I may have a bidding war on my hands.
I have now run "The Rent-Controlled Job" for a group of my Leverage players. Out of the modules that I have written so far, I had a choice between running that one or "The Snake Oil Job". I held back "The Snake Oil Job"; I think that my players should receive fair warning when I am going to run it, because I suspect that it will be a popular scenario. It is about tackling a celebrity quack and his anti-vaccination followers, and this resonates with a lot of my players. I may have people vying to be in the crew for that one. Kali has already notified me of her "dibs"....
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The Rent-Controlled Job proved to be an interesting instalment of the Leverage chronicle, because the players and I got to test some new or previously under-used features of the game, and they were successful.
We had two new players to the chronicle - Matt and Sue Houghton - bringing with them two new members of the Underground Railroad.
Sue was playing Eva Morgan (Hitter), who had in the past been very much a member of the Free Love movement. At some point, she saw that movement's darker side, and she went on to become a social worker, focussing on sex workers and victims of human trafficking. Eva has a caring nature, and tries to use reason and negotiation to get people out of dangerous situations, but when things turn nasty, she can extract people with surprising shows of force.
Matt was playing Charles (Thief) - a limousine driver with manners to go with his impeccable British accent (which in no way means that he is necessarily British). Charles has heard the loose lips of the rich and corrupt in the back of his car on many occasions, and their misdeeds have motivated him to take action.
I get the feeling that Matt has a very good head for picking up rules systems. Charles is very different in style to Cleo Huntington. She's a commodity-moving burglar; he's a getaway driver. A car chase may not be a scenario that will arise often, but I think that Matt pre-empted this; he also equipped Charles with a Talent for shadowing. As a result, he excels at tailing vehicles; this enables Matt to use the character's focus on driving pro-actively rather than just reactively. I've got to say - that's smart character generation, especially for a game that puts more onus on players to initiate scenes.
Among the new features, I was also trying out a "Mark Map" - a small board in the middle of the table, on which I would put post-it notes, setting out the parts of the bad guy's network that the crew had uncovered, as well as listing their assets and allies. This addition seemed to be well-received; it helped players to remember characters' names and relationships, and to see an overview of the Mark's empire.
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The story brought Ed Mason, Joel Hogarth, Cleo Huntington, Eva Morgan and Charles to San Francisco, where an unscrupulous property developer was making life Hell for the residents of a rent-controlled building in the Dogpatch area.
Stanley Pritchard was a businessman well-known for buying up disused or crumbling buildings and then destroying them. This earned him the nickname "Demolition Stan". He could flatten a building, and then sell its empty site to a construction company as a blank canvas for their architectural plans. In a city experiencing as much rapid gentrification as San Francisco, this "strip 'em and flip 'em" approach was making Pritchard a lot of money.
He had bought an entire city block, and most of it consisted of abandoned warehouse and office space, but one building was a residential apartment block with tenants. Pritchard wanted them to leave, but he also did not want to fork out the money to compensate so many tenants by going through the no-fault eviction process. He also could not jack up the rents. As a result, he set about using under-handed tricks and creating awful conditions to force tenants out, using a sleazy property manager called Frank Caviolo as his agent.
The crew learned of his antics from a former resident called Jackie Pierce. She had tried to withhold payment of rent when she held Caviolo responsible for electrical failings and pest problems that started to occur in her apartment. He managed to get her evicted, after a top-flight legal team showed up to support him in court, and squashed her and her lawyer on a technicality: she had not put the withheld rent in an ESCROW account. Eva had then brought Jackie to Cleo so that they could find her temporary shelter using the Railroad's safehouses.
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The players got stuck into the plot. Joel Hogarth starting looking into Stan Pritchard's financial dealings, and learned that he received investment from a police benevolent fund (to which he was also a donor), and that he often sold vacant lots to a developer called Valmont construction. Joel learned that both Valmont and Pritchard's companies would be represented at a technology conference at the Moscone centre, which captured his curiosity.
Meanwhile, Cleo and Eva preferred to get their information by hitting the ground - going door-to-door in the building to talk to the tenants about their situation. They discovered that most of the residents were experiencing pest problems or faulty utilities, most of which started after men dressed in maintenance workers' uniforms came to visit them. The only working bathroom on the ground floor belonged to Viera Solomon, a hulking Samoan mechanic, who could fix the odd breakage and could not be intimidated into letting strangers into his home. Solomon was allowing all his neighbours - including a wheelchair-bound child and his great-aunt - use his facilities after their homes were sabotaged. Inspecting the damage, Ed Mason learned that the tenants' flats had been crudely vandalised; the property manager was claiming that he had called in proper repair services, but the "criminal element" in the neighbourhood kept scaring them away.
Charles decided to tail Jackie's lawyer, Harvey Harper. Harper represented all of the residents, but he was by reputation an ambulance chaser; Charles was concerned that Pritchard's next logical step was to subvert their lawyer. He followed Harper in the evening and did not see anyone approach the lawyer... but he did flush out the two rent-a-goons that were also tailing Harper. Being amateurs, they had to follow the lawyer two cars behind, while Charles - better able to keep his distance - had a bead on them.
Unfortunately, Charles' plans went awry when he followed the thugs to the street where Harper lived (Matt rolled snake eyes!). He drove by too overtly, spooking them, and they drove off at speed, scraping parked cars, and hitting Charles' car in the process. When the residents of the street came out to see the damage, Charles was left to explain to the police what had happened, because the goons were long gone. Even the explanation got complicated; Harper enthusiastically tried to represent Charles to the officers, and was poorly received.... The crew's wheelman ended up having to spend a few hours downtown until the cops were satisfied that he had not caused any criminal damage.
At least Matt scored some Story Points out of the encounter, and learned that Harper was genuine, if not a popular guy.
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Cleo had more success breaking into Frank Caviolo's apartment. With her thief skills, she effortlessly got into his home, and found a lot of incriminating evidence. She found a ledger that suggested payments to Caviolo from Pritchard, every time he got a resident out for less than the value of a no-fault eviction. She also found two maintenance workers' uniforms, and heard some telling answerphone messages from Pritchard to Caviolo.
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In the scene at the Moscone Centre, Jon felt that his character was in his element. Joel and Ed soon learned that Valmont construction was at the conference to appear alongside the exhibition for Image Pad - a popular online art website that, among its other services, protects and promotes the work of technical artists. The CEO of Image Pad, the meticulous Gloria Goldberg, had a new project - she had worked with a young architect on the design for a "condominium of the future", and Valmont was going to make it a reality for her. This was the prize for which Pritchard was vying; he wanted to demolish the entire block in the Dogpatch of San Francisco so that Valmont would buy his site as the location to provide swish residences for Silicon Valley's tech hipsters.
The players in my Leverage games have seldom used Flashback Actions, but Jon took one during this scene. He retrospectively revealed that Gloria Goldberg had wanted to recruit Joel for her company in the past, and he was - as far as she was concerned - a hot commodity. This enabled him to earn her trust; she felt that she was recruiting him to help market her futuristic condominium to her employees and the people of San Francisco.
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I think that the Twist floored the crew for a moment; it certainly upset the characters. They received a call, notifying them of some kind of commotion at the apartment building. Narcotics police had gone to Solomon's home, and arrested him for drugs that they found in the apartment. Not only that, but they had seized the apartment under the rules of civil asset forfeiture, in the process taking away the only working bathroom on the ground floor.
The residents and the crew both suspected that drugs had been planted while Solomon was at work. Ed Mason had set up a camera outside of the building, and sure enough - when he checked the footage - he saw Caviolo's two rent-a-goons enter the building, and then leave again later in maintenance workers' uniforms.
Harper thought that he could get Solomon off the charges; everyone knew that people were coming in and out of his apartment constantly, and so the police would have a lot of difficulty proving that the drugs were his. However, Harper was aware of a problem with this defence: it could give the police cause to search other apartments, and who knew what they would find then.
To make matters worse, the crew realised that Solomon could not get his apartment back; under the rules of civil asset forfeiture, the owner would have to bring a legal challenge to recover it. All Pritchard had to do was drag his feet on bringing a case; Solomon would be homeless in the meantime. Also, Pritchard could probably rely on the police to return the apartment once he asked for it back... being such a generous benevolent fund donor.
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Ed and Joel had their plan to deal with Pritchard; they planned to use the dirt that they had gathered on Caviolo and Joel's access to convince Gloria Goldberg that Pritchard's site was a problem, and that she should convince Valmont to go with Pritchard's competitor - a Japanese company that had bought and restored waterfront land at Hunter's Point. Joel believed that he could use his influence on the CEO of Image Pad to get the residents of Pritchard's building a place in the futuristic condominium, as part of a good public relations exercise.
What followed was one of the best role-playing moments in the chronicle so far. While Richard and Jon were laying out their characters' plans, I could see that Sue was itching to say something. When she did, it was the verbal wake-up call that the crew's hackers needed to pull them back to reality. I am paraphrasing Eva's reaction, but it was along these lines:
Eva: "We don't need to get these people into the new building - that won't happen for ages! We've got a child in a wheelchair who doesn't have access to a toilet right now! We need to think about where our clients are going to be living next week - tomorrow even! We need social services to put pressure on the owner, and we need the residents to get their compensation payments!"
Eva had a plan that addressed the immediate problems; she wanted Pritchard to think that he could secure the sale to Valmont, but only by treating his tenants properly and paying the no-fault eviction compensation. This was the way to use Gloria Goldberg's influence: to get her to insist on fair treatment for the residents as part of the deal. If the crew also wanted to use their dirt on Caviolo to sink the deal later - fine, but they needed Pritchard to think that he was going to succeed right up until the tenants had received every last penny of compensation.
The crew recognised that her plan was the right one, and I think it provided an intense role-playing moment for Jon, because he realised that Joel had been so focussed on sticking it to Pritchard that he had overlooked the clients in their hour of need. Jon was still reeling a bit from Sue effectively calling him out some time after the game.
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The players put their final plan in motion, which included a very neat ploy from Kali and Matt to deal with the rent-a-goons. Returning to Caviolo's apartment, Cleo bugged his telephone, and so she overheard when the two thugs returned to the building to plant more drugs. When she learned which apartment had been targeted, she slipped in quickly - while the goons were on their way downstairs - and threw the drugs down the laundry chute to Charles' waiting arms.
Rather than waiting for Frank Caviolo to call the police, Charles had tipped them off instead. As the thugs exited the building, they ran into cops, who had already found the narcotics in their car. As the cherry on top of this set-up, the goons had - true to form - donned their maintenance worker disguises before leaving. This meant that they were arrested in their costumes, giving credence to the tenants' reports that crooks dressed as workmen were responsible for the local crimes. This result certainly helped to eliminate some of Pritchard's allies from his "Mark Map", and ultimately free Solomon from any suspicion.
Eva got her social services contacts to expose the horrors taking place in the building, and Joel used their formal protests to suggest a risky proposition to Gloria Goldberg. He advised her to buy Pritchard's building as the cheaper option, but - rather than incurring reputational damage - she could turn the social services controversy into a public relations win - by insisting on a deal that guarantees fair treatment for the tenants. His pitch was a hard sell, especially since Gloria Goldberg practically had an army of lawyers and accountants as her entourage, but Joel managed it.
Meanwhile, Ed Mason was putting together a separate media package of all the dirt that the crew had gathered on Caviolo and Pritchard, so that he could spike Pritchard's deal after he had compensated the residents.
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The players did not win the Wrap-Up action; the dice told an interesting tale, because each die that I rolled for Pritchard represented a surviving part of his network. My roll was narrowly higher than Richard's score, because I got a maximum result on the die that represented Pritchard's top-flight legal team. The "Mark Map" worked well as a clear, visual reminder that this part of the Mark's empire was still operating.
This meant that the tenants got their compensation money and their mistreatment stopped, but Pritchard was not incriminated when Caviolo and his thugs fell, nor was he ruined when the crew tried to sink his deal with Valmont. Gloria Goldberg was pressuring Valmont to withdraw, but Pritchard was threatening to sue for breach of their agreements and promises. In other words, the Mark's shield against liability held up; the story was a legal mess for him and he did not win, but it was not his doom.
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I learned a few more things from this game too.
I think that Mastermind may be the skill set that players are most likely to underestimate. Very few players have jumped at the role of the crew's mastermind, and now Richard has re-written his character to be more hacker than mastermind. However, some of the players found a lot of use for their Mastermind dice during the scenes. One example was when Eva and Cleo went canvassing the neighbourhood: they were not tricking people, but liaising with them and gathering information.
Later in the game, Sue used her Mastermind die again, when she was arranging for social services to intervene. Mastermind covers attempts to get other agencies or organisations to do your bidding - to do what players in World of Darkness LARPs would call "influence actions". Mastermind was not Eva's primary or even her secondary role, but she had "Social Worker" as a Distinction, and she used it to get a powerful bonus on her dice roll, leading to success.
I should add that I was pleased to see crewmembers using their other, less powerful abilities to achieve their goals. Leverage has more possibilities when players don't see their characters as just performing their primary roles. Also, the players did not meta-game; when a player thought of something to do, his or her character usually did it, rather than passing it to the crewmember that had a better ability rating for the task.
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Some of the research that went into this game can be found under the following links:
A narrative of evictions in San Francisco
Rent control in San Francisco
The compensation costs of no-fault evictions
A San Francisco renters' horror story
The ACLU on asset forfeiture abuse...
...and John Oliver on asset forfeiture
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