Hey Blades fans,
I’ve released a big ol v2 update for Copperhead County, my Forged in the Dark game of modern-day, southern-fried crime and corruption. This is a major update with lots of polish and, for the first time, full setting writeups. Six original playbooks, three original crews, an original, real-world setting.
Copperhead County is a realist crime action-drama game with a dope soundtrack. I like to think of it as The Wire in Tennessee with a sideline in GTA – esque – Breaking – Bad-ian action. Steal things and drive cars and blow stuff up! Rig elections and subvert a corrupt GOP machine! Fight mountaintop removal mining! Succeed in American capitalism through crime! Copperhead County.
If this sounds up your alley, find it on itch.io! Thanks!!!
Did an email go out to the folks who got the first version?
Dungeon Musings I sent an email out to EA purchasers. For people who downloaded the very first free version, I don’t have any way to contact them, and there aren’t further free updates (though one can download the playbooks).
Jason Eley Thanks Jason! I did purchase it through your page, but I am pretty sure I deleted the update email in one of my regular spam purges. 🙂
Dungeon Musings It went out about the same time as this post! Unfortunately itch doesn’t give me any info on email deliverability, but I hope people are getting them. Anyway, the changelog is:
*Added a bunch of setting pages
*Clarified + balanced some special abilities better (mostly impacting the wording of Hazard abilities)
*Some changes to crew upgrades: I dropped the training upgrades, which I’ve never been a big fan of, and gave crews a special ability that takes their place. I also added a repeatable upgrade that grants a Cash/Rep boon.
*Big change to Turf: rather than acting as perma-Rep, Turf is a requirement to advance Tier (you must have a Turf level equal to your new Tier). I’ve always wanted to make Turf beefier, but this idea came very recently while I was thinking about Tier growth in my campaign. I like that this ties Tier growth explicitly into the Claims map. Accordingly the Claims map shifted a bit, and I also slightly lowered the Rep requirement to advance (10 instead of 12).
Jason Eley Thanks so much for the substantive reply, Jason! Those changes to Turf sound really interesting and I like the idea of Tier being linked to Turf (that, intuitively, makes sense).
Dungeon Musings Thanks! I was on a walk thinking about my current campaign, where the PCs just got to Tier 2, and considering that it feels a little weird for a new crew to go from Tier 0 to 2-4 relatively quickly, when there are established factions that, presumably, have been Tier 2-4 for a long time. I think tying Tier and Turf together, and grounding crew expansion in territorial expansion, makes that aspect of the game world make more sense for me. It’s a relatively big change from the Blades core but I hope it makes sense for everyone else too. (Weirdly, this also makes my players’ Tier illegal, because they only have 1 Turf. I might have to give them a retrospective Turf as a reward for accomplishing their long-term goal of getting the Stringer’s wife elected as County Trustee [this campaign is wild]).
And thank you for buying and caring!!!
Purchased! Looking forward to reading through this. The touchstones hit all the right buttons and the playbooks look spot on.
todd estabrook Thank you!