I started an alpha game of my modern-southern-crime hack, Copperhead County, with my group over our past two…

I started an alpha game of my modern-southern-crime hack, Copperhead County, with my group over our past two sessions. The first game was mostly character and crew creation, but our game this week saw their first score, and I was very pleased with how it played out. Hopefully by recounting the score I can give a look at the project overall. I’ll post some actual material someday; right now I just have some Google Drive play sheets, a poorly drawn map, and scattered notes.

The setting is Cooley County, TN, a hazily-located stretch on the Tennessee-North Carolina border. The county has one smallish city in the center and a few small towns scattered about the hinterlands. I think of the timeframe as ‘201x’, but when my players asked what year it was, I decided ours was in spring 2014. There’s a large local-politics element to the setting, so I wanted to make it a midterm election year, in case the criminals get wrapped up in it later. This also allowed us to make lots of jokes about the world of 2014.

I have five players and five playbooks, so everyone took one. The playbooks are mostly reskins of Blades books: the Cleaner (a Hound/Lurk combination), a stealthy problem solver; the Hazard (Leech), a volatile mechanic and chemist; the Heavy (Cutter), an unstoppable enforcer; the Marker (Spider), a cunning schemer and support; and the Wheeler (Slide), a wily politicker. Our Cleaner is Willem, a weirdo ex-sniper and junkie; our Hazard is Haddie, an 18 year-old chemistry whiz trying to afford college; our Heavy is Marvin, a short-tempered and terrifying ex-soldier; our Marker is Jessie Roy, a lazy but sly gamer; and our Wheeler is Camila, a stylish and cool ex-pat from Philadelphia.

I’m focusing on two main crew types, Hellraisers and Outfit. I didn’t feel that defining crews by their criminal activity fit my milieu, where, ala my main inspiration, Justified, most crimes will involve stealing and/or drugs. Hellraisers are mostly a Breakers reskin; they are a tough crew of shitkickers who make their name by force and fear. Outfit are mostly a Thieves reskin; they are a quiet crew of operators who insinuate into the corrupt local power structure.

The players decided to be Hellraisers, and unanimously wanted to start in the countryside rather than the city, so I had them start in the small town of Droop Branch, where the economy revolves around a whiskey distillery (inspired by Jack, George Dickel, and the various Kentucky bourbons) and a quarry owned by a shady mineral company (also exploring the lucrative avenues of mountaintop removal and fracking in the county). They decided their lair would be a bar named Marlene’s on the outskirts of town, run by a friend of the crew. The crew is yet unnamed.

The Quickstart setup is Fire on the Mountain: the Pettimore clan, a tier 3 crime family in control of the backwoods, were hit by unknown assailants who torched their mountainside marijuana greenhouse. The family patriarch also died in the blaze, leaving his son and associates scrambling and out for blood.

My original idea was to have the crew approached by a member of another crime family, the McMorrows (tier 1), who have an ancestral feud with the Pettimores and would seek to recruit the PCs to take advantage of their enemy’s weakness. But the PCs decided their crew had a negative status with the McMorrows, so I flipped it: a Pettimore lieutenant visited Marlene’s, spreading the word that his family would look favorably upon any muscle who hit the McMorrows. The PCs decided this was a fine idea, and looking at their Claims Map, decided to go after a McMorrow Drug Lab (a Cash-generating Claim, like the Coin-generating ones in Doskvol).

Haddie was curious whether any of the McMorrows were in her age range, and if she knew them. I made a fortune roll and she did. The NPCs I had noted for the McMorrow family were a big sister, Tracy, who is trying to restore the family’s fallen fortunes; and her husband Victor, a Floridian transplant with shady connections down south. With that information, I said there was a younger brother, Kyle, a little older than Haddie, and Haddie decided he had unsuccessfully tried to seduce her in high school.

This started a fun chain where Haddie texted Kyle to talk him into setting up a drug buy, so the crew could tail him and Assault their lab. The two youngs texted back and forth while everyone else in the crew looked over Haddie’s shoulder and gave her advice. She successfully lured Kyle to a nearby Waffle House, but when she didn’t show, and then texted to ask if they could just meet at his dealer, he got spooked and drove off. Luckily, the crew was on hand in their 70s-style van and tailed him into the mountainous countryside.

Kyle drove to a cabin down a forlorn backroad, where he and some pals were getting high and playing Madden on XBox One (I take the verisimilitude of this game v seriously and strenuously researched an appropriate video game). Willem and Jessie snuck around the cabin to scout, but when Kyle’s friend went to the bathroom, he nearly spotted them and they scampered back to the van. This introduced another complication: as they reached the van, an SUV drove up the road past them. The crew couldn’t make out much detail through the SUV’s dark windows, but they saw two men inside, and noted the car’s Florida license plate.

The crew decided now was the time to strike, before these mysterious visitors pulled something. Jessie snuck up on them as they exited their SUV and distracted them with a setup action (throwing a coin, Hitman-style), giving Marvin an opening to charge forward and wallop one in the gut with his baseball bat. Meanwhile, Willem crept up and shot the other guy in the knee with his silenced pistol (he originally intended a headshot, until a flashback action by Jessie convinced him not to kill anyone tonight). They both rolled well and the Floridians hit the dirt, although their cries of pain started to attract the youngsters’ attention away from Madden.

Marvin decided to hoist the two men up by himself and throw them in the van. Unfortunately he botched the roll, and gave the knee-shot man an opening to pull a pistol from his jacket and open fire. Fortunately, Marvin then rolled a 6 on his resistance roll (using his best attribute, Grit) and stood there coolly as the man’s bullets flew harmlessly past.

But the gunfire definitely drew Kyle’s attention, and soon he was in the doorway with a shotgun, one of his friends behind him with a pistol. Camila tried to bluff by saying his family had sent them over to stop these guys, who were going to rob them. This was a desperate action, because unbeknownst to the crew, these guys were associates of Kyle’s brother-in-law who were there to pick up product. Camila bombed the roll, and a standoff ensued, worsened when another of Kyle’s associates appeared in an upstairs window with a rifle.

Marvin was able to recover the situation with his fearsome presence, intimidating Kyle into giving up the cabin and leaving with his life. They struck a deal for the crew to let everyone go, including the Floridians, but Jessie almost sank it when, giving into his love of video games, he tried to order the youngsters to leave behind the XBone. The crew took the Floridians’ guns and phones and let them back into their SUV, while Kyle, his goons, and his terrified friends (including a local college football star, who would have been worth some extra Heat had the crew shot up the place) came outside with their XBone thrown into a box, and drove sadly away.

The crew proceeded to ransack the cabin. Upstairs, they found a janky drug lab: a small tablet press where Kyle’s goons spoofed pain pills using heroin, cut heavily with powdered milk; along with a few chemistry tools and some poorly-labeled chemicals. The crew loaded their van up, and then Haddie threw a molotov through the cabin window, torching the place. Goodbye, gentle mountain cabin…

The crew only took a small amount of Heat, since we agreed they contained the situation, and they didn’t kill anyone. They got a couple of Cash from the looted drugs, and their new Drug Lab claim rolled them another Cash afterward.

A successful first score for a dangerous new crew. Who else will they beat up and rob? Will their attack on the McMorrows lead to war in the hills? Find out next time… #CopperheadCounty