My players are a crew of Shadows and have just announced as the intention of their first self-motivated score to get the “Covert Drop” claim, taking it away from one of their rivals. They want that sweet extra 2 coins from Espionage/Sabotage scores.
I’m having some trouble wrapping my head around exactly what the covert drop is, though. I’m assuming the extra coin comes from clients who appreciate that their dealings are harder to track, but how would it work fictionally?
Is it just a loose cobblestone under which the rival has been exchanging messages? How does the rival prevent the wrong person from grabbing the message, presuming they don’t have a separate drop EVERY time they get a new client? What happens when enough clients know the location and word gets out?
Is it a location with a person who can keep an eye on things? I considered having it be a restaurant with a maitre d’ whom the clients tell a pass code and who has the secret correspondence delivered with the client’s dinner.
I’ve also considered a homing pigeon or delivery owl roost, with some sort of “magic stone” that each bird homes to and from. I imagine these sorts of messengers are common through out the city, just that this one happens to be run by a spy master.
What are your thoughts? Have you used the “Covert Drop” claim in your game? Are any of my ideas any good? Do you have other ideas that could work? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
The special nature of the Covert Drop claim (” The perfect hidden exchange point is worth the extra coin to discerning clientele. “) seems like it would preclude your “loose cobblestone” and the like. This is something special. Your restaurant (we have used The Centuralia Club) seems more on the mark.
I see your point. It’s funny, though, that I got the loose cobblestone idea from the Wikipedia page about “dead drops” and other spy craft that has actually been used. Though, in those cases it’s usually messages between people with a pre-established relationship, rather than spies for hire.
You don’t really need our help, all of your ideas are great.
For me, the NPCs associated with a claim are always really fun to play – after all, they typically start out hostile, or as obstacles of some sort, but become useful parts of the crew as time goes on. Seeing how the players deal with making assets truly ‘theirs’ is always fun. And you’ve got that part covered.
It’s also important that claims have the potential to be “taken back” later, if certain entanglements ar hit. You’ve got that part covered.
Beyond that, the only necessity is for the claim to make sense for the faction that currently holds it, and you know your game better than we do, so I’m sure you’ve already sorted that out.
The Cover Drop our crew has is a number of Wraith couriers disguised as mailmen working out of a small delivery hub. They still think they work for the Wraiths.
In my game, the Northhook Benevolent Society are a Shadows crew specialising in espionage. They picked up Covert Drops as their first score too.
Their Covert Drops were at Vreen’s Hound Races in the centre of Nightmarket. The Cyphers had a deal with Vreen that was a win-win, Cyphers got better quality intel from discerning people and Vreen got those same folk betting at his races as a cover.
The score to make that claim was fairly convoluted. First, the crew found out that Vreen is spending the money that gullible investors have put into his hound racing track and then use it to secretly buy up a heap of properties in Crow’s Foot that were currently undervalued. Then the crew set things up to look like the Cyphers’ were betraying Vreen by delivering that intel to the Crows. Finally the crew provided evidence to Vreen about this betrayal and then offered to fill the void the Cyphers left.
My game features a crew of Shadows called ‘The Clever Dicks’ who also went for Covert Drops as their first claim. We picked the upstairs member’s room/library of a gaming house that had pretensions of being a gentleman’s club, but the twist was that it was actually a spirit node being used by the Dimmer Sisters for obscure purposes.
The score to claim it was an infiltration/sabotage job to hack the spirit wards subtly enough that the Dimmer Sisters wouldn’t realise that they had been pwned and let the Reconciled back in to use the spirit node unmolested. The payoff for this was that the Reconciled would act as middle man cut-outs for the Covert Drop.
Consequences and entanglements from this score ended up with The Clever Dicks in a full-sale war with another Tier 1 gang and a bunch of longer term clocks ticking in the background for when the Dimmer Sisters and some other Tier 3 operators would run out of patience with the shit that the Clever Dicks have been stirring up.