Oh shucks I'm running a Forged in the Dark Game again, this time around it's "Copperhead County", a riff on crime drama like Breaking Bad and Ozarks. I won't bore you with the nitty-gritty of the mechanics, this is just what happened at the table:
1. The players created their crew, an old family descended from a venerable (Though largely senile) moonshiner named Atticus Vandeveer. Rather than simply "Start from the bottom" the players thought it would be interesting to have the family be an established criminal element selling home-distilled liquor to bars around the county under the nose of the Tax Man, and the "Low-status" of the crew mechanically is explained by recent setbacks: Atticus' son and de facto paterfamilias of the Vandeveers, Lucas, got nabbed for some white-collar crime and is locked up in the state prison up in Nashville. The job of these remaining men in the family is to rebuild the prestige and clout of the Vandeveers in a county of old money, new poverty, and meth-head bikers.
2. The initial scenario has the Pettimore clan, one of the largest crime families in the region, undergoing their own troubles. One of their drug labs was burned down AND the patriach, Buck Earl, died. His son, Buck Junior, is left trying to put out the fires of the situation and restore order to the newly-unsettled mountain syndicate. The players are approached by Albert Lockeland, an uncle in the Lockeland clan. The Lockelands are bigger than the Vandeveers but smaller than the Pettimores, and they wanna horn in on the meth market with the Pettimores getting destabilised. Albert offers to pay the players a tidy sum to break into a suburban property owned by the Pettimores and steal their meth-lab equipment. Seems straightforward enough, and after going through character and crew creation I wanted to keep the score pretty simple.
3. The players did a little sniffing around. The lab was staffed by a pair of younger Pettimores, who seemed to primarily operate at night and were never home on Sundays. Sam, the getaway driver of the crew, stole an electricians van, they bought some hardhats and safety vests, and prepared to roll up while the cooks were away and make off with the goods. Seemed like a cakewalk. But Jay, the "face" of the crew, did a little hob-knobbing around and learned that despite Alberts keen interest, it was well-known on the streets that Eli Lockeland, the clan patriarch, abhors meth and stimulants of all kinds, being a proud opiate man who worked hard to corner the local market on heroin. It would seem that Albert was going rogue, trying to carve a little piece of the pie for himself without the consent of his father.
4. Despite this, the players rolled out at 1 in the afternoon on a Sunday, attempting to look very official. They disabled the power in the house at the meter, and after a awkward and highly-suspicious-looking display of "Look Busy at the Jobsite" managed to pick the lock on the front door and get in. They loaded up the truck, and everything seemed like it would be smooth sailing. But on the way out to the dropoff with Albert, Sam noticed a tail. 2 scruffy-looking members of the local Heathens 1% MC were following a few blocks behind. Sam gunned it, lost the tail and made the dropoff.
5. Using a flashback, Jamie (A sort of overseer/manager type class for the crew) established that he had quietly tipped off the Lockeland patriarch of Albert's doings, and was hoping to provide proof at the dropoff. The dice indicated a complication, and so I ruled that Albert smelled something was off and directed the players to a new dropoff point at the last minute. Jay rapidly tried to coordinate with the rest of his crew and with Eli Lockeland to keep the double-cross going smoothly, and managed it with some assistance from Jay.
6. The new dropoff was at a lonely rest area outside town, where two other bikers from the Heathens with a girlfriend in a sidecar were waiting. The bikers confirmed the presence of the goods, and then menaced the players into stepping out of the vehicle with sawed-off shotguns. It was a setup! Sam hit the gas and ran one biker down, and Jamie came up in his vehicle to try and hit the other. A botched roll and two shells of buckshot later, and Jamie is is VERY rough condition. Sam is furious at this assault on his family and swings the van around to run the other biker down. The girlfriend is screaming and reaching for her phone, but Jamie and Braxton (The crew's Muscle) threaten her with a snub-nose and secure her with zip-ties. Arbuckle, the elderly distiller for the crew, attempts to revive the bikers to avoid having corpses on their hands, but fails both rolls. They are left with a stolen meth-lab, two dead bikers, a hostage witness, and no money.
7. The contact with the Lockelands shows up, and offers the crew money for their hostage, indicating that he has "Questions" for her about what exactly is going on, and thanks the crew for exposing Albert's secret schemes. The crew chop-shops the motorcycles and sells the meth equipment during downtime, and thanks to a lucky roll manages to break even with as much money as Albert had promised them before the double-cross. The party got some money, bolstered their reputation, and got on the bad side of the Heathens MC. How this will complicate their lives will be determined in two weeks, when we have the next session.
No comments:
Post a Comment