Building a Crew

Note: These rules are an optional add-on for groups that want to build up a faction of their own, instead of being a small group of itinerant adventurers. If you use them, they replace the rules for bonds and grudges in the main rulebook. These rules will probably disappear after the current playtest.

The crew is a special faction, because it’s the faction that represents the player characters. Your crew represents the common goals that unite your group, and the beginnings of a legacy that will outlast its founding members. You don’t create a crew at the start of the game, but you can create one at any point after it begins. You might be able to found your crew immediately, or you might need to do a special mission or adventure to lay the foundations of your crew before it comes into being.

Your crew is mostly the same as any other faction, but with some extra rules. It starts out at Tier 0, with strong hold. You can improve your Tier and hold by building up your faction’s Reputation and doing missions or adventures that bring your crew notoriety and influence. You can lose it temporarily by getting embroiled in conflict with other factions, or permanently if some calamity occurs to cripple your faction.

When your crew is founded, you must decide together on what its identity will be. This is its reason for existing, which holds it together. It affects how other factions will think of your crew and treat you, and the kind of jobs and opportunities that are likely to come your way. It’s also a way to tell the GM what kind of story you’re interested in exploring with your crew. Pick one of these options, or make up your own:

Before you start, you should also talk about what your crew’s base of operations or meeting place is. Since you begin at Tier 0, it might be a very modest or abandoned sort of place. It depends on the tone and fiction established by the table, though. Does your crew have any other turf, territory or assets at their disposal when they start out?

Faction Status

Your crew has a status with each faction that represents how well they are liked or hated by it:

When the game begins, you have 0 status with every faction. When complete a mission or an adventure of some kind, you might lose 1 or 2 status with factions that are hurt by your actions. If any factions are helped by your actions, you may gain 1 status with them.

You temporarily lose 1 hold when your crew is at war (-3 status) with any other faction. This can knock your crew down a Tier, although it’s temporary and you’ll get it back as soon as you end the war (one way or another).

Reputation

In order to advance the crew, you will need to undertake missions and adventures to earn Reputation. This is a measure of clout and renown, required for other factions to take you seriously and to attract the support you need to develop and grow.

Whenever you complete a mission or adventure that will draw attention to your crew, you gain 2 Reputation (unless you keep the operation completely quiet so no one knows about it). If the Tier of your mission was higher than your crew’s current Tier, then you get +1 Reputation per Tier difference. If it was lower, you get -1 Reputation per Tier difference (to a minimum of zero).

Sometimes the Tier of a mission will be obvious (i.e. you stole something from a Tier IV faction). If it’s not, the GM can make a judgement call about what Tier that adventure was equivalent to.

The maximum Reputation you can accrue at any given time is 12. If you have 12 Reputation, you can reset it to zero and choose one of the following:

Increasing the Tier of your crew has several benefits. Narratively, it means that your crew is bigger and more powerful, with more members and better equipment - this will be reflected in the quality and scale of your holdings and cohorts. You can also use the crew’s Tier as a trait to make fortune rolls whenever the quality and power of your crew is tested for some reason. Most commonly, you will roll your crew’s Tier when you leverage its resources during the downtime phase.

Heat

The Foundation is full of prying eyes and informants. Anything you do might be witnessed, and there’s always evidence left behind. Anyone can run afoul of the law, but running a crew means you have roots and obligations that make it much harder to simply lay low for a while. To reflect this, your crew acquires Heat whenever you complete an adventure that involves committing crimes or defying the authority of the powers that be:

Add +1 Heat if the target was high-profile or well-connected, or if the target was affiliated with the Foundation or a megacorporation. Add +2 Heat if any killing was involved, whether the player characters did the killing or not. Bodies draw attention.

When your Heat reaches 9, you gain a Wanted Level and clear your Heat (any excess Heat “rolls over”). Your Wanted Level can go up to a maximum of 4. It determines how high the bounties on your crew members are, and can also be used as a trait for the GM to make fortune rolls with. The higher your Wanted Level, the more serious the response when the powers that be take action against you (they’ll send a force of higher quality and scale).

The easiest way to reduce Heat is to lay low and take a break from adventuring. Every time you enter the downtime phase, your Heat reduces by 1. If you want to reduce it faster, you can spend a downtime action doing so and make a fortune or action roll - for example, you might try to pin the evidence on a rival crew or convince someone to make a few incriminating reports disappear. This works the same as filling in a progress clock - so limited effect clears 1 Heat, standard effect clears 2 Heat, and so on.

You can’t reduce your Heat below zero, and getting down to zero doesn’t drop your Wanted Level. Getting rid of a Wanted Level is a much more daunting task. It will always require a special mission, a long-term project with multiple stages, or a big sacrifice - like giving up a crew member, a holding or a cohort.

Assets & Income

When your crew has reached at least Tier I, you gain access to an organisation larger than yourselves which has its own resources and assets to draw from. You can leverage these resources in two ways during the downtime phase: to draw an income or acquire an asset.

When you draw an income, you spend a downtime action finding profits and money that the faction can spare. Drawing an income is done on behalf of the whole crew, and it can only be done once per downtime phase. Roll your crew’s Tier; you earn Cash equal to the result on the highest die, which can be split between the player characters however they want.

When you acquire an asset, you spend a downtime action using the faction’s connections to get your hands on something that might otherwise be out of reach. That could be an actual tangible item you need, temporary access to a vehicle or service in the local area, the temporary assistance of an expert or a gang, or anything else that seems reasonable for the crew to help out with. Roll your crew’s Tier:

The result of your roll indicates what quality of asset your crew can get for you right now. For more abstract goals, like access to a service or community, the GM may have to decide on an appropriate minimum quality that you must achieve.

If your roll is enough to cover the quality of the thing you wanted, then you get it. If not, then your crew either can’t provide it, or they can’t cover the entire cost. You might need to settle for a cheaper equivalent or one with less features, a temporary or consumable version, or covering part of the cost yourself.

Holdings

Your crew’s holdings represent their territory and their sources of power and influence. Note that “holdings”, “claims”, “turf”, “hunting grounds” and so on all mean the same thing in this game. They are fictional details that give your crew a tangible advantage when they can make use of them, but different holdings don’t necessarily have special rules or mechanics that differentiate them from each other.

Holdings tell you exactly what resources and assets your crew has at their disposal - if you have a hidden safehouse that you can hunker down in during times of war, then your options are different from a faction that has corrupt clerks in the magistrate’s court. They can also count as a major advantage that gives you +1d when making fortune rolls or working on a long-term project, if you can find a way to make use of them.

For example:

Cohorts

A cohort is either a gang of lackeys or an expert who is part of and works for your crew. When you recruit a new cohort, first decide whether you want to recruit a gang or an expert and what type of cohort you want them to be:

For example, if your crew is Tier I and you decide to hire a gang of thieves, there will be about 3-5 of them and they will be quality 1 (they roll 1d on fortune rolls). If you decide to hire a single expert infiltrator instead, they will be quality 2 (they roll 2d on fortune rolls). Cohorts roll their full quality when doing appropriate activities for their type; otherwise, their quality is 0.

When you recruit a cohort, you should also choose an edge and a flaw for them. Some examples of edges:

And flaws: