#CopperheadCounty Gamma:
After many moons and my ongoing playtest, I’m pleased to show the community a Gamma edition of my modern-southern-criminal hack, Copperhead County.
Inside, you’ll find:
Five new playbooks and two new crews (h/t to Adam Schwaninger for these PDF templates)
An original setting and factions, many with full writeups (neighborhood writeups tk)
Copperhead County, Gamma edition: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ykU-B7_WwNRzRsP9I4lK2nEdk4MlOf7rGZ5sup6a3y0
Playbooks: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxKYBKmPes3HbEpvOFRQTTItWnM/view?usp=sharing
This is a very personal project I’ve been working on for a long time, combining my favorite RPG Blades in the Dark with all my other favorite things. I’m proud of it and I hope you like it.
I am one of the lucky few that gets to play in this hack and it’s really great. Every session feels like an episode of an awesome crime drama with just the right amount of grit.
The fictional setting feels so real and well thought out, and the hack of BiTTD to play a real world crime RPG is great.
“Take Heat equal to your new Bank level”. I might have missed this before, but that’s pretty hot.
I also really love the potential for the Wheeler’s “Britt, a trophy spouse” as friend or (and perhaps more interestingly) rival. So good.
Adam Schwaninger You gotta be careful with the taxman! The Outfit has an upgrade that helps. Hellraisers don’t care about the government.
Grit, Gumption and Grace are amazing names for the Attributes.
This looks great.
It’s a minor thing, but I really like the addition of “Your” to the playbook items. “Your silenced pistol.” It’s a nice touch.
I’m the Wheeler in Jason’s prototype game, and I love the system, and Jason’s running of it. Every session has evoked the drama and indulgent character acting from all the crime fiction I love. The setting comes from familiarity and passion and it really gels.
Adam Schwaninger​ I totally agree, and made Britt my character’s rival for that reason. Jason’s a great GM so the PC-NPC interactions are always extensive and fulfilling, but the story kernals on the page are also very strong.
Also, Jason Aaron, Jason Latour, Jason Eley. Just sayin’. 🙂
John Harper Thank you John!
Adam Schwaninger this is my bid to claim my place among the Great Southern Jasons.
Adam Maunz Adam Schwaninger Camila the Wheeler has also gotten a lot of use out of Baird, who in our reality is like an R&B-gospel singer. He was just instrumental in setting up a meeting between Camila and Gabrielle Barnett, who is maybe now Camila’s love interest? We’ve had some very interesting games recently. I’m going to work on an AP now that I can take a break from this.
I love how much the text oozes with the modern criminal style. I like the ex trigger moves every playbook gets, they look simply delightful.
Gorinich Serpant Thank you! I am proud of those trigger abilities. We just updated to this ability list and most of the crew took one and hit them. The 2xp trigger is intended to encourage sort of late-game drama, so we’ll see how that works.
Jason Eley I have a lot of love for the depth and detail you’ve put into your factions. It’s dense with ideas, which is super gameable but it also makes sense that as a contemporary setting, well, there’s a lot of people and groups available. Also it means you could run vastly different campaigns that touched only subsets of the factions and get very different feels. Which… well, that’s what happens with crime fiction anyway, isn’t it? Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy and Justified are all in the same “setting” essentially, just different gaming groups. 🙂
Still digesting the Justice minigame (I think calling it a minigame isn’t too inaccurate?). Going to jail in our world seems like a much, much bigger deal for character playability than going into Ironhook in Duskwall.
I really, really enjoy Copperhead County, and playing as the Cleaner makes for some really fun opportunities to do crazy things and sometimes I even avoid trying to injure the other characters we run into. Even when we have a session where everything goes wrong (see two sessions ago) it’s a real blast to see how it all unfolds and to get caught up in the consequences and the systems and story.
Adam Schwaninger Thank you! I’ve seen that in our game, where even though we’ve leaned very heavily into the faction game. there are still lots of these factions we haven’t seen, especially the more ‘legitimate’ ones. I want to expand the scope out as the crew Tiers up.
The factions are the oldest part of this, I started writing down ideas for them, I think, while the Blades KS was still going… they started out really knocking off Justified and the base factions and it’s been very fun developing them into their own thing and building the world around them. The basis for Albright Solutions was Ulf Ironborn, for example (crossed with Sam Elliott in Justified and an article I read about the Silk Road).
You’re very right about Justice. Earth justice is much more complex than a fantasy setting, and I want to honor that, but not bog it down. I feel like it should be a major part of the game if a PC or an important NPC gets arrested and goes on trial, and that in a modern setting, players will want to play around with stuff like that. I hope that now, I at least have a decent basis to work off of. It’s kind of like an extended entanglement minigame?
Prison is tricky too. I don’t necessarily want prison to be a big part of the game, but its important, and there’s a lot of precedent in the inspirational fiction: various prison storylines in Justified, and Avon in The Wire (who definitely used a long-term project to get out early). I like my idea where, since there’s a local prison, you can take a crew upgrade to get your PCs sent there, and then they can still participate in a limited fashion. So hopefully that will work.
Adam Schwaninger I actually got the chance to mess with Justice tonight, because I rolled an Arrest entanglement! I decided to use my draft as guidelines and kind of wing it. I arrested Marvin, our Brick. The first thing we did was find a lawyer, since the crew doesn’t have a Lawyer cohort; I handled that with the Acquire an Asset activity, which worked out well because Marvin rolled really badly and then dropped a bunch of Cash raising his result level up in order to hire a better lawyer. Then we went to Bail as-written, the cops offered him a lesser sentence, which he refused. I think at that point, the deal could be that the crew takes Heat, or they implicate another faction and take a status hit and/or face Reprisals. Marvin refused the deal and the crew bailed him out. I started a Marvin’s Trial clock and ticked it down after their score was over. I was satisfied with how it worked so far and have some good edits to make.
Glad it seems to have gone well! What kind of time is Marvin looking at by refusing to play ball?
They were Wanted Level 1, so a distribution charge that would get him several months to a year.
But… after their job, they’re Wanted Level 2 now! But he was already arrested on less serious charges, so I think it makes more sense to set the original charge and follow it? Justice is complicated.
Thanks for linking me to this, looks to be exactly what I am looking for.
This is intriguing and looks really well-written. Kudos!