Hey i had a quick game making question. I have a group of friends wanting to play as a crew of smugglers. I wad not ready for them to choose that option. What can i do to create scores for them. I mean i kbow how to run shadows, assassins and hawkers. But nothing comes to mind for smugglers. Tips, advice or help would be mich appretiated.
Hey i had a quick game making question.
Hey i had a quick game making question.
Page 123 contains a lot of ideas for smuggler scores.
And, if in doubt, always ask the players. What makes smugglers interesting to them? How can they make money from a gang war in Crows Foot?
When I GMed smuglers I struggled with this at first until someone pointed out that they may be smugglers, which defines their core skill set however they can do more than smuggle.
First off the smuggling related inspiration, you have the movie ‘blow’, I havn’t seen it but ‘Brazil’ is also meant to be good inspiration, Midnight Express is a good example of how things can go wrong, War Dogs, Lord of War. Even the Dallas buyers club could prove to be good inspiration.
However with smugglers this is just the starting point. Just like the interesting thing about hawkers isn’t selling drugs, the interesting thing about smugglers isn’t the smuggling it is the complications that come from smuggling.
One of my favorite GM tricks is get the crew to smuggle Spirit Essences and then get the dimmer sisters to rob or try to rob the crew of their payload.
Now you have interesting follow up scores, does the crew want pay back? Why were they trying to steal it? Can they make a deal (usually deal). Spirit Essences are suddenly hard to get and there is spirit warden attention to their movements, how does the crew cope with that.
Another fun thing I like is the Horde wants Hollows to be smuggled to a certain area from under the vice dens of silkshore (implied they are debtors who could pay their debts). Why do they want the hollows. Do the horde then want the crew to smuggle the raw materials (you know not hollowed people) or even gather those raw materials?
Is someone trying to stop them?
Or even if it is just boring smuggling of drugs and weapons, if there is a new source of those things in duskwall, the existing vendors of those things are going to have opinions on this.
Will they want to wipe out the crew, or press gang them into service?
How will the crew react?
In short the figure out the complications from the smuggling, hint at wider implications and watch as thing spin out of control.
Before you know it (this just occurred in my tuesday game) the crew will accidentally summon a chaos god who destroys the lightening barrier (and half of duskwall) just because they want to make the dimmer sisters suffer.
I was just in the same situation this week – except I’d been rooting for Smugglers, and really pleased when the players plumped for it! And then immediately I’m all “hmmmmm, huuuuh, so what do they actually DO?”
But I found I’ve actually got a TON of material to work with. All you really need is a “default score”, a kind of starting arena, that’ll give your team a decent idea of at least the kind of scores they can go on.
Or, to go by the book: you need a starting situation to insert the characters into. Two factions in conflict with one another. You just need to add the slight constraint, that this is less “all out war between two factions,” and more “one faction is controlling something the other faction wants.” (to be continued)
Your tools here are all the stuff the group decides in character creation. Cargo type; contact; reputation. Individual character goals.
Basically, you want to establish a market – a buyer, a seller, or both. If your crew favors arms, their market can be the criminal element, and your crew is getting involved in gang wars. Contraband? That’s for those who get luxuries, so probably the rich and the nobility; the crew are now low criminals helping the pampered elite evade the law. Arcane? Pick the weird element of Duskwall the characters are going to be supplying, and pick who’s getting in their way.
Ironhook is always my go-to for “reliable” smuggling opportunities, because, well, it’s a very immediate and consistent source of people whose movement is constrained. My group built a crew interested in the arcane, so we placed them smuggling things back and forth from the Deathland Scavangers — Ironhook inmates sent to search for artifacts in the Deathlands. The crew will be able to sell artifacts the scavangers manage to keep from their captors, and provide the scavengers with occult survival equipment. I was also able to tell the group, “So look, probably your main points of contact will be Ironhook itself, and the groups out in the Deathlands” – there you go, a nice narrow scope, with plenty of room to maneuver and expand.
Lastly, you can simply twin your smugglers to a new crew of Hawkers (or a few competing ones). That works for practically any type of Smuggler crew, and lets you provide regular opportunity offers.