#CopperheadCounty AP: The Best Brands Hijack
This is the continuing tale of my playtest game of Copperhead County, my modern-southern-criminal Blades hack. If you want to read the entire saga up to this point:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JasonEley/posts/PcYiYuWjSud
If you want to read more about the hack:
Playbooks: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxKYBKmPes3HQXV0RExOUnhwUkE
(special thanks to Adam Schwaninger for letting me use his files to make these PDFs!)
Factions/some setting: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxKYBKmPes3HX1h2dmJ3TXdrOEk
This was a somewhat uncharacteristic adventure for our Hellraisers: they didn’t piss anyone off and they didn’t blow anything up. They merely worked together and got a nice payday with little Heat. If only the life of crime could always be so simple…
After the crew’s last adventure, ransacking a gun workshop run by the Heathens MC, we discussed a few different things they could do next, and they decided to make a move into stolen goods. I’d had an idea in mind for a while and was ready to go: their mechanic contact set them up to meet Rich Sturges, a shady pawn shop owner, at a Triple B’s restaurant (the B’s stand for Buffalo, BBQ, and Beer: maybe I should trademark this idea) in a new shopping center in the city suburbs. Rich was looking for a crew of criminals to break into the shopping center’s Best Brands, a big-box electronics retailer, and make off with all the iPhones, iPads, and HDTVs they could carry. Then he’d fence the goods through his store, kick up to the Mob, and everyone would have a nice payday. If they got along, maybe he’d work with them again as their Pawn Fence.
The PCs took him up on the offer and set about gathering info on the store. Haddie the Hazard asked around and learned the Best Brands delivery truck arrived early Tuesday mornings, while Jesse the Marker scoped out the shopping center and noted that, with a nearby movie theater bustling with the summer blockbuster season, they couldn’t count on the area being quiet at night. So rather than heisting the store directly, and dealing with security guards, cameras, and civilians, they decided to hijack the delivery truck before it reached the store. They set up a stakeout in the center’s 24-hour Zip Burger (tier 2, a regional burger chain based in the county) the next Tuesday morning and observed the truck’s approach and delivery, confident they could pinpoint the truck in the wild next time.
Flash to the next week, when the plan came together: the crew’s Gang of Soldiers, led by their lieutenant Cole, would take a crew van and set up on the highway, alerting the crew to the truck’s approach. Meanwhile, Marvin the Heavy and Willem the Cleaner would take Jesse’s car, an old sedan that could pass for an unmarked police car, and approach the truck on the highway, using a storebought siren to force it to pull over into a weigh station. Jesse, Haddie, and Camila the Wheeler would wait in the weigh station, ready to unload the truck once the driver was dealt with. With a strong ‘fake police car’ detail, I gave them a 4d Engagement roll, and they 6ed it.
They successfully pulled over the truck, and I created two clocks: Notice, to measure the danger of their weigh station hijacking being noticed by passing vehicles, and Suspicion, to measure the truck driver’s suspicion that Marvin, a towering man wearing a bulletproof vest, was not a real cop. Marvin ordered the driver out of the truck while Willem tried to sneak around to the back; unfortunately, the driver spotted him, and his suspicion grew that a weedy junkie in a hoodie was not actually the cop’s partner. The driver came out, and tried to hand Marvin a $50, explaining that he was making an important delivery to the city, and his friends wouldn’t be happy with the delay. No dice with Marvin, who tried to yell the driver down, but the driver’s Suspicion clock filled and he got right back in Marvin’s face. So, Marvin punched his lights out. Feeling bad about hurting a civilian, Marvin then decided to take some Cash out of his own pocket and slip it into the driver’s, showing there were no hard feelings (one of their reputations is for being For The People).
With the truck secured, the crew then had a long argument about whether to take the truck into the mountains and unload it, or whether to find a road off of the highway and do it: the difference being that the mountains would offer seclusion from notice, but with the danger of crashing the truck; while staying along the highway would be safer for the truck, but more dangerous for them. They ultimately took it into the mountains and worked very hard and took a lot of stress to safely park the truck on a dirt road, then worked together with their Gang to unload the merchandise into their vans. During the offload, Willem dropped a box, and out spilled a blizzard of packing peanuts and a flurry of white powder. It seemed that when the truck driver said he had an important delivery to make, he wasn’t kidding. Camila gave the matter a quick consideration and determined the hidden cocaine was meant for the Mountain Mafia (tier 4, the old-guard county mob, the most powerful criminal faction in the area). Wisely deciding not to antagonize the Mob, they decided to have Rich, who had some connections with them, return the cocaine with their apologies.
A simple, low-key truck hijacking gave the crew a nice bundle of Cash and very little Heat. But the glow didn’t last long, because their post-score Entanglement rolled Show of Force: a negative-status faction makes a play against them. Checking their faction statuses, I decided to tie this into the events of their last adventure, along with a faction I’d been hoping to position as a villain this season.
Camila got a call from Jensen Allbright, the Californian transplant they’re allied with against the Heathens MC (see last job), that his own shipment of gunsmith machinery had been attacked by the Copperhead Patriots (tier 2, an extremist militia with very bad opinions). It seemed they would either need to give up Jensen’s gun trade, which he had agreed to pay them a percentage of, to the Patriots, or step up and go to war… and they chose war. They’d better watch out next time: as cathartic as it may be to beat on those stars-and-bars-waving militiamen, the Patriots can more than match them gun-for-gun and explosion-for-explosion…
Are your entanglements mostly vanilla Blades? I’m especially wondering how you’ve adapted the explicitly supernatural results.
Adam Schwaninger I kept the ones that made sense and added some new ones to replace the supernatural ones, mostly involving Claims. I actually need to rewrite them a little to bring them up to my current version. Let me do that and I’ll post them.
Also WRT the heist itself: mechanically, was the lead-in mostly Gather Info rolls before engagment? The burger joint recon, the truck schedule, etc.? Were they flashbacks based on info post-engagement? It reads like the flash-forward triggered the engagement roll, but I’m curious if that was just setting the next scene or you’re putting flashbacks in continuity.
You’re right: the flash-forward did trigger the engagement roll, and I was flattening the continuity to make sense for the reader. We had pretty weird continuity this week, in part because Jesse’s player was out last game. His idea was for Jesse to be out gathering info for a future score, so I decided to place the first scene, where they talked to Rich, as a flashback to before their last score. Then, we returned to the ‘present’ and did downtime (we usually do downtime at the start of a session because we run out of time the prevous session), and I gave Jesse a free gather info action, before everyone else’s downtime, to account for his absence. His other gather info, and Haddie’s gather info, were both during downtime.
The burger joint recon was pre-engagement, while they were selecting their target- they wanted to see if they could learn the truck schedule, so they could decide whether to hit the truck or hit the store. They did a group Survey action and got a 6, so they decided to move forward with the truck as their target.
We actually don’t do a ton of flashback actions in this game… we do some, but not as many as when we played core Blades. I’m not sure if that’s a difference in genre, or just in their approach: since they’re the Breakers-esque Hellraisers, they typically do pretty straightforward approaches and deal with obstacles as they arise. They’ve also gotten 6es on their last two Engagement rolls, so they haven’t needed to flashback to deal with them!
Adam Schwaninger Here’s a pass at it. Most of it is very similar, though I adjusted the costs and replaced the spooky ones. I might like to make some changes to how Wanted Level / Incarceration works (to do something with local / state / federal authorities), and then adjust these, but for now the vanilla approach has worked fine.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ekuufeFBbUMR2Zhv6WLrDEjYsIxy4B9MesvcPbT0AL4/edit?usp=sharing