Had a fun downtime phase in Jason Eley’s #CopperheadCounty game last night. We’re playing the Blood faction, which is a close-knit family gang (the Hunnicutts) who are trying to raise money for Ezekiel Hunnicutt’s medical bills. I play Eustace the Mover (a driver/daredevil), Ezekiel’s younger brother, and Adam Maunz and Tyler Ellis play Zeke the Stringer (a planner/spider) and Earl the Cleaner (a covert hunter/killer), Ezekiel’s two sons.
Our first score was a lucrative stickup job against some college frat molly dealers where Eustace defined himself as a raging trash fire person when he crowbar’d one of the frat-gang enforcers in the girlfriend. Jason’s set up a stash-alike track but for the crew as a whole for Ezekiel’s medical fund, and we put any Cash overflow into that. It was just enough to get Ezekiel’s track from quality 0 to 1, and the tug-of-war clock we have set up to track his condition stayed neutral at 4/8 ticks.
One of the interesting hacks in Copperhead County is that you roll your Stash level to indulge vice. The stinger here is that every new stash level you achieve also comes with some increased Heat, basically from tax evasion. It gives more mechanical heft to Stash besides feeling good about retiring a PC later on down the line. Not that Eustace plans on retiring. We all agreed he’s the most likely to be killed by his family.
The Best Brands Caper
Next was a bit of setup and stakeouts for our next score, fixed up for us by Eustace’s friend, Dante Richman (think Isaiah Whitlock), a retired crook who made it out of the game alive and rich. This guy Sturges wants us to knock over a Best Brands big box electronics store the friday before their grand opening. After a ridiculous fortune roll revealed that Earl’s friend Keller worked the strip mall as a security guard, we decided to get some security uniforms and go for a stealth plan. We’ll see how it shakes out in 2 weeks.
My own notes are that I should’ve brought it more as Eustace. I was only firing on 2/3rds my cylinders due to RL stuff, though, and I missed a perfect opportunity to nab 2XP from my No, Fuck You xp trigger when Zeke accosted me about hitting Amanda with the prybar. Earl and the crew itself did fairly well XP-wise, however, especially considering it was downtime, which is always a little lighter IME.
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The fortune roll of Earl’s friend Keller, a security guard, working at the shopping center was fun and silly. I don’t know what the writers are thinking with these kind of narrative shortcuts.
I am pleased with my innovation of the Medical Fund Track (which is about half the size of a normal Stash track). It shows the malleability of the game mechanics and how you can twist them for your own unique needs. Narratively, it gives the game a different feeling where the PCs are motivated by something beyond “Let’s increase our personal wealth / power via crime.”
Speaking of different feelings, I’m also happy so far that this is a city-based game. My first game is set in one of the county’s small towns, and while they occasionally venture into the city, they mostly do a lot of fighting hillbillies in the hills and on the highways. But #CopperheadCounty is about more than hillbillies and this game has been very suburban so far- sticking up college kids in a condo, planning a big box heist.