Most of my players are no fans of the anti-vaccination movement, and so the opportunity to take it on in a game of Leverage was always going to be popular. For this game, I snapped up the following:
Kali as Cleo Huntington;
Elle as Angel Cross;
Andy as Theodore Camberley III;
Jon as Joel Hogarth; and,
Mairi as Samantha "Sam" Jones
Sam was a new addition to the Underground Railroad - a former-USAF fighter pilot, who was sent on a badly-planned air support mission after her superior did not listen to her tactical advice. When she managed to survive and return, she found that her commanding officer had pinned the bad decisions on her. A punch in his face and one dishonourable discharge later, and the Railroad can count a battle tactician among its members.
This was my Christmas episode, in which the crew were called upon to deal with a crisis at the Seattle Children's Hospital. After an unvaccinated child was brought into the hospital, his measles spread to a girl whose immune system was compromised due to chemotherapy. This caused her death, and also led to the hospital's exasperated top oncologist to make some very angry public statements about the head of the anti-vaccination movement in Seattle - a Dr Otto Ire.
When I created the character of Dr Ire as the mark for this game, I mashed together a number of real life examples, including Dr Oz, Andrew Wakefield and Matthias Rath. This gave me a villain for the piece who was rich, litigious and the head of a profitable business empire built on the sale of vitamin supplements. Noting that celebrity nutritionists like Dr Oz have a significant celebrity following, I also wrote Dr Ire to have his own television show, as well as celebrity endorsements.
Dr Ire was suing the oncologist for defamation of character, and also using his anti-vaccination movement to harass the hospital. Claiming to his followers that the hospital's misuse of poisonous chemotherapy treatments was responsible for the girls death, Dr Ire was arranging protests outside the hospital, which were scaring parents and children away. The hospital's administration wanted to support their oncologist, but Dr Ire's lawsuit was burning through their litigation fund through a drawn-out discovery process, draining the hospital's resources.
Wanting Dr Ire to have support from a celebrity who was famous for being famous, I came up with Lauren McCallister as a "mark agent. I don't know whether "The Real Housewives of Seattle" is a real thing - they actually have a "Real Housewives of the Potomac" on US television now, so almost any major affluent area of the country might have a "Real Housewives" by now. I decided that Lauren would be such a "Real Housewife".
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In my view, the players had a solid strategy from the outset. Jon and Kali were very concerned about finding a way to neutralise the threat of Dr Ire's top-flight lawyers, especially because the mark in the previous episode - "The Rent-Controlled Job" - survived because of his legal team.
Looking at the mark map, the crew hatched a plan to cause Dr Ire's empire to collapse by convincing his celebrity fans that his nutritional products were poisonous. This plan played very much to Cleo Huntington's strengths; as a chef to celebrities and a skilled grifter, she was the ideal person to infiltrate the set of the Real Housewives of Seattle, just in time to get involved in their Christmas Special. Competition was going to be hot between the housewives regarding which one could put on the best Christmas spread (well, hire someone to make the best spread), and so Cleo decided to pose as the gourmet chef, swooping in to help Lauren McCallister.
Cleo's efforts to infiltrate the Real Housewives' production provided us with a good mini-tutorial on using two features of the Leverage game: Call-Backs and Distinctions. In promoting herself to Lauren McCallister as a caterer, Cleo made a reference to offering her catering services to Maurice Colman at the opening of his gallery in "The Sideways Job". Since this Job has not been spent from Cleo's rap sheet, the reference allowed her to do for free something that would normally have cost her a Story Point: in this case, activate her "Chef to the Stars" Distinction. This gave her a bonus to all of her attempts to sell herself to Lauren as the chef that she needed.
In her haste to outdo the other housewives, Lauren snapped up Cleo in an instant and started trusting her very quickly, even agreeing to allow Cleo to do a "nutritional work-up" for her.
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During their planning, the crew nonetheless discovered something that raised serious concerns for them. Theodore had been digging through Dr Ire's finances. He did not discover anything illegal; Dr Ire was making millions legally and even benefitting from tax breaks by holding charity galas (which he also used to advertise his vitamin supplements). However, Theodore learned that Dr Ire may be making preparations to move his manufacturing overseas, greatly cutting his overheads. Not only that, but Dr Ire was also in close contact with the Health Minister for the small African nation of Lesotho.
Looking deeper into Dr Ire's history, the crew learned that he had previously taken legal action against Medicins Sans Frontieres for defamation, after they spoke out against him for promoting his vitamins as a treatment for HIV in Lesotho, where HIV infection is a serious healthy issue. They resolved to find a way to attack his credibility at his next charity gala, hoping to discredit him before the Lesotho government could invest further in his snake oil.
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This led the players into some "dark territory", where they contemplated using their Story Points to create an asset in the form of a local celebrity whose child had died - someone with clout who could take issue in public with Dr Ire suing the children's hospital. If they could have such a person speak out against Dr Ire at a charity event, his reputation with his movement and the Lesotho government might suffer.
This led to players tentatively making such comments as "Can we get a dead child as an Asset?".
"We're all going to Hell," Jon lamented. I think the players were being a bit hard on themselves, considering that most fantasy role-play consists of subterranean home invasion and killing sentient creatures for their loot. When writing Leverage games, I often have to come up with plot elements that are both horrible and tragically plausible, so having the players join in did not perturb me. If anything, observing the Story Point system and players' creativity create meta-angst for them was interesting.
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A twist in the story took place at the charity gala, when Sam spotted a young African male approaching a podium while Dr Ire was giving a speech. Being able to assess a combat situation in the blink of an eye, Sam realised that the young man had a gun and was trying to shoot Dr Ire. She also noticed that Dr Ire's bodyguards had also observed him, and that he was more likely to get himself killed than to harm his target. Sam intervened, tackling the man to the ground.
Dr Ire's bodyguards were actually Lesotho soldiers that had been tasked with protecting him, and were more accustomed to shooting at problems than the proper rules of being a bodyguard (e.g. focus on protecting the principle). They opened fire, and Sam took a bullet in the shoulder blade. Despite this injury, she was still able to bundle the young man into a backstage area and overpower one of the bodyguards, allowing Angel to swoop in and smuggle the man out of the building.
The crew later learned that he was a medical student from Lesotho whose sister had died from AIDS. His studies enabled him to learn that the vitamin pills that she had been prescribed were snake oil; grief-stricken, he came looking to take revenge on their supplier, Dr Ire.
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After the event, the crew gathered more information about Dr Ire's situation. Due to the panic caused at the charity gala, he was now secluded on one floor of a hotel with the Lesotho health minister, with security guards patrolling the floor and no-one but Dr Ire's closest associates able to visit.
Joel met with and interviewed a doctor from Medicins Sans Frontieres, whom he had encountered at the gala. From him, Joel confirmed that the Lesotho government had already been running trials of Dr Ire's vitamin treatments for HIV in Lesotho. These trials had done nothing but cost people time that proper treatments could have added to their lives, but a history of western exploitation in Lesotho had helped Dr Ire to convince the health minister that such treatment was just a Big Pharma conspiracy to create third-world debt.
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Meanwhile, Cleo's role in the job was proceeding according to plan. She not only prepared a mild poison to make Lauren physically sick, but - after getting access to the McCallister home - she swapped out her vitamin pills for ones that would reveal, under testing, more dubious artificial ingredients.
The poison became effective at just the perfect moment: when Lauren was presenting a taster spread to her other housewives. This resulted in her swooning and then throwing up on live network television, much to the schadenfreude of her rival housewives. Lauren was mortified, and Cleo used this opportunity to persuade her that the "dietary work-up" had raised some questions about her vitamin supplements. Lauren agreed to find out what the ingredients were in her tablets - the ones that Cleo had forged for her.
At this point, the plan started to come together for the crew. Checking the mark map, Mairi pointed out that turning Lauren against Dr Ire would at least split his empire in half. The two of them shared a PR man and a lawyer, and the PR man would choose Lauren as a client over Dr Ire, since she was the bigger celebrity, and a local sports star was also speaking out against Dr Ire (because the players did ultimately get their "dead child" asset).
After creating a scare for Lauren about her vitamins, Cleo convinced her to go with Angel to confront Dr Ire in the hotel - realising that she would be allowed access, since Dr Ire would think that Lauren was his ally. This turned out even better than the crew expected, because Lauren - ever the drama queen - showed up at the hotel with a camera crew. She then talked her way to Dr Ire's hotel room, where she accused him of poisoning her and issued him with a lawsuit - on network television and in front of the Lesotho health minister!
Suffice to say, this was the coup de grace that the crew wanted to deliver for the wrap-up montage. Dr Ire still left for Lesotho, hoping that his business plans would proceed, but was surprised when the health minister had him arrested and thrown into a Lesotho prison as soon as his 'plane landed. Discredited and now with much greater worries than defamation of character, Dr Ire's lawsuit against and harassment of the Seattle Children's hospital both went away. So the crew helped to give sick children a merry Christmas, while providing some riveting Xmas television entertainment for the rest of Seattle.
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I think that the game worked well, and I had a lot of fun playing Lauren McCallister, partly because I felt that doing so injected more personality than I had offered in previous games, and partly because she worked very well as an annoying diva. Even in the latter stages of the game, her character had players grinding their teeth. "Don't worry; she's on our side now," Elle tried to assure Andy at one point. "I know," he replied "but I just hate her so much!"
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Some of the research that went into this game can be found using the following links:
John Oliver on Dr Oz and Nutritional Supplements
Ben Goldacre on Matthias Rath
Jenny McCarthy - my inspiration for Lauren McCallister
Seattle Children's Hospital Oncology
Information on Lesotho from Medicins Sans Frontieres
Friday 15 January 2016
Tuesday 27 October 2015
Leverage Role-Playing - Episode Four: The Rent-Controlled Job
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
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"....
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
Tuesday 20 October 2015
Leverage Role-Playing - Episode Three: The Debt to Society Job
My research for games of Leverage can be troubling, because sometimes I find myself reading articles or watching documentaries about scandals that show just how unjust society as a whole - not just select individuals - can be. The "Kids for Cash" scandal is a recent example that made me feel deeply angry.
For those unfamiliar with "Kids for Cash", the short version is that two Pennsylvania juvenile court judges - Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan - imposed harsh sentences on juveniles for trivial offences, while receiving money for the construction of a private prison. The number of juveniles being sent to jail was of course bolstering the business case for that private prison. Eventually, an investigation from the FBI and the Philadelphia Juvenile Law Center caught up to them, and they received very long sentences for racketeering and honest services fraud.
The Kids for Cash documentary is an excellent film, because the director - Robert May - did a fine job getting all sides of the story to talk to him openly, including the judges. The most moving and difficult stories are those of the juveniles, some of whom were imprisoned - for long periods - for offences as minor as yelling at an adult, or for mocking a teacher on a MySpace page. The damage done to them in the detention centres more than eclipsed what were, in many of the cases, mere indiscretions.
The judges appear in the film and are given space to tell their side of the story as they wanted. Ciavarella appeared tearful, and his family talk about the way that the investigating bodies conspired against him. Conahan chose to appear meditative, sitting on a beach and staring out into the distance. However, they both utterly failed to come across as sympathetic. Some of their sentences left horrible mental scars on young people, and led to at least one suicide, but all of their tears were for themselves. The juxtaposition is horrible between the mercilessness with which the judges treated inexperienced juveniles, and the sympathy that they sought for themselves, despite having far less of an excuse for breaking the law.
Yet the most vile thing about the "Kids for Cash" scandal is that Ciavarella's draconian sentencing practices were fine with the general public in Pennsylvania - until his financial misdeeds were revealed. The parents of his victims were horrified, and the Philadelphia Juvenile Law Center were hot on his case; they had been following his trials, and noticed that he was getting an exceptionally high number of parents to waive the right to an attorney, and then handing out harsh sentences, sometimes in trials that lasted for less than two minutes. Most citizens in the state, however, thought he was doing a great job.
The staff at the Philadelphia Juvenile Law Center commented on this problem. After Columbine, people did not want the authorities to take any chances with young offenders, and this led to support for more "zero tolerance" approaches to children. How messed up is that? Support for guns in the United States is so strong that, after a gun massacre, gun control remained a very difficult thing to achieve, but the authorities could crack down on the children! That was being "tough on crime", so citizens were okay with it.
Ciaverella claimed that the scandal is mis-titled, because he never literally exchanged kids for cash. This might even be true, because he can point to the fact that he was giving juveniles harsh sentences before he was receiving funds (which he failed to declare to the public or the IRS). What bothers me intensely is that, if he had never accepted money, he could have carried on handing out disproportionate and life-ruining sentences to young people for the rest of his career, and only the parents of his victims and the Philadelphia Juvenile Law Center would have been speaking out against him. In other words, he could have gotten away with atrocities, if he had not failed to declare money.
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The Debt to Society Job was difficult to write, because it touched on the issue of people not caring when justice is being abused in the middle of polite society. For this game, I pitched a crew from the Underground Railroad against a mayor, who was running a mayor's court in Erie County, Ohio. For information about the abuses in these courts, The Outskirts of Hope - an ACLU article - has the goods. Basically, debtors' prison should not be occurring; it violates the US Constitution and the Ohio State constitution. A person can be imprisoned for refusing to pay a debt, but means-testing is mandatory to ensure that people are not being incarcerated for being unable to pay. In these mayor's courts, that compulsory step is being skipped. A lot.
Poor people in small-town areas of Ohio are being trapped in a cycle of being put on payment plans to address a fine, falling behind and being imprisoned. Incarceration then causes them to lose their jobs, letting them fall further behind, especially once court costs get added to their debts. Sadly, none of this is part of the game's fictional narrative. The fictional part is the group of neo-pulp outlaw heroes swinging in to save the day and bring down the mayor.
For this game, I had an entirely new crew of characters appear in Ohio to help a debtor called Belinda, who was afraid that she was about to be thrown back into jail for falling behind on her payments. The crewmembers were as follows:
Andy was Theodore Camberley III (the Mastermind) - a financial planner who used to arrange money transfers and overseas investments for big corporations... until he realised just how much he was involved in capital flight and tax evasion, and that he was on the wrong side.
Dom was Herb Wolfson (the Thief) - an activist and anarchist with a talent for using stealth and sabotage against Wall Street. Very much the kind of person to say that "property is theft, man", he was mostly spending his time on petty acts and demonstrations, until the Railroad tried to convince him that his talents were better utilised elsewhere.
Katrina was Audrey Freeman, a.k.a. "Rain" (the Hitter) - a blue-haired Aikido expert and self-professed "maniac pixie dream girl". We asked Katrina whether she meant "manic pixie dream girl". Turns out the answer is no. A corporation took away her dojo, leaving her with a highly-developed desire for revenge against big money.
Elle was Angel Cross (the Grifter) - a bubbly former congressional aide, who went to Washington to make well-intentioned changes. Once she saw the extent of the lies and fiscal influence in politics, she realised that helping senators and representatives was not going to build a better America. Then, the Railroad convinced her that her skills would be useful elsewhere.
Adrian was Martin Archer (the Hacker) - a corporate drone by day, but an open-source creator and conspiracy-chasing hacker by night. Archer spent his working hours protecting his employers from cyber-attacks, until his own delving into their systems showed him that he had been protecting information that should not be secret,
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The players learned that the mayor of Milan, Ohio - who was running the mayor's court - was up for re-election, and so they were drawn to getting involved in the politics to ensure that he lost to his challenger. This was a tall order; the mayor was a local man and a fifteen-year incumbent, whereas his challenger was Dalton Furlow, a Republican from out of town, who had fallen out of favour when his run at the State Legislature ended in a scandal ten years ago. He had run on a platform of family values, but then his affair with his secretary came to light.
Yes, this was the game in which players found themselves rooting for a Republican.... This initially caused some misgivings, but they learned that he was now married to his secretary and had been for nine years. They also learned that he was a moderate Republican - a protege of John McCain - and had not been a lawyer. So, the crew knew that he could not and likely would not run a mayor's court in the way that the incumbent was doing.
The crew certainly liked that Furlow was a believer in campaign finance reform. From Archer's fact finding and Camberley's grasp of numbers and finance, they soon learned that the mayor's campaign for re-election was receiving support from the same private prison to which he was sending debtors. However, the mayor and the corporation had made the right moves to avoid a "debtors for cash" scandal. The mayor never directly received or touched the money. It was filtered through a non-profit into a Political Action Committee, enabling the mayor's cousin to spend it on campaigning and political tactics. Even though the mayor, his cousin and the correctional company were avoiding any public declaration of the prison's fiscal support, none of them were doing anything illegal.
The private prison's corporate owners certainly appreciated the mayor's support. Their Lake Erie facility had suffered blows to its reputation in recent inspections. They had been forced to dismiss their catering company, after maggots were found in prisoners' food. Also, being a prison, its financial success depended on attendance numbers: the more prisoners, the better.
As a former congressional aide and a skilled grifter, Angel easily got herself a place among the staff for Furlow's relatively-impoverished campaign, bringing with her campaign money. Ted Camberley still has copious funds of his own from his career in finance, and easily created a PAC for Furlow.
Meanwhile, the other party members launched their own campaigns of sabotage against the offices of both the non-profit and the PAC that were supplying the mayor. They soon learned that the non-profit was just a shell for funnelling money to the PAC, but the PAC's offices were highly-protected.
This did not stop them from getting access; Herb let his straggly pet dog Bakunin into the building, and tricked the security guards into thinking that the animal was setting off alarms. This caused them to call their technical support, but Archer had re-routed the call to himself. This got him invited into the building's security station, where he created an opening for Rain to enter the PAC's open-plan office. There, she planted a USB device - one of Archer's potent inventions - on the PAC's networked computers, effectively giving him access to the whole system. She also copied their files and, before leaving, performed enough sabotage of office equipment to slow down the PAC's operations.
With the PAC's files, the crew quickly learned which influential people in the village were the biggest threats to the mayor's re-election - which ones had their own ideas for the local council and wanted new blood in the mayoral seat. Armed with this information, they set out to win more support for Furlow, and Rain also passed lots of information about the mayor's dodgy financial backers to a young documentary-maker.
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I had to admit that I was having trouble generating drama at times during the game. Part of the reason for this was because the players had an almost-ridiculous run of luck in the first couple of hours of play. They were winning at just about everything that they attempted. At one point, Dom pointed out that dice had been rolled about twenty times, and the players had yet to have a single die come up with a 1. Of course, once he said that, Murphy's law started to catch up with him.
The mayor never became an effective threat to the crew. Strangely, a side plot produced a much greater threat than anything the mayor did. When the crew learned that Belinda's boyfriend had borrowed money from a dangerous loan shark to clear her debts to the court, Herb Wolfson decided to go looking for said shark. This local underworld figure was Clay Kirkwood - who had learned that he could easily fly under a village sheriff's radar while quietly running all of the loans and drugs trade in the area.
Herb went asking for information about Kirkwood too openly, and he was snatched off the street and taken to a meeting with the local crime boss. Herb tried to convince Kirkwood that he needed a loan, but Kirkwood had already come to view him as a problem. He promised that he would leave some money for Herb behind a bar, but when Herb went to collect it, he was tricked into picking up a bag containing drugs. The police then arrived, and Herb found that he had been set up. He managed to escape (and Angel later used her extensive range of costumes to disguise him), but he was effectively framed as a drug dealer.
I may actually have to re-write the character of Clay Kirkwood. I had originally written him to be a minor bad guy for a side plot; not too clever but a little dangerous. However, because of the way that the dice fell in play, he covered his back deftly and did a complete number on one of the crew. Now Dom has a lasting feature on Herb's character sheet to reflect what Kirkwood did to him. Perhaps I should re-write Kirkwood as a Foil - the Leverage game's concept of a recurring antagonist that might show up in other stories - like James Sterling (Mark Sheppard) in the television series.
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Elle was pro-active in using Angel's Idealist Talent on other characters. It gives her a bonus when convincing others to do the right thing, and it was very effective for bringing people together to oppose the mayor. It also provided one of the more interesting complications of the game. Elle passed a test to persuade Furlow to do the right thing, but in the process rolled a 1. So, the opposing candidate was prepared to take a stand against corrupt campaign financing, to such an extent that he returned the crew's money and politely refused to work with Angel. He had looked into her PAC and got an inkling of just how dark Ted Camberley's dark money was! This took away some of Furlow's power, but I think it actually made the crew like him more....
The game came to a conclusion with Furlow's election victory. Those influential figures in the village supported him, and they made sure that documentary footage about the mayor's financial backers was broadcast to all of the voters. This enabled the mayor to be toppled, and Furlow ceased to run a mayor's court, instead referring traffic and ordinance fines to the more conventional magistrates' courts. The crew also managed to settle the debt that Belinda's boyfriend had to Kirkwood, although this was because Ted Camberley used the PAC money that Furlow returned to pay the debt.
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I was not as happy with this game as I was with The Sideways Job, partly because I did not really feel in the right place to portray characters myself. I felt like I had a bad time trying to give colour to the game at times, but that may be a matter of perspective.
Nonetheless, I think that I learned a couple of useful lessons from the game:
1) I should have a mechanism for building to a climax. The Leverage rulebook advises the storyteller to figure out what the "pressure" is in each game. In my home-made modules, I write down what the pressure is, but what I need is a gauge - almost like the "doom track" in Arkham Horror games. This would help the players to estimate how many minutes are left until midnight - how close they are to the Wrap-up Montage. Such a gauge would not necessarily be a bad thing; it could represent the pressure that the player characters are putting on the bad guy.
In The Debt to Society Job, I had difficulty figuring out at what point we were ready to cut to the climax, and something to guide me in that regard would be useful.
2) I should have something to help players to create scenes. Leverage is a somewhat unusual game, because it encourages players to be pro-active, rather than responsive to problems that the story-teller creates. The Mark won't necessarily come to you; the players must think of creative ways to take the fight to him and his supporters.
This can seem great, but some players are better at being devious on the fly than others. Also, when characters have cool powers, their players may become too focussed on how to get those powers into the game, even though they may have lots of other means at their disposal to take action.
Perhaps "user stories" would be a useful solution. I have been using these at work, because they are helpful as means for lay people to set out to IT people what they need from a system. They work well because they take input, which could include complaints and queries, and they help staff to express their business requirements in a constructive way: "I want to do X, so that Y will be achieved".
So, when players are trying to come up with scenes in which their characters are taking action, encouraging them think along these lines may help to get the ball rolling. I could even provide lots of examples of what actions can be taken with the game's skills as further guidance. Games can be challenging when some of the onus to introduce plot elements falls on the players.
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Some of the research that went into this game can be found under the following links:
The Outskirts of Hope
The "Kids for Cash" scandal
Maggots in private prison food
John McCain on Campaign Financing
PACs have to disclose their donors. Non-profits don't.
The Kids for Cash documentary is an excellent film, because the director - Robert May - did a fine job getting all sides of the story to talk to him openly, including the judges. The most moving and difficult stories are those of the juveniles, some of whom were imprisoned - for long periods - for offences as minor as yelling at an adult, or for mocking a teacher on a MySpace page. The damage done to them in the detention centres more than eclipsed what were, in many of the cases, mere indiscretions.
The judges appear in the film and are given space to tell their side of the story as they wanted. Ciavarella appeared tearful, and his family talk about the way that the investigating bodies conspired against him. Conahan chose to appear meditative, sitting on a beach and staring out into the distance. However, they both utterly failed to come across as sympathetic. Some of their sentences left horrible mental scars on young people, and led to at least one suicide, but all of their tears were for themselves. The juxtaposition is horrible between the mercilessness with which the judges treated inexperienced juveniles, and the sympathy that they sought for themselves, despite having far less of an excuse for breaking the law.
Yet the most vile thing about the "Kids for Cash" scandal is that Ciavarella's draconian sentencing practices were fine with the general public in Pennsylvania - until his financial misdeeds were revealed. The parents of his victims were horrified, and the Philadelphia Juvenile Law Center were hot on his case; they had been following his trials, and noticed that he was getting an exceptionally high number of parents to waive the right to an attorney, and then handing out harsh sentences, sometimes in trials that lasted for less than two minutes. Most citizens in the state, however, thought he was doing a great job.
The staff at the Philadelphia Juvenile Law Center commented on this problem. After Columbine, people did not want the authorities to take any chances with young offenders, and this led to support for more "zero tolerance" approaches to children. How messed up is that? Support for guns in the United States is so strong that, after a gun massacre, gun control remained a very difficult thing to achieve, but the authorities could crack down on the children! That was being "tough on crime", so citizens were okay with it.
Ciaverella claimed that the scandal is mis-titled, because he never literally exchanged kids for cash. This might even be true, because he can point to the fact that he was giving juveniles harsh sentences before he was receiving funds (which he failed to declare to the public or the IRS). What bothers me intensely is that, if he had never accepted money, he could have carried on handing out disproportionate and life-ruining sentences to young people for the rest of his career, and only the parents of his victims and the Philadelphia Juvenile Law Center would have been speaking out against him. In other words, he could have gotten away with atrocities, if he had not failed to declare money.
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The Debt to Society Job was difficult to write, because it touched on the issue of people not caring when justice is being abused in the middle of polite society. For this game, I pitched a crew from the Underground Railroad against a mayor, who was running a mayor's court in Erie County, Ohio. For information about the abuses in these courts, The Outskirts of Hope - an ACLU article - has the goods. Basically, debtors' prison should not be occurring; it violates the US Constitution and the Ohio State constitution. A person can be imprisoned for refusing to pay a debt, but means-testing is mandatory to ensure that people are not being incarcerated for being unable to pay. In these mayor's courts, that compulsory step is being skipped. A lot.
Poor people in small-town areas of Ohio are being trapped in a cycle of being put on payment plans to address a fine, falling behind and being imprisoned. Incarceration then causes them to lose their jobs, letting them fall further behind, especially once court costs get added to their debts. Sadly, none of this is part of the game's fictional narrative. The fictional part is the group of neo-pulp outlaw heroes swinging in to save the day and bring down the mayor.
For this game, I had an entirely new crew of characters appear in Ohio to help a debtor called Belinda, who was afraid that she was about to be thrown back into jail for falling behind on her payments. The crewmembers were as follows:
Andy was Theodore Camberley III (the Mastermind) - a financial planner who used to arrange money transfers and overseas investments for big corporations... until he realised just how much he was involved in capital flight and tax evasion, and that he was on the wrong side.
Dom was Herb Wolfson (the Thief) - an activist and anarchist with a talent for using stealth and sabotage against Wall Street. Very much the kind of person to say that "property is theft, man", he was mostly spending his time on petty acts and demonstrations, until the Railroad tried to convince him that his talents were better utilised elsewhere.
Katrina was Audrey Freeman, a.k.a. "Rain" (the Hitter) - a blue-haired Aikido expert and self-professed "maniac pixie dream girl". We asked Katrina whether she meant "manic pixie dream girl". Turns out the answer is no. A corporation took away her dojo, leaving her with a highly-developed desire for revenge against big money.
Elle was Angel Cross (the Grifter) - a bubbly former congressional aide, who went to Washington to make well-intentioned changes. Once she saw the extent of the lies and fiscal influence in politics, she realised that helping senators and representatives was not going to build a better America. Then, the Railroad convinced her that her skills would be useful elsewhere.
Adrian was Martin Archer (the Hacker) - a corporate drone by day, but an open-source creator and conspiracy-chasing hacker by night. Archer spent his working hours protecting his employers from cyber-attacks, until his own delving into their systems showed him that he had been protecting information that should not be secret,
-
The players learned that the mayor of Milan, Ohio - who was running the mayor's court - was up for re-election, and so they were drawn to getting involved in the politics to ensure that he lost to his challenger. This was a tall order; the mayor was a local man and a fifteen-year incumbent, whereas his challenger was Dalton Furlow, a Republican from out of town, who had fallen out of favour when his run at the State Legislature ended in a scandal ten years ago. He had run on a platform of family values, but then his affair with his secretary came to light.
Yes, this was the game in which players found themselves rooting for a Republican.... This initially caused some misgivings, but they learned that he was now married to his secretary and had been for nine years. They also learned that he was a moderate Republican - a protege of John McCain - and had not been a lawyer. So, the crew knew that he could not and likely would not run a mayor's court in the way that the incumbent was doing.
The crew certainly liked that Furlow was a believer in campaign finance reform. From Archer's fact finding and Camberley's grasp of numbers and finance, they soon learned that the mayor's campaign for re-election was receiving support from the same private prison to which he was sending debtors. However, the mayor and the corporation had made the right moves to avoid a "debtors for cash" scandal. The mayor never directly received or touched the money. It was filtered through a non-profit into a Political Action Committee, enabling the mayor's cousin to spend it on campaigning and political tactics. Even though the mayor, his cousin and the correctional company were avoiding any public declaration of the prison's fiscal support, none of them were doing anything illegal.
The private prison's corporate owners certainly appreciated the mayor's support. Their Lake Erie facility had suffered blows to its reputation in recent inspections. They had been forced to dismiss their catering company, after maggots were found in prisoners' food. Also, being a prison, its financial success depended on attendance numbers: the more prisoners, the better.
As a former congressional aide and a skilled grifter, Angel easily got herself a place among the staff for Furlow's relatively-impoverished campaign, bringing with her campaign money. Ted Camberley still has copious funds of his own from his career in finance, and easily created a PAC for Furlow.
Meanwhile, the other party members launched their own campaigns of sabotage against the offices of both the non-profit and the PAC that were supplying the mayor. They soon learned that the non-profit was just a shell for funnelling money to the PAC, but the PAC's offices were highly-protected.
This did not stop them from getting access; Herb let his straggly pet dog Bakunin into the building, and tricked the security guards into thinking that the animal was setting off alarms. This caused them to call their technical support, but Archer had re-routed the call to himself. This got him invited into the building's security station, where he created an opening for Rain to enter the PAC's open-plan office. There, she planted a USB device - one of Archer's potent inventions - on the PAC's networked computers, effectively giving him access to the whole system. She also copied their files and, before leaving, performed enough sabotage of office equipment to slow down the PAC's operations.
With the PAC's files, the crew quickly learned which influential people in the village were the biggest threats to the mayor's re-election - which ones had their own ideas for the local council and wanted new blood in the mayoral seat. Armed with this information, they set out to win more support for Furlow, and Rain also passed lots of information about the mayor's dodgy financial backers to a young documentary-maker.
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I had to admit that I was having trouble generating drama at times during the game. Part of the reason for this was because the players had an almost-ridiculous run of luck in the first couple of hours of play. They were winning at just about everything that they attempted. At one point, Dom pointed out that dice had been rolled about twenty times, and the players had yet to have a single die come up with a 1. Of course, once he said that, Murphy's law started to catch up with him.
The mayor never became an effective threat to the crew. Strangely, a side plot produced a much greater threat than anything the mayor did. When the crew learned that Belinda's boyfriend had borrowed money from a dangerous loan shark to clear her debts to the court, Herb Wolfson decided to go looking for said shark. This local underworld figure was Clay Kirkwood - who had learned that he could easily fly under a village sheriff's radar while quietly running all of the loans and drugs trade in the area.
Herb went asking for information about Kirkwood too openly, and he was snatched off the street and taken to a meeting with the local crime boss. Herb tried to convince Kirkwood that he needed a loan, but Kirkwood had already come to view him as a problem. He promised that he would leave some money for Herb behind a bar, but when Herb went to collect it, he was tricked into picking up a bag containing drugs. The police then arrived, and Herb found that he had been set up. He managed to escape (and Angel later used her extensive range of costumes to disguise him), but he was effectively framed as a drug dealer.
I may actually have to re-write the character of Clay Kirkwood. I had originally written him to be a minor bad guy for a side plot; not too clever but a little dangerous. However, because of the way that the dice fell in play, he covered his back deftly and did a complete number on one of the crew. Now Dom has a lasting feature on Herb's character sheet to reflect what Kirkwood did to him. Perhaps I should re-write Kirkwood as a Foil - the Leverage game's concept of a recurring antagonist that might show up in other stories - like James Sterling (Mark Sheppard) in the television series.
-
Elle was pro-active in using Angel's Idealist Talent on other characters. It gives her a bonus when convincing others to do the right thing, and it was very effective for bringing people together to oppose the mayor. It also provided one of the more interesting complications of the game. Elle passed a test to persuade Furlow to do the right thing, but in the process rolled a 1. So, the opposing candidate was prepared to take a stand against corrupt campaign financing, to such an extent that he returned the crew's money and politely refused to work with Angel. He had looked into her PAC and got an inkling of just how dark Ted Camberley's dark money was! This took away some of Furlow's power, but I think it actually made the crew like him more....
The game came to a conclusion with Furlow's election victory. Those influential figures in the village supported him, and they made sure that documentary footage about the mayor's financial backers was broadcast to all of the voters. This enabled the mayor to be toppled, and Furlow ceased to run a mayor's court, instead referring traffic and ordinance fines to the more conventional magistrates' courts. The crew also managed to settle the debt that Belinda's boyfriend had to Kirkwood, although this was because Ted Camberley used the PAC money that Furlow returned to pay the debt.
-
I was not as happy with this game as I was with The Sideways Job, partly because I did not really feel in the right place to portray characters myself. I felt like I had a bad time trying to give colour to the game at times, but that may be a matter of perspective.
Nonetheless, I think that I learned a couple of useful lessons from the game:
1) I should have a mechanism for building to a climax. The Leverage rulebook advises the storyteller to figure out what the "pressure" is in each game. In my home-made modules, I write down what the pressure is, but what I need is a gauge - almost like the "doom track" in Arkham Horror games. This would help the players to estimate how many minutes are left until midnight - how close they are to the Wrap-up Montage. Such a gauge would not necessarily be a bad thing; it could represent the pressure that the player characters are putting on the bad guy.
In The Debt to Society Job, I had difficulty figuring out at what point we were ready to cut to the climax, and something to guide me in that regard would be useful.
2) I should have something to help players to create scenes. Leverage is a somewhat unusual game, because it encourages players to be pro-active, rather than responsive to problems that the story-teller creates. The Mark won't necessarily come to you; the players must think of creative ways to take the fight to him and his supporters.
This can seem great, but some players are better at being devious on the fly than others. Also, when characters have cool powers, their players may become too focussed on how to get those powers into the game, even though they may have lots of other means at their disposal to take action.
Perhaps "user stories" would be a useful solution. I have been using these at work, because they are helpful as means for lay people to set out to IT people what they need from a system. They work well because they take input, which could include complaints and queries, and they help staff to express their business requirements in a constructive way: "I want to do X, so that Y will be achieved".
So, when players are trying to come up with scenes in which their characters are taking action, encouraging them think along these lines may help to get the ball rolling. I could even provide lots of examples of what actions can be taken with the game's skills as further guidance. Games can be challenging when some of the onus to introduce plot elements falls on the players.
-
Some of the research that went into this game can be found under the following links:
The Outskirts of Hope
The "Kids for Cash" scandal
Maggots in private prison food
John McCain on Campaign Financing
PACs have to disclose their donors. Non-profits don't.
Thursday 23 July 2015
Leverage Role-Playing - Episode Two: The Cult Job
This weekend gave me the opportunity to run my second session of the Leverage role-paying game, titled "The Cult Job".
The story re-united Cleo Huntington (Kali's thief) with Ed Mason (Richard's mastermind) and John Cotton (Adam's grifter). A new member of the underground railroad joined them: a hacker called Joel Hogarth (Jon Lee).
Hogarth used to create media and social manipulation for major marketing companies, but quit after finding it too soulless; he joined the railroad while looking for a new direction and moral purpose in life. Jon portrays his character as quite a tech-savvy hipster, which may make Jon quite keen to join Richard in a future episode of Leverage that I am currently planning - about the scandalous effect of IT corporations on the San Francisco renters' market.
Hogarth used to create media and social manipulation for major marketing companies, but quit after finding it too soulless; he joined the railroad while looking for a new direction and moral purpose in life. Jon portrays his character as quite a tech-savvy hipster, which may make Jon quite keen to join Richard in a future episode of Leverage that I am currently planning - about the scandalous effect of IT corporations on the San Francisco renters' market.
"The Cult Job" on the other hand, brought the crew to the outskirts of a small town in Texas called Palestine. Their client was an eighteen year-old girl called Temperance Gilead. She had been born and raised in a secluded community of Branch Davidians. After running away from home and a marriage that her cult-leader father had arranged for her, she discovered that she had no birth record or social security number, and could not prove her US citizenship. Her parents were refusing to confirm her birth status. In other words, she was a victim of identification abuse, whereby parents withhold proof of citizenship from offspring who are of age to leave home, depriving them of a means to live independently and coercing them to return.
The underground railroad had given Temperance a place to live in one of their Texas safe-houses. A retired member of the railroad - a former school teacher - was looking after her and helping to fill the gaps in her education. In the meantime, the crew had a specific goal - to steal a young woman's identity back for her.
Their target was far from ordinary. The community that Temperance's father led was secluded from society. They had previously been living apart in tents and trailers, but "David Gilead" had come into a lot of money within the last five years, enabling the Davidians to upgrade to proper buildings with water and power. Joel and Ed did a little digging, and soon established that a former Wall Street shark called Chad Warren had experienced a personal meltdown after the recession and been recruited into the cult, donating his vast earnings. They were also mortified to learn that Warren - in his late forties - was the man to whom Temperance had been promised in marriage, because of a "vision" that her father had in a dream.
David Gilead himself had several children via a number of different "spiritual wives" in the community. He had become the cult's prophet after spending years as their most successful recruiter. He had been very skilled at identifying vulnerable people and bringing them into the fold. Temperance's mother June, Joel learned, was one such person; she had been a drug addict and had lost a son to child services before David Gilead found her, got her clean and in the process got control over her. Temperance had told the crew that her mother had doubts in private about the cult leader, but never had the courage to stand against him.
-
The team did a lot of checks on the Branch Davidians while forming their plans, and they even learned of an active ATF investigation into one of the cult members. A man called Jason Hall was suspected of buying assault weapons for the group. That activity is not illegal in Texas, but he was also attending gun shows in the area and buying sufficient gun parts to create "franken-guns". The ATF believed that he was selling those weapons to gang members for additional funding. Arming felons would certainly be a problem, and the ATF were on high alert after the Twin Peaks shoot-out involving biker gangs near Waco.
Joel successfully hacked the ATF and got access to their file on the Branch Davidian investigation. However, Joel is played by Jon, and his dice hate him. He had difficulty rolling dice at any time in the game without getting a 1, and he incurred a serious complication while hacking the ATF. The agency discovered that they had been hacked, and believed that the Branch Davidians were responsible. This caused them to accelerate their investigation into the cult.
Jon rolled a lot of complications during the game, but every time he did, he received a Story Point. By the end of the game, he had a stack of 4 to spend, which is a lot of power in a game of Leverage. Jon has already said that Leverage may be his new favorite game, because it means that he actually gets compensated for his lousy dice luck. I can almost imagine Jon whispering to his luckless dice "Strike me down, and I'll become more powerful than you could possibly imagine!"
-
The underground railroad had given Temperance a place to live in one of their Texas safe-houses. A retired member of the railroad - a former school teacher - was looking after her and helping to fill the gaps in her education. In the meantime, the crew had a specific goal - to steal a young woman's identity back for her.
Their target was far from ordinary. The community that Temperance's father led was secluded from society. They had previously been living apart in tents and trailers, but "David Gilead" had come into a lot of money within the last five years, enabling the Davidians to upgrade to proper buildings with water and power. Joel and Ed did a little digging, and soon established that a former Wall Street shark called Chad Warren had experienced a personal meltdown after the recession and been recruited into the cult, donating his vast earnings. They were also mortified to learn that Warren - in his late forties - was the man to whom Temperance had been promised in marriage, because of a "vision" that her father had in a dream.
David Gilead himself had several children via a number of different "spiritual wives" in the community. He had become the cult's prophet after spending years as their most successful recruiter. He had been very skilled at identifying vulnerable people and bringing them into the fold. Temperance's mother June, Joel learned, was one such person; she had been a drug addict and had lost a son to child services before David Gilead found her, got her clean and in the process got control over her. Temperance had told the crew that her mother had doubts in private about the cult leader, but never had the courage to stand against him.
-
The team did a lot of checks on the Branch Davidians while forming their plans, and they even learned of an active ATF investigation into one of the cult members. A man called Jason Hall was suspected of buying assault weapons for the group. That activity is not illegal in Texas, but he was also attending gun shows in the area and buying sufficient gun parts to create "franken-guns". The ATF believed that he was selling those weapons to gang members for additional funding. Arming felons would certainly be a problem, and the ATF were on high alert after the Twin Peaks shoot-out involving biker gangs near Waco.
Joel successfully hacked the ATF and got access to their file on the Branch Davidian investigation. However, Joel is played by Jon, and his dice hate him. He had difficulty rolling dice at any time in the game without getting a 1, and he incurred a serious complication while hacking the ATF. The agency discovered that they had been hacked, and believed that the Branch Davidians were responsible. This caused them to accelerate their investigation into the cult.
Jon rolled a lot of complications during the game, but every time he did, he received a Story Point. By the end of the game, he had a stack of 4 to spend, which is a lot of power in a game of Leverage. Jon has already said that Leverage may be his new favorite game, because it means that he actually gets compensated for his lousy dice luck. I can almost imagine Jon whispering to his luckless dice "Strike me down, and I'll become more powerful than you could possibly imagine!"
-
The crew formed a plan to get some of the team into the Branch Davidians' compound, not by approaching them, but by tricking one of the cult's recruiters into thinking that they were prime candidates for converts. John Cotton had an idea of the crew posing as a failing televangelist and a married couple who act as his film crew. The televangelist would put on a terrible performance near the churches in Palestine, Texas, and the couple would voice their doubts about him within earshot of the cult's recruiter, convincing him that they were "in the market" for a new saviour.
Being a slick grifter in a sharp suit, John Cotton naturally took the role of the televangelist, while Joel and Cleo filmed him, making no efforts to conceal their disapproval of his terrible performance.
John Cotton: "Uh... ladies and gentlemen, I am today here to talk to you about Gawd... to speak with you on a level... about the Devil!"
Joel Hogarth: "Ugh, this is terrible. Can you believe this? He's really lost his way!"
Cleo Huntington: "To think how much I used to believe in him! All those years I spent devoting time to him - now he just seems like a false prophet."
John Cotton: "As you may know... throughout the ages, servants of God have been able to handle snakes without fear of being harmed! Well, I went out into the wilds today, and I found this... death adder. So, I will just reach into this glass box..."
Cleo Huntington: "Oh no - he's doing the snake thing again... give me strength!"
Joel Hogarth: "Did we remember to take that thing to the vet?"
Joel Hogarth: "Did we remember to take that thing to the vet?"
John Cotton: "Aaaah! See? The snake has bitten me and yet I have not died!"
Joel Hogarth: "This is just painful to watch; he's really doesn't know what he's doing anymore."
Cleo Huntington: "There must be a better way! Lord, send us a sign!"
Cult recruiter: "Excuse me; I couldn't help overhearing..."
-
So Joel and Cleo were taken back to the Branch Davidian compound and introduced to the cult's leader. David Gilead was quite a clever and controlling mark, so he had a few aces up his sleeve. He knew that the authorities were investigating him, and had already identified an undercover FBI agent in his community. He was giving this agent false information and preventing him from finding anything significant; he was even keeping the agent from accessing a completely mundane storehouse, just to create a decoy.
When he met Joel and Cleo, he saw an opportunity. Here was a married couple with an interest in his group and television equipment. Rather than being secretive, he invited them to film his group, figuring that media coverage would prevent the FBI from making any aggressive moves against him. He was confident that he had enough control over his community that they would give Joel and Cleo a good impression.
-
Meanwhile, Ed Mason and John Cotton decided to infiltrate the ATF encampment that was nearby, out of sight of the Branch Davidians' compound. John had been keeping some fake FBI badges and windbreakers for just such an occasion, and so "Agent Pond" and "Agent Williams" rolled up to investigate. At the same time, Joel was listening into the FBI's communication with their inside man.
Inside the camp, Ed and John encountered some very militaristic and gung-ho ATF agents, itching for a excuse to take on the Branch Davidians, and one highly-stressed FBI negotiator - the liaison to the undercover agent - trying to convince them to look for a non-violent approach. Joel's earlier fumble was working against a peaceful solution; most of the ATF agents were now convinced that the joint-operation was under cyber-attack from the cult and they needed to act fast.
Ed and John backed the negotiator's play, and this is where Adam rolled a complication. The negotiator, Agent Price, took Adam's character aside and said "So, you must be John Cotton, then!" Earlier, John had tried to use his FBI contacts to learn more about the Branch Davidians, and news of his interest had clearly been conveyed to Agent Price. However, the negotiator thought that John Cotton was present to represent the CIA, and he was not going to blow his cover, because John and Ed were the only other people backing his play. Nonetheless, John now had no choice but to support Agent Price's decisions.
-
Meanwhile, Joel and Cleo were finding the Branch Davidians difficult to infiltrate, due to the group's paranoia. They agreed to stay the night in a small house for guests, and Cleo attended a dinner for some of the women of the community. She met Temperance's subdued mother. She also met Kendall, a woman whose husband had left her because of her infertility; she was currently enjoying high status among the women as a prospective "spiritual wife" for David Gilead, who was promising to "pray with her" to cure her infertility. Cleo also met another woman who was, with quiet anger, avoiding such advances; the cult leader had told the husbands of his group to observe celibacy, while he "fathered God's children". This sounds crazy, but I modelled Gilead's behaviour on things that David Koresh did as leader of the Waco chapter.
Cleo did manage to slip away at one point, late at night. She broke into the storehouse (easily - she picked the lock with her eyes closed just to make it more interesting) and realised it was a decoy. Still, eluding the cult members was difficult; at times, Kendall seemed to be following her with a flashlight and a Stepford smile.
Joel used his computers to put footage from the community on the internet overnight, in the hope that this would deter the ATF from taking any violent action. It worked, but Jon rolled a 1 in the process, causing a complication: the following morning, a couple of television news outlets had vans and cameras set up near the entrance to the compound, thinking that a wacky cult was opening its doors to public interest. Now the crew had to contend with the media watching. Jon's dice are the gift that keeps on giving.
-
The crew managed to turn their fortunes around on that new day, probably in no small part because Jon started to spend from his small arsenal of Story Points.
Cleo tailed Jason Hall into the community's chapel, but then he disappeared. Moments later, Joel saw Jason Hall leaving David Gilead's home with the cult leader, on the way to the morning sermon. Realising that a hidden link existed between the chapel and the home, Joel decided that he would have a snoop inside the house, while everyone else was gathered in church. He found a key under a plant pot with a note for Kendall; it was clearly intended so that she could let herself into David Gilead's home so that they could "pray" together.
Inside the cult leader's study, Joel quickly found a secret doorway, and a safe behind a painting. This posed an ironic problem. The crew's hacker was in the study, while their safecracker was stuck in the chapel, surrounded by people. Fortunately they improvised; Joel stuck his earpiece onto the safe so that Cleo could listen and give guidance. While other church-goers were kneeling in muttered prayers, Cleo was whispering "Right a bit... now slowly turn it to the left..."
Jon got his first lucky roll of the game and I rolled a 1, so Joel got to find pretty much everything he needed in the safe, including a photograph album containing proof of Temperance Gilead's parentage and the cult leader's laptop. Joel also found the secret route from the chapel to the house; it went underground to a bunker, where Gilead and Hall had been keeping a large supply of guns. The bunker was intended to be a place of last resort in the event of a Waco-style siege.
-
The crew then formed a solid idea for destroying the mark. Joel had been recording the undercover agent's transmissions to the FBI, and filming footage of David Gilead talking. Using the editing suite on his Mac Book, he synched the audio with the footage and tuned the agent's voice to sound like the cult leader's. He then left the composite playing on Gilead's laptop in his study.
In the ATF encampment, John Cotton and Ed Mason approached Agent Price. John tipped off the FBI agent that the storehouse was a decoy. "We re-tasked an X-ray satellite to photograph the storehouse on its way back to Cuba," he said. "It's empty, but how we know this is classified, so don't tell the ATF where we got this." Ed Mason then got Agent Price to arrange for a FBI helicoptor to do a fly-over of the Branch Davidian compound. When asked why, John Cotton explained that the helicoptor would be picking up and delivering David Gilead to the FBI without a single drop of blood being spilt. The negotiator was stunned; "I heard stories..." he said, "about Honduras... but I didn't think you could do things like this..."
In the chapel, Cleo tried to slip away from the congregation, but Kendall followed her. However, this was a trick - Cleo used Kendall's suspicions to lure her into discovering the secret passage, and she followed it to David Gilead's house. There, she entered the study and found a recording of her leader, ostensibly ratting out his cult members to the FBI!
What happened next was too fast for the mark to handle. Kendall ran out of his home in hysterics, holding the laptop above her head for everyone to see, just as the entire community was emerging from the chapel. The crowd turned to outrage and spontaneously began to chase down their leader, who ran from them. Just at that moment, a helicoptor with big "FBI" markings swooped down with an agent on a rope ladder to rescue Gilead. Acting on panicked instinct, the cult leader took the agent's hand and was whisked away... up high into the sky, where the television crews were able to film his escape.
This apparent betrayal immediately shattered Gilead's cult following, but most of his followers had committed no crimes, so no violence occurred and no arrests were made at the scene. The FBI did not even have a strong case against the cult leader, but now he had little choice but to provide evidence against Jason Hall, who otherwise might come after him.
The crew meanwhile, simply left without being captured in any footage. They were able to provide Temperance Gilead with proof of her identity, and even ultimately re-unite her with her mother.
-
In the game's wrap-up, the crew soundly crushed the mark. Jon rolled a lot of dice and was able to count most of them to get his result; David Gilead had strong dice (two d12s), but did not really stand a chance.
The wrap-up mechanic in Leverage is quite cool, because the main antagonist can get to roll a lot of dice, depending not just on his own abilities, but also on how many of his allies and resources can help. The better the crew does at eliminating the mark's advantages during the game, the weaker he is in the finale.
What made this game interesting was that the players found a way to eliminate most of David Gilead's advantages because of the way that they tricked him, not because they ground down his allies. The mark had a lot of things working for him, but those things were supposed to be threats to the crew because of the Branch Davidians' paranoia and nosiness. Since Kali and Jon set him up by using the community's suspicions to bait them and letting them draw their own conclusions, David Gilead could not call on their dice in the wrap-up contest. The finale was the kind of psychological Judo that can make a crew really dangerous.
-
I think that the game went well. However, I think that I learned a few lessons that keep in mind for any future games, for my benefit and also for the players:
1) Don't let the planning stage of the story go on too long, At the start, the players get a lot of information about the game, and they can spend a long time mulling over their options. However, they should be reminded not to wait too long before putting a plan into action. Inevitably, they are going to learn even more from people they meet and clues that they find during play, so - while they should think about their approach - no plan is set in stone.
2) Encourage the players to avoid being wedded to one idea for a solution. They were initially thinking of ways to set up Jason Hall or David Gilead so that the FBI or ATF to arrest them, but they ultimately realised that the ATF were too gung-ho to really be part of the solution.
Some of the research that went into this game can be found under the following links:
Identification abuse of a young girl in Texas
Biker shoot-out near Waco, Texas
Some material about David Koresh and his cult following
John Oliver on militarisation of the police
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Cult recruiter: "Excuse me; I couldn't help overhearing..."
-
So Joel and Cleo were taken back to the Branch Davidian compound and introduced to the cult's leader. David Gilead was quite a clever and controlling mark, so he had a few aces up his sleeve. He knew that the authorities were investigating him, and had already identified an undercover FBI agent in his community. He was giving this agent false information and preventing him from finding anything significant; he was even keeping the agent from accessing a completely mundane storehouse, just to create a decoy.
When he met Joel and Cleo, he saw an opportunity. Here was a married couple with an interest in his group and television equipment. Rather than being secretive, he invited them to film his group, figuring that media coverage would prevent the FBI from making any aggressive moves against him. He was confident that he had enough control over his community that they would give Joel and Cleo a good impression.
-
Meanwhile, Ed Mason and John Cotton decided to infiltrate the ATF encampment that was nearby, out of sight of the Branch Davidians' compound. John had been keeping some fake FBI badges and windbreakers for just such an occasion, and so "Agent Pond" and "Agent Williams" rolled up to investigate. At the same time, Joel was listening into the FBI's communication with their inside man.
Inside the camp, Ed and John encountered some very militaristic and gung-ho ATF agents, itching for a excuse to take on the Branch Davidians, and one highly-stressed FBI negotiator - the liaison to the undercover agent - trying to convince them to look for a non-violent approach. Joel's earlier fumble was working against a peaceful solution; most of the ATF agents were now convinced that the joint-operation was under cyber-attack from the cult and they needed to act fast.
Ed and John backed the negotiator's play, and this is where Adam rolled a complication. The negotiator, Agent Price, took Adam's character aside and said "So, you must be John Cotton, then!" Earlier, John had tried to use his FBI contacts to learn more about the Branch Davidians, and news of his interest had clearly been conveyed to Agent Price. However, the negotiator thought that John Cotton was present to represent the CIA, and he was not going to blow his cover, because John and Ed were the only other people backing his play. Nonetheless, John now had no choice but to support Agent Price's decisions.
-
Meanwhile, Joel and Cleo were finding the Branch Davidians difficult to infiltrate, due to the group's paranoia. They agreed to stay the night in a small house for guests, and Cleo attended a dinner for some of the women of the community. She met Temperance's subdued mother. She also met Kendall, a woman whose husband had left her because of her infertility; she was currently enjoying high status among the women as a prospective "spiritual wife" for David Gilead, who was promising to "pray with her" to cure her infertility. Cleo also met another woman who was, with quiet anger, avoiding such advances; the cult leader had told the husbands of his group to observe celibacy, while he "fathered God's children". This sounds crazy, but I modelled Gilead's behaviour on things that David Koresh did as leader of the Waco chapter.
Cleo did manage to slip away at one point, late at night. She broke into the storehouse (easily - she picked the lock with her eyes closed just to make it more interesting) and realised it was a decoy. Still, eluding the cult members was difficult; at times, Kendall seemed to be following her with a flashlight and a Stepford smile.
Joel used his computers to put footage from the community on the internet overnight, in the hope that this would deter the ATF from taking any violent action. It worked, but Jon rolled a 1 in the process, causing a complication: the following morning, a couple of television news outlets had vans and cameras set up near the entrance to the compound, thinking that a wacky cult was opening its doors to public interest. Now the crew had to contend with the media watching. Jon's dice are the gift that keeps on giving.
-
The crew managed to turn their fortunes around on that new day, probably in no small part because Jon started to spend from his small arsenal of Story Points.
Cleo tailed Jason Hall into the community's chapel, but then he disappeared. Moments later, Joel saw Jason Hall leaving David Gilead's home with the cult leader, on the way to the morning sermon. Realising that a hidden link existed between the chapel and the home, Joel decided that he would have a snoop inside the house, while everyone else was gathered in church. He found a key under a plant pot with a note for Kendall; it was clearly intended so that she could let herself into David Gilead's home so that they could "pray" together.
Inside the cult leader's study, Joel quickly found a secret doorway, and a safe behind a painting. This posed an ironic problem. The crew's hacker was in the study, while their safecracker was stuck in the chapel, surrounded by people. Fortunately they improvised; Joel stuck his earpiece onto the safe so that Cleo could listen and give guidance. While other church-goers were kneeling in muttered prayers, Cleo was whispering "Right a bit... now slowly turn it to the left..."
Jon got his first lucky roll of the game and I rolled a 1, so Joel got to find pretty much everything he needed in the safe, including a photograph album containing proof of Temperance Gilead's parentage and the cult leader's laptop. Joel also found the secret route from the chapel to the house; it went underground to a bunker, where Gilead and Hall had been keeping a large supply of guns. The bunker was intended to be a place of last resort in the event of a Waco-style siege.
-
The crew then formed a solid idea for destroying the mark. Joel had been recording the undercover agent's transmissions to the FBI, and filming footage of David Gilead talking. Using the editing suite on his Mac Book, he synched the audio with the footage and tuned the agent's voice to sound like the cult leader's. He then left the composite playing on Gilead's laptop in his study.
In the ATF encampment, John Cotton and Ed Mason approached Agent Price. John tipped off the FBI agent that the storehouse was a decoy. "We re-tasked an X-ray satellite to photograph the storehouse on its way back to Cuba," he said. "It's empty, but how we know this is classified, so don't tell the ATF where we got this." Ed Mason then got Agent Price to arrange for a FBI helicoptor to do a fly-over of the Branch Davidian compound. When asked why, John Cotton explained that the helicoptor would be picking up and delivering David Gilead to the FBI without a single drop of blood being spilt. The negotiator was stunned; "I heard stories..." he said, "about Honduras... but I didn't think you could do things like this..."
In the chapel, Cleo tried to slip away from the congregation, but Kendall followed her. However, this was a trick - Cleo used Kendall's suspicions to lure her into discovering the secret passage, and she followed it to David Gilead's house. There, she entered the study and found a recording of her leader, ostensibly ratting out his cult members to the FBI!
What happened next was too fast for the mark to handle. Kendall ran out of his home in hysterics, holding the laptop above her head for everyone to see, just as the entire community was emerging from the chapel. The crowd turned to outrage and spontaneously began to chase down their leader, who ran from them. Just at that moment, a helicoptor with big "FBI" markings swooped down with an agent on a rope ladder to rescue Gilead. Acting on panicked instinct, the cult leader took the agent's hand and was whisked away... up high into the sky, where the television crews were able to film his escape.
This apparent betrayal immediately shattered Gilead's cult following, but most of his followers had committed no crimes, so no violence occurred and no arrests were made at the scene. The FBI did not even have a strong case against the cult leader, but now he had little choice but to provide evidence against Jason Hall, who otherwise might come after him.
The crew meanwhile, simply left without being captured in any footage. They were able to provide Temperance Gilead with proof of her identity, and even ultimately re-unite her with her mother.
-
In the game's wrap-up, the crew soundly crushed the mark. Jon rolled a lot of dice and was able to count most of them to get his result; David Gilead had strong dice (two d12s), but did not really stand a chance.
The wrap-up mechanic in Leverage is quite cool, because the main antagonist can get to roll a lot of dice, depending not just on his own abilities, but also on how many of his allies and resources can help. The better the crew does at eliminating the mark's advantages during the game, the weaker he is in the finale.
What made this game interesting was that the players found a way to eliminate most of David Gilead's advantages because of the way that they tricked him, not because they ground down his allies. The mark had a lot of things working for him, but those things were supposed to be threats to the crew because of the Branch Davidians' paranoia and nosiness. Since Kali and Jon set him up by using the community's suspicions to bait them and letting them draw their own conclusions, David Gilead could not call on their dice in the wrap-up contest. The finale was the kind of psychological Judo that can make a crew really dangerous.
-
I think that the game went well. However, I think that I learned a few lessons that keep in mind for any future games, for my benefit and also for the players:
1) Don't let the planning stage of the story go on too long, At the start, the players get a lot of information about the game, and they can spend a long time mulling over their options. However, they should be reminded not to wait too long before putting a plan into action. Inevitably, they are going to learn even more from people they meet and clues that they find during play, so - while they should think about their approach - no plan is set in stone.
2) Encourage the players to avoid being wedded to one idea for a solution. They were initially thinking of ways to set up Jason Hall or David Gilead so that the FBI or ATF to arrest them, but they ultimately realised that the ATF were too gung-ho to really be part of the solution.
Some of the research that went into this game can be found under the following links:
Identification abuse of a young girl in Texas
Biker shoot-out near Waco, Texas
Some material about David Koresh and his cult following
John Oliver on militarisation of the police
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Friday 17 April 2015
Leverage Role-Playing - Episode One: The Sideways Job
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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."
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.]
-
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
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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."
-
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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