
When figuring out what the PCs do: Ignore them!
Seriously! So you want a creepy mystic? That doesn’t have to be a whisper! So you want to have a bunch of PCs who run around murdering? They don’t have to be a breakers crew!
Instead, treat both the playbook and crew as character skills or something. Something that differentiates each character from each other, NOT something that defines what that character is or does.
So, for example, in the game I’m running, one of the characters was orphaned as a child, and grew up in the sewers raised by ghosts. Creepy, right? They’ve got a strong affinity for spirits and ghosts. So a whisper, right? Nope. That’s our Lurk. Why? Because the player likes playing thieves and other sneaky characters – so the “skill set” chosen for that creepy magic character was the lurk playbook. Their ability is the “turn invisible and walk through walls” ability, which is nicely thematic for ghosts. Their vice is to descend into the sewers and allow ghosts to possess them (eating away their negative emotions and reducing stress in the process) – when the group runs into ghosts, and I call for a resistance roll to avoid freezing or fleeing, I don’t ask this character to roll because, fictionally, they are comfortable with the ghosts. (But fictionally, they’re also at odds with the spirit wardens, etc.)
Same with the crew – the players decided to pick the thieves crew. But then we “just play” – they’ve done a score with pickpoceting, but they’ve also run a black-market auction, recovered stolen goods, violently assaulted and captured a brothel. Sold that brothel when they got word that the previous owners were coming back for revenge. Discussed bounty hunting… uh… negotiated alliances… lots of stuff.
At no point have I told them “A guy comes up to you and asks you to steal this thing” – I just started with the usual “there’s about to be a war here” and let them involve themselves. And since they’re a thieves crew, they have certain advantages – in their case, they are “the Tunnellers” with a hidden headquarters somewhere in the sewers, and a map of the tunnels beneath the city – so they can come and go. It also means they could be effective smugglers (although they haven’t done that yet) – and have come into territory conflict with the fog hounds who DO use those same tunnels for smuggling. But if they wanted to “do smuggling” there’s no reason why they shouldn’t, is there? And their current advantages might make them more effective at smuggling than a “smugglers” crew – depending on the method of their smuggling.
I just roll with the game – I try to drop lots of opportunities for all sorts of gang types. The hound’s slaver friend suggested that there’s always wanted criminals he could bounty hunt and sell as slaves. The Lampblacks are on the lookout for muscle. The claims on their sheet creates new plots (they wanted a fence, and trying to get one led to them running the black market auctions…) and so on.
The fact that they’ve only once ever actually done a “just pickpocket people” score, even though they’re a thieves crew… it really doesn’t matter at all. The game is more awesome, not less, because it means the PCs are always doing something new and interesting. It means their situation can escalate in crazy new exciting ways, and it means we’re not getting bored of robbery after robbery. But it leaves them free to do robbery after robbery if that’s what they’d like to do.
I totally agree that if every score is about smuggling something gets boring very easily same as with every other “core” score for each crew type. But if my players choose this as their crew type then I have to assume that they want smuggling to play a central part in their game at least in the background and especially at the beginning sessions. So we have to establish what products they move, how they do it and what are the routes.
+Mike Pureka This “hired” thing is something that my group (me included) has been doing practically all these decades of gaming. As I think of this perhaps turf in smuggler’s crew sheet is actually their clientele and grabbing turf is just muscling their way into some hawker gang’s operation telling them that we can move your product instead of that other smuggler gang.
+Tony Demtriou, I sort of agree with you. I see playbooks as sort of archetypes that help players (and GMs) new to the game to get a pretty fast start of the game but they also show what each PC is good at. Of course they can do other things as well. Crew type is their core business, of course they can and probably will do other type of scores. Smuggler crew will never get above Tier I if they just move their products and shadows never get very far if they just pick pockets and break into other peoples’ houses without seeing a bigger picture and trying to expand and diversify.