After what I consider to be a pretty successful game of Leverage on Saturday, I thought that I would write up the experience. Kali, Richard, Adam, Beth and I played through an adventure that I had written called "The Sideways Job"; the story flowed quite well, and we all got to find out how the rules of the game work in practice.
First of all, we generated characters. This took some time; I think in future I should help prospective players to make their characters before the day of the game. The adventure itself lasted about 6 hours; character creation tagged a couple of hours on the front.
So the players fleshed out their parts in the story:
Richard was Ed Mason (the Mastermind) - a former tobacco-company executive, who had tried to turn whistle-blower after finding out about his corporation's horrific behaviour in third-world countries. Ed's bosses out-maneuvered him, leaving him without a job or a credible case. He tried to find a better life by joining the ACLU, but found that even they did not have the power to challenge corporate greed.
Kali was Cleo Huntington (the Thief) - a caterer to the rich and famous who used access to their homes and venues to scout them for burglary. Cleo is a very different kind of thief to Parker in the television series - being both a gourmet chef and an expert fence. In the parlance of the old Underground Railroad, Cleo would be a "conductor" - someone who has the skills to move people and items from place to place.
Beth was Maria Vasquez (the Hitter) - an EMT who used to be in the US army. She did bomb disposal in Afghanistan, but indiscriminate drone strikes horrified her. She then tried to be an army medic, but she was forced out of the army when her colleagues took a dim view of her providing medical aid to Afghan civilians.
Adam was John Cotton (the Grifter) - a shark in a sharp suit. John was a good company man for the CIA, but he got tired of the bureaucracy that kept him from going after bad guys, just because they had moved to domestic soil. So he took a leave of absence from the service to take action for himself.
So we have four highly-skilled individuals, each with their own issues with the establishment. They made perfect members for the Underground Railroad.
The concept of the Leverage games that I am running is that the heroes are all members of a modern version of the Underground Railroad in the United States. Since its days as a network that helped slaves escape to freedom in the nineteenth century, my fictional take on the railroad has become a network of safe houses and outlaw heroes, all working to tackle the injustices that the law fails to touch.
The table was at first split over what job to do; I had a couple of stories ready to be played, and while The Winter Soldier Job seemed perfect for Beth and Adam's characters, The Sideways Job seemed ideal for Richard and Kali's. The latter sounded a little quirkier, I think, and so the group agreed to it.
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The story started with Ed Mason contacting the network, so that he could assemble a crew for a job in Napa Valley, California. Their base of operations was a townhouse functioning as a bed 'n' breakfast, but it was also a front - historically, it had been a safehouse for the railroad since the civil war.
Mason began to explain the job, pouring a glass of wine for the crew:
Ed Mason: "Thank you all for coming. I've called you all here to discuss a job... about wine. But before we go any further, I should clarify that we're here to help a family - not to kill anyone."
John Cotton: "For the last time, I am not an assassin."
Mason had been investigating insurance firms that avoid paying out, and had come across the case of Lorenzo Agnelli - a man who ran a small, commercial wine cellar not far from Santa Rosa. He had made a claim after what he had reported as an arson attack on his cellar. However, the insurers had refused, after their investigator discovered that Lorenzo's sister believed that their doddering father was responsible for the fire. Without obvious signs of an accelerant, the local cops had no proof of arson - and they could not justify bringing in a CSI team.
But Lorenzo was sure that he had been targeted; the fire had not harmed his customers' wine, but had destroyed his family's nest egg - four bottles of Penfolds Grange Hermitage 1951, which had a combined value of over $200,000. When checking the scene, Cleo found evidence that someone had picked the lock to the wine cellar, but it was so subtle that the police had missed it.
What made the wine valuable was its scarcity; less than twenty bottles of Penfolds Grange 1951 exist. Since the Agnelli family had no personal enemies, Maria hacked a wine trading website's database to see whether anyone else in the area claimed to own the same wine, because destroying another owner's collection would increase the value of the surviving bottles.
Sure enough, they found their prime suspect. A man called Bertrand Colman was on record as owning three bottles. With some quick research, the crew learned that Colman used to be a hedge fund manager, but he had gone to prison for eighteen months for lying about the value of investments to his clients and misappropriating their money to spend on himself. Although the court had fined him heavily, his victims had always claimed that he had hidden assets from the FBI, preventing them from recovering much of their money.
While Bertrand had been in prison, his brother Maurice - a PR guru for exhibitions and art galleries - received a lot of overseas investment to set up and direct his own gallery in Santa Rosa and fill it with art. When Bertrand came out of prison, he immediately got a new job as the day manager at this gallery. He was later given the bottles of wine from his brother as a "reward" for his work, as if they were just ordinary bottles of plonk.
[I should perhaps have put a trigger warning on this game for
Richard. He has a real loathing for white-collar crooks, especially the
ones that get away with their crimes even after they have been caught,
by hiding assets overseas. He immediately realised that the wine and
the gallery were all just fronts so that the mark could retrieve his
hidden assets from abroad, and it got Richard pretty fired-up. The
upside was that he delivered a really good "reason why the mark sucks"
speech to the other players, just as Timothy Hutton has done on so many
episodes of the show.]
Cleo Huntington: "If he understands the value of the wine, why destroy it instead of stealing it?"
Ed
Mason: "He can destroy it because he doesn't care about it - he just
uses valuable things as a way to move his money around. This guy's a
total crook - he's the kind of person who'd take a baseball bat to a
Ferrari if he thought it'd make him money! And what about all the other
people that he stole from? They're all innocent victims too! Helping
this family is not all we're going to do; we're also going to get back
everything that he stole before and return it!"
John Cotton: "You don't do things by halves do you?"
John Cotton used his FBI contacts to do a little digging into Bertrand and discovered that in prison he had shared a cell with a fraudster called Eric Bradley, who had been convicted of hiring men to burn down his restaurant so that he could collect on the insurance. [Adam asked a really spot-on question during the planning phase of the game and it paid off]. As soon as Eric Bradley came out of prison, Bertrand had hired him to be the gallery's security chief.
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The first major scene featured the crew attending a function at the gallery. In a single call, Cleo manipulated Maurice Colman into letting her provide the catering for the function, and so she and Maria were present as staff. Cleo had even managed to swing access to the gallery on the previous evening, giving her plenty of time to scout the location's security and valuables. She was surprised to find that nothing in the gallery was particularly valuable - the paintings were all hype, but the security was top-of-the-line.
Maria had to tolerate serving champagne flutes to rich snobs, but when you have a directional microphone hidden under your tray, a high society function is a great way to eavesdrop. She caught a conversation between Bertrand Colman and the owner of the vault where he kept his wine, in which he said when he was going to take his bottles to auction.
Posing as guests, Mason and John Cotton did not have as much success working the room - they managed to rub the thuggish security guards the wrong way. Nonetheless, Mason found a major clue; a genuine art enthusiast had heard a rumour that Maurice had been buying up paintings of real value, but not the scraps that were on show in the gallery.
After the function, Mason made further contact with the art enthusiast, and discovered that he had heard about the art purchases from a man by the name of Carlton Connor. Cleo recognised the name; Connor was one of her black market contacts.
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Cleo arranged a meeting and was able to convince her contact that she had goods that Maurice Colman might like to buy [Kali had given Cleo a special Talent, which meant that she almost always has something of value to trade]. Thus, she was able to get Connor to spill valuable information: Maurice had bought all of his valuable paintings at once, which suggested to Connor that they were purchased so that they could act as hidden assets.
This left the crew scratching their heads. Why would the Colman brothers still need to hide assets? Bertrand's scheme had apparently worked; the $1.2 million dollars that had been invested in the gallery was effectively clean; Bertrand could hardly be re-tried for his previous financial crimes. Nonetheless, the crew had a couple of plans: (a) find a way to swipe Bertrand's wine bottles during their transit to the auction house, and (b) sell Maurice a painting with a tracking device and follow it; hopefully it would lead the crew to the other hidden paintings.
Suspecting that the Colman brothers were setting up an insurance scam, John suggested that the crew get hold of the insurance details for the gallery. The gallery's firewall caught Maria's spear-fishing attack, but - by presenting himself to Maurice as a competitive insurer - John Cotton was able to get a valuation for the gallery. The crew was surprised to find that the valuation seemed about right for the real value of the gallery and the artworks inside it - about $400,000.
So, with no sign of insurance fraud, the crew were back to the original question: what possible need existed to hide assets? Then, one by one, the truth dawned on them...
Ed Mason: "Wait... what if Maurice is hiding the paintings from his own brother... making him think that all of the money is in the gallery? I mean, it's not like his brother knows anything about art...."
Cleo Huntington: "That would make sense for the security; I saw a laser net on a painting that was worth more than the painting itself!"
John Cotton: "That would also explain why the security guards are on alert - they don't know what they're guarding isn't worth much."
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I think my favourite scene of the whole game was the scene that followed. The crew decided to make a play for Bertrand's wine bottles at the auction house, as opposed to trying to break the wine out of a cutting edge vault or trying to snatch it in transit. They knew that a group of Bertrand's goons would be bringing the wine to the venue in a secure case. Mason got a copy of the case, and - with help from Lorenzo - Cleo forged a set of three bottles of Penfolds Grange Hermitage 1951. She made sure that the corks could not pass authentication though - the plan was to switch Bertrand's bottles for fakes that would land him in trouble for fraud at the auction.
The crew tag-teamed the situation really well, despite the obstacles in their way. Maria staked out the gallery and tipped off the rest of the crew as the security guards drove to the vault. Mason waited in a coffee shop opposite the auction house and notified Cleo and John as the guards arrived. Then John got the desk clerk out of the way by "accidentally" spilling coffee on her jacket. This got her to go the bathroom, but there was a catch - John noticed that the clerk had a security badge, but he could not get it from her.
Meanwhile Cleo set herself up behind the desk and got ready to receive the guards and the wine. Knowing that she did not have a badge, she asked Maria to be ready with a distraction, in case the guards asked about it. Of course, nothing distracts people quite like hearing their car alarm go off while they're making a delivery, so Maria put a brick through their car window.
Cleo Huntington: "Can I help you, sir?"
Eric Bradley: "Yes - this is for lot 34. Wait... aren't you supposed to have a ba..."
*Weeeeoooooo - weeeeooooooo*
Eric Bradley: "The car!"
Cleo Huntington: "Right you are, sir. Lot 34; got it. I'll make sure it's delivered."
*Yoink*
Cleo then slipped away with the case, so that when the real clerk returned, all that was needed was for Mason to land the con, by delivering the fake case to the auction as if it were Bertrand's.
This is where the whole plan went sideways. Bertrand had traveled to the auction house separately, and he arrived just as Mason was handing over the case. Bertrand knew all of his security guards, and knew that Mason was not one of them. He confronted Mason and asked him what he was doing, and his attempts to claim that he was one of Eric Bradley's men did not convince. Panicking, Mason tried to flee the auction house with the case, but ran straight into the security guards that were outside inspecting their car. Watching from a distance, Maria saw Bertrand's goons grab Mason, bundle him into their car and drive away.
[The whole scene was a great piece of teamwork, but on the very last action, Richard rolled snake eyes on 2d8 - a massive complication. As he said at the time "It's all gone Pete Tong!" - for me, it was beautiful.]
And yet, this being Leverage, even though the crew's plan seemed to have unravelled, they still found a way to save the day, as if they had a perfect back-up plan all along.
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Mason still had his earpiece in, and so the rest of the crew could hear him being questioned in the car. When asked who he was, Mason hit on a new plan: "I guess you caught me - I work for your brother; he hired me to get the wine from you."
Bertrand and his goons decided to drive to the gallery to confront Maurice. Hearing this, the rest of the crew drove to the location to be ready to act. Bertrand arrived, and had his men frog-march Mason to Maurice's office.
Maurice Colman: "Who is this?"
Ed Mason: "No use pretending you don't know now, Maurice; they caught me! The jig's up..."
Maurice Colman: "I have no idea who this is!"
Ed Mason: "Bertrand's gonna know everything now - about you taking his money... about the real valuable paintings!"
Maurice Colman: "This is preposterous!"
Ed Mason: "Well, I do have this proof..."
Mason produced a recording of Cleo's conversation with Carlton Connor, when he revealed that Maurice had been buying paintings worth close to $750,000 on the black market to be hidden assets. Turns out Cleo had been wearing a wire [got to appreciate a good flashback].
Maurice at first tried to stutter an explanation, but then he suddenly bolted out of the room, with Bertand and Eric Bradley in hot pursuit. He managed to lose them by locking a door behind him, and he raced out to his car to escape, carrying a collection of painting tubes from the gallery's storeroom. Throwing them into the back seat of his car, he started to drive away.
Of course, in Leverage as in horror films, one should always check the back seat. As the car was pulling out of the lot, the trunk quietly opened, and Cleo rolled out, clutching the tubes. Of course, as soon as the crew figured out that Maurice was trying to steal from Bertrand, they knew that he would have to make a break for it with the valuable paintings, which would flush them out into the open. So, Cleo was waiting for Maurice in his car.
Of course, Mason was still in trouble; he was stuck in an office with two security guards, and could be handed over to the police.... But then came a knock at the office door. When one of the goons went to open it, it was slammed back in his face, knocking him prone - as Maria strode into the room and laid out the other guard with a single right hook. Time for the crew to make off with the spoils.
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So in the end, Maurice lost all his wealth and had to go on the run from his own brother, but what about Lorenzo and the wine? When Cleo took the wine from Eric Bradley, she checked it and realised that Bertrand's bottles were also fakes - Maurice had even conned him about the value of his wine investment. So she entered them into the auction anyway.
Bertrand managed to avoid getting in trouble for fraud by pinning the crime on Eric Bradley, but the crew found a way to turn even this to their advantage. Since Bradley had a criminal history of fraud and arson already, not only did this help Bertrand use him as a scapegoat, but it helped the crew to link Bradley to the fire in Lorenzo's wine cellar, especially since he was handling the same wine as the one that the fire destroyed. This was enough to convince Lorenzo's insurers of the legitimacy of his claim and get the Agnelli family their money.
So Bertrand lived to fight another day - but he did not live well, having lost his brother, his henchman and almost $1 million - most of his ill-gotten gains - to the crew. With Cleo's black market connections, the crew also had the means to liquidate the paintings and return money to Bertrand's original victims - just as Mason had vowed to do.
[The finale was actually pretty tough, because the players were taking on two marks, when most games of Leverage only pit them against one. They had done a really good job of attacking Maurice Colman's network of agents and resources, and Richard had a powerful clue to use against him. However, Bertrand still had a lot of his network, which meant that he had a lot of dice to roll in the 'Wrap-up Flashback' - including any of Eric Bradley's characteristics that applied. So one antagonist lost in the final test against the crew, but the other won. This does not mean that a bad guy beat the crew, but it does mean that he did not get his full comeuppance; his henchman went to jail instead of him; maybe Bertrand Colman will be back in a future episode.]
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A good time was had by all, and I am hoping to run more jobs in the future. The crew might have slightly different membership next time; I can run a game for a crew of up to five, and the point of the Underground Railroad is that different members of the network may show up when a call for aid goes out. This creates plenty of room for players to duck in and out of a series of games, not requiring the consistent attendance of a role-playing campaign.
Some of the research that went into this game can be found under the following links:
Penfolds Grange Hermitage 1951
Swiss banks and hidden assets
A hedge fund fraud of comparable scale to Bertrand's crimes
The problem of lack of resources to investigate non-fatal arson
The penalties for wine forgery
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