One thing I, and the other players, in my group have struggled with a bit is the 4th crew xp trigger “express the goals, drives, inner conflict, or essential nature of the crew.”
We’re not having much luck coming up with goals or drives. Immediate thoughts seem like things all crews would be doing and not particularly unique. Like taking over more territory or earning respect or something like that.
So I’m curious what sorts of goals, drives, or essential natures people have seen/used in play and what that looked like.
It’s all about your crew and the interpersonal dynamics that only exist because of who these characters are. No other crew will have these exact relationships, and when you put them on display, you get XP.
My crew, the Devil’s Gentry, has two dishonored nobles and two peasants and we see the class tension of the Shattered Isles play out in this venn diagram… similarly, one of our nobles and one our peasants both play fast and loose with their violence, creating strife even within our class divisions, and pushing them away from their counterparts.
When concocting the origin of our crew, we devised that everyone was collected by the Spider to replace a former crew she sold out to the Bluecoats. So we look for that in our games too: the Spider flaunting being in charge or silencing dissent or looking for ways to exploit the crew, and we look for the tension too, when members of the crew defy or undercut our “leader.”
We found out our Cutter thinks of our Leech as a little brother, a stand-in for a brother that was killed in Severos. That came up in play when our Cutter saved him from a bullet in an ambush. And our Whisper is a talkative drunk, spilling secrets about the Gentry everytime they go out on the town, leading an Inspector right back to their doorstep, and keeping secrets from the crew… which is going to get them yelled at, if they ever wake up from their coma.
What you’re looking for with the goals, drives, inner conflict, and essential nature of the crew goes beyond being “shadows” or “smugglers” or “bravos.” None of that is essential, I say. It’s about the specific crew at your table, and seeing their particular storylines emerge and get put on display.
Well, most Crews start with a Reputation (Bold, professional, strange, etc.) If their Reputation is “Ambitious,” or “Bold,” are they playing it safe, or taking on crews above their station? If the are “Strange,” are they seeking out the weirdness of Duskvol, or just sticking up the local liquor store?
It’s an easy place to start anyways.
Alfred Rudzki Right. I’m not looking to copy what anyone else is doing, just looking for inspiration in how other players are coming up with this stuff. Concrete examples like yours really help learn & come up with new ideas. So definitely thanks for that.
Arne Jamtgaard Our reputation is “daring” and we’ve been doing pretty good with that one. But there’s an xp trigger for reputation that’s separate from goals/drives.
Jeremiah Frye have you made a relationship map for your crew? I think it will help a lot, if you haven’t. Map the crew out and just try grouping them by some different metrics: backgrounds, birthplace, education, what they did during the war, their vices, their reactions to NPCs, etc. Look for overlap and tease out the differences even when they overlap.
I would argue for “essential nature” also being attached to how well they performed “Their Thing”. Did the Shadows pull off a daring burglary of a powerful noble? Did the Bravos cow an entire block while taking “donations”? Did the Cult slay the false prophet of their god’s rival? Basically, does everyone feel that the crew played to type? If so, consider the XP.
Jeremiah Frye You are absolutely right, good sir. I should learn to read the line ABOVE the one I’m looking at as well. 🙂
So the Stagehands have earned xp from this trigger when the crew came up against itself. The Spider was fine with torture to extract information, the Slide was okay with it, but the Lurk and the Whisper were definitely not.
There are jobs that you do to get Coin to keep your head above water. Then there are scores that advance your agendas. If you’re a crew looking for revenge, tick this when your score is against your nemesis. (Not just ‘another crew in our way’ but ‘the ones that screwed us over three scores ago.’) If you’re a crew looking for power, tick it when the score actually increases your status with a faction. Etc.
Your players must have a ‘bigger picture’ for the crew beyond “Steal stuff” or “Drug stuff.” That’s where I think this comes in.
Alfred Rudzki Our GM has a relationship map going.
Ben Liepis I feel like that’s covered by the first XP trigger for each crew. For example, Assassin crews have “Execute a successful accident, disappearance, murder, or ransom operation.” So I feel like essential nature would be more than just what the crew type is.
Arne Jamtgaard Excellent point. We’ve basically just been taking scores that come our way (that the GM has made for us) without pushing much for things we want to do on our own. Granted we’re only a few sessions in and I think we’re starting to get itchy for going after some specific things or crews that we’re starting to take a dislike to.
Jeremiah Frye, I guess a better way to put it is if they did their thing but it was in a way that really set them a cut above others of their type. Almost a “Man, nobody could’ve done that but us!” kind of moment. I wasn’t suggesting that my above post was the way to pull that trigger, just another way.
We’re pretty loose with it, pulling it on my above idea as well as if we saw the “heart” (our biggest one, honestly) of the crew on screen.
Ben Liepis Fair point!
In our games, this trigger typically means two things:
Was there major interaction or conflict either between the PCs or the PCs and the cohorts/Claim NPCs?
Did we pull off a score or fill out a clock relevant to the whole crew that wasn’t merely about resources and keeping your head above the water, but accomplished a goal that everyone cares about?
And those aren’t very hard triggers to hit. If the players are at all interested in the game, they’ll be getting at least one XP every session.
In games I run myself, the crew will sometimes get XP for this trigger even if no one technically did anything. Once a crew gets a gang or a few claims, I like to spend a fair bit of time introducing them as people and hint at possible future lines of conflict. The role of the PCs isn’t very active there (though I still rope in players to help describe NPCs that share a milieu with their characters), but the crew still gets to mark XP because we’re doing nothing but learning more about it.
In my games I’ve found this requires a little bit of pre-planning at session zero. We’ve come up with an idea for the big themes in the season and If the crew is working toward them they get exp.
The Hawker crew are a couple of Skovlanders with other foreigners helping them. They’re very anti-Imperial, so we seem to be building toward a rebellion theme of sorts. We’ve only done a couple of jobs, but going out of our way to screw with the Imperial hierarchy has given us the 1xp we can agree on.
The Assassin’s are focused on gaining power and re-establishing the crime empire one of them claimed to formerly hold. Heists where they take on/out rivals are the main payoff for this trigger so far.