Author: Rustin Simons

My COIN Add-on uses Doskvol’s population as part of it’s mechanic. I’m thinking about 200,000.

That sound right to you? Here’s my thinking….

If we have a 6 per 1000 gang member rate (that CA’s current gang rate),

that give us 1200 gang members. Given Doskvol’s reputation, we might be tempted to bump up that rate. But given the Tier math, not sure I’d want to change that.

As I look over the listed gangs in the book and count up the ones that sound like real criminal, thugs on the streets sorts, I get about 20. Which gives them about 60 Thugs each. That matches Tier descriptions, with the higher tier gangs with larger cohorts and lower tier with smaller. Just eyeballing it, that feels close. You got maybe hundreds of unnamed Tier 0 and Tier I groups bubbling up and dying off all the time.

That leaves the other, non-thuglike, factions pulling from other parts of the population to fill their ranks. Thus Factions like the Hive or other more sophisticated type factions really are not population based, right? They are more quality and positioning based.

Blue Coats, on the other-hand, need some more clarity. Modern cities have about a 20-30 police per 1000. I’m thinking, in Doskvol, drop that to about 15 per 1000. That gives Doskvol about 3000 Blue Coats. They are tier 3, so we break up them per district. That gives them around 275 per, but that would not be an equal distribution. With the richer districts getting proper 20-30 per 1000. Leaving each district with around— and now I’m really just eyeballing, 120 Blue Coats? That would be about right for a Tier III cohort, have two gangs per?

That jive with your campaigns?

It doesn’t account for incarceration rates either… So some wiggle room still available.

The Add-on that I’m considering introduces downtime fictional events that would normally happen over rather long spans of time. I’m beginning to wonder if I should adjust the scale of that narrative. But I’m not sure just how much to scale.

On average, for a 15-20 session campaign of Blades, how much in-game time (i.e., the fictional time) will have passed?

So, I’m playing Falling Sky, by GMT– a COIN game that represents various factions of Gallic revolts under Caesar. It’s a game you can play solo, and the cards drive what factions can and can’t do. Also, I’m pondering my current Blades game. I’m the GM. And I thought to myself, “Hey, why not use a COIN based game to simulate what the factions in Doskvol are doing during downtime, wouldn’t it be cool if I had some Event cards and various factions Commands…..”

Well, since then, I’ve decided to create my own COIN system for Doskvol. Which should help me learn COIN just in general. (I’m still baffled a bit by Lines of Communication in Fire in the Lake) And, it forces me to dig deep in to the politics of Doskvol on a large scale. It’s been fun.

Anyhow, I’m to the point where I wonder what Fonts I should use for the map– I’m in Inkscape/Gimp. And I can’t tell you how many times I get stuck on the Font question and just give up on a project.