OPERATOR TACTICS · TERRA CONFLICTUS 2066
WARRANTYVOID
THE MISSION BOOK · VOLUME ONE
THIRTY-TWO CONTRACTS. EIGHT DISTRICTS. FIVE PEOPLE WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER.
PROPERTY OF NOBODY
Operator Tactics · Terra Conflictus 2066
MB-01 · 2
Operator Tactics · Terra Conflictus 2066 · Lost Angeles
WARRANTY VOIDTHE MISSION BOOK · VOLUME ONE
Thirty-two contracts across eight districts of Lost Angeles, and five people to run them with.
This book carries no core rules. It assumes the Operator Tactics core book is on the table beside it, and it assumes nothing else.
What is in it
The crew. Five pre-generated operators with full stat blocks, backstory, relationships and secrets. The first place they exist as characters a stranger can pick up and play.
The work. Two currencies, nine rate bands, twelve mission verbs, and procedures that answer what happens next without ever needing a plot.
The jobs. Thirty-two contracts, one spread each, grouped by where they are. Thirteen are written to be refused.
The competition. Six rival crews. None are villains and four are better at this than you are.
The one rule
The stated mission and the real situation are never the same. Every contract has a Truth, and it is not a twist to be sprung — it is the situation the crew walked into.
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Contents
Contents
CONTENTSFour parts
Part 1 · The Crew
The splice · THE SPLICE p.8
The relationship map · THE RELATIONSHIP MAP p.10
Playing this crew · PLAYING THIS CREW p.12
Danka Ivel · DANKA IVEL p.14
Theo Ashe · THEO ASHE p.18
Grigor Tam · GRIGOR TAM p.22
Cas · CAS p.26
Ozzy Okonkwo-Cruz · OZZY OKONKWO-CRUZ p.30
The garage · THE GARAGE p.34
The orbit · THE ORBIT p.36
Part 2 · The Work
The Board · The Board p.39
Rate Bands · RATE BANDS p.40
Heat · HEAT p.42
Clout · Clout p.43
The Body Economy · THE BODY ECONOMY p.44
The Clip · THE CLIP p.48
Downtime in the Wash · Downtime in the Wash p.49
Complications · COMPLICATIONS p.50
The Generator · THE GENERATOR p.52
Burned · BURNED p.54
MB-01 · 4
Contents
Part 3 · The Jobs
Barricadia · BARRICADIA p.58
Center Point · CENTER POINT p.70
The Musk Tunnels · THE MUSK TUNNELS p.80
The Raze · THE RAZE p.90
Ring Road · RING ROAD p.100
The High Top · THE HIGH TOP p.110
The Low Coast · THE LOW COAST p.120
Monitor Central · MONITOR CENTRAL p.130
| Cluster | Contracts |
|---|---|
| BARRICADIA | THE WASH p.60 · NOBODY'S KID p.62 · THE FILTER JOB p.64 · GOOD PRESS p.66 · THE STANDPIPE WAR p.68 |
| CENTER POINT | HOUSE RULES p.72 · THE ARM p.74 · SIX MINUTES OF FAME p.76 · THE BOOTH p.78 |
| MUSK TUNNELS | DARK TRANSIT p.82 · GRID FIRMWARE p.84 · WHAT THE TUNNEL KEEPS p.86 · ONE-WAY FARE p.88 |
| THE RAZE | GROUND TRUTH p.92 · THE CRATER LOT p.94 · BURN NOTICE p.96 · WHAT GREW BACK p.98 |
| RING ROAD | RENTAL SOUND p.102 · THE LONG WAY p.104 · PACK FREQUENCY p.106 · TITLE AND DEED p.108 |
| THE HIGH TOP | THE VIEW p.112 · CLEAN HANDS p.114 · PATRON p.116 · THE INVITATION p.118 |
| LOW COAST | SLACK WATER p.122 · SALT WAKE p.124 · WHAT THE SEA FILED p.126 · THE LAST TENANT p.128 |
| MONITOR CENTRAL | SERVICE NOTICE p.132 · REPOSSESSION p.134 · THE WHOLE QUEUE p.136 |
Part 4 · The Competition
Grava Pack · GRAVA PACK p.140
The Bonded · THE BONDED p.142
Sunset Delivery · SUNSET DELIVERY p.144
Hallim & Hallim · HALLIM & HALLIM p.146
The Second Unit · THE SECOND UNIT p.148
Hearsay · HEARSAY p.150
Cross-references throughout are printed with live page numbers. If a reference points somewhere, it resolves.
5 · MB-01
How to use
Before you start
HOW TO USE THIS BOOKA machine for manufacturing situations, not a campaign
There is no metaplot in this book and no chapter you have to read first. There is a crew, an economy, and thirty-two situations, and the campaign is whatever the table's choices make out of them.
As a one shot
- Pick a contract at Band 2 or 3. THE FILTER JOB p.64, DARK TRANSIT p.82 and RENTAL SOUND p.102 all work cold.
- Hand out the five crew packages and let people read the left-hand pages only.
- Read the contract's card, Truth and Not-Line. That is your prep.
- Run it, and resolve THE CLIP p.48 at the end even in a one shot. It is the best ninety seconds in the book.
As a campaign
- Start with THE WASH p.60. It costs nothing and it buys everything.
- Track Heat and Clout from session one. Everything downstream assumes them.
- Follow the Connections field rather than a running order.
- Roll on And then? p.51 between every second or third contract.
- Use COMPLICATIONS p.50 when a contract is run a second time or generated fresh.
- Run THE WHOLE QUEUE p.136 only after twelve contracts. It is built from what the table has banked.
Open and Sealed
Every spread is marked. Open may be read aloud or handed across the table. Sealed may not. The book is designed to be turned around, and the pre-gens are built so a player can read three pages of their own character and not the fourth.
MB-01 · 6
How to use
WHAT THIS BOOK ASSUMES Open
The core rules. Operator Tactics, any current printing. Stat blocks here use the standard line plus augment tag and augment cost. Nothing else is required.
Lost Angeles. Districts, routes and contacts come from the existing city material and are not restated. Every contract works without it; the cluster spreads carry what you actually need.
Three to five players. Six seats exist. See PLAYING THIS CREW p.12.
Comedy as the default register. This is a crew who film their crimes and post them. Eight contracts here are funny on purpose, and the tone matters as much as the stat blocks.
Safety and content
The body economy in this book is about ownership of people's bodies, and several contracts turn on debt, repossession, medical coercion and eviction. NOBODY'S KID p.62 and REPOSSESSION p.134 in particular should be flagged before play.
Run whatever safety tools your table already uses. The contracts are built so the institution is the antagonist and the people are not, but that does not make the subject matter lighter.
A note on the Warden
Almost nothing here is solved by winning a fight, and several contracts have no opposition at all. If a session ends with the crew having out-shot somebody, check the Not-Line: it will usually say that was not what the contract was.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/001
'we're not a company. we're five people and a building.'
@barricadia_lifer and a tap
WARRANTY VOID and a tap
WARRANTY VOID and a tap
7 · MB-01
Part 1
The
Crew
FIVE OPERATORS · ONE BUILDING · ONE TAP
The splice8
The relationship map10
Playing this crew12
Danka Ivel14
Theo Ashe18
Grigor Tam22
Cas26
Ozzy Okonkwo-Cruz30
The garage34
The orbit36
Modified bodies, voided terms of service. It prints on a bootleg tour shirt, which is where they got it.
MB-01 · 8
The Crew
The thesis
THE SPLICEFour defectors, one baseline, and a building with a standpipe
A splice is a crew of mixed gene-forged lineages. To the states that bred them it was a write-off: a unit not worth reconstituting, assembled from whatever survived. The generation that came after took the word and wore it.
Warranty Void is four defectors and one unmodified nineteen-year-old. A wolf who left a Kavast pack at nineteen, a raven who walked off with a Protectorate sensorium, a bear thirty years into Compact persistence doctrine, a lynx whose manufacturer went bankrupt in the fifties, and a shop kid from Barricadia who talked his way in.
They live in a decommissioned water-reclamation substation, they keep the last filtration line running and the alley tap open free, and they film their crimes in their living room and post them. All three of those facts are load-bearing.
Why they work
Nobody was issued to anybody. Every state cohort in this setting is matched, uniform and supplied. A splice is thrifted. That is the argument the whole crew is making with their bodies.
The tap is the politics. They did not set out to be a civic institution. Grigor signed a lease and left a standpipe open, and it has been quietly compounding ever since.
The channel is the risk. It is how they eat, how they are protected, and how they will eventually be found. See Clout p.43.
The tone
Comedy is the default register. Crimes done with enthusiasm, bets that escalate past sense, flexes played completely straight. The engine is sincerity colliding with chaos: they take every dumb objective seriously and the world refuses to cooperate.
The dread runs underneath and is rationed. Each of the five has a wound on their File page, and this volume surfaces each once and resolves none.
For the Warden
In any three consecutive sessions, at least two should be funny. That is a structural note, not a style one: the drama in this book only lands because the surface is loud.
9 · MB-01
The Crew
Part 1
THE MAPFive people, and the specific way each pair goes wrong
1 Grigor is the hub because everyone brings him things and he brings nobody anything. That is the arc.
MB-01 · 10
The Crew
THE PAIRS, IN ONE LINE EACH Open
Grigor & Ozzy Anti-mirror. The only relationship where somebody asks how the other one is, and it is always this direction. Ozzy asks as a joke; Grigor answers yes; neither is fooled.
Grigor & Danka Same breeding, thirty years apart. He knows exactly what she is going to become and has no idea how to say it.
Grigor & Theo Dark mirror. Irony that deflects against sincerity that absorbs. Neither processes anything and they recognise it in each other.
Grigor & Cas The quiet mirror. The other one who maintains everything except herself. They cover for each other without discussing it.
Cas & Ozzy Engine pair. Aftermarket by design beside factory settings by birth, both unclaimed, self-made in opposite directions. He messes up his kit on purpose when she spirals.
Theo & Ozzy Two performers. He is the only person alive who can name Theo's bits to their face, because he runs the same machinery.
Danka & Theo Defector pair. Two people who walked away from the states that made them and have never once compared notes.
Danka & Cas Both bought a self: one with a title and a car, one with a notarised document. Neither has noticed they agree.
Danka & Ozzy He is banned from touching, describing or monetising the car. He is currently monetising the car. This is a bomb. Let the table watch it tick.
Using the map
When a session stalls, do not add a lead. Put two of these five in a room and give one of them a reason to want something from the other. The map is a list of scenes that always work.
The wounds Sealed
One per operator, none of them resolved in this volume. Each has a d6 of surfacing scenes on its File page. Surface each once.
Danka Her littermate Vesna got a message out eight months ago, asking for help. She has not answered and has told nobody.
Theo The receive hardware was never fully stripped. In range they still catch Protectorate traffic. The crew does not know.
Grigor His augments are failing and persistence doctrine means he cannot feel it. A back-alley medic gave him five hard years.
Cas The Caseline IP went to a liquidation shell that holds a dormant recall option over her genome. She checks its filings weekly.
Ozzy The augment fund exists, untouched since the hire, and he has not closed the account either.
Rationing
These are multi-season assets. A volume that spends more than one of them properly has spent too many, and a volume that spends none has wasted the File pages.
11 · MB-01
The Crew
Part 1
PLAYING THIS CREWThree to six seats, and what to do with the gaps
By table size
Five players. The intended shape. One package each, and nobody reads a fourth page.
Four. Cut Theo and give B-Roll to the table as a shared resource, once per session, invoked by anyone. The channel still exists; nobody is holding the camera.
Three. Danka, Grigor, and one of Cas or Ozzy. Fold the missing abilities into the survivors and reduce every Main clock by one.
Six. Use the sixth seat, below.
The sixth seat
There is room in the garage for one more cot and there always has been. A sixth player builds an operator normally and joins as the new one, which is a real position in this crew: nobody here has ever recruited anybody except Ozzy, and the way they did that was Danka tracking him down to hurt him.
Give the sixth seat one structural job the others cannot do, and make it social rather than mechanical: the only one with a living parent nobody is lying to, or the only one who can walk into Center Point unrecognised, or the only one who has been inside Service.
Or play the orbit
A player who does not want a pre-gen can run somebody from THE ORBIT p.36 instead. Frequency, Dr. Silk, Petrina and Marisol all have enough written to play, and a table where one player is the district rather than the crew produces a very different and much sharper campaign.
MB-01 · 12
The Crew
SESSION ONE Open
- Hand out the packages. Left-hand pages only. Five minutes, and let them read the three-second reads aloud to each other.
- Open in the garage. Grigor is cooking. Somebody is at the alley tap. Nobody has a job yet.
- Somebody comes to the door. Run THE WASH p.60 or THE FILTER JOB p.64. Both begin with a person and an object on a table.
- Do not explain the economy. Heat and Clout are introduced by the first Fallout table the crew triggers, not by a lecture.
- Resolve THE CLIP p.48. Ninety seconds. What went up, what got left out, what the district said. This is where the table works out what kind of crew they are.
- End on the comment. Not on the payout.
What to establish in the first hour
The tap is free. Say it twice. Every Barricadia contract is downstream of it.
They are recognised. Somebody in the street knows their names before the crew has done anything.
Money is tight. Standing costs are roughly one Band 2 contract a month. Say the number out loud once.
Grigor is fine. He will say so. His player is told he is fine. See his File page.
What not to do in session one
Do not open with a fight, a mystery, or an institution. Open with a neighbour who needs something and cannot pay for it, and let the players decide who they are in front of somebody who is watching.
13 · MB-01
Part 1 · The Crew · No. 01
Danka
Ivel
PEDESTRIAN
WOLF · GENE-FORGED · 24 · SHE/HER
THE DRIVER · EX-KAVAST
BARRICADIA, LOST ANGELES
THE DRIVER · EX-KAVAST
BARRICADIA, LOST ANGELES
Three-second read: Kavast-issue jacket with the unit markings torn off and grocery-store patches sewn over the ghosts. Foam slides she drives in. A junk-shop trucker hat that does not really cover the ears.
MB-01 · 14
The Crew
The Person Open
Kavast bred her for the pack and issued her nothing. She bolted at nineteen with no plan and no paperwork, and has spent five years buying things that have her own name on the title. She started with a car nobody else would have saved.
The crew calls her PEDESTRIAN, which is their joke about the one thing she is comprehensively bad at being. She has never asked them to stop, and she has never laughed at it either, and both of those facts are the character.
"I don't need a pack. I left mine."
A chosen pack is a different thing from a bred one, and choosing is the part Kavast never let her do.
Drives her
Owning things Kavast said she would never be issued. Cars, mostly, and one in particular. Ownership is how she proves the self is hers: every title with her name on it is a document the program said would never exist.
Fears
The pack instinct itself. If she bonds with these four, it might be the breeding talking, and then nothing about her is hers. She cannot tell the difference from the inside, and there is no test.
Weakness
Escalation. Wolf aggression patterns, plus a steering wheel, plus a rival who said something. She does not start it. She has never once been the one to stop it.
Loves
The car, out loud and at length. The crew, which she will not say. She has put more hours into the first than into every relationship she has, and would not accept that as a metaphor.
Arc
Ownership as selfhood → choice as selfhood. Objects were the practice; people are the exam. The beat that costs her is the one where she has to say out loud that these four are hers.
Speaks like
Short sentences. Engine grammar for everything, including feelings. Flat delivery. When she is amused it lands a beat late: one huff, gone.
"It's not a shortcut. It's a different route that happens to be faster."
"That's a rental sound. Whatever that is, it's not ours."
"I'll circle once. That's parking."
Quirks
Circles any building once before going in, and calls it parking. Her ears flatten when she lies, which is the entire reason she does not lie. Will not let anyone eat in the car and has never once said why.
How the world reads them
As trouble that has not started yet. People clock the jacket before they clock the face, and the jacket is Kavast even with the markings gone — the cut is the tell, and everyone in Barricadia can read a cut. Buyers assume she is muscle and negotiate with whoever is standing next to her, which suits the crew fine and costs her something every single time.
Theme
The setting argues about who owns a body. She extends the argument to who owns a feeling, and she is losing it.
1 Kavast pack doctrine, litter structure, and what an unanswered message costs inside it are in the Faction Reference; this book assumes them.
15 · MB-01
The Crew
The Operator Open
What she is for: she turns any bad ending into a driving problem, which is the only kind of problem this crew reliably survives.
SHOOT
FIGHT
TACT
OPINT
GUTS
MOBI
AR
FW
MW
4+
2+
2+
4+
2+
6"
1
3
2
ARCHETYPE
Driver/Pilot · Primary Vehicle Operation (2+) · Secondary Navigation (2+)
KEYWORD
Aggressive — but only once engaged, and only if someone made it personal.
CLASS ABILITY
Civilian. The car is always available and never expendable. Once per mission Danka may declare that the route exists: any withdrawal, pursuit or approach she is driving succeeds without a roll, and the GM narrates what it costs the car. A GM who threatens Civilian has the whole table's attention and should know what they are spending it on.
DOCTRINE
Pack Instinct. Kavast bred it in and defection did not remove it. When a splicemate takes a Mortal Wound, Danka may immediately move her full MOBI toward them, outside the turn order. She does not get to decide whether to.
PRESSURE SPEND
Nothing Rented. Spend 1 Pressure to have already fitted, fixed or fuelled the thing that is about to fail. Name the part. Once per mission.
AUGMENT TAG
Wolf reflex suite, Kavast issue. Re-roll one failed FIGHT per mission.
AUGMENT COST
Escalation. After she wins a Fight, she must close with the nearest enemy if able.
Three things only they can do
Drive it. Nobody else at this table gets to touch a vehicle while she is conscious, and the rules should feel that way.
Read the machine. She hears a fault before it is a fault. Any vehicle, any door motor, any generator: she knows how long it has left.
Own it. She can produce a title, a receipt or a bill of sale for almost anything she carries. In a district that runs on provenance, that is a social weapon.
Gear
The Kavast jacket, markings gone, patches sewn over the ghosts. Foam slides she drives in. A ratchet she clicks while thinking. One key on a plain ring, and she checks for it the way other people check a pulse.
Not carried: nothing that belongs to anybody else. Ask her to hold something and watch what happens to her face.
The ability, in play
The plan has failed, the roller door is coming down, and Cas is mid-sentence. Danka declares Civilian: there is a route, there was always a route, and the crew is on it. Then the GM says what it cost — a panel, a wheel, the respray, the thing she will spend three sessions fixing.
Pairs with
Cas · The Plan gets them in. Civilian is the only reason there is a way out of it.
Grigor · He holds the door, she holds the engine. Nobody in this city has beaten that combination twice.
Theo · Overwatch Grammar calls the route from elevation. She does not ask twice.
1 Balance note for the GM: on paper she is the crew's best fighter. In practice her doctrine row removes her choice at the worst possible moment, and that is the cost of the statline. Do not soften it.
MB-01 · 16
The Crew
The File Sealed
Everything on this page is yours, not theirs. None of it has been spent on the channel.
The secret
Her littermate got a message out. Vesna, eight months ago, asking for help. Danka has not answered and has told nobody, not even Grigor, and the message is still on the device she has not factory-reset. She has read it more times than she has driven the car this year.
Three ways to hurt them
Say she is still Kavast. Say the jacket gave her away, say the driving is doctrine, say she flinched like a pack animal. It works every time and it should.
Damage Civilian. Not destroy it. Damage it, badly, in a way that is her fault.
Make her hold something. Anything that belongs to someone else, for any length of time, in front of people.
Pressure points on the crew
Grigor is the same breeding in a different tense: the wolf who did his thirty years. She watches him for the version of herself she is trying to outrun, and neither has said so.
Theo is the defector pair. Two people who walked away from states that made them, who never discuss it, and who each assume the other handled it better.
Ozzy is banned from touching, describing or monetising the car. He is currently monetising the car. She does not know yet.
Cas bought a self with a notarised document; Danka bought one with a title and a car. They have circled this agreement for a year without either noticing it.
Surfacing the wound d6
| d6 | The scene |
|---|---|
| 1 | Vesna sends a second message. Shorter. This is the arc's hinge. Spend it once. |
| 2 | A Kavast recruiter offers her a clean record and her litter back, and means it. |
| 3 | Someone she cannot outrun makes it a driving problem anyway. |
| 4 | The crew needs her to leave the car behind, and the mission actually requires it. |
| 5 | She is asked, in public, what her callsign means. Ozzy answers for her, wrongly, kindly. |
| 6 | Grigor tells her what happens to the ones who stay in. |
Sincerity ceiling · once per campaign
"I didn't leave a pack. I left a supplier."
Delivered flat, to nobody, while working. It stops the room because it is the first time she has named what Kavast was. Do not set it up.
ConnectionsGRIGOR TAM p.22 same breeding, opposite tense ·
VROZA PACK p.150 the wolf who stayed ·
C11 THE STANDPIPE WAR p.58 ·
RING ROAD p.96 her nights
17 · MB-01
Part 1 · The Crew · No. 02
Theo
Ashe
B-ROLL
RAVEN · GENE-FORGED · 22 · THEY/THEM
THE DOCUMENTER · EX-PROTECTORATE FLIGHT
BARRICADIA, LOST ANGELES
THE DOCUMENTER · EX-PROTECTORATE FLIGHT
BARRICADIA, LOST ANGELES
Three-second read: A raven, head to collar-ruff. Pajama-adjacent layers over armour plate, lens rigs jury-rigged onto thrifted frames, and augment maintenance patches worn visibly and on purpose.
MB-01 · 18
The Crew
The Person Open
The Protectorate built them to watch. Surveillance-optimised, flight-trained, a targeting sensorium wired into a body that was never expected to have opinions about what it saw. They took all of that, walked off with it, and pointed it at framing clips.
Everything the crew does, Theo is filming. Everything Theo posts is a bit. The channel exists because they made it exist, forty-eight hours before Ozzy was selling shirts for it, and none of the other four have ever quite worked out whether that was a hobby that became a job or a confession that became a job.
"If it's all content, none of it can hurt."
Some things need a witness, and a witness is a different job from a camera.
Drives them
An audience the Protectorate cannot revoke. They were built to watch; now people watch back, and the watching belongs to them, and every view is a small permanent secession.
Fears
Sincerity on camera. A sincere Theo has no plausible deniability left. Underneath that, and worse: the silence of a head with nobody else in it.
Weakness
They will keep filming when they should be helping. Not out of coldness. Out of the certainty that the footage is the useful thing they contribute, which is a lie they have never tested.
Loves
The crew's off-camera moments, which they never post and secretly archive. The archive is large. Nobody has seen it.
Arc
Performing for an audience → witnessing for the crew. The beat that costs them: the camera goes down while something matters, or something sincere goes up with no bit wrapped around it.
Speaks like
Flat, fast, edit-room jargon as native slang. Sentences are cuts. They end early rather than arrive anywhere sincere.
"Don't look at me, look at the thing. The thing is the shot."
"That's a cutaway. We'll fix it in the edit. There is no edit."
"I got it. I got all of it. That's the problem, isn't it."
Quirks
Perches on chair backs, never sits properly. Murmurs "cutaway" to themselves when a conversation turns sincere, sometimes audibly, always when it is about them.
How the world reads them
As harmless and slightly annoying, which is the most useful thing a surveillance asset can look like. The rigs read as hobbyist. The layers read as somebody who does not go outside. The Protectorate spent a great deal of money on a sensorium that now gets waved past doors because the guard has decided it is a kid with a camera.
Theme
State property that walked off, and an unreliable narrator the audience trusts anyway. Both halves of the setting's argument in one person.
1 Channel grammar, the VOID card, and the standing rule that red never appears on crew material are specified in the Channel Identity file; the book follows it on every spread.
19 · MB-01
The Crew
The Operator Open
What they are for: they see it first, they see it from above, and they have already recorded the thing nobody else noticed.
SHOOT
FIGHT
TACT
OPINT
GUTS
MOBI
AR
FW
MW
4+
5+
4+
2+
4+
6"
1
3
1
ARCHETYPE
Recon Specialist · Primary Scouting (2+) · Secondary Electronic Security (4+)
KEYWORD
★ Init — they see it first. They always see it first.
CLASS ABILITY
B-Roll. Theo is always filming. Once per mission, the crew may consult the footage: ask the GM one question about a scene the crew has already been in, and get a true answer. The footage does not lie, which is occasionally the problem.
DOCTRINE
Overwatch Grammar. Protectorate flight training, never unlearned. From elevation, Theo may name what is behind one wall, door or corner within line of sight, once per mission, without rolling.
PRESSURE SPEND
Post It. Spend 1 Pressure to put something on the Feed right now. The district reacts within the hour. Gain 1 Clout. The GM gains 1 Heat and does not have to say what it bought.
AUGMENT TAG
Surveillance sensorium. +1 OPINT on the first Field Read of each mission.
AUGMENT COST
Receive hardware never fully stripped. See The File.
Three things only they can do
See it. Elevation, optics, and a sensorium built by a state that wanted total coverage. Theo's Field Read is the crew's actual intelligence apparatus.
Prove it. They have footage. Of nearly everything. In a district that runs on rumour, a clip is a legal instrument.
Name the bit. They can read a room's performance the way they read a sightline, and say out loud what everyone in it is pretending. They almost never do.
Gear
Lens rigs jury-rigged onto thrifted frames. Three cameras, two of which the crew knows about. Augment maintenance patches worn visibly, which is a statement. A receipt folded against the chest, and they will not say what for.
Not carried: a weapon they are any good with. FIGHT 5+ is not a typo, and it is not a flaw to be fixed.
The ability, in play
Three sessions ago the crew walked through a lobby and nobody was paying attention. Now they need to know who was at the desk. Theo consults B-Roll, the table gets a true answer, and the GM has to honour a detail nobody wrote down — which is the ability working exactly as intended.
Pairs with
Cas · Field Read feeds The Plan. Her contingency is only as good as their first look at the room.
Ozzy · He talks them in; Theo films it. The footage is leverage on everyone in the room, forever.
Danka · Elevation plus a driver is the crew's whole approach doctrine, such as it is.
1 Balance note for the GM: Theo's abilities generate information, not damage. If your sessions do not have questions in them, the strongest operator at this table has nothing to do.
MB-01 · 20
The Crew
The File Sealed
Everything on this page is yours, not theirs. None of it has been spent on the channel.
The secret
The receiver still works. Their receive hardware was never fully stripped, and in range they still catch fragments of Protectorate traffic. It is a genuine intelligence asset and a genuine security breach, and the crew does not know. Using it in play should always cost something, and the cost should never be Theo's to pay alone.
Three ways to hurt them
Take the camera. Theo without a lens is a person with nothing to hide behind, which is the most exposed anyone in this crew ever gets.
Watch the archive. The off-camera footage they never post. Have someone find it, and be kind about it.
Ask them to be sincere on camera. Not cruelly. Sincerely. Have someone they respect ask, once, gently, with the light on.
Pressure points on the crew
Grigor is the dark mirror and the season's spine: irony that deflects against sincerity that absorbs. Neither of them processes anything. They recognise it in each other and neither will say it.
Ozzy is the near mirror, the other performer, and the only person alive who can name Theo's bits to their face because he runs the same machinery.
Danka is the defector pair. Two people who walked away from the states that made them and have never once compared notes.
Cas would call the receiver a security hole and be right, which is exactly why Theo has not told her.
Surfacing the wound d6
| d6 | The scene |
|---|---|
| 1 | The receiver catches something true. Not a bit, not useful, not asked for, and now they have to decide whether to tell the crew. This is the arc's hinge. |
| 2 | Someone else's camera catches the crew, and the footage is better than Theo's. |
| 3 | A Protectorate flight officer recognises them by gait on a public feed. |
| 4 | The archive surfaces. Somebody sees the footage Theo never posts. |
| 5 | They are asked to film something they should be stopping, and they can only do one. |
| 6 | A comment section works out something the crew was hiding, correctly, from a frame Theo did not think about. |
Sincerity ceiling · once per campaign
"I kept everything. Not the posts. The other stuff. In case one of you stops being here."
Said fast, to the floor, as though it were logistics. It is the only sentence they have ever finished. Do not set it up.
ConnectionsGRIGOR TAM p.22 the dark mirror ·
OZZY OKONKWO-CRUZ p.30 the other performer ·
THE CLIP p.44 how posting works at the table ·
C19 VANTAGE TRAFFIC p.74 the receiver, spent
21 · MB-01
Part 1 · The Crew · No. 03
Grigor
Tam
PATIENT
BEAR · GENE-FORGED · 34 · HE/HIM
THE ANCHOR · EX-EASTERN COMPACT
BARRICADIA, LOST ANGELES
THE ANCHOR · EX-EASTERN COMPACT
BARRICADIA, LOST ANGELES
Three-second read: A bear who dresses like an adult. Compact cold-weather surplus, worn plain, and in this crew that reads as radical.
MB-01 · 22
The Crew
The Person Open
Eastern Compact persistence doctrine, middle generation. He earned the callsign in Compact service, where it meant endurance. The kids think it is a hospital joke and he has never once corrected them.
He remembers when "splice" was a write-off, a word for a unit not worth reconstituting. He flinches at it and uses it anyway, because the four people in this garage reclaimed it before they were old enough to know what it cost, and he is not going to be the one who tells them.
"Endurance is the same thing as being okay."
The crew doesn't need him to survive them. They need him present, which is harder.
Drives him
Keeping this one intact. He has outlasted two units. Outlasting is the thing he was built for and the thing he is sickest of, and he has never found a way to say the second half.
Fears
Being the last one standing again. There is no third time he survives as himself, and he has done the arithmetic on that as carefully as Cas does anything.
Weakness
He absorbs everything and processes nothing: damage, insults, grief, Compact doctrine as a personality disorder. He also defers every conflict to keep the house peaceful, so things fester on his watch.
Loves
Cooking for people who talk too much to notice they are being fed. The tap in the alley, which he will not discuss. A radio serial nobody else listens to.
Arc
Surviving the crew → living with them. The beat that breaks doctrine: he lets someone else go back in, or he sits down and eats a meal somebody else cooked for him.
Speaks like
Slow, complete, Compact-inflected, warm all the way in. Dry humour at glacier speed. A quick sentence from him is the alarm.
"Eat first. The problem will keep. Problems are patient too."
"I have been in worse rooms. I was younger. It was not better."
"Sit down. You are no use to me upright and lying about it."
Quirks
Counts heads constantly, everywhere, including in restaurants he is not working. Writes shopping lists like operations orders. Puts a bowl in front of a client before anyone has said a word.
How the world reads them
As somebody's father, which he is not, and as a man who has already decided how this ends, which he has. Compact surplus worn plain reads as either nostalgia or threat depending on the district, and in Barricadia it reads as neither: it reads as the man who keeps the tap open, and that is a kind of citizenship nobody else on this crew has earned.
Theme
The difference between surviving and living, and the generational bridge: the man who knows what "splice" cost, handing it to the kids clean.
1 Compact persistence doctrine and what it does to a body over thirty years are in the Faction Reference. The garage, the standpipe and Marisol Vega are on p.34.
23 · MB-01
The Crew
The Operator Open
What he is for: he is the reason the rest of them get to be reckless, and the building they live in is his, in every way that is not on paper.
SHOOT
FIGHT
TACT
OPINT
GUTS
MOBI
AR
FW
MW
4+
2+
4+
4+
2+
4"
3
3
2
ARCHETYPE
Fighter · Primary Hand-to-Hand Combat (2+) · Secondary Field Medicine (4+)
KEYWORD
Hardened — the first Flesh Wound each mission does not slow him. He will not mention it either.
CLASS ABILITY
The Doorway. Grigor may occupy a doorway, breach or chokepoint as a single action. While he holds it, no enemy may pass without winning a Fight against him, and every enemy who considers it must first pass a Morale check. Most do not fight the doorway. Most sit down.
DOCTRINE
Anchor. Any operator within 6" of Grigor may re-roll one failed GUTS check per mission. He does not know he does this and would be embarrassed to hear it described.
PRESSURE SPEND
Go Back In. Spend 1 Pressure to re-enter a location the crew has withdrawn from, alone, and retrieve one person or one thing. He always succeeds. What it costs is the GM's, and it is never nothing.
AUGMENT TAG
Compact persistence frame. Ignore the penalty from the first two Field Wounds.
AUGMENT COST
He cannot feel degradation. The GM tracks his real condition privately. His player is told he is fine.
Three things only they can do
Hold. There is no version of a fight where Grigor is moved off a position by force. Attrition is the only answer, and attrition takes longer than the session does.
Feed. He can turn a hostile room into a room where people are sitting down. It is not a social skill. It is an ambush with soup.
Carry. Anything. Anyone. Both, at once, uphill, without commentary.
Gear
Compact cold-weather surplus, plain. A knife he uses for food. Letters, folded, against the chest, and nobody has asked. Whatever the kitchen needs, which he buys personally and lists like an operations order.
Not carried: a phone he answers. If you need Grigor, you come to the garage, which is the point.
The ability, in play
The crew has pulled back. Something is still in there. Nobody argues, nobody rolls, and nobody asks him to. He spends the Pressure and goes, and the GM decides what the building takes out of him on the way — which is the only mechanic in this book where the cost is entirely the Warden's to name.
Pairs with
Everyone · Anchor is a passive the whole table uses and nobody thanks him for. Play that.
Danka · The Doorway buys the seconds Civilian needs. It is the crew's oldest working plan.
Ozzy · Soup and a sales pitch have taken more rooms than either of them will admit.
1 Balance note for the GM: the augment cost is the whole character. Track his real Field Wounds on your own sheet and tell his player nothing. When it finally matters, it will matter all at once, and that is the arc firing on schedule, not the GM being unfair.
MB-01 · 24
The Crew
The File Sealed
Everything on this page is yours, not theirs. None of it has been spent on the channel. This one in particular should be spent slowly.
The secret
His augments are failing. Persistence doctrine means he cannot feel it. A back-alley medic gave him roughly five hard years and he intends to spend all of them here. He has not told anyone, he is not going to, and he has already decided how he wants it to go, which is the part that will hurt the table most when it surfaces.
Three ways to hurt them
Threaten the house, not the man. He will absorb anything aimed at himself. Aim it at the building and the tap and you have his full attention for the first time.
Make somebody else go back in. He will not allow it. Making him allow it is a whole session.
Put another old survivor in front of him. Someone thirty years further down the same road, who loves by portion the way he does, and who will say the thing about him he cannot say himself.
Pressure points on the crew
Danka mirrors him across time: the same breeding, thirty years earlier, still convinced she got out clean. He knows exactly what she is going to become and has no idea how to say it.
Theo is the dark mirror. Irony against sincerity, and neither of them processes anything.
Cas is the exact quiet mirror: the other one who maintains everything except herself. They recognise it and cover for each other.
Ozzy is the anti-mirror and therefore the only one who asks. He asks in the register of a joke. Grigor answers yes. Neither is fooled and both keep doing it.
Surfacing the wound d6
| d6 | The scene |
|---|---|
| 1 | Field Stabilize fails on him, visibly, for no reason his player can see. First tremor. Spend early and never explain it. |
| 2 | Marisol Vega asks him to stop paying rent, and means it kindly. |
| 3 | Someone from the second unit surfaces, alive, and wants to talk about it. |
| 4 | The tap fails and the queue is at the door. |
| 5 | He is asked to choose which of the four goes in, and the mission requires an answer. |
| 6 | Somebody cooks for him. That is the whole event. Let it be the whole event. |
Sincerity ceiling · once per campaign
"There is no spare. Do you understand me? On this crew there is no spare."
Delivered loud, once, to Ozzy, and it is the only time in the campaign he raises his voice. Do not set it up. Let a player earn it by doing the expendability arithmetic out loud.
ConnectionsDANKA IVEL p.14 same breeding, thirty years on ·
THE GARAGE p.34 his building, his tap ·
MARISOL VEGA p.35 ·
SERVICE p.— vol. two: what a failing frame is worth to an assessor
25 · MB-01
Part 1 · The Crew · No. 04
Cas
Caseline-9
SPREADSHEET
LYNX · GENE-FORGED · 26 · SHE/HER
THE PLANNER · CASELINE LINEAGE, DISCONTINUED
BARRICADIA, LOST ANGELES
THE PLANNER · CASELINE LINEAGE, DISCONTINUED
BARRICADIA, LOST ANGELES
Three-second read: A lynx in tactical kit from three different armies that no longer exist, immaculately organised and annotated in paint pen. Tufted ears through a cut hat.
MB-01 · 26
The Crew
The Person Open
Her legal name is a batch designation from a private lineage startup that folded in the fifties. Her genome is a discontinued product line. The firmware for her reflex augments has not been updated in a decade and never will be, because there is no longer anyone to update it.
She plans everything because her own body ships with no support. That is not a metaphor she would enjoy having pointed out, and it is the first thing anyone notices about her.
"Enough preparation makes chaos impossible."
The crew is the redundancy. People are the patch.
Drives her
Publicly: a plan that survives contact, just once. She would frame it. Actually: the list. Eight batchmates, four unlocated, and every spare credit goes to a broker for leads.
Fears
The day an augment fails and there is no patch, no manufacturer, no recall notice. Caseline-2 died that way and she found out from a forum post three months late.
Weakness
Confidence, plus competence, plus four teammates who improvise. She is the comedy fuse. Underneath it: she plans instead of feeling, and she cannot improvise socially at all.
Loves
The other eight, scattered, most unlocatable. She keeps the list on a card. Also her own kit, laid out in rows, which is the only place in her life where everything is where she put it.
Arc
Redundancy through planning → redundancy through people. The beat: a plan dies completely and she calls the audible, or she puts the card of eight on Grigor's table and asks for help.
Speaks like
Precise clauses. Quantities everywhere. Deadpan so dry that new listeners need a week to find the jokes. Product-speak slips out under stress and costs her jar money.
"Spec says three thousand microns. This has nine hundred, and paint."
"The plan has nine steps. We are currently on step none of them."
"That is not a contingency. That is a mood."
Quirks
Touches each pouch in sequence before rollout. When a plan collapses she goes silent for exactly three seconds, and the crew has learned to count them out loud, which she pretends to hate.
How the world reads them
As a professional, and then as a problem. The kit is too good and too dead — three armies that no longer exist, which to anyone who knows surplus means she is either a collector or orphanware, and in Lost Angeles that is a question about her body, not her gear. She has been asked it politely twice and impolitely more than that.
Theme
The states claim bodies and so does the market. A person can be a product line, a discontinuation, a residual. Her counter-argument is maintenance as dignity.
1 Orphanware — gene-forged whose manufacturer no longer exists — is a lexicon term with real social weight in Lost Angeles. See the Lexicon, and the body economy on p.40.
27 · MB-01
The Crew
The Operator Open
What she is for: she is the reason the crew ever has a plan, and the reason it is funny when they do not.
SHOOT
FIGHT
TACT
OPINT
GUTS
MOBI
AR
FW
MW
2+
4+
2+
2+
4+
6"
1
3
1
ARCHETYPE
Technician · Primary Technical Engineering (2+) · Secondary Electronic Security (4+)
KEYWORD
★ Init — she has already thought about this room.
CLASS ABILITY
The Plan. Before deployment Cas may declare one contingency. Once per mission any operator may invoke it to re-roll a failed TACT check. If the mission's Climax Variable fires, the contingency is spent whether it was used or not, because that is what happens to plans.
DOCTRINE
Discontinued. No state trained her and no manufacturer supports her. She has no doctrine bonus, and in exchange she is the only operator who may re-declare The Plan mid-mission, once, after it has already failed.
PRESSURE SPEND
The Cache. Spend 1 Pressure to have already put something here. Name it; it must be portable, and it must be something she could have bought. Twice per mission, and the second one is a cache she was saving.
AUGMENT TAG
Reflex augments, firmware a decade stale. +1 TACT.
AUGMENT COST
Orphanware. On any natural 1, the augment does not respond for the rest of that activation.
Three things only they can do
Know the part. Any manufactured object: what it is, what it should be, and precisely how it has been faked. She can run forensics on a cartridge, a lock or a body.
Have brought it. The Cache is the crew's answer to almost every logistics problem, and it is also why there are surplus crates in Barricadia with her handwriting on them.
Rebuild live. When the plan dies, watching her rebuild it out loud in complete sentences is the single best thing this character does. Give her the room.
Gear
Kit from three dead armies, in rows, pegboard outlined in paint pen so a missing tool is a hole in a drawing. A notebook. A grease pencil. A notarised title, framed, that says she owns herself.
Not carried: anything she has not tested. She would rather be under-equipped than surprised, and she has been wrong about that exactly once.
The ability, in play
Cas declares the contingency before the crew rolls out: if the tunnel grid is live, there is a second way. The Climax Variable fires in the third scene and the contingency is gone whether anyone used it or not. She goes quiet for exactly three seconds. Then she re-declares, once, out loud, and that is the character.
Pairs with
Ozzy · The Cache plus Talk Us In means the crew was both expected and supplied. It is the most obnoxious opening in the book.
Theo · His Field Read is her input. Without it she is planning from rumour, and she knows it.
Grigor · Anchor covers the GUTS check her plans never account for, because she does not plan for fear.
1 Balance note for the GM: Cas is the strongest statline here, and the Climax Variable is the counterweight. Fire it. Every contract in this book has one, and every one of them is designed to cost her the contingency.
MB-01 · 28
The Crew
The File Sealed
Everything on this page is yours, not theirs. None of it has been spent on the channel.
The secret
The recall option. She bought herself out at nineteen and the notarised title hangs like a diploma. But the Caseline IP went to a shell company in the liquidation, and that shell holds a dormant recall option over her genome. She checks its filings weekly. The title on the wall is real and it may not be enough, and she has never said that sentence to anyone.
Three ways to hurt them
File something. One week the shell company files. It does not have to be about her. She will not sleep until she knows.
Surface a batchmate. One of the four unlocated names, alive, in trouble, and asking. She will spend anything.
Break the plan for a stupid reason. Not a clever counter. Somebody being careless. That is what actually wounds her.
Pressure points on the crew
Grigor is the same lie in a different uniform, and the exact quiet mirror: the other one who maintains everything except herself.
Ozzy is the dark mirror. The same fear of being left behind, the opposite tool: systems against relationships. He leaves his kit messy on purpose when she spirals, so her hands have somewhere to go.
Danka bought a self with a title and a car; Cas bought one with a notarised document. Neither has noticed they agree.
Theo is carrying a live security hole she would shut down in an afternoon if she knew about it.
Surfacing the wound d6
| d6 | The scene |
|---|---|
| 1 | The shell company files. This is the arc's hinge. Read it in play, out loud, in full. |
| 2 | Caseline-4 surfaces, and is not what the list said she would be. |
| 3 | A surplus lot turns up sealed with Caseline-teal tape. |
| 4 | An augment fails mid-mission for the first time in front of everyone. |
| 5 | A clinic offers her a firmware fork, unlicensed, written by someone who is guessing. |
| 6 | Somebody asks what the nine on the end of her name is for, and she answers honestly. |
Sincerity ceiling · once per campaign
"There were nine of us. That's not a batch size. That's a decision somebody made about how many of me to run."
Delivered as a technical observation, which is how she delivers everything that costs her. The room notices a beat late. Do not set it up.
ConnectionsOZZY OKONKWO-CRUZ p.30 the engine pair ·
THE BODY ECONOMY p.40 orphanware, leases, upkeep ·
DR. SILK p.37 ·
SERVICE p.— vol. two: the shell company is a creditor
29 · MB-01
Part 1 · The Crew · No. 05
Ozzy
Okonkwo-
Cruz
OEM
BASELINE · UNMODIFIED · 19 · HE/HIM
THE FACE · THE FIXER · THE DISTRICT
BARRICADIA, LOST ANGELES
THE FACE · THE FIXER · THE DISTRICT
BARRICADIA, LOST ANGELES
Three-second read: Slight frame, big jersey, bigger bag, hands mid-motion. Every dead faction's colours in one outfit and none of their flags. The only silhouette on this crew with no augment shapes in it, and the only one who turned that into a brand.
MB-01 · 30
The Crew
The Person Open
He sold unlicensed Warranty Void shirts on the street within forty-eight hours of the crew's first clip going minorly viral. Danka tracked him down to hurt him. He talked his way from a beating into a job in under four minutes by showing her the sales figures and offering her the district. He has timed the retelling.
Nineteen, unmodified, and the only one here who chose this family with nothing shared in the blood. The other four are defectors from something that bred them. Ozzy has a mother above a print shop who thinks he does logistics for a security firm, two sisters, one of whom is an accountant and nearly audits his cover story every Sunday, and a father at a rotary press who has never once asked.
"If I'm funny enough, nobody does the math on me."
They kept him for the judgment. The jokes were never the job.
Drives him
Proving a baseline belongs on a splice on merit. Underneath that: being irreplaceable, because replaceable means expendable, so he compulsively acquires usefulness. Skills, contacts, favours, revenue streams.
Fears
The math. In a hard extraction, who gets left. He has run the numbers on himself and concluded he is the answer. He is wrong, and being wrong has never once stopped the math from running at night.
Weakness
His mouth writes cheques an unmodified body cannot cash, and he cannot stop escalating a feud. He treats rivalry as content strategy. Sometimes the other side is using real bullets.
Loves
The crew's reputation, tended like a garden. His family, protected by a beautiful ongoing lie. And provenance itself: he romances an authentication certificate the way other people read poetry, which, given his own wound about being a real one, is the entire character folded into a receipt.
Arc
Performing usefulness → trusting membership. Two beats carry it. First, the rescue happens to him, and the crew's math turns out never to have been his math. Second, a gray-market broker offers him augments — become a real one — and he declines, on camera, because OEM stopped being armour and became a choice.
Speaks like
Fast, warm, salesman rhythm across three registers he switches mid-sentence: market patter, crew ops-speak, family-dinner voice. Nickname-heavy. Self-deprecating math jokes that are not jokes. The only voice on this crew that fills a silence on purpose.
"OEM means original. Look it up. Original. Equipment. Me."
"I'm not touching the car. I'm standing near the car. Adjacent is free, Danka."
"One sec, it's my mum. No, she can tell when I rush it. We're pinned down, not rude."
Quirks
Prices everything he touches, out loud, involuntarily, including evidence, including once a live grenade. Folds shirts when thinking. Never sits with his back to the register, a shop-kid instinct that makes him the crew's third door-facer for entirely civilian reasons. Sends his mother a voice note every night without exception, from anywhere, mid-crisis if necessary.
How the world reads them
As a shop kid, which is accurate and is also the whole exploit. Buyers see somebody to haggle down and lose to. Security sees nothing worth logging. The crew's enemies see the soft target and the way in — and Vroza's pack settled on "pet," a word that got into him and stayed. The one read nobody has ever offered him is that he is the crew's most necessary member. He would not believe it, and he would sell you a shirt about it.
Theme
What belonging is worth. And the generational rhyme: the last generation reclaimed "splice" from the states, and the youngest baseline is reclaiming the blank slur through OEM, printed on shirts, worn as original.
1 Wardrobe runs on The Spread's sixteen circuits; sixteen canon jerseys and their two registers, ironic and sincere, are indexed at p.— . Repetition is the tell.
31 · MB-01
The Crew
The Operator Open
What he is for: he opens doors that do not open to force, and he is the only operator on this crew a scanner cannot find.
SHOOT
FIGHT
TACT
OPINT
GUTS
MOBI
AR
FW
MW
4+
4+
4+
2+
4+
5"
1
2
1
ARCHETYPE
Spy · Primary Infiltration (2+) · Secondary Social Engineering (2+)
KEYWORD
None. He is baseline. That is the whole point and it should cost him.
CLASS ABILITY
Talk Us In. Once per mission, before the shooting starts, name a way the crew is expected: a delivery, a buyer, an inspection, a cousin. The GM must let it work, and then decides what it costs. Ozzy does not roll. The cost is always social and always collected later.
DOCTRINE
— none issued —
PRESSURE SPEND
Everybody Knows Somebody. Spend 1 Pressure to have already done a favour for someone in this room. Name them, name the favour. Twice per mission, and the second one is expensive.
AUGMENT TAG
— none —
AUGMENT COST
— none —
BASELINE
Factory Settings. Those three empty rows are the ability. Ozzy pays no augment upkeep in downtime, carries no lease, cannot be repossessed, and does not register on augment-scanning security. Where the rest of the crew is hardware with a serial number, he is a kid with a bag.
DAWN RUNNER
Proposal, not yet ratified. He trains at dawn, secretly, so he is never the reason an exfil slows. Sprint moves MOBI ×3 rather than ×2. Resolves the contradiction between MOBI 5" and the origin package's "fastest baseline sprint anyone has clocked."
Three things only they can do
Walk in. At security-cam grain he reads as some teenager with a bag. Nothing worth logging. The crew has weaponised exactly this.
Price it. He can value anything at a glance — stock, salvage, a bribe, a body's worth of leased hardware. It is a party trick until it is intelligence.
Ask. He is the only one who asks Grigor if he is okay. Four defectors never learned how. He calls it vibes management so nobody looks at it directly.
Gear
Whatever is current, whatever he can flip. The vendor bag, which has never been empty. Burner phones. Immaculate ledgers, which are the actual reason Cas respects him. Shirts he designed himself on his father's press. One price gun, clicked while thinking.
Not carried: nothing engineered touches his silhouette. His only owned colour is price-gun fluoro, the orange of a markdown sticker, somewhere on him at all times. The states get signal colours. His is the one that means for sale.
The ability, in play
There is a gate, two guards, and no plan. Ozzy names the delivery they are expecting, and they are expecting it, because the GM has to let it work. Three sessions later a man at that gate asks him for the favour back, in front of the crew, at the worst possible moment. That is the cost, and it was always going to be social.
Pairs with
Cas · Her cache, his cover story. Aftermarket and factory settings running the same con from opposite ends.
Theo · He opens the room, they record it. Between them the crew owns most of Barricadia's embarrassing footage.
Grigor · The only pairing on this crew where somebody asks how the other one is, and it is always this direction.
1 Balance note for the GM: on paper he is the weakest operator here. In a session with a locked door, a stranger, or a price on something, he is the only one who matters. Contracts in this book are built so that at least one door per job is his.
MB-01 · 32
The Crew
The File Sealed
Everything on this page is yours, not theirs. None of it has been spent on the channel. Publication has not touched any of it, which means you can still be the first table to land it.
The secret
The augment fund exists. He has been saving for gray-market work since before the crew. He has not touched the account since the hire. He has not closed it either. The lie, converted into money, sitting in a balance he checks and hates. What he eventually spends it on — the family's shop debt, or a real printer for the merch operation — is the table's to discover, not yours to decide.
Three ways to hurt them
Call him the pet. A Vroza pack scout once sneered that the crew travels with a pet baseline. The sentence lives in him rent-free, and his beef with that pack is personal in a way the crew has not clocked.
Pick him up. Carry him and he loses his mind. Comedy on the surface. The math underneath.
Do the math out loud. Anyone who costs the crew's members aloud, in front of him, has found the wound without trying.
Pressure points on the crew
Cas is the engine pair: aftermarket by design beside factory settings by birth, both unclaimed, self-made in opposite directions. He leaves his kit messy on purpose when she spirals, so her hands have somewhere to go, and would rather die than have that known.
Theo is the mirror. Two performers buying safety with a bit. He is the only person alive who can name Theo's bits to their face, because he runs the same machinery.
Danka — he is banned from touching, describing or monetising the car, and is currently monetising the car in secret. This is a bomb. Let the table watch it tick.
Grigor is the anti-mirror, and therefore the only relationship where Ozzy asks the question. He asks it as a joke. Grigor answers yes. Neither is fooled and both keep doing it.
Surfacing the wound d6
| d6 | The scene |
|---|---|
| 1 | A broker offers him augments on credit. Good ones. A real lease, a real body, a real serial number. This is the arc's second beat. Spend it once. |
| 2 | Dee surfaces. His school friend who enlisted into a corporate program at seventeen and stopped answering. The stall two doors down still asks. |
| 3 | The rescue happens to him, and it costs the crew something they do not mention afterward. |
| 4 | His mother says a sentence that proves she has always known what "security logistics" means. |
| 5 | Someone finds the Civilian fan merch. Danka finds it second. |
| 6 | He is asked, sincerely, to price a person. He can. That is the problem. |
Sincerity ceiling · once per campaign
"I can get you anything in this city. Ask me what I cost. Go on. It's the only number I know by heart."
Delivered as a joke that lands wrong and silences a room. Do not set it up. Let a player walk into it.
ConnectionsCAS p.26 engine pair ·
MARCO CRUZ p.31 ·
C07 THE FILTER JOB p.46 the four seconds where the job points at his father ·
VROZA PACK p.150 the pet
33 · MB-01
The Crew
The standing set
THE GARAGETwo names for one building, which is the location's whole social situation
The crew calls it the garage. The district calls it the Wash, and has since before any of them were born. The plate bolted by the vehicle door still reads WESTERN CORRIDOR WATER ALLOCATION NETWORK / RECLAIM SUB 3, which nobody has removed, because removing it is a bigger job than it looks and because Grigor said leave it.
From the street: a dead utility building with a working repair shop bolted into the front of it. Roll-up door, open in daylight, a car up on stands, someone's legs sticking out from under it. A hand-painted board over the door with no business name on it, only hours, and the hours are wrong. Down the alley side there is a queue of four to nine people with containers, which is the part visitors never expect and never forget.
What it was
A neighbourhood reclamation substation. When allocation drops, Barricadia drinks what it can clean itself, and Sub 3 cleaned water for roughly eleven blocks. A filter batch failed. The Reclaim Co-op that ran it was liable, could not cover it, and folded under the debt. The building went dark and the eleven blocks went onto cartridges and the mercy of the market, which is the condition THE FILTER JOB p.64 is about and which nobody in that contract says out loud.
How the crew got it
Grigor. He was looking for a room with a stove and found a building with a standpipe and a woman in the office who could not pay the arrears. The lease he signed is legal, cheap and boring. The other half of the deal is not written anywhere: the crew keeps the last filtration line running and the alley standpipe open, free, no hours, no questions. He has never once described this as a negotiation. He would tell you the tap was already there.
The failure mode
It is not a raid. It is the channel. They film their crimes in their living room and post them, and the room is recognisable. Nobody in the crew has fully sat with this. Frequency has, and prices accordingly.
1 The cover story is vehicle repair and parts, cash, no paperwork, ask for Danka. It holds because it is ninety percent true.
MB-01 · 34
The Crew
THE ROOMS, AND WHO IS IN THEM Open
Bay one. Danka's, and clean the way an operating theatre is clean. Civilian lives here. Nobody eats in this bay and nobody has ever been told why.
Bay two. Cas's bench, pegboard outlined in paint pen so a missing tool is a hole in a drawing. The tactical bench is here and it is not for cars.
The dosing room. Grigor's kitchen, built into the old chemical dosing room, the only room in the building with a door that closes. This is where clients get fed before they get asked anything.
The north wall. Theo's corner, blackout-curtained. The archive is in here. Nobody has asked to see it.
Wherever. Ozzy's cot is wherever Ozzy's cot is this week. Five cots total, a fact Frequency will sell you.
The back two-thirds. A decommissioned water-reclamation plant with its settling tanks intact. One filtration line still works. The crew maintains it. This is the most important sentence on this spread.
House rules, unwritten
- The tap stays open. Nobody has ever proposed otherwise and the proposal would end a friendship.
- You do not touch someone else's bay. Cas's pegboard is a legal document.
- Whoever is cooking decides what is being discussed. This is Grigor's only exercise of authority and it is total.
- Clients eat first. Every time. Even the ones the crew are going to refuse.
Marisol Vega Open Sealed
Open. Sixty-one, last treasurer of the Barricadia Reclaim Co-op, holds the paper on the building. Comes by monthly for rent she has never once raised and stays for lunch. Lost the building and did not lose the neighbourhood.
Sealed. She is the reason a Jaguario enforcer has never leaned on this address, and she has never explained how that works, and Ozzy has three theories, and none of them are right. She is also the only person alive who could evict them and the only person who never will.
▲ WESTERN CORRIDOR WATER ALLOCATION NETWORK // PLATE, UNREMOVED
RECLAIM SUB 3 · SERVICE AREA 11 BLOCKS · STATUS: DECOMMISSIONED 2061 · THIS FACILITY IS NO LONGER PART OF THE ALLOCATION NETWORK.
ConnectionsTHE WASH p.60 the tap, before it mattered · THE STANDPIPE WAR p.68 the tap, contested · Grigor Tam p.22 · THE BODY ECONOMY p.44
35 · MB-01
The Crew
Standing cast
THE ORBITSix people the crew cannot do this without, and what each of them costs
None of these six are allies. They are a market the crew happens to be liked in. Every one of them has a price, every price is different in kind, and none of them are money.
FREQUENCY
Signal pirate, Center Point, and the best-informed person in this book. Knows what the crew's rent is, how many cots are in the garage, and which of them checks a bank balance they never spend.
Price: never credits. Frequency trades in things that are true and not yet known. Every answer costs the crew a fact about themselves, and Frequency decides which one, and always prices correctly.
DR. SILK
Gene-clinic, Barricadia, unlicensed and better than licensed. Treats orphanware for whatever they have, which is usually nothing. Half the names on the register in GOOD PRESS p.66 are her patients.
Price: she does not charge the crew and she does not do favours. What she does is choose who gets sent which job, and being on her list is worth more than a discount. Losing it is not recoverable.
1 Full sheets for Frequency and Dr. Silk exist in the Character Files line and are not reprinted here. These entries are the show-use layer only.
MB-01 · 36
The Crew
MARCO CRUZ
Ozzy's father. Runs a rotary press in Barricadia, one of three left. Believes his son does logistics for a security firm and has never once asked a follow-up question, which is either love or discipline and is probably both.
Price: he will do anything the crew asks and will never send a bill. The cost is entirely Ozzy's, and it is paid in the silence after each favour.
BLESSING OKONKWO
Matriarch of the stall and the shop. Feeds the crew, on sight, without asking, in quantities that suggest she has done arithmetic about five people.
Price: none, and that is the problem. She knows what "security logistics" means. She has always known. He does not know she knows. Play her as someone quietly waiting for her son to tell her himself.
RAZBORKI
Jockey and DJ, the Tooth and Gear, nine years behind that booth. Runs the crew's public living room and has never asked them for anything until THE BOOTH p.78.
Price: access, and it is cheap, and it will be expensive exactly once.
BONZER KABESH
Jaguario recruiter. Genuinely likeable, genuinely dangerous, and entirely honest about what he is doing, which is recruiting, at all times, including now.
Price: every conversation is a deposit. He is not building a relationship, he is building a file, and one day he will present it as an invitation.
Using the orbit
When a contract stalls, do not add a clue. Have one of these six turn up and ask for something. A stalled session is almost always a session where nobody wants anything from the crew right now, and these are the six people who always do.
ConnectionsNOBODY'S KID p.62 Dr. Silk chose the crew · THE FILTER JOB p.64 Marco's press census · THE BOOTH p.78 Razborki asks · Clout p.43
37 · MB-01
Part 2
The
Work
HOW A CONTRACT BECOMES A CAMPAIGN
The Board39
Rate Bands40
Heat42
Clout43
The Body Economy44
The Clip48
Downtime in the Wash49
Complications50
The Generator52
Burned54
Everybody in this city is contracted to somebody. The only question anyone is actually asking is whether they know the terms.
MB-01 · 38
The Work
The loop
THE BOARDPosted → cased → the job is not the job → chosen → paid → posted about
Work reaches this crew four ways, and which way it arrives tells the players more than the brief does.
The open board. Physical, in Barricadia: a standpipe, a wall, a shop window. Free to read, free to post, and anyone can take it. Open-board work is small, local and honest, and the client is almost always a person rather than an institution. Bands 1 to 3.
The closed board. Brokered. Costs a fee to access and a relationship to keep. Dr. Silk forwards, Frequency sells, agencies four layers deep commission. Closed work pays properly and never tells you who is really paying. Bands 3 to 6.
The door. Somebody comes to the garage. The most dangerous kind, because it means they know where the crew lives, and also the kind the crew never refuses, because somebody came to the door.
The Feed. A DM, a comment, a tag. The channel generates work by existing, and the work it generates is always partly about the channel.
The two currencies
| The Rate | The Exposure | |
|---|---|---|
| Measures | Pay and danger | How public this job has to be |
| Scale | Band 1 to 9 | E1 dark to E5 broadcast |
| Moves | Credits, gear, favours | Heat and Clout |
The engine is the tension between them. Work that pays well is usually dark and earns no Clout. Work that makes a great clip usually earns Heat the crew cannot afford. The thing that gets them hired is the thing that gets them caught, and every contract prints both numbers on the card so the table sees the trade before taking the job.
The one rule
The stated mission and the real situation are never the same. Every contract has a Truth field, and it is not a twist to be sprung — it is the situation the crew walked into. The brief is what somebody wanted them to believe on the way in.
Reading the card
Every contract in Part 3 opens with the same block in the same corner. It is the only thing on the spread that never moves, and it is designed to be read in four seconds before anybody reads a sentence.
RB:n The Rate Band. Scope and pay, from the ladder on the facing spread.
Exposure E1 to E5, with a plain-language note. This tells the crew whether the job can be filmed before they know what the job is.
Verbs Primary first, then secondary. TRACE › CLEAR › DELIVER is an investigation that becomes a cleanup that becomes a delivery, in that order, and the crew will not see the second two coming.
Client / Offered Who is asking and what they say they will pay. The Offered line frequently contains the first lie in the contract.
Swing The predicted Heat and Clout movement on a clean outcome. The Fallout table overrides it.
Session Honest runtime and crew size. A contract that says one long means three to four hours and the Warden should say so before anyone commits.
What a job actually costs
Contracts print what the client offers. They do not print expenses, and expenses are how a Band 2 job ends with the crew poorer than they started: fuel and parts for Civilian, augment upkeep for four of the five, whatever Ozzy promised somebody, and a filtration line that eats money every month whether or not anyone is working.
Assume a month of standing costs is roughly one Band 2 contract. A crew that only takes work they approve of will be broke by the third month, and that pressure is the campaign.
Refusing
A refused contract is not a wasted session. The client goes to somebody worse, and that is a consequence with a name and an address. Thirteen contracts in this volume are built to be refused; every one of them has a Fallout row for it.
NextRATE BANDS p.40 · HEAT p.42 · Clout p.43
39 · MB-01
The Work
Reference
RATE BANDSNine bands. Warranty Void lives at two through four.
The Band is a promise about scope, not a rule. It tells a Warden how big the night is before they have read a word of the contract, and it tells the players what they are being asked to survive.
| RB | Name | Pay | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Favours | 0–200 cr | Neighbourhood. Paid in food, parts, goodwill. |
| 2 | Odd Work | 200–1k | A day. One vehicle, no plan needed. |
| 3 | Contract | 1k–5k | The default. A night, a plan, a complication. |
| 4 | Hard Contract | 5k–20k | Somebody armed is expecting you. |
| 5 | Package | 20k–75k | Multi-night. A crew this size needs a fixer. |
| 6 | Corporate | 75k–250k | You are a line item in somebody's budget. |
| 7 | Strategic | 250k–1M | A faction changes posture because of you. |
| 8 | Deniable | 1M–5M | Nobody signs anything. Everybody lies. |
| 9 | Void | 5M+ | Retirement money. Nobody spends it. |
Reading the ladder
Bands 1 and 2 are where the crew's life is. Bands 3 and 4 are where their work is. At Band 5 and up they are out of their weight class and the card should say so. Band 9 exists to be looked at.
Exposure
| E | At the table | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dark | Nothing goes up. If this is filmed the contract has failed. |
| 2 | Quiet | Not posted, not hidden. Theo films it; it sits in the archive. |
| 3 | Cut | Posted, edited, deniable. The crew controls the frame. |
| 4 | Public | Happens in front of the district. Posting is a formality. |
| 5 | Broadcast | The exposure is the product. Somebody is paying for reach. |
MB-01 · 40
The Work
THE VOLUME, BY BAND Open
| RB | Contracts |
|---|---|
| 1 | THE WASH p.60 |
| 2 | NOBODY'S KID p.62 · THE FILTER JOB p.64 · HOUSE RULES p.72 · THE CRATER LOT p.94 · RENTAL SOUND p.102 · THE LAST TENANT p.128 |
| 3 | THE STANDPIPE WAR p.68 · THE ARM p.74 · DARK TRANSIT p.82 · ONE-WAY FARE p.88 · GROUND TRUTH p.92 · TITLE AND DEED p.108 · SLACK WATER p.122 |
| 4 | GOOD PRESS p.66 · SIX MINUTES OF FAME p.76 · GRID FIRMWARE p.84 · THE LONG WAY p.104 · THE VIEW p.112 · SALT WAKE p.124 · REPOSSESSION p.134 |
| 5 | WHAT THE TUNNEL KEEPS p.86 · BURN NOTICE p.96 · PACK FREQUENCY p.106 · THE INVITATION p.118 · SERVICE NOTICE p.132 |
| 6 | THE BOOTH p.78 · WHAT GREW BACK p.98 · CLEAN HANDS p.114 · WHAT THE SEA FILED p.126 |
| 7 | PATRON p.116 |
| 8 | THE WHOLE QUEUE p.136 |
By cluster
| Cluster | Contracts |
|---|---|
| BARRICADIA | THE WASH p.60 · NOBODY'S KID p.62 · THE FILTER JOB p.64 · GOOD PRESS p.66 · THE STANDPIPE WAR p.68 |
| CENTER POINT | HOUSE RULES p.72 · THE ARM p.74 · SIX MINUTES OF FAME p.76 · THE BOOTH p.78 |
| MUSK TUNNELS | DARK TRANSIT p.82 · GRID FIRMWARE p.84 · WHAT THE TUNNEL KEEPS p.86 · ONE-WAY FARE p.88 |
| THE RAZE | GROUND TRUTH p.92 · THE CRATER LOT p.94 · BURN NOTICE p.96 · WHAT GREW BACK p.98 |
| RING ROAD | RENTAL SOUND p.102 · THE LONG WAY p.104 · PACK FREQUENCY p.106 · TITLE AND DEED p.108 |
| THE HIGH TOP | THE VIEW p.112 · CLEAN HANDS p.114 · PATRON p.116 · THE INVITATION p.118 |
| LOW COAST | SLACK WATER p.122 · SALT WAKE p.124 · WHAT THE SEA FILED p.126 · THE LAST TENANT p.128 |
| MONITOR CENTRAL | SERVICE NOTICE p.132 · REPOSSESSION p.134 · THE WHOLE QUEUE p.136 |
By verb
| Verb | The ask | The lie it usually tells |
|---|---|---|
| RETRIEVE | Get the object back | The object is not what they said |
| DELIVER | Move this, do not open it | It is opened, or it opens itself |
| EXTRACT | Get the person out | The person does not want out |
| COLLECT | Bring in the debtor | The debt is fraudulent |
| BREAK | Sabotage, denial, arson | Something else dies with the target |
| HOLD | Guard it for one night | The threat is already in the room |
| TRACE | Find out who, where, why | The client is in the answer |
| LIFT | Take it from a hard place | The hard place was already robbed |
| RUN | Outpace, transit, race | The route is the trap |
| CLEAR | Contamination, hazard | It is not an animal problem |
| PERFORM | Sponsored, staged, filmed | The stunt is cover |
| REPOSSESS | Take the augments back | The job they should refuse |
PERFORM is unique to this crew and this book: somebody hires Warranty Void to make Warranty Void content, the money is real, and so is whatever it is cover for. REPOSSESS is the moral floor. It exists to be offered.
NoteThirteen of this volume's contracts are written so that refusing, or switching sides, is the correct play. That ratio is deliberate.
41 · MB-01
The Work
Track one
HEATWho has noticed, and what noticing costs
Heat is institutional attention: Monitor Central, Kavast, Jaguario, the Syndicate, a property holder, an agency four layers deep. One track, 0 to 10, on the crew sheet. Every contract prints a predicted swing and the Warden adjusts by outcome.
Heat does not decay on its own. It comes off only by being spent: a favour called in, a name given up, a district that vouches, a month spent boring. That is a downtime action and it costs something every time.
Thresholds
3 · Logged. Somebody has a file. Not an enemy yet, a record. The next contract in that faction's territory opens with them already knowing the crew's faces, and the Warden should say so out loud.
6 · Interested. An institution allocates a person to the crew. They are named, they are competent, and they turn up in scenes that are not about them. Add one to the Second clock of every contract.
9 · Actioned. The file becomes a decision. Assets are committed. At 9 the Warden may open any session with a consequence rather than a contract — a raid, a summons, a rival hired, an address visited.
10 · Burned. See BURNED p.54. The crew is too well-known to work, and the campaign changes shape rather than ending.
Who is holding it Sealed
Track Heat by faction as well as in total. Four points of Kavast Heat is a feud; four points of Monitor Central Heat is a filing cabinet; four points of Syndicate Heat is a booth that has started paying attention. The total tells you when. The distribution tells you what.
The Warden's rule
Never spend Heat on a random encounter. Heat buys consequences the players can trace back to a decision they made. If the table cannot name which contract earned it, it was wasted.
1 Contracts in Part 3 print swings like +3 HEAT · −2 CLOUT. Those are the clean-outcome numbers; the Fallout table on each contract overrides them.
MB-01 · 42
The Work
Track two
CLOUTWhat the district gives you for free, and what it asks back
Clout is Feed attention and district standing, and in Lost Angeles those are the same number. 0 to 10. It is earned by being seen doing something the district approves of, and it is the crew's actual income in a way credits are not.
Clout decays. Lose one point per month of in-fiction time with nothing posted. The channel is not a trophy, it is a job.
Thresholds
3 · Known. Doors open on recognition. One free favour per contract from anyone in the district: a look the other way, a name, a place to put a vehicle. The crew stops paying for small things.
6 · Protected. Barricadia lies for them. Informants do not report what they saw. Reduce all Heat gained inside a district at Clout 6 by one. This is the mechanical form of THE WASH p.60 and THE FILTER JOB p.64.
9 · Leverage. The crew can move a room. A post changes what a queue believes, a meeting goes their way because everyone watched the clip. Also: they are now worth renting, and SIX MINUTES OF FAME p.76 is what that looks like.
10 · Recognisable. They cannot be anonymous anywhere in Lost Angeles. Every E1 contract now costs a point of Clout to run dark, because staying dark means visibly not being somewhere.
The trap
Clout is the only resource in this book that hurts you at maximum. A crew at 10 Clout has everything except the ability to walk into a room unrecognised — and roughly a third of the contracts in Part 3 need exactly that.
Spending it
Call the district. Spend 2 Clout: forty people are suddenly in the street where you need them. No roll. They will not fight.
Vouch. Spend 1 Clout to remove 1 Heat from a single faction. You are trading public goodwill for institutional forgetting, and it works about as well as that sounds.
Sell it. Spend 3 Clout for a Band-4 payday, once. Somebody wants the channel to say something. See SIX MINUTES OF FAME p.76.
TogetherHeat is what the city does to you. Clout is what the district does for you. A campaign is the argument between them.
43 · MB-01
The Work
The setting, as a system
THE BODY ECONOMYFour of these five are hardware with a serial number
Augments are not owned. They are leased, licensed, or orphaned, and which one a body is determines almost everything about how that body moves through Lost Angeles.
Leased. A manufacturer or a state holds title. Payments are monthly, upkeep is scheduled, and standing is certified. A current lease is a document you carry.
Licensed. Bought out. The title is yours, notarised, framed on a wall if you are Cas. This is rarer than it sounds and less final than it looks.
Orphanware. The manufacturer no longer exists. No patches, no parts, no recall notices, no recourse — and, crucially, no one to pay, which sounds like freedom until an assessor asks who is responsible for the hardware in your chest.
Upkeep
Every gene-forged operator pays upkeep in downtime: one downtime action per month, or credits, or a clinic that owes them. Miss two months and the augment tag on their sheet stops working until it is serviced. Ozzy pays none of this, which is the entire mechanical argument for being baseline, and the crew never lets him forget that it is also the entire argument for being expendable.
Assessors Sealed
A recovery contractor with a scanner and a schedule. They do not arrest. They assess: establish whether hardware in a body is current, and if it is not, file for recovery. An assessment sweep is public, scheduled, and legal, and it is the most frightening thing in this book precisely because nobody involved is doing anything wrong.
▲ CERTIFICATE OF LEASE STANDING // SPECIMEN
THIS INSTRUMENT CERTIFIES THE HOLDER'S AUGMENT LEASE IS CURRENT, IN GOOD STANDING, AND NOT SUBJECT TO RECOVERY ACTION. PRESENT ON DEMAND TO ANY AUTHORISED ASSESSOR. THREE SECURITY LAYERS. ASSESSORS CHECK THE THIRD.
MB-01 · 44
The Work
DEFAULT, AND WHAT IS ON THE OTHER SIDE Open
Defaulting on an augment lease is not a crime. It is a breach, and breach is answered with recovery, and recovery means the hardware comes out. The person it came out of is released the same day, which everyone involved considers humane.
Where they go
Monitor Central Asset Recovery and Remand. It is not a prison and nobody in it is a prisoner; they are accounts, held while leased hardware is assessed, stripped, refurbished and resold. The staff are technicians. Everybody says in Service and nobody says in prison.
This crew is called Warranty Void. Service is the building that enforces the warranty. Every wound in Part 1 points at it: Cas's discontinued line and the shell that holds a recall option, Grigor's failing frame, Theo's un-stripped receiver, Danka's Kavast-issue everything.
In this volume
Service is real, it is named, and the crew are afraid of it — but the module is Volume Two. In Volume One, default is a threat with a price, and the failure state a table will actually reach is BURNED p.54. If a character is taken into Service in Volume One, that is a campaign event, not a scene, and it should end an arc rather than a session.
At the table
Missed upkeep. Augment tag offline until serviced. Two months: the Warden may call for an assessment on any public contract at E4 or E5.
Assessed and current. Nothing happens, publicly, in front of people, and it takes four minutes and is humiliating.
Assessed and not current. Recovery is filed. The crew has until the end of the next contract to settle, forge, hide, or leave the district.
Ozzy. Scans clean. Always. He is the crew's answer to every assessment in the book and he knows exactly what that is worth.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/CLIP/022
"we're not late. we're unsupported."
@caselinesurvivor how do you service something nobody makes
WARRANTY VOID you don't. you keep it warm.
WARRANTY VOID you don't. you keep it warm.
ConnectionsGOOD PRESS p.66 four hundred names · REPOSSESSION p.134 the job on the other side of the desk · Cas p.26 · Grigor Tam p.22
45 · MB-01
The Work
The floor of the same system
IMPULSE STOCKThe grade where the person is the asset
Everything on the previous spread assumes a body with hardware in it. There is a grade below that, and Lost Angeles is full of it.
Impulse stock are commercial gene-forged built small: mascots, greeters and tie-ins, ninety to a hundred and forty centimetres, made before the wars to work indoor venues and sold as inventory rather than hired as staff. A frosted-cereal tiger. A frozen-novelty sundae with a chipped cherry. An insurance company's owl. The companies died in the Upheaval; the paperwork did not.
The distinction that matters here: everywhere else in this section, a person defaults on hardware and the hardware is recovered. With impulse stock there is no hardware. The person is the asset. No default is required. No procedure is required. The van does not come for a lung — it comes for a lot number, and the lot number answers the door itself, cheerfully, because that is what it was built to do.
Why they are still working
The full-size venue units mostly walked away in the Upheaval: big, visibly dangerous, hard to inventory. The small ones did not, because they were countable. They had product codes and depreciation schedules. Administrators closing a failed brand sold the schedule, and impulse stock has moved through every year since the way pallets move — bundled into asset lots, written down, repossessed, put up as collateral, inherited by people who did not know what was in the warehouse.
A lieutenant with nine impulses did not take nine people. He bought lot 41 at auction, legally, with a receipt, and the receipt is why nobody has come for him.
The script
They are not simple. What they carry is a compliance package: attention routed to a fixed set of service behaviours, deference to a handler, and a brand phrase the body produces under stress whether or not the person wants it. They understand their situation completely. What they cannot reliably do is refuse, improvise outside the service frame, or stop talking when talking is what gets them killed.
In a venue that was charming. In a contested zone it is a position report, delivered at volume, by someone who is trying to help.
▲ ASSET LOT MANIFEST // SPECIMEN
LOT 41 · MIXED COMMERCIAL · 9 UNITS · CONDITION: SERVICEABLE · TITLE: CLEAR · NO RESERVE. VIEWING BY APPOINTMENT. THE MANIFEST IS ACCURATE. THAT IS THE PROBLEM WITH IT.
MB-01 · 46
The Work
IMPULSE STOCK AT THE TABLE Open
Impulses turn up in this book as somebody's escort, somebody's inventory, or somebody standing outside a shuttered franchise still greeting people. Full rules are in the Impulse Stock guide; what a Warden needs here is the shape.
Grade sets durability
| Grade | Origin | At the table |
|---|---|---|
| Loose | Promotional giveaway build, minimum spec | Drops to almost anything. The cheapest life in the setting. |
| Carded | Standard retail | The working grade. Most impulses you meet. |
| Boxed | Premium build; flagship stores, executive gifts | Survives. Becomes a character. |
Running them
One action. Always. Never a second, for any reason. They move or they act.
One thing they are good at. Whatever the product line was built to do. Everything else is ordinary or worse.
They never check morale. The handler checks. Drop the handler and they do not rout — they keep executing the last order, alone, in a fight their controller has already left.
The phrase fires. Say it out loud, every time, at the worst available moment. A Warden who mumbles it has thrown away the best thing about them.
If the crew picks one up Sealed
The papers problem
An impulse the crew takes in is loose, not free: no holder, no papers, no protection. Any competent broker can construct a chain of title over one in about a week, and several make a living doing it. Once per campaign, at your timing rather than theirs, somebody comes to collect — with documentation, and usually with the law on their side rather than in their pocket. This is not an ambush. It is a man with a folder. Buy the title, forge it, refuse it, or hand the person over, and charge them properly for whichever they choose.
Tone
The comedy is on the company, never on the person. They are funny because a customer-service script keeps surfacing in a firefight. They are not funny for being what somebody built them to be, and a table that starts laughing at the second thing has lost the whole device.
If one goes down, that was a death, and the paperwork will not record it. Nobody is notified. A lot number is not a family.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/CLIP/031
"six units, is what the paper said."
OZZY he asked me what i cost. i didn't have an answer ready. first time all year.
GRIGOR Set another place.
GRIGOR Set another place.
47 · MB-01
The Work
Post-contract procedure
THE CLIPThe job is over. Now decide what the city gets to see.
Every contract in Part 3 has a Clip field: what Theo posted, and the top comment. That field is not flavour. It is the second half of the contract, and it happens after the fallout is resolved, at the table, as a scene.
Run it in four questions. It takes ninety seconds and it generates the next three sessions.
- What went up? The players decide. Anything from nothing to the whole night. Theo's player has the final cut and the rest of the crew get to argue about it.
- What got left out? Name one thing that was deliberately not shown. Write it on the crew sheet. It is now a thing that exists and can be found.
- What did the district say? Roll or pick a comment. The comment is the district's verdict and it is usually not the verdict the crew wanted.
- What does it cost? Apply the Exposure. E1 posted at all is a breach. E5 not posted is a breach of a different contract.
What the comments do Sealed
| d10 | The top comment, and what it starts |
|---|---|
| 1 | Somebody recognises a location the crew did not mean to show. +1 Heat. |
| 2 | Somebody recognises a person. That person is now in danger and did not consent to any of this. |
| 3 | The district translates the subtext to each other, correctly. +1 Clout. The crew taught something without meaning to. |
| 4 | A rival crew quote-posts it. The feud is now public and has an audience keeping score. |
| 5 | Someone asks a question the crew cannot answer on camera. The refusal becomes the bit. +1 Clout. |
| 6 | A client from a previous contract comments. They are not happy, and they are specific. |
| 7 | It is misread completely, and the misreading is better for the crew than the truth. |
| 8 | An institution's account replies. Politely. In brand voice. +2 Heat. |
| 9 | Somebody offers them work in the replies. Roll or pick a Band 2 contract; it starts next session. |
| 10 | Nothing. No traction. The best thing they did all month and the Feed does not care. −1 Clout and Theo takes it badly. |
1 The channel's standing rules apply to everything posted: metadata never lies, the client's face is theirs and not yours, and red never appears on crew material.
MB-01 · 48
The Work
Between contracts
DOWNTIME IN THE WASHTwo actions each. This is where the campaign actually happens.
Between contracts each operator takes two downtime actions. Grigor cooks whether or not he spends one. The garage is open, the tap is running, and there is always somebody at the door.
Service. Pay augment upkeep. Gene-forged only. Skipping this is how a campaign gets its best crisis.
Work the district. Gain 1 Clout, or convert a favour owed into a concrete asset: a vehicle bay, an alibi, a name.
Cool it. Remove 1 Heat from one faction. Requires a month of being boring, which Ozzy experiences as a punishment.
Build. Cas or Danka. Add a permanent modification to Civilian, the bench, or the building. Track it; players remember these more than payouts.
Cut. Theo. Edit and post something from the archive. Gain 1 Clout, and name what it revealed.
Trade. Ozzy. Turn stock into credits, or credits into a contact. He is the only one who can convert Clout into money without spending it.
Chase it. Spend a downtime action on a personal thread: Vesna's message, the shell company's filings, the four unlocated names, Dee, the second unit. The Warden must give something back every time. Not the answer. Something.
Answer the door. Somebody has been waiting. Roll a Band 1 or 2 contract, or use THE WASH p.60. Costs nothing and generates everything.
The Warden's rule
Do not narrate downtime. Ask each player what their character is doing and then have somebody interrupt them. The interruption is the scene; the action is the excuse for it.
NextCOMPLICATIONS p.50 · THE GENERATOR p.52 · BURNED p.54
49 · MB-01
The Work
d20
COMPLICATIONSRoll one to make any contract in this book new, or to make a generated one true
A complication is applied at the briefing, before the crew commits. It changes the terms, not the situation. Every one of these is a constraint the players can see and plan around, which is the only kind worth rolling.
| d20 | The complication |
|---|---|
| 1 | No witnesses. The client will not pay if anyone outside the crew learns this happened. Exposure drops to E1 regardless of what the card says. |
| 2 | The target is beloved. Whatever the crew is aimed at, the district likes it. Every Clout gain becomes a loss. |
| 3 | Already tried. Another crew took this contract last month and did not come back. Their gear is still there. |
| 4 | The client is lying about the money. They have a third of it. They intend to find the rest before the job ends. |
| 5 | On a clock nobody mentioned. Reduce the Main clock by one. The Warden does not say they have done this. |
| 6 | Somebody is filming. Not Theo. The crew appears in someone else's content by the end of the night. |
| 7 | A rival took the same contract. They are competent, they are ahead, and they are not hostile yet. |
| 8 | Split brief. Two crew members were told different things by the same client. Tell them separately. |
| 9 | The law is present. Monitor Central has a scheduled reason to be here that has nothing to do with the crew. |
| 10 | It is a favour, not a job. The pay is withdrawn and the ask remains. See who still wants to go. |
| 11 | One of the crew is known here. Roll or choose. Somebody at the location has history with them. |
| 12 | Wrong address. The brief's location is correct and the situation has moved two hundred metres. |
| 13 | The object is bigger than described. Whatever they are moving does not fit in Civilian. |
| 14 | A child is present. Not in danger, not a hostage. Present, and watching, and the crew now has an audience with no filter. |
| 15 | Everyone is armed. Nobody intends to use it. That is not the same as safe. |
| 16 | The client wants to come. They will not be talked out of it and they are useless. |
| 17 | Assessment sweep. An augment check is running in this district tonight. See THE BODY ECONOMY p.44. |
| 18 | It is raining and the power is out. Lost Angeles does this. Half the crew's kit is now decoration. |
| 19 | Somebody already paid them. Check the crew's accounts. Money arrived last week from a name nobody recognises. |
| 20 | The contract is a test. Someone is watching to see how the crew handles it before offering the real one. |
MB-01 · 50
The Work
After the fallout table
AND THEN?Consequence tables that move the story instead of describing the weather
Each contract's Fallout table resolves that job. This resolves the campaign. Roll once after every second or third contract, or whenever a session ends tidily and should not have.
| d12 | The consequence |
|---|---|
| 1 | Somebody comes to collect. A favour the crew took in an earlier contract is called in, at the worst hour, by someone who is owed it. |
| 2 | The client changes the deal. Retroactively. They have a reason and the reason is good. |
| 3 | A rival is hired against them. Not to hurt them. To take the next contract first, publicly. |
| 4 | An institution files. Paper arrives at the garage with the crew's names on it. Nothing happens for three weeks. |
| 5 | The district asks for something. Not a job. A commitment. The tap, the room, a name on a petition. |
| 6 | Someone from a wound rail surfaces. Warden's choice: Vesna, a batchmate, Dee, the second unit, a Protectorate frequency. |
| 7 | A previous target reappears, doing better than the crew left them, and wanting to talk. |
| 8 | The channel gets an offer. Money for reach. See SIX MINUTES OF FAME p.76 for the shape of it. |
| 9 | Monitor Central schedules a sweep in Barricadia. Public notice, nine days out. |
| 10 | A crew member is recognised somewhere they need to be anonymous. Apply Clout thresholds. |
| 11 | Something the crew hid gets found — by a friend, who is hurt, not by an enemy. |
| 12 | Vroza does something. Not to the crew. Near them, publicly, in a way that requires an answer. |
The test
A consequence is only worth rolling if the table can say which decision caused it. If they cannot, do not use it — put it back and pick the one they can.
NoteRoll consequences between contracts, never during. A contract already has three clocks; it does not need a fourth.
51 · MB-01
The Work
Six rolls
THE GENERATORClient, ask, truth, obstacle, turn, and the problem with the money
Roll six times and you have a contract. Fill the rest from the template on the facing page. The Truth is the only roll that matters; everything else is scenery around it.
| d10 | 1. WHO IS ASKING | 2. WHAT THEY WANT |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A neighbour, no leverage | Something taken back |
| 2 | A parent | Somebody found |
| 3 | A shopkeeper with a debt | Somebody moved |
| 4 | A broker, four layers deep | A thing delivered unopened |
| 5 | A clinic | A place watched for one night |
| 6 | A crew like this one | A person's name |
| 7 | A property holder | Something broken, quietly |
| 8 | A media buyer | Something broken, loudly |
| 9 | An institution's account | A hazard cleared |
| 10 | Nobody. It came to the door. | A performance |
| d10 | 3. THE TRUTH — what is actually happening |
|---|---|
| 1 | The client is the perpetrator and does not know it yet |
| 2 | The target is right, and can prove it |
| 3 | It is a test of the crew, run by someone else |
| 4 | The object is a person, or was |
| 5 | Someone is building a list, and the job is a way of collecting names |
| 6 | It already happened. The crew is being hired to make it look recent |
| 7 | The paperwork is the weapon; the violence is decoration |
| 8 | Two clients, same job, opposite outcomes, neither knows |
| 9 | The thing everyone is afraid of is a cover for something boring and profitable |
| 10 | It is exactly what it says, and that is why nobody else took it |
MB-01 · 52
The Work
4–6, AND THE FILL Open
| d10 | 4. THE OBSTACLE | 5. THE TURN |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A locked institution | Somebody the crew knows is inside it |
| 2 | A crowd | The client lied about who is at risk |
| 3 | A schedule the crew cannot move | There is a second buyer, and better |
| 4 | A rival, ahead of them | The target asks for help instead of running |
| 5 | A district that is watching | Doing the job destroys something unrelated and loved |
| 6 | Water, weather, or a dead grid | The pay is real and the client cannot survive paying it |
| 7 | Somebody armed and reluctant | The crew's own footage is the evidence against them |
| 8 | A document | A crew member is named in the paperwork |
| 9 | A body that will not scan clean | Refusing costs more than doing it |
| 10 | Nothing. It is easy, and that is the problem | It was already done before they arrived |
| d6 | 6. THE PROBLEM WITH THE MONEY |
|---|---|
| 1 | They have a third of it |
| 2 | It is somebody else's money |
| 3 | It is not money; it is a favour that cannot be refused later |
| 4 | Paying it ruins them and they will pay it anyway |
| 5 | It arrives before the job is agreed |
| 6 | It is exactly right, on time, in full, and that has never once happened |
The fill
- Band and Exposure from the ask. Neighbourhood and personal is 1 to 2; brokered is 3 to 4; institutional is 5 up.
- Three leads, always three: a physical object, a person who talks, and a document.
- Three clocks: what the opposition is doing, what the district is noticing, and what is happening to the client while the crew deliberates.
- A Not-Line. One sentence: what this contract is not, so you do not misrun it. Write this before you write anything else.
If the generated contract does not make the crew choose between the money and somebody they will have to see again, roll the Truth once more. That is the only column that can fail.
ThenApply a complication p.50 at the briefing, and resolve THE CLIP p.48 when it is over.
53 · MB-01
The Work
When Clout and Heat both max
BURNEDNobody arrested you. Nobody will hire you either.
At Heat 10, or at Clout 10 with Heat 6 or higher, the crew is Burned. It is not an arrest and it is not an ending. It is an economy that has quietly closed.
The open board still has work on it. The crew are simply not who anyone wants doing it, because everything they touch is documented, recognisable and attached to five faces the whole city can pick out of a queue. The channel did this. That is the point of the failure state: it is caused by the thing that made them successful.
What changes
No closed board. Brokers stop forwarding. Dr. Silk does not answer. Frequency will still talk, and will charge more, and will enjoy it.
Open board only. Band 1 and 2 work, from people who have nowhere else to go, which is the work the crew is best at and cannot live on.
Recognised everywhere. No contract can be run at E1 or E2. Every job is public whether the crew posts it or not.
The orbit chooses. Each of the six in THE ORBIT p.36 decides, once, whether they still know the crew. Roll or decide by what the crew has actually done.
Assessments. A burned crew is a scheduled crew. Monitor Central runs an augment sweep on Barricadia within the month. See THE BODY ECONOMY p.44.
This is not a punishment
Burned is a different game, not a lesser one. The crew has a district that loves them, an audience that watches them, and no employers. That is the most interesting position in this book and it is where Volume Two opens.
MB-01 · 54
The Work
HOW A CREW COMES BACK Open
Four ways out, and each one costs something the crew has spent the whole volume acquiring. Pick the one the table has been building toward; do not roll for this.
Go dark. Stop posting. Entirely. Clout decays one per month and at 5 the closed board reopens. It takes four to five months of in-fiction time, Theo's player has nothing to do with their signature ability, and the district notices the silence and draws its own conclusions.
Give somebody up. Trade a name to an institution and remove 4 Heat immediately. It works, it always works, and everyone in THE ORBIT p.36 finds out within the week.
Be useful to somebody enormous. Take a Band 6 or higher contract from the faction holding the most Heat. Succeed and the file closes. This is how a crew becomes an asset, and assets are not free afterwards.
Leave. Another city. The sandboxes exist and the crew's Clout does not travel. Everything resets except the wounds, which is the most honest thing this book can say about a fresh start.
Running a burned session
- Open with somebody at the door who should not be able to find them, and who found them easily.
- Offer one job that is beneath them and one that is above them. Nothing in the middle exists any more.
- Have a stranger quote the channel back at them, warmly, at the wrong moment.
- Make one member of the orbit visibly choose. On screen. Without a speech.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/—
the channel did not post this month.
@barricadia_lifer everything ok over there
— —
— —
Volume Two
Service is the other failure state and it is a place rather than a condition. A character taken in default does not go Burned; they go into the building this crew is named after. That module is Volume Two. In this volume, Service is a threat with a price, and the price is on THE BODY ECONOMY p.44.
ConnectionsHEAT p.42 · Clout p.43 · THE ORBIT p.36 · THE WHOLE QUEUE p.136 the contract that burns a crew on purpose
55 · MB-01
Part 3
The
Jobs
THIRTY-TWO CONTRACTS · EIGHT CLUSTERS
Barricadia58
Center Point70
The Musk Tunnels80
The Raze90
Ring Road100
The High Top110
The Low Coast120
Monitor Central130
Every one of these is somebody's ordinary week. The crew is what happens to it.
MB-01 · 56
The Jobs
How to use Part 3
THIRTY-TWO CONTRACTSOne spread each. Never a page turn mid-job.
Each contract is a single spread. The left page is what the crew can be shown; the right page is yours. The chips say which: Open may be read aloud or handed across the table, Sealed may not.
Contracts are grouped by where they are, and each cluster opens with a spread of its own. That is not decoration. A crew that goes to the Low Coast for one job finds four, and the four are connected, and travelling somewhere becomes entering a network of situations rather than picking a quest off a list.
Reading a contract in ninety seconds
- The card. Band, Exposure, verbs, and the Heat and Clout swing. Four seconds.
- The Truth. Sealed, right page, top. Read it second and everything else makes sense.
- The Not-Line. Bottom of the right page. One sentence saying what this contract is not.
- The Clocks. Three of them. They are the session's structure.
- Everything else can be read while the players are arguing.
What every contract has
A Truth that is not the brief. Never a twist to be sprung. It is the situation the crew walked into.
Three leads. Always three: a physical thing, a person, and a document.
Three clocks. What the opposition does, what the district notices, and what happens to the client while the crew deliberates.
A Climax Variable. Rolled when the crew commits. Not a random event; what the situation does under pressure.
A Fallout table. Including a row for refusing and a row for taking the other side.
A Clip. What went up and what the district said. Resolve it after the fallout. See THE CLIP p.48.
Connections. Two or three other contracts, people or systems. Follow them. That is the campaign.
Nothing in Part 3 is a plot. Every contract stands alone and every contract points at two others. Run them in whatever order the table's choices produce, and the network does the work a metaplot would have done badly.
ReferenceRATE BANDS p.40 · COMPLICATIONS p.50 · THE CLIP p.48 · THE GENERATOR p.52
57 · MB-01
The Jobs
Cluster
BARRICADIAThe crew lives here. Everything they lose, they lose in front of neighbours.
Barricadia catches its own water, cleans it badly, and sells the cleaning. Independent recyclers, unlicensed clinics, print shops and stalls, and the garage, which means every contract here is played in front of people who know the crew's names.
Nothing here pays well. Everything here compounds: a favour taken in one contract is called in two later, and the district's protection is the crew's largest asset and is made entirely of small decisions.
Who runs it
Nobody, officially. No faction holds Barricadia. The recyclers are independent, the co-ops folded, and Monitor Central assesses four times a year and otherwise does not visit.
Jaguario, at the edges. Bonzer Kabesh recruits and property holders lean, and neither has ever leaned on the garage, and only Marisol knows why.
The queue. The standpipe line is the district's actual government. It decides what is true and it meets every morning.
What it costs to be here
Nothing in credits. Everything in obligation. A crew working Barricadia is expected to answer the door, and most contracts here have a Fallout row for not doing so.
Contracts in this cluster
THE WASH p.60 · NOBODY'S KID p.62 · THE FILTER JOB p.64 · GOOD PRESS p.66 · THE STANDPIPE WAR p.68
MB-01 · 58
BARRICADIA
ON THE STREET RIGHT NOW Open
| d10 | What is happening as the crew arrives |
|---|---|
| 1 | Two women who have known each other forty years are not speaking and the queue has taken sides. |
| 2 | A print shop is running past midnight and the whole street can hear it. |
| 3 | Somebody is selling cartridges at three under and nobody is asking why. |
| 4 | An assessment notice has gone up at the standpipe and a small crowd is reading it. |
| 5 | A child is going door to door with a list, taking orders for something. |
| 6 | A vehicle nobody recognises has circled the block twice. |
| 7 | Grigor is cooking and there are more people in the garage than live there. |
| 8 | A recycler tower is making a noise it has not made before. |
| 9 | Somebody has painted over a notice and somebody has re-posted it. Three times. |
| 10 | It is raining, and the 400 block's queue starts before dawn. |
Rumours
| d6 | What people are saying |
|---|---|
| 1 | The garage crew got their building for nothing and somebody is going to want it back. |
| 2 | There is a second tap somewhere and whoever runs it is charging. |
| 3 | Dr. Silk will be closed down before the year is out. |
| 4 | The cheap produce on the stalls is grown on the Raze and it will kill you. |
| 5 | Marisol Vega has something on Jaguario. That is why nobody touches the Wash. |
| 6 | The next sweep is not routine. Somebody has been paid to make it thorough. |
Two contacts
Petrina, scrap gate · buys anything, pays cash, never haggles twice, twenty years on this ground. Free information, once you have sold her something.
Standpipe 4 · not a person. Forty people who know everything and trade it for a favour, a shirt, or nothing at all.
Run THE WASH p.60 first if you can. It costs nothing, it is not a crime, and it buys the district protection that every later contract in this book quietly assumes.
59 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 01 · BARRICADIA
THE WASHSit on the tap for one day and count. That is the whole job.
RB:1
EXPOSURE E2 · NOT FILMED. THEO FILMS IT ANYWAY.HOLD › TRACE
I am not going to make this complicated. Somebody is taking more off that tap than they should, and the queue has started arguing about it, and last Tuesday two women who have known each other forty years did not speak.
I do not want anybody caught. I want it to stop being a thing people argue about. You live here now. This is what living here is.
— Marisol Vega, last treasurer of the Barricadia Reclaim Co-op. She stayed for lunch.
The Situation Open
The alley tap runs free, no hours, no questions, because Grigor keeps the last filtration line alive and never once described that as a negotiation. Four to nine people are queued at any daylight hour. It is the single most load-bearing fact about the crew's standing in this district and none of them think about it.
For three weeks somebody has been drawing more than a household's worth. The queue has noticed. The queue has theories. The theories have started to be about who deserves water, which is how a neighbourhood begins to come apart, and Marisol has seen this exact thing happen to a building before.
Objectives Open
Primary · Work out who is over-drawing and make the arguing stop. Say it plain at the table: the objective is not a name. The objective is that on Friday the queue is calm.
Secondary · Do it without anybody in the queue losing face in front of the queue.
The Leads Open
- Count it. Sit there. Actually sit there, for hours, with a clipboard, like the world's least glamorous surveillance operation. Ozzy will monetise this within twenty minutes.
- Ask Grigor. He has been standing next to that tap every day for two years. He will answer the question that is asked, which is not the same as the question that matters.
- Follow the containers. The jugs are painted with family names. Two of them are painted in the same hand and the names do not match.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Sixty-one, comes by monthly for rent she has never raised, stays for lunch. She lost the building and did not lose the neighbourhood. She has never explained how a Jaguario enforcer has never leaned on this address and Ozzy has three theories.
Sealed. She already knows who it is. She has known for a week. She is not asking the crew to investigate; she is asking them to be the ones who decide, because whatever they decide the district will accept, and she wants them to find out that they have that power by using it.
1 A crew that has not run C01 can still run everything else; the district's protection just costs them a Clout threshold instead of a lunch.
MB-01 · 60
Barricadia
The Truth Sealed
It is the Danquah household, four doors down, and they are not hoarding. Their own block's tap failed in February and nobody filed anything because filing means admitting the recycler is dead, and a dead recycler means a rent reassessment. So one family has quietly been carrying water for eleven households, at dawn, in the same three jugs, repainted. They are running a second version of exactly what Grigor is running, and they are doing it in secret because they are afraid of being told to stop.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · Friday. 0–3. Ticks each day the arguing continues. At 3 somebody says the sentence out loud in the queue that cannot be taken back, and the crew is now solving a feud instead of a shortfall.
Second · The Dawn Draw. They come before light. Miss it two days running and the crew is watching an empty alley and learning nothing, which is funny once.
Tail · Grigor. He works it out one scene before the players do and says nothing, because saying it would embarrass a neighbour. If nobody asks him directly, he never volunteers it.
Leverage Sealed
The jugs · painted in one hand, two names. Cas will spot the paint match without being asked and will say so at the least tactful possible moment.
Ozzy's queue · ninety minutes of standing in a line is ninety minutes of the whole district talking to him. He will come back with the answer and four unrelated business opportunities.
Marisol's ledger · she has the Co-op's old allocation maps. The February failure is on them, unrepaired, with a date.
Opposition Sealed
Nobody · there is no opposition in this contract and that is the design. The pressure is entirely social, and a crew that reaches for a weapon here has misread a fifteen-hundred-credit district relationship.
The queue itself · forty people who have each already decided who the villain is, and who will be disappointed by the truth, which is harder to manage than anger.
The Turn Sealed
The over-draw is a charity, and the moment the crew names it in public they end it, because the Danquahs will be too ashamed to come back. The correct play is to make the second tap official and boring. Grigor will do it in one sentence if anyone thinks to ask him to. Nobody usually does.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | When the crew moves |
|---|---|
| 1 | The Danquah grandmother gets there first and confesses to the queue, badly, and starts crying. |
| 2 | Somebody in the queue already knew and has been covering. They are furious at the crew for looking. |
| 3 | The February failure is worse than reported and eleven households are about to be reassessed. |
| 4 | A Jaguario runner is in the queue, listening, taking an interest in a tap that serves fifty people. |
| 5 | Theo has been filming for ninety minutes and the footage is genuinely beautiful. Posting it ends the secret. |
| 6 | Marisol says, mildly, that she has known all week, and asks what they are going to do about it. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Made the second tap official, quietly | +0 / +2 · eleven households now owe the garage |
| Named the family in the queue | +0 / +0 · the draw stops. So does the carrying. |
| Posted the footage | +1 / +3 · beautiful, viral, and the Danquahs never come back |
| Fixed the February recycler | +0 / +3 · a whole block owes you, and Monitor Central now has a repair filed |
| Walked away | −0 / −1 · Marisol says nothing, which is worse |
Pay: none, and never offer any. Non-money: eleven households, the Danquah grandmother's standing invitation, and the first real proof that the crew's address is a civic institution whether they wanted one or not.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/CLIP/019
"the tap is not a bit."
@barricadia_lifer that's just a queue. why is this the best thing you've posted
WARRANTY VOID yeah
WARRANTY VOID yeah
The Not-LineNot a mystery, not a crime, and not a warm-up. It is the contract that establishes what the crew's address means, so that every later job where the district protects them has already been paid for. Run it first if you can.
ConnectionsC03 THE FILTER JOB why the district owes them ·
C05 THE STANDPIPE WAR the same water, escalated ·
THE GARAGE p.34 the tap, the lease, the deal nobody wrote down ·
GRIGOR TAM p.22
61 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 02 · BARRICADIA
NOBODY'S KIDBring her home. She is fifteen and she is running with a crew.
RB:2
EXPOSURE E1 · DARK. NOTHING ABOUT THIS GOES UP.EXTRACT
My daughter is fifteen. Six weeks ago she stopped coming home and I have since learned she is living with a group of older gene-forged in the Wash. I am told they are not a gang. I am told a great many things.
I am not asking anyone to be hurt. I am asking for her to be brought to the address below, at which point my responsibility resumes and yours ends. I will pay half in advance to demonstrate that I am serious.
— name withheld at client's request. The address is in Center Point, not Barricadia.
The Situation Open
Ilse Marchetti is fifteen, jackal lineage, and six weeks ago she walked out of a household in Center Point and did not come back. She is currently sleeping in a converted substation eight blocks from the garage with four other forged kids between sixteen and twenty-two, none of whom are a gang and all of whom look like one.
Her father has money, a lawyer, and a reasonable manner. He has done everything correctly. He filed, he waited, he hired professionals. He is, by every measure the district can apply, the responsible party. The crew will like him.
Objectives Open
Primary · Locate Ilse and deliver her to the Center Point address. Say it plain at the table: the client's objective is a fifteen-year-old in a car.
Secondary · Establish, before you decide anything, why a kid with a home like that is sleeping on a substation floor.
The Leads Open
- Dr. Silk. She forwarded the job and she has treated Ilse twice, and she will not say for what, and the fact that she forwarded it anyway is the loudest thing in this contract.
- The substation. Not hidden. Everyone in four blocks knows. Nobody has reported it, which in Barricadia is a verdict.
- The other four. Older, forged, broke, and organised around one rule: nobody goes back to a house they ran from. They will not fight the crew. They will simply stand in the doorway and be sixteen.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Fifty-four, articulate, wounded, and entirely sincere. He will answer every question the crew asks. He will thank them for asking. He has photographs and he will show them, and they are the photographs of a man who loves his kid.
Sealed. He is not violent and he has never hit her. What he has done is sign her up, at thirteen, for a lineage-correction programme — a course of augment work to bring a jackal-lineage daughter closer to the phenotype he paid for and did not get. Two rounds are done. The third is booked. He does not think of this as harm. He thinks of it as finishing.
1 Check in with the table before running this one. The subject matter is bodily autonomy and a minor, and the contract is built so that the law is the villain, but it should still be a conversation first. 2 Ilse never appears on the channel. If a table posts her, that is a real fallout row and it should stick.
MB-01 · 62
Barricadia
The Truth Sealed
Ilse is not a runaway, she is a defector, and every adult in this book would recognise the shape of it instantly. The substation crew is a splice. The rule about not going back is the only doctrine they have. Dr. Silk forwarded the job specifically so it would land with these five and not with someone who would just deliver her, which is the most dangerous compliment anyone has paid this crew.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Third Round. 0–3. Booked for the end of the month. At 3 it happens, whatever the crew decided, unless somebody stopped it.
Second · The Advance. He has already paid half. Every day the crew holds his money without delivering is a day he starts making other arrangements, and the other arrangements are worse and cheaper.
Tail · The Other Four. If the crew handles the substation badly, the four scatter, and Ilse goes with them somewhere nobody is watching at all.
Leverage Sealed
Dr. Silk · has the records and will not hand them over, and will tell you exactly why she will not, and the reason is good. Press her and you lose a clinic. Ask her the right question and she answers it.
The booking · the third round is scheduled at a licensed clinic with paperwork. Paperwork can be delayed, misfiled, or made expensive, which are three different contracts.
Danka · nobody has to explain this job to her. She will have an opinion inside four seconds and it will not be a negotiating position.
Opposition Sealed
The father · has done nothing illegal. He has receipts, consent forms and a lawyer, and he is correct on every point of law in Lost Angeles. He is the opposition and he never raises his voice once.
The law · a fifteen-year-old forged minor has no standing to refuse elective augment work authorised by a guardian. This is the actual antagonist of the contract and it cannot be punched.
The Turn Sealed
Land it when somebody asks Ilse why she left and she answers plainly, without drama, in the flat register a kid uses for a thing they have already finished crying about. She is not running from cruelty. She is running from an improvement.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | When the crew decides |
|---|---|
| 1 | The father arrives at the substation himself, alone, unarmed, and asks to talk to her. He is very good at this. |
| 2 | Ilse offers to go back, voluntarily, to protect the other four. She has already worked out that she is what makes them findable. |
| 3 | The lawyer files first: an interference claim naming the garage's address. |
| 4 | One of the other four takes the client's money behind everyone's back. They needed it. They are seventeen. |
| 5 | Dr. Silk offers a third option that is illegal, expensive, and would actually work. |
| 6 | Grigor says the sentence about there being no spare, and it is not about Ilse. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Delivered her as contracted | +0 / −3 · paid in full. Dr. Silk stops forwarding work. |
| Refused and returned the advance | +2 / +1 · the father hires someone worse within a week |
| Stopped the third round without taking sides | +1 / +2 · the hardest outcome and the right one |
| Made it public on the Feed | +3 / +2 · she is safe and she is now a story, forever |
| Took the money and did not deliver | +3 / −1 · you are a crew that keeps advances now |
Pay: 900 cr for delivery, 450 already banked. Non-money: whatever the crew decides here is what Dr. Silk tells people about them for the next year, and she talks to everyone.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // —
nothing was posted.
THEO filmed it. not posting it. it's in the other folder.
— —
— —
The Not-LineNot a rescue and not a kidnapping. It is a custody question in a city with no framework for a child who objects to her own upgrade, and the crew are the only people in it with standing to notice that, because four of them are what she is going to become.
ConnectionsDR. SILK p.37 she chose this crew on purpose ·
DANKA IVEL p.14 defection, from the other end ·
THE BODY ECONOMY p.40 consent, guardianship, leases ·
C31 REPOSSESSION the same law, ten years later
63 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 03 · BARRICADIA
THE FILTER JOBSomebody is washing the dead ones and selling them back
RB:2
EXPOSURE E4 · FILMED, POSTED, DISTRICT-VIRALTRACE › CLEAR › DELIVER
Looking for the people who fix things. Not the shop, the other ones. I bought filters at eleven and they were washed. My son is on the machine at the clinic twelve days now and they meter it. I do not want anybody hurt. I want to know who sold them so I can tell the whole queue.
I can pay one eighty. I know what that is. Ask at the standpipe, they know me.
— no name given. taped to the pipe with electrical tape.
The Situation Open
Barricadia cleans its own water, and the system hangs on one consumable: the media cartridge. Rated four hundred hours, eleven credits on the street. Three under market, which the whole queue has noticed and nobody has questioned, because three under is the difference between filtered and not.
Somebody is running spent cartridges through solvent, wrapping them in counterfeit labels good enough to fool a building recycler, and selling them back. A washed cartridge reads correct for eighteen hours. Hour nineteen is contaminated water through a bedside vaporizer at a child's head height, eight hours a night, for twelve nights.
Objectives Open
Primary · Identify the supplier and put the answer in front of the district before the stock moves. Say it plain at the table: find who printed the labels, and make the queue believe it.
Secondary · Get clean cartridges into Barricadia hands tonight, from any source, explained or not.
The Leads Open
- The part. The cartridge itself, on a bench, opened like a deposition. Spec says three thousand microns of media. This has nine hundred and paint.
- The label. Registration-clean, kerning wrong. Rotary press, older than anyone in the crew. Three shops in the district still run one.
- The queue. Standpipe 4 knows who has been selling at eleven, and will say so for a favour, a shirt, or nothing at all.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Steady, work-rough hands, a watch with a taped strap. She lines up three objects and lets them talk: the scorched cartridge, a vaporizer cup, a district clinic invoice reading O2 SERVICE // METERED // DAY 12. She asks for nobody to be hurt and means it.
Sealed. She cannot pay 180 either. She will pay it, and then the metering runs on. If the crew takes the full fee, that is a real thing that happened and the table should feel it. If they refuse it, do not reward them out loud.
1 Filter quality, standpipe density and Market Whispers are in the Lost Angeles Map Companion; this contract assumes them and does not restate them. 2 The solvent is never named. Keep it that way.
MB-01 · 64
Barricadia
The Truth Sealed
Not a cartel, not a state. A floor manager with a rented warehouse by the flood channel, a good press, and an order book in tidy columns. He is not evil, he is competent, which is worse: the operation is clean, profitable, and would have run for years. And the plates are the business. Break the warehouse and you take the stock. Take the stock and he prints again by Thursday. Nobody at the table will think to ask about the plates.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Stock Moves. 0–4. Ticks each night, and each time the crew is seen asking. At 3 a box truck is loading. At 4 it is gone, and so is the answer.
Second · The Queue Talks. Barricadia's surveillance is informants. Every open enquiry ticks it. At 3 he knows a crew is looking; at 5 he stops sleeping there.
Tail · Day Thirteen. The clinic meters daily. Every day is another line on an invoice she cannot pay, and another night at bed height.
Leverage Sealed
Marco Cruz, printer · names every rotary in Barricadia in one sentence. Also Ozzy's father, believes his son does security logistics, and has never been asked a question like this.
Standpipe 4 · the queue. Free and immediate, and it costs a favour the district collects later.
The order book · names every recycler that bought. Hand it to the queue and his trade ends permanently, and nine arguments start on nine landings.
Opposition Sealed
The floor manager · wants the stock out and himself unremembered. Will not fight. Goes out a window at the first hard silhouette in a doorway and leaves the coat. Folds if named in public. Returns if not.
Eleven night workers · paid by the pallet, told the stock is refurbished, and half believe it. They sit down on the pallets unprompted, like a drill they have practised. Anyone who shoots here has misread the contract.
The Turn Sealed
Land it on the third rotary press. Two check out; the third is a rental. The second-to-last name on the list is Marco Cruz, and for about four seconds, before the census clears him, the job is pointed at the crew's own family. Nobody says the thing. That silence is the scene and it is worth more than the warehouse.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | At the warehouse |
|---|---|
| 1 | The truck is already rolling. The contract becomes a RUN, on Danka's terms, at night, loaded. |
| 2 | The order book names a recycler the crew drinks with. |
| 3 | The workers are a family. All eleven. Same surname on the pay sheet. |
| 4 | He offers the plates as a trade for the walk. It is a fair deal and it is disgusting. |
| 5 | Somebody else got here first and left. The stock is short by 200 and the press is warm. |
| 6 | One factory-sealed pre-Upheaval cartridge in the stock. Worth more than the whole night. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Named him to the queue, quietly | +0 / +2 |
| Named him, and the district ran him out | +1 / +3 |
| Free cartridges off an unexplained truck | +1 / +3 · the district starts protecting you |
| Hurt somebody on the floor | +3 / −2 · Barricadia never forgets this one |
| Kept the plates | you are now in the filter business |
Pay: 180 cr, and they should feel bad taking it. Non-money: Standpipe 4 owes you, Marco owes a print run, one recycler landlord opens a door for a year.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/002
"warranty honored."
@standpipe4evr where did the truck come from
WARRANTY VOID no.
WARRANTY VOID no.
The Not-LineNot a fight, and not a mystery. Everyone in Barricadia already suspects. It is a race to make the district certain before the stock leaves, against a man who has done nothing provable and everything wrong.
ConnectionsC05 THE STANDPIPE WAR the queue collects its favour ·
C04 GOOD PRESS the plates surface, printing something worse ·
MARCO CRUZ p.31 ·
SERVICE p.— vol. two: the man who buys the plates is paying off a lease
65 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 04 · BARRICADIA
GOOD PRESSThe plates turned up. They are not printing filter labels any more.
RB:4
EXPOSURE E3 · THE HEIST IS FILMED. THE REASON IS NOT.LIFT
CERTIFICATE OF LEASE STANDING — This instrument certifies the holder's augment lease is current, in good standing, and not subject to recovery action. Present on demand to any authorised assessor.
Holder: [REDACTED] · Lineage: jaguar, Commercial · Instrument: WV-forensics flags this as a forgery at the third security layer only. Nothing before the third layer is wrong.
— brought in by a man who paid four hundred credits for it and wants to know if it works.
The Situation Open
The counterfeiter's plates were never recovered. Somebody bought them, and somebody worked out that a rotary press good enough to fake a filter label is good enough to fake a lease-standing certificate — the single piece of paper that stands between an orphanware body and an assessor.
They are selling at four hundred credits to people who do not have four hundred credits, and the certificates fail at the third security layer, which is the layer an assessor checks. Every person walking around Barricadia holding one believes they are safe and is carrying a document that will be read aloud at their own repossession.
Objectives Open
Primary · Take the plates and the print run out of circulation before the next assessment sweep. Say it plain at the table: steal the press, burn the stock, and do it without telling four hundred people they have been robbed.
Secondary · Find out who is buying the customer list, because somebody is.
The Leads Open
- The certificate itself. Cas will find the third-layer failure in under a minute and will then be unable to talk about anything else.
- The buyers. Ozzy knows four people holding one. All four are relieved. None of them can be told.
- Marco's census. Three rotary presses in Barricadia. His is one. The other two were cleared during the filter job. The press has moved districts and come back.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. There is no client and no fee. A man brought a certificate to the garage because the crew has a reputation for knowing whether a thing is real, which is Ozzy's fault and Ozzy's pride.
Sealed. He is not a customer. He is a runner for the operation, sent to find out how good the forgery reads to the one crew in Barricadia with a lynx who does forensics. He will report back either way, which means the clock starts the moment Cas opens her mouth.
1 Lease-standing certificates, assessors and recovery action are specified on p.40. A table that has not read that spread will still run this contract fine; it just becomes a heist instead of a horror story.
MB-01 · 66
Barricadia
The Truth Sealed
The operation is not selling documents. It is building a list. Four hundred names of orphanware in Barricadia, each self-identified, each having paid to declare that they cannot survive an assessment. That list is worth more to a recovery contractor than the certificates ever were, and it has already been offered to one.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Sweep. 0–4. A scheduled assessment sweep is nine days out and public. At 4 it happens and the certificates fail in the street, in front of people, one after another.
Second · The Runner. Ticks the moment Cas says the word forgery in front of him. At 3 the press moves again. At 5 the list sells.
Tail · The Buyers. Four hundred people who will be angrier at the crew than at the forger if they find out this way. Every one of them paid, and paying felt like solving it.
Leverage Sealed
Marco Cruz · can identify the press by its registration drift from a single sheet, and will, and will then ask his son a question neither of them wants.
Dr. Silk · treats half the names on that list. She will not give the crew the list. She will tell them, exactly once, how many of them there are.
The third layer · whoever wrote the forgery knew the first two layers perfectly and guessed at the third. That is not a printer's knowledge. That is somebody who has held a real one.
Opposition Sealed
The operation · four people, one press, no ideology, and a genuine belief that they are helping. They will argue this, fluently, and part of the argument is true.
The recovery contractor · has already made an offer on the list and is not in Barricadia and never will be. You cannot reach them in this contract. That is deliberate. They are Volume Two.
The Turn Sealed
Land it when the crew finds the ledger and it is not a sales ledger, it is a register: names, lineages, manufacturers, and a column for whether the manufacturer still exists. Cas will read her own product line on page two, in someone else's handwriting, filed under discontinued.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | At the press |
|---|---|
| 1 | The list has already sold. There is a receipt. The buyer's name means nothing to the crew yet. |
| 2 | The four operators are orphanware themselves and hold their own certificates, printed first. |
| 3 | The press is in a room with eleven boxes of finished stock and a family asleep upstairs. |
| 4 | The runner got there first and warned them, and they are waiting, and they want to negotiate. |
| 5 | Monitor Central is already outside. Somebody else called this in. |
| 6 | Marco's registration analysis was wrong by one press, and the right one is his. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Plates destroyed, list destroyed, quietly | +2 / +1 · nobody ever knows you saved them |
| Plates destroyed, list published as a warning | +3 / +3 · four hundred people are warned and exposed at once |
| Kept the plates | +1 / +0 · you are now the only good forger in Barricadia. See C31. |
| Sweep happens first | +1 / −3 · the district watched it happen and knows you knew |
| Handed it to Monitor Central | +0 / −4 · Barricadia does not speak to you again this volume |
Pay: nothing. This contract costs money to run. Non-money: the register, which is the most dangerous object in Volume One, and a decision about what to do with four hundred names that the crew will be living with for the rest of the campaign.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/007
"paper is not a body."
@orphanware_4lyf is mine real
WARRANTY VOID dm us. don't post the number.
WARRANTY VOID dm us. don't post the number.
The Not-LineNot a caper and not a takedown. It is a contract about a document that people bought because it let them stop being afraid, and the crew are going to take it away from them for good reasons that nobody in the queue will accept.
ConnectionsC03 THE FILTER JOB where the plates came from ·
C31 REPOSSESSION the register, used ·
CAS p.26 page two of the ledger ·
THE BODY ECONOMY p.40 what a certificate is actually for
67 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 05 · BARRICADIA
THE STANDPIPE WARTwo blocks, one tap, and the crew owns the tap.
RB:3
EXPOSURE E4 · UNAVOIDABLY PUBLICHOLD
NOTICE: The alley tap on Reclaim Sub 3 is a private facility operated at the owner's discretion. Queue position is not a right. — posted anonymously, printed, Tuesday
the tap is FREE and has always been FREE ask anyone who has lived here — written over the above, Tuesday night
Meeting Thursday re: allocation. All households. — Marisol Vega, Wednesday
— by Friday there are nine notices and two of them name the crew.
The Situation Open
The 200 block's recycler failed in February and was never repaired. The 400 block's failed in August. Both blocks now queue at the garage's alley tap, which was built to serve eleven households and is currently serving thirty-one, and the line now starts before dawn and does not clear.
Nobody has done anything wrong. There is simply not enough, and for the first time the crew's free tap is a thing worth fighting over, which means the crew are no longer neighbours who happen to have water. They are an authority, and they never applied for the job.
Objectives Open
Primary · Keep the tap open and keep the district whole. Say it plain at the table: by the end of tonight there is either a rule everyone accepts, or there is a fight at your front door.
Secondary · Do not let anybody establish that the crew decides who drinks.
The Leads Open
- The line. Stand in it. It is the same intelligence-gathering move as C01 and it works for the same reason and the crew will resent that.
- The two recyclers. Both repairable. One needs a part, one needs eleven thousand credits and a filed permit, and the second one is the actual contract.
- The printed notice. Somebody in this argument owns a printer and is pretending to be a neighbour.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. There is no client. Marisol has called a meeting for Thursday and has not asked the crew to attend, which is how she asks the crew to attend.
Sealed. She called the meeting to force this exact confrontation while it is still about water. She has seen a district lose a tap before and she knows the next stage is not a queue, it is a landlord, and she would rather the crew learn to hold a room than learn to hold a door.
MB-01 · 68
Barricadia
The Truth Sealed
The printed notice came from a Jaguario-adjacent property holder who owns eleven units across both blocks and who benefits enormously if the tap becomes conditional — because a conditional tap is a service, and a service can be attached to a tenancy. He does not want the tap closed. He wants it managed, preferably by someone with a reputation for being reasonable. He has been extremely polite so far and intends to make the crew an offer at the Thursday meeting, in public, in front of everyone, as a favour.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · Thursday. 0–3. The meeting. At 3 it happens whether the crew has a position or not, and a room full of frightened people will accept the first plan anybody offers.
Second · The Line. Each dawn it starts earlier. At 3 there is a shoving incident. At 5 somebody brings a weapon to a water queue, and after that this district is different.
Tail · The Filtration Line. Sub 3 was built for eleven households. Running thirty-one, the last working line has weeks, not months, and only Cas has noticed.
Leverage Sealed
Marisol Vega · can hand the crew the room, once, if they ask her to instead of waiting for her to.
The 200 block's part · obtainable in an afternoon by anyone with salvage contacts. Fixing one recycler halves the queue and buys the whole argument time.
Bonzer Kabesh · Jaguario recruiter, and he will happily explain how his people handle allocation disputes, at length, for free, because the explanation is the recruitment.
Opposition Sealed
The property holder · never raises his voice, has read the Co-op's articles, and is offering to help. Everything he proposes is reasonable and every one of them ends with the tap having conditions.
Thirty-one households · not opposition, but not allies either. Frightened, tired, and entirely willing to accept an unjust rule if it means the line moves.
The Turn Sealed
Land it at the meeting, when somebody stands up and says the crew should decide who gets water, and means it as a compliment. The trap in this contract is being handed power by people who like you.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | At the Thursday meeting |
|---|---|
| 1 | The property holder offers to fund the repair, on one condition, and the room turns to look at the crew. |
| 2 | The filtration line fails during the meeting. Everyone hears it. |
| 3 | A 400-block resident produces the crew's own channel footage as evidence of what they can afford. |
| 4 | Kavast makes an unsolicited offer of a water truck, with markings, weekly. Danka leaves the room. |
| 5 | Someone proposes the crew charge, at cost, and half the room agrees, and it is the reasonable position. |
| 6 | Grigor speaks. He has not spoken in the whole meeting. Let him have the scene. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Repaired a recycler, tap stays unconditional | +1 / +3 · the correct outcome and the expensive one |
| Accepted the property holder's funding | +0 / +1 · the tap has conditions now. Forever. |
| Handed allocation to Marisol and the Co-op | +0 / +2 · you gave the power away on purpose. Nobody notices but her. |
| Let the crew be the authority | +2 / +2 · you are a faction now. Volume Two treats you as one. |
| Closed the tap | +0 / −5 · do not do this. It is on the table because it must be. |
Pay: none, and running the tap costs the crew money every week hereafter. Non-money: whatever answer the district gets on Thursday is the crew's standing position in Barricadia for the rest of the campaign, and it will be quoted back at them.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/009
"we don't run the water. we just live here."
@thewash400 then who does
WARRANTY VOID that's the meeting
WARRANTY VOID that's the meeting
The Not-LineNot a defence of a location and not a negotiation with a villain. It is the contract where the crew find out that the free tap made them powerful, and that the only way to keep it free is to refuse the power in public, which is much harder than fighting for it.
ConnectionsC01 THE WASH the same tap, before it mattered ·
THE GARAGE p.34 Sub 3, and what Grigor signed ·
MARISOL VEGA p.35 ·
C29 THE LAST TENANT the same property holder, at the seawall
69 · MB-01
The Jobs
Cluster
CENTER POINTThe crew's public living room, and the best noise floor in Lost Angeles.
Center Point is where the raid-race scene drinks. The Tooth and Gear is the room: nine hundred people on a race weekend, a booth that has run for nine years, and a bar that settles its own disputes and has never needed help until this volume.
It is also, because nine hundred drunk people are the finest cover money can buy, where quieter institutions do business in plain sight. Every contract in this cluster is played in a crowd.
Who runs it
Razborki · Jockey, DJ, and the room's actual authority. Nine years behind that booth and everyone in Center Point defers to it without noticing they do.
The Syndicate · holds a standing booking on booth nine and has since March. Nobody in this district will say the word out loud.
Frequency · broadcasts from somewhere in these blocks, knows everything, and sells it at a price that is never money.
What it costs to be here
Drinks, and being known. Center Point does not take fees; it takes familiarity. A crew that turns up twice is a regular, and a regular is expected to help when the room needs it.
Contracts in this cluster
HOUSE RULES p.72 · THE ARM p.74 · SIX MINUTES OF FAME p.76 · THE BOOTH p.78
MB-01 · 70
POINT
ON THE STREET RIGHT NOW Open
| d10 | What is happening as the crew arrives |
|---|---|
| 1 | Race weekend. Nine hundred people in a room built for four hundred. |
| 2 | A bet has escalated three times and there is now a card and odds. |
| 3 | The music stops for four seconds and nobody knows why. |
| 4 | Somebody is filming the back corner and does not know what that means. |
| 5 | Two crews who lost to each other last season are at adjacent tables. |
| 6 | A Kavast pack walks in, in colours, on a race night. |
| 7 | The booth is empty. Razborki has not left that booth in nine years. |
| 8 | Someone is buying for the whole bar and will not say what they are celebrating. |
| 9 | A stranger is asking, politely, which crew is which. |
| 10 | Ozzy has sold eleven shirts and started one argument. |
Rumours
| d6 | What people are saying |
|---|---|
| 1 | Booth nine has been paid for since March and nobody has ever eaten there. |
| 2 | Razborki is being leaned on and will not say by whom. |
| 3 | There is money moving through the race book that is not race money. |
| 4 | Frequency is one person. Frequency is four people. Frequency is a room. |
| 5 | Someone is buying quiet on a building at the district edge. |
| 6 | The Tooth and Gear moved here from Barricadia and the old room is still open. |
Two contacts
Razborki, the booth · will play anything, cut anything, or drop the room to silence on request. A DJ is a crowd-control asset and the crew has never thought of it that way.
Frequency · answers questions. The price is always a true thing about the asker, and it is always correctly assessed.
This cluster escalates hard: HOUSE RULES p.72 is a comedy about crowd control and THE BOOTH p.78 is a counter-surveillance contract that can end a campaign. Run them in order.
71 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 06 · CENTER POINT
HOUSE RULESWork the door on race weekend. Nobody dangerous is outside.
RB:2
EXPOSURE E4 · IT IS A PUBLIC ROOM WITH A HUNDRED CAMERASHOLD
Race weekend. Full house. I need four people on the room who are not bouncers, because bouncers make it a bouncer night, and I do not want a bouncer night, I want a Saturday.
Rules are: nobody bleeds on the floor, nobody films the back corner, and the Razborki decision is final and is always me. Six hundred and you drink free, which historically has been a mistake on my part.
— Razborki. Wrote it on a coaster. Kept the coaster.
The Situation Open
The Tooth and Gear on race weekend is nine hundred people in a room built for four hundred, a raid-race crowd that has been drinking since the qualifiers, and a bar that runs on the understanding that the house settles disputes and the house has never once needed help settling anything.
This weekend the house needs help. Razborki will not say why. The crew are being hired as furniture: five recognisable faces standing in the right places so that everyone does the arithmetic and behaves.
Objectives Open
Primary · Get to closing with the room intact. Say it plain at the table: nothing catches fire, nobody dies, and the night is still fun.
Secondary · Work out what Razborki is actually worried about, because it is not the crowd.
The Leads Open
- The room. Nine hundred people, four flashpoints, and one of them is a bet that is going to happen whether anyone sanctions it or not.
- The back corner. Rule three is do not film it. Rule three is the only rule Razborki repeated.
- Ozzy. Within an hour he has sold eleven shirts, learned six things, and started one of the four flashpoints personally.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Jockey and DJ, runs the booth, has run this room for nine years and has never asked anyone for anything. Warm, loud, extremely fast, and treats the crew like regulars because they are.
Sealed. A Syndicate table booked the back corner three weeks ago and has been paying for it whether they use it or not. Tonight they are using it. Razborki cannot refuse a Syndicate booking and cannot be seen to accommodate one, so they have hired five people who are famous for not caring about either.
MB-01 · 72
Center Point
The Truth Sealed
The crew are not security. They are a witness, hired in a form that cannot be accused of witnessing. Razborki wants five recognisable faces in the room so that whatever happens in the back corner happens in front of people who will remember it, and the Syndicate knows they are there, and everyone behaves better. It works right up until it doesn't.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · Closing. 0–5. Ticks each time a flashpoint is handled badly, and once at the top of each hour regardless. At 5 the room goes.
Second · The Corner. 0–3. Ticks when anyone approaches, films, or looks too long. At 3 the booth stands up and leaves mid-drink, which is worse than a fight.
Tail · The Tab. They are drinking free. This is not a joke and the GM should track it.
Leverage Sealed
The booth · Razborki will play anything, cut anything, or drop the room to silence on request. A DJ is a crowd-control asset and nobody in this crew has thought of that.
Grigor · stands in a doorway. That is the entire contribution and it resolves at least one flashpoint without a roll.
The regulars · forty people who have known this room longer than the crew and who will back the house against outsiders, if asked, in the right register.
Opposition Sealed
Nine hundred drunk people · not enemies. Weather. They respond to tone, to music, to whether the people at the edges look worried.
The Syndicate table · six of them, expensive, quiet, and entirely uninterested in the crew. They will not start anything. They are here to finish something.
The Turn Sealed
Land it when the crew realise the loudest thing in the room is not the flashpoint they are managing. Somewhere behind them a booth has gone quiet, the wrong people are standing too close, and Theo's camera is pointed the wrong way on purpose.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | Before closing |
|---|---|
| 1 | The bet escalates past sense and Grigor is holding a table of drinks overhead while patrons keep drinking off it. |
| 2 | Someone films the corner. It is not one of the crew and it is already uploading. |
| 3 | The Syndicate table asks Razborki to cut the music. Razborki looks at the crew. |
| 4 | A Kavast pack walks in, in colours, on a race weekend, which is a message. |
| 5 | The corner empties mid-drink and leaves a bag under the table. |
| 6 | Ozzy's flashpoint becomes the night's actual crisis and he is delighted. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Room intact, corner unwatched | +0 / +2 · Razborki owes you and says so publicly |
| Room intact, you saw what the corner did | +2 / +2 · you are a witness now, and they know |
| It went | +1 / −2 · the Tooth and Gear is closed for two weeks and it is your fault |
| Posted the corner | +4 / +4 · the best clip of the season and the Syndicate has your address |
| Sided with the regulars against the booking | +2 / +3 · Center Point loves you. The Syndicate files it. |
Pay: 600 cr and a permanent tab. Non-money: the Tooth and Gear becomes the crew's room in a way it was not before, and Razborki will take one call from them, any hour, for the rest of the campaign.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/REC/004
silent. eight minutes. one arm.
@toothandgear the man is holding SEVEN DRINKS
WARRANTY VOID nine. count again.
WARRANTY VOID nine. count again.
The Not-LineNot a bouncer job and not a heist. It is a comedy about crowd management with a second, quieter contract running behind it that the crew were hired not to notice, and the whole design is that they notice anyway.
ConnectionsC07 THE ARM the bet, run as its own contract ·
C09 THE BOOTH what the corner was doing ·
CENTER POINT p.62 the room, the map, the regulars ·
THE CLIP p.44 posting the corner is a real decision
73 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 07 · CENTER POINT
THE ARMIt started as a bet. It is now a sanctioned event with a card and odds.
RB:3
EXPOSURE E5 · BROADCAST. THIS IS THE POINT.PERFORM
SATURDAY. THE TOOTH AND GEAR. ONE TABLE. ONE ARM. PATIENT VS THE ROOM.
Rules: anyone may challenge. Two arms allowed against his one. House takes ten. Odds posted at the door and adjusted live because I am not a charity.
He has not agreed to this yet.
— OEM. The post had eleven thousand views before Grigor saw it.
The Situation Open
Ozzy has booked, promoted, seeded and sold an event that his crewmate has not consented to, and it is now large enough that cancelling it would be a bigger incident than running it. Razborki has cleared a table. There is a card. There are odds. There is a man from the High Top who has flown down.
Grigor will do it. Everyone knows Grigor will do it. The contract is not whether he competes; it is everything the event drags into the room while nine hundred people are looking the other way.
Objectives Open
Primary · Run the event, take the gate, and get out of the building with the money. Say it plain at the table: the arm-wrestling is the easy part and it is not the job.
Secondary · Keep Grigor's shoulder attached to Grigor.
The Leads Open
- The book. Ozzy's odds are honest, which is his one professional vanity, and honest odds attract people who want to move money quietly.
- The challengers. Eleven signed up. Nine are drunk. One is a Kavast pack member out of colours. One is not here to arm-wrestle.
- The gate. Four thousand credits in cash, in a room of nine hundred, held by a nineteen-year-old with a bag.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Ozzy is the client, the promoter, the bookmaker and the problem. He will explain that this is the highest-margin thing the crew has ever done and he will be correct.
Sealed. He booked it the day after a Vroza scout called him the pet. This entire event is a nineteen-year-old building a stage on which the largest member of his crew publicly beats a room, and he has not admitted that to himself, let alone anyone else.
1 Grigor's augment cost means his player must not be told about the Shoulder clock. Track it on the GM side and let the fallout arrive without warning. This contract is the best place in Volume One to fire it.
MB-01 · 74
Center Point
The Truth Sealed
Somebody is using the book to launder. Three of the wagers are far too large, placed early, spread across outcomes, from a table that does not care which way it goes. The event is a clean, cash-heavy, fast-settling market that appeared in Center Point overnight, and money like that always finds a market like that within a day.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Card. 0–5. One challenger per tick. At 5 the last name on the card steps up and it is the one who is not here to arm-wrestle.
Second · The Shoulder. 0–4. Grigor cannot feel degradation. The GM tracks this privately. At 4 something goes, and his player is still being told he is fine.
Tail · The Gate. Ticks every time the bag is put down, handed over, or left with someone. It has been put down twice already.
Leverage Sealed
Razborki · can extend, cut or kill the card from the booth, and will follow the crew's lead if the crew gives one.
Cas · will have read the book by the second challenger and will announce the laundering out loud at the worst possible volume.
Theo · is cutting this live. What goes in the edit decides whether this is a legend or an incident.
Opposition Sealed
The eleventh challenger · Kavast, out of colours, and here to make a splice lose in public. He will not cheat. He does not need to and that is the threat.
The quiet table · wants a clean settlement and a fast exit. If the event is stopped mid-card they will want their stake back, in cash, tonight, from the bag.
The Turn Sealed
Land it when Grigor wins the eighth and does not sit down, and Ozzy sees his face and understands, for the first time, what he has actually organised — not a payday, a proof, and the proof is costing someone else's body.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | The last name on the card |
|---|---|
| 1 | The Kavast challenger wins, cleanly, and offers his hand, and means it, which is worse. |
| 2 | Grigor's shoulder goes mid-pull. The room hears it. He finishes the pull. |
| 3 | The quiet table calls the whole book and wants settling now, in cash, before the last match. |
| 4 | Vroza is in the room. Has been for an hour. Nobody saw her come in. |
| 5 | Danka takes a challenge on Grigor's behalf and it becomes a completely different night. |
| 6 | The gate bag is gone. Ozzy knows exactly who has it and cannot say so on camera. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Ran the card, took the gate, paid out clean | +1 / +4 · the clip of the season |
| Stopped it mid-card | +2 / +0 · you refunded a laundry and it noticed you |
| Grigor got hurt and finished anyway | +1 / +5 · legend. And Vol 2 opens with a shoulder. |
| Named the laundering in the room | +3 / +2 · Center Point is safer. You are not. |
| Lost the gate | +1 / −1 · Ozzy paid the punters out of his own account. Nobody knows. |
Pay: the gate, currently 4,000 cr, minus payouts, minus the house ten, minus whatever the night costs. Non-money: the single most-watched thing the channel has ever posted, and everything that comes with being watched.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/011
"patient vs the room. the room lost."
@highside_money who took the third bet
WARRANTY VOID ask the third bet
WARRANTY VOID ask the third bet
The Not-LineNot a tournament and not a caper. It is a comedy that is secretly about Ozzy's wound and Grigor's secret, running at the same table, in front of nine hundred people, while somebody launders money through the ticket price.
ConnectionsC06 HOUSE RULES the same room, sober ·
GRIGOR TAM p.22 the shoulder, and what he cannot feel ·
OZZY OKONKWO-CRUZ p.30 why he booked it ·
VROZA PACK p.150 the pet, answered
75 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 08 · CENTER POINT
SIX MINUTES OF FAMEA sponsor wants a stunt. The stunt is aimed at a building.
RB:4
EXPOSURE E5 · THE EXPOSURE IS THE PRODUCTPERFORM › BREAK
Seeking established Feed talent, Lost Angeles, splice-composition preferred, for a single integrated content activation. Six minutes maximum runtime. Full creative freedom within brief.
Deliverable: one stunt of your own design, executed at the location provided, filmed in your existing house style, posted to your own channel with no visible sponsor marking. Discretion is the entire product.
— buyer represented by an agency that represents four other agencies.
The Situation Open
Somebody is offering the crew eighteen thousand credits — more than every contract in this cluster combined — to do the thing they already do for free, at a location of the buyer's choosing, with no branding, no script and no notes.
It is the best offer the channel has ever had and it is obviously wrong, and the reason it is obviously wrong is that a sponsor who does not want to be seen is not buying content. They are buying an event.
Objectives Open
Primary · Execute a six-minute stunt at the specified location and post it. Say it plain at the table: they are being paid to be somewhere spectacular, at a specific hour, for reasons nobody will tell them.
Secondary · Find out what the stunt is cover for before it is cover for it.
The Leads Open
- The location. A decommissioned transit interchange on the Center Point edge, scheduled for a heritage review in eleven days.
- The hour. The brief specifies a window. The window is ninety minutes wide and it is at 03:00, which is not when audiences are awake.
- The agency. Four layers deep. Ozzy can get through two of them by Tuesday and the third by lying to someone's assistant.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. A media buyer who is pleasant, professional, and empowered to say yes to almost anything. She has watched every artifact the channel has posted and can quote them, which is flattering and is meant to be.
Sealed. She does not know either. She was hired by an agency that was hired by an agency. She is being paid extremely well to not ask, and when the crew tell her what the job actually is, she believes them, and that is the moment she becomes useful.
MB-01 · 76
Center Point
The Truth Sealed
The interchange is structurally sound and about to be listed, which would block a redevelopment. A spectacular, well-documented, publicly-loved stunt causing visible damage eleven days before a heritage review is a demolition argument that costs eighteen thousand credits instead of a legal fight that costs four hundred thousand. The crew are being hired as a wrecking ball with a fanbase.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Review. 0–4. Eleven days. At 4 the review sits, and whatever the building looks like on that day decides whether four hundred families keep a transit link.
Second · The Window. The 03:00 slot is not negotiable and the buyer cannot explain why. It is when the structural survey team is booked to arrive at 06:00.
Tail · The Money. Half on post. If the crew post anything at all, the argument is made, even if the stunt was harmless. The footage is the weapon, not the stunt.
Leverage Sealed
The buyer · once she understands, she has documents, an agency chain, and a career she is willing to spend some of.
Frequency · signal pirate, Center Point, and can tell the crew who has been buying quiet on this building for six weeks. The price is high and specific.
The heritage review · is public, and submissions are open, and nobody has told the four hundred families that it is happening.
Opposition Sealed
The redevelopment · is a shell inside a fund inside a holding company. It cannot be fought, punched, or found in this contract. It can only be embarrassed.
The crew's own audience · wants the stunt. They have been promised a stunt. Not delivering is a real cost and the fallout table means it.
The Turn Sealed
Land it when Cas prices the structural spec and works out that the brief's suggested stunt — the one the buyer keeps gently steering them toward — puts the load exactly where a survey team would look first.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | At 03:00 |
|---|---|
| 1 | A second crew is already there, hired as a backup, and they do not know either. |
| 2 | The survey team arrives early. At 04:00. They were always going to. |
| 3 | The buyer arrives in person to stop it, having worked it out an hour after the crew did. |
| 4 | Theo can cut six minutes that reads as spectacular and causes nothing. It is the best editing of their life. |
| 5 | The building is occupied. Nine people live in the east concourse and the brief did not mention them. |
| 6 | Do the stunt somewhere else, at the same hour, and post it with the interchange in the background, untouched. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Posted the stunt as briefed | +1 / +5 · richest the crew has ever been. The link closes in Vol 2. |
| Refused and returned the brief | +2 / +0 · a different crew does it in nine days |
| Did the stunt, damaged nothing, posted anyway | +2 / +4 · the hardest option and it works |
| Exposed the buyer chain on the channel | +4 / +3 · the review saves the building. Four agencies now know your address. |
| Made the submission instead of the stunt | +1 / +1 · nobody watches it. The building stands. |
Pay: 18,000 cr, structured half and half, and it is real money that will not come again this volume. Non-money: a media buyer who owes them, and the first hard proof that the channel is an asset other people want to rent.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/013
"we did the bit. we didn't do the job."
@ctrpt_transit the 4 line stays open?? for real?
WARRANTY VOID for now. go to the review.
WARRANTY VOID for now. go to the review.
The Not-LineNot a sabotage job and not an ad read. It is the contract where the crew learn that an audience is a weapon that can be pointed by whoever is paying, and that refusing the money is not the same as refusing to be used.
ConnectionsCLOUT p.42 what an audience is worth to someone else ·
FREQUENCY p.36 ·
C24 PATRON the same buyer, one tier up ·
THEO ASHE p.18 the edit as the decision
77 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 09 · CENTER POINT
THE BOOTHThe back corner has been paid for since March. Find out what it is for.
RB:6
EXPOSURE E1 · DARK. IF THIS IS FILMED THE CREW IS FINISHED.TRACE
I cannot ask you this in the room and I cannot ask you this on any channel and I am not going to write down what it is about.
Nine years I have run that bar. I know what every table in it is for. I do not know what that one is for and I have started to think the reason I do not know is that I was not supposed to still be here to wonder.
— unsigned. Written by someone else, dictated, which tells the crew more than the note does.
The Situation Open
Booth nine, back corner, standing booking since March, paid weekly whether used or not, by a Syndicate account. It is used perhaps twice a month. Different people each time. They order nothing, stay under forty minutes, and leave separately.
Nine years of institutional knowledge says a bar table that is paid for and unused is not a table. It is an address. And an address in a room with nine hundred witnesses is not a hiding place; it is a deliberately public one, which is a much more expensive thing to buy and means the meetings need to be seen happening while never being heard.
Objectives Open
Primary · Establish what booth nine is for, without the Syndicate learning that anyone asked. Say it plain at the table: this is the first contract in the book where being noticed is the failure condition.
Secondary · Get Razborki out from under it, if there is a way, and there may not be.
The Leads Open
- The bookings. Razborki has nine years of ledgers. The March start date lines up with something and it is not a Syndicate event.
- The people. Eleven different individuals across seven months. Theo has footage of every one of them and has never once looked at it.
- The silence. No listening device the crew can afford works in that corner, which is itself the answer to a question nobody has asked yet.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Razborki is frightened in a way the crew has never seen, and is asking for help in the only format that cannot be traced back: a dictated note under a door, unsigned.
Sealed. They already tried to end the booking in June. They were talked out of it, pleasantly, by someone who knew the name of their sister's employer. They have not told anyone that and they are not going to tell the crew unless the crew earns it.
1 This is the highest-Band contract in the Center Point cluster and it is deliberately unwinnable in the ordinary sense. A crew that walks away having learned nothing has still played it correctly.
MB-01 · 78
Center Point
The Truth Sealed
Booth nine is a verification point. People who are about to be trusted with something are sent to sit in the most public room in Center Point for forty minutes, alone, in view of nine hundred people and every camera in the building, and if nobody comes for them they are clean. It is a counter-surveillance ritual, and it works, and the Syndicate has been running it under Razborki's roof for seven months because a bar full of raid-race drunks is the best noise floor in Lost Angeles.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Next Sitting. 0–3. Roughly fortnightly. At 3 someone sits in booth nine, and whatever the crew has set up is either running or it is not.
Second · Attention. 0–4. Ticks on every enquiry, every ledger pulled, every question asked of a regular. At 4 the Syndicate knows a crew is looking, and this contract's fallout table is no longer the worst thing that can happen.
Tail · Razborki. They are the only person who could have asked. If attention reaches 4, everyone works that out in an afternoon.
Leverage Sealed
Theo's archive · seven months of race-weekend footage, unwatched, containing every face that has sat in that booth. It is the crew's single best asset and reviewing it takes real screen time.
Frequency · knows what the ritual is called and will trade the name for something the crew does not want to give. Frequency always prices correctly.
Ozzy's queue · eleven faces, and one of them buys shirts. That is the entire way in and it is not a plan, it is a coincidence he made.
Opposition Sealed
The Syndicate · is not present, not hostile, and not looking at the crew. It is an institution running a procedure. Nothing in this contract fights back until the very end, and then it does not fight, it decides.
The room itself · nine hundred people are the Syndicate's security here. Any crew that clears the room to work has announced itself perfectly.
The Turn Sealed
Land it when the crew understands that the booth is not where the secret is kept — the booth is a test, and the person sitting in it is being watched by the Syndicate to see whether anyone approaches them. The moment the crew approaches, the crew becomes the answer to somebody else's verification.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | At the next sitting |
|---|---|
| 1 | The person in booth nine is someone the crew knows, and they are terrified, and they are alone on purpose. |
| 2 | Nobody sits. The booking is used to watch the crew instead. It has been for two weeks. |
| 3 | Razborki cancels the booking that night, without warning, in front of everyone. |
| 4 | The Syndicate offers the crew the same arrangement: a standing booking, paid, at the garage. |
| 5 | Theo's archive contains a face that also appears in Protectorate traffic. The receiver was right. |
| 6 | The sitting is a Kavast officer. The feud and the Syndicate are the same thread and Vol 2 is now different. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Learned what it is, nobody noticed | +1 / +0 · you know something enormous and can tell nobody |
| Learned it, and were noticed | +5 / +0 · the Syndicate now has a file on five people |
| Got Razborki out | +4 / +2 · the bar survives. Razborki does not run it after Vol 2. |
| Took the Syndicate's offer | +0 / +0 · the garage is now a verification point. Read that sentence again. |
| Posted any of it | +6 / +5 · do not. It is on the table because it must be. |
Pay: none. Razborki offered the bar and the crew should refuse. Non-money: the ritual's name, eleven faces, and the understanding that Center Point has a floor under it.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // —
nothing was posted. rule three.
THEO the corner stays out of the edit. forever.
— —
— —
The Not-LineNot an infiltration and not a hit. It is a surveillance contract run in the most crowded room in the city against an opponent who never appears, where the only way to lose is to be seen looking, and the crew's entire personality is being seen.
ConnectionsC06 HOUSE RULES the corner, from the outside ·
THEO ASHE p.18 the archive, and the receiver ·
FREQUENCY p.36 ·
HEAT p.41 thresholds 6 and above
79 · MB-01
The Jobs
Cluster
THE MUSK TUNNELSThe only way across the city that does not pass a checkpoint. Everyone knows that, including the grid.
A pre-Upheaval transit network running under four districts, half of it in use and half of it sealed. Everything that matters moves through here, which is why the sensor grid down here is better than anything on the surface.
Nine days ago Monitor Central upgraded the firmware and called it public safety. Nobody has run a dark transit since. Every contract in this cluster is downstream of that sentence.
Who runs it
Monitor Central · owns the grid, publishes the notices, and has not told anyone that the new firmware is reporting a structural fault it cannot afford to announce.
The hauliers · nine independent operators whose margins died with the upgrade, and who have pooled everything they have to do something about it.
Nobody, in the sealed sections · and that is not the same as nothing.
What it costs to be here
Time, and nerve. There are no tolls down here. There is a grid that logs everything, a structure that is settling, and ninety minutes of dry service road twice a day.
Contracts in this cluster
DARK TRANSIT p.82 · GRID FIRMWARE p.84 · WHAT THE TUNNEL KEEPS p.86 · ONE-WAY FARE p.88
MB-01 · 80
TUNNELS
ON THE STREET RIGHT NOW Open
| d10 | What is happening as the crew arrives |
|---|---|
| 1 | A section is in lockdown and nobody has said why. |
| 2 | A survey team is working a wall with instruments and will not answer questions. |
| 3 | The ventilation is running loud in a section where it should be idle. |
| 4 | A haulage crew is parked up arguing about a route that no longer works. |
| 5 | Something is transmitting on a band that has been dead for eleven years. |
| 6 | Water on the floor of a section that has never had water in it. |
| 7 | Three vehicles running nose to tail, unlit, at speed. |
| 8 | A maintenance shaft has been opened and not closed. |
| 9 | The grid pings and everyone in earshot checks their own paperwork. |
| 10 | Rea Okonkwo-Cruz is on shift and will wave the crew through, once. |
Rumours
| d6 | What people are saying |
|---|---|
| 1 | The upgrade was not about crime and Monitor Central will not say what it was about. |
| 2 | Section 11 has been sealed since the collapse and somebody has been living in it. |
| 3 | The ventilation and the sensors are on the same bus. Kill one and you kill the other. |
| 4 | There is a corridor down here that Kavast has been surveying for a year. |
| 5 | The consortium buys the transit logs and underbids the hauliers with their own data. |
| 6 | The tunnels are closing. Not this year. But they are closing. |
Two contacts
Rea Okonkwo-Cruz · Ozzy's sister, night shift, knows which sections have gone strange this month and will say so on a phone at 2am. Costs Ozzy a family conversation every time.
The nine hauliers · can move anything anywhere off the books, if the crew has ever done right by them. See GRID FIRMWARE p.84.
DARK TRANSIT p.82 and GRID FIRMWARE p.84 are the same firmware from opposite sides and are best run in that order, a session apart.
81 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 10 · MUSK TUNNELS
DARK TRANSITNine steps through the tunnels. It dies at step two.
RB:3
EXPOSURE E3 · CUT AND POSTED. THE FAILURE IS THE CONTENT.DELIVER › RUN
One case. Sealed. Barricadia to the Highside interchange, tonight, arriving before 05:00. Tunnel transit, not surface. Do not open it, do not scan it, do not photograph the seal.
The case is not dangerous and is not illegal. It is time-sensitive and it is embarrassing. Those are different problems and you are being paid for the second one.
— fee held in escrow with a name the crew will recognise and cannot reach.
The Situation Open
The Musk Tunnels are the only way across Lost Angeles that does not pass a surface checkpoint, which is why everything that matters moves through them and why the sensor grid down there is better than anything on the streets above.
Nine days ago Monitor Central pushed a firmware upgrade to the tunnel grid and announced it as a public safety improvement. Nobody has run a dark transit since. The crew is the first, they do not know that, and Cas has built a nine-step plan against a specification that is nine days out of date.
Objectives Open
Primary · Get the case to the Highside interchange before 05:00, intact and unopened. Say it plain at the table: the plan is going to fail, and the contract is what they do about it.
Secondary · Find out why the grid was upgraded this month, because the notice did not say.
The Leads Open
- Cas's plan. Nine steps, briefed over a tabletop model, genuinely excellent, and obsolete. Let her present all nine. It matters that the table hears the good version first.
- Rea Okonkwo-Cruz. Ozzy's sister works a night shift that runs a tunnel route. She knows which sections went strange this month and will say so over a phone at 2am.
- The old dead spots. Three sections where the grid never worked. Two are still dead. The third is the whole contract.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. A broker two intermediaries out, escrowed, professional, and entirely reachable right up until the moment the crew needs something.
Sealed. The case belongs to a Center Point property fund and contains survey documents that would make a heritage argument. It is embarrassing rather than criminal, exactly as advertised, and the client has been honest about everything except the fact that a second party wants the same case and has already made an offer to the same broker.
1 Cas's contingency should be spent by the Climax Variable in this contract. That is the intended experience and it is why she can re-declare.
MB-01 · 82
Tunnels
The Truth Sealed
The firmware upgrade was not about crime. A section of the tunnel has been settling for eight months and the old grid could not see it. The new grid can, and the new grid is now reporting a structural fault that Monitor Central has not announced, because announcing it closes a transit corridor that four districts depend on. The sweep that catches the crew is a survey team, and they are more frightened than the crew is.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · 05:00. 0–5. Ticks per scene underground and once per improvisation. At 5 the interchange shift changes and the delivery window is gone.
Second · The Grid. 0–3. Ticks the moment step two fails. At 3 the section goes to lockdown and the crew is inside it with a sealed case.
Tail · The Second Party. They know the route. They did not have to be clever; the broker sells to whoever asks twice.
Leverage Sealed
Rea's shift log · which sections have gone strange, and when. Free, immediate, and it costs Ozzy a conversation with his family about what he actually does.
The Raze · surface exit, cratered, undercarriage-eating, and available to exactly one driver in this city.
The survey team · can be talked to. They are technicians on a night shift who have been told not to explain anything and would love to explain something.
Opposition Sealed
The grid · not a person. A schedule, a firmware version and a lockdown procedure, and it is genuinely good, and the correct response is to stop fighting it.
Monitor Central response · slow, procedural, and uninterested in a chase. They will seal the section and wait, which is much worse.
The Turn Sealed
Land it in the lockdown, when the crew finds the survey team and works out that the thing everyone is afraid of down here is not enforcement. The tunnel is failing. The case, the client and the fee stop being the point about forty seconds after that.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | In the section |
|---|---|
| 1 | The seal is broken. Not by the crew. It was broken before they picked it up. |
| 2 | The second party is in the tunnel, ahead of them, and is not hostile and is also not leaving. |
| 3 | The section drops eleven centimetres while they are in it. Everyone hears it. |
| 4 | The survey team asks the crew for help, and helping means missing 05:00. |
| 5 | The only way out is the Raze, loaded, at speed, in the dark. Danka has been waiting all night for this. |
| 6 | The interchange is closed at 04:20 and nobody was told. The client already knew. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Delivered on time, dark, unopened | +1 / +3 · full fee, and a broker who will use them again |
| Delivered late | +1 / +1 · half fee. The client is reasonable about it, which is unsettling. |
| Opened the case | +2 / +2 · the escrow is void and the crew knows something worth money |
| Helped the survey team | +2 / +4 · four districts keep a corridor. Nobody outside this contract ever learns why. |
| Posted the tunnel failure | +4 / +5 · the corridor closes within a week and eleven thousand people reroute |
Pay: 3,200 cr, structured half on arrival and half on silence, and the second half is the interesting one. Non-money: Rea, who is now involved, and a survey team who will answer a call.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/014
"the plan had nine steps."
@ratline_retro which step did you get to
WARRANTY VOID none of them
WARRANTY VOID none of them
The Not-LineNot a stealth run and not a chase. It is a contract about a good plan meeting a world that changed nine days ago, and the actual test is whether the crew keeps improvising after they find out the thing underneath is worse than the job.
ConnectionsC11 GRID FIRMWARE the upgrade, from the other side ·
C12 WHAT THE TUNNEL KEEPS the dead sections ·
CAS the plan, and re-declaring it ·
DANKA_IVEL the Raze exit
83 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 11 · MUSK TUNNELS
GRID FIRMWARESomebody wants the sensors blind for six hours. The sensors are not only sensors.
RB:4
EXPOSURE E1 · DARK. THIS ONE CANNOT BE POSTED AT ALL.BREAK
We are nine independent haulage operators. Since the upgrade our margins are gone: every route we ran is now logged, every log is sold to the interchange consortium, and the consortium underbids us with our own data. Four of us will not last the quarter.
We want the grid down in Sections 4 through 9, from 23:00 to 05:00, once. Not destroyed. Down. One night is enough to prove the logs can be lost, and once they can be lost nobody can sell them.
— nine signatures, all legible, which tells you how frightened people are of the alternative.
The Situation Open
The tunnel grid does three jobs on one bus: it logs transits, it monitors structural strain, and it drives the ventilation interlocks. Everyone who talks about the grid talks about the first job. The people who built it care about the third.
Nine hauliers want six hours of darkness and have pooled everything they have to buy it. It is a sympathetic ask from sympathetic people and it is the most dangerous contract in this cluster.
Objectives Open
Primary · Take the grid down in Sections 4 through 9 between 23:00 and 05:00. Say it plain at the table: they are being asked to blind a system, and nobody has told them what else the system does.
Secondary · Establish what the grid controls before you touch it. Cas gets one scene. Give it to her.
The Leads Open
- The interlocks. Anyone who reads the spec finds it in ten minutes: ventilation fans are slaved to the same bus. Blind the grid and the fans hold their last state.
- The consortium. Buying the logs, underbidding with them, and entirely legal. Ozzy can price the whole scheme from two conversations.
- The maintenance route. There is a physical access point, and it is inside a section that is settling. See DARK TRANSIT p.82.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Nine people who have each put in more than they can afford. They are not criminals, they have never done this before, and they have brought a typed letter to a crime, which is either touching or a liability.
Sealed. Two of the nine have already been approached by the consortium with a buyout and are here to be seen participating, so that when the sabotage happens they are above suspicion and their competitors are not. They are not villains either. They are just further along.
1 If the table's Cas is absent, give the interlock discovery to whoever has the highest TACT and let them find it one scene later. The contract must not be runnable without somebody noticing.
MB-01 · 84
Tunnels
The Truth Sealed
Six hours of held-state ventilation in Sections 4 through 9 is survivable in winter and lethal in a heat inversion, and Lost Angeles is in one. Nobody in the contract knows this except whoever wrote the interlock spec. The hauliers are asking for a favour that will kill people in a tunnel they themselves drive, and the crew are the only people in the chain with the expertise to notice.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · 23:00 to 05:00. 0–6, one per hour. The job is a six-hour hold, and the contract is what the crew does with the hours.
Second · The Inversion. 0–4, hidden. The Warden tracks air quality privately. At 4 the first haulier crew in Section 6 stops answering the radio.
Tail · The Two. The two bought-out signatories need this to be traceable. They will leave something behind if nobody is watching them.
Leverage Sealed
Cas · reads the interlock spec and refuses the job on the spot, out loud, in front of nine desperate clients. The whole contract turns on whether the table lets her.
The ventilation itself · can be manually forced open at three points, which turns a six-hour blindness into a six-hour blindness that nobody dies in, and takes the entire crew all night.
The consortium's contract · the log purchase agreement is a document, and documents can go to a regulator, which is slower, legal, and works.
Opposition Sealed
The consortium · not present, not violent, and winning. They are buying data from a public utility at a fair price and there is nothing to punch.
The clients · will beg. They have already paid. When the crew explains the interlocks, at least three of the nine will say do it anyway, and one of them will be right that they have no other option.
The Turn Sealed
Land it the moment Cas finishes reading the spec. The contract stops being a sabotage job and becomes a negotiation with nine people about whether their livelihoods are worth an unknown number of strangers, and the crew has to run that negotiation in a room where everyone is already crying.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | During the six hours |
|---|---|
| 1 | A haulier crew enters Section 6 anyway. Their radio goes quiet at hour four. |
| 2 | The two bought-out signatories plant evidence pointing at the other seven. |
| 3 | The manual vents work, and holding them open costs the crew the entire six hours and the whole fee. |
| 4 | Monitor Central sends the survey team from DARK TRANSIT p.82 into the dark section. They do not know the grid is down. |
| 5 | The consortium offers the crew triple to leave the grid alone. In writing. Which is a document. |
| 6 | The inversion breaks early. Nobody dies. Nobody ever finds out how close it was, including the crew. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Grid down, vents forced open, nobody hurt | +3 / +1 · the hardest possible night and the right one |
| Grid down as briefed | +4 / −3 · people died in a tunnel and nine clients know who did it |
| Refused, took the regulator route instead | +1 / +2 · slower, legal, and two of the nine still fold |
| Refused outright | +0 / −1 · somebody else takes it in a fortnight and does not read the spec |
| Took the consortium's money | +0 / −2 · the nine lose everything and the crew has 33,000 credits |
Pay: 11,000 cr pooled from people who cannot afford it, and the crew should think hard about taking it. Non-money: nine haulage operators who between them can move anything, anywhere, off the books, forever.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // —
nothing was posted. E1.
CAS the fans are on the same bus. read it. READ IT.
— —
— —
The Not-LineNot a sabotage caper. It is a contract where the crew are the only people qualified to notice that a sympathetic request is a mass-casualty event, and the entire difficulty is social: convincing nine desperate people of something they do not want to be true.
ConnectionsC10 DARK TRANSIT the same firmware, the other side ·
C12 WHAT THE TUNNEL KEEPS ·
CAS the scene where she refuses ·
HEAT thresholds 6 and above
85 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 12 · MUSK TUNNELS
WHAT THE TUNNEL KEEPSA cache in a dead section. The owner is not dead.
RB:5
EXPOSURE E2 · QUIET. THEO FILMS IT AND SITS ON IT.RETRIEVE
Section 11 has been dead to the grid since before the upgrade and will be dead after it. There is a cache in it. It has been there eleven years. I know what is in it and I am not going to tell you.
Bring it out and I will tell you one true thing about yourselves that none of you know and one of you has been paying somebody else to find out.
— Frequency. The signal was sent to five devices simultaneously, which is itself the message.
The Situation Open
Section 11 was sealed after a collapse eleven years ago and never reopened. It is dead to the grid, dead to the maps, and reachable through a maintenance shaft that everybody in the tunnels knows about and nobody uses.
Frequency does not hire people. Frequency sells information and has never once needed a crew. The fact that this offer exists at all is the loudest thing in the contract, and every member of the crew has independently worked out which of them the fee is aimed at.
Objectives Open
Primary · Recover the cache from Section 11. Say it plain at the table: Frequency is paying in a secret, and secrets are the only currency that hurts everyone at the table at once.
Secondary · Work out why Frequency wants it now, eleven years late.
The Leads Open
- The shaft. Known, unused, and structurally the reason it is unused.
- The collapse. Public record, eleven years old, four dead, and the names are available to anyone who looks. One of them is not dead.
- Frequency. Will answer questions before the job at the usual price, which is a true thing about the asker.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Signal pirate, Center Point, best-informed person in this book, and entirely straightforward: the fee is a fact, the fact is real, and it will be delivered.
Sealed. Frequency is being squeezed. Somebody with more reach has worked out where the broadcasts come from, and the cache contains the only leverage Frequency has ever had over them. This is not a job. It is Frequency asking for help in the only grammar they have.
MB-01 · 86
Tunnels
The Truth Sealed
The cache belongs to Ivo Marun, who was recorded as the fourth casualty of the collapse and who walked out of Section 11 through a route that is not on any map and has been living four districts away under a name he bought. The cache is his whole life: documents, currency, and the reason he needed to stop being himself. He has been watching the shaft for eleven years.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Section. 0–4. Section 11 is not stable. Ticks each scene inside. At 4 something gives, and the way the crew came in is not the way they leave.
Second · Marun. 0–3. He knows within an hour of anyone entering. At 3 he is at the shaft head, and he is not armed, and he is not leaving.
Tail · Frequency's squeeze. Whoever is closing on Frequency is on a schedule the crew cannot see and will not miss.
Leverage Sealed
The casualty list · four names, three graves. Ozzy finds this in an afternoon and cannot stop talking about it.
Theo's receiver · Section 11 is dead to the grid but not to everything. Something down there is still transmitting on a Protectorate band and only one person on this crew can hear it.
Marun himself · can be found before the job rather than after it, which turns a recovery into a negotiation and is the better contract.
Opposition Sealed
Ivo Marun · fifty-eight, unarmed, and has spent eleven years preparing for exactly this evening. He does not want to hurt anybody. He wants the box, and he has thought about it longer than the crew has been alive.
Section 11 · the collapse was never repaired because repairing it meant surveying it. It is the most dangerous physical space in Volume One.
The Turn Sealed
Land it when the crew opens the cache — or when Marun tells them what is in it, which is better. It is not treasure. It is proof of a thing Frequency did, kept by a man who survived it, and Frequency has spent eleven years hoping he was actually dead.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | At the shaft head |
|---|---|
| 1 | Marun is waiting, unarmed, and asks them not to hand it over. He explains why. He is right. |
| 2 | The section gives while the crew is inside and Marun is the only person who knows the other route. |
| 3 | Frequency arrives in person. Nobody has ever seen Frequency in person. |
| 4 | Theo's receiver resolves the Section 11 transmission and it is a distress loop that has been running for eleven years. |
| 5 | The people squeezing Frequency are already at the shaft, politely, with a vehicle. |
| 6 | The cache is empty. Marun emptied it in year three and has been guarding a box of paper ever since. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Handed it to Frequency | +2 / +1 · you get the fact. It is true and it is bad. |
| Gave it to Marun | +3 / +0 · Frequency is finished within a month, and never says a word about it |
| Destroyed it | +2 / +1 · both of them survive and neither forgives you |
| Kept it | +4 / +0 · you now hold leverage over the best-informed person in Lost Angeles |
| Refused the job | +0 / +0 · Frequency stops answering, permanently, and the crew loses their best source |
Pay: one true fact about the crew, delivered whatever they decide. The Warden chooses which wound it opens, from the five on the File pages, and it should be the one the table has been circling.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/REC/009
eleven years of a room with no light in it.
@tunnelrat_88 what was in the box
WARRANTY VOID a man
WARRANTY VOID a man
The Not-LineNot a dungeon crawl and not a treasure hunt. It is a contract where the payment is the danger, and where the correct play is probably to find the opposition before the objective and talk to him.
ConnectionsC10 DARK TRANSIT the dead sections ·
FREQUENCY the price, and who pays it ·
THEO_ASHE the receiver, and what it hears ·
THE_ORBIT
87 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 13 · MUSK TUNNELS
ONE-WAY FAREMove the crates. The passenger comes with them.
RB:3
EXPOSURE E2 · QUIETDELIVER › EXTRACT
6 crates + 1 passenger. Barricadia to Low Coast. Overnight. Passenger travels with the load, not with you. Passenger does not get out at either end where anyone can see.
Fare paid on delivery by the passenger. Crates paid by me now.
— chalked, then half rubbed out, then chalked again in a different hand.
The Situation Open
Six crates of legitimate haulage and one person who has paid to travel inside the load. It is a routine arrangement in the tunnels and everybody involved has done it before, and the only unusual thing about this run is that the passenger is paying more than the freight is worth.
The passenger will not give a name, will not be photographed, and has asked twice whether the crew films their work.
Objectives Open
Primary · Six crates and one passenger from Barricadia to the Low Coast, overnight, nobody seen at either end. Say it plain at the table: it is a simple run and the passenger is the contract.
Secondary · Do not open the crates. Seriously. The crates are fine.
The Leads Open
- The passenger. Forty-ish, exhausted, well-dressed under a bad coat, and carrying a case they will not put down even to sleep.
- The fare. Paid on delivery. Nobody who is running pays on delivery unless somebody at the far end is holding the money.
- The crates. Genuinely legitimate. Bonded, sealed, boring, and the manifest matches. This is the one honest thing in the contract.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. A haulage operator with six crates and a margin problem, who is grateful, straightforward and slightly too keen for the crew to take the passenger as well.
Sealed. The client does not know who the passenger is. They were paid a flat fee to attach a person to a legitimate load, and they took it, and they have been quietly sick about it for two days.
MB-01 · 88
Tunnels
The Truth Sealed
The passenger is Ilke Vantroyen, the assessor who filed recovery orders on eleven Barricadia accounts last quarter, two of them Dr. Silk's patients. She is defecting, and the case she will not put down holds enough of her employer's files to end a recovery contractor's licence. If the crew place the face before the Low Coast, they will want to leave her in a tunnel.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · Dawn. 0–4. The run has to finish in the dark at both ends. At 4 the Low Coast end is in daylight and the passenger cannot leave the vehicle.
Second · Recognition. 0–3. Ticks whenever the passenger is seen properly, spoken to at length, or filmed. At 3 somebody on the crew places the face.
Tail · The Far End. Whoever is holding the fare at the Low Coast is not a friend of hers. They are the buyer for the drive.
Leverage Sealed
The case · she will not open it, and will describe the contents accurately if asked directly and kindly, which nobody expects to work.
Dr. Silk · can name a recovery order in one call, and will, and then has to decide something herself.
The buyer · at the far end holding the fare, expecting a courier rather than a defector, and unaware she copied more than they paid for.
Opposition Sealed
Nobody, for two hours · the opposition here is the crew's own recognition, arriving late, in a moving vehicle, with nowhere to put the argument.
The buyer's people · two, professional, and willing to take the case off a courier who has developed second thoughts.
The Turn Sealed
Land it when somebody recognises her, in the middle of the run, in a confined space, at speed. She filed on people the crew has met. She also carries the only evidence that would stop the next eleven. Both are true and neither cancels the other.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | At the Low Coast end |
|---|---|
| 1 | The buyer is a recovery contractor and intends to bury the drive, not use it. |
| 2 | She asks the crew to take the drive and leave her. She has already decided she does not get out of this. |
| 3 | One of Dr. Silk's patients is waiting at the far end. Somebody told them. |
| 4 | The crates are searched by people who were not looking for her. |
| 5 | She offers the drive as the fare. It is worth more than this whole cluster. |
| 6 | Dawn. Nobody leaves the vehicle for eleven hours, and the argument finishes in it. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Delivered her as contracted | +1 / +0 · the drive is buried; eleven more orders file next quarter |
| Took the drive, delivered her | +3 / +1 · she knew you would, and is fine with it, which is worse |
| Took the drive to Dr. Silk | +3 / +4 · Barricadia gets a year of warning |
| Left her in a tunnel | +1 / −2 · she is found, she talks, and she names you |
| Drove her out instead | +4 / +2 · a defecting assessor now lives somewhere, and it has to be somewhere |
Pay: 2,400 cr for the crates, and a fare the crew may not want to collect. Non-money: the drive, which is a Volume Two asset disguised as a Band 3 payday.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/016
"six crates. no passenger. that's the whole clip."
@lowcoast_night six? i counted seven
WARRANTY VOID count again
WARRANTY VOID count again
The Not-LineNot an escort and not a betrayal. It is a two-hour drive in which the crew work out who is in the back, and the whole contract is what they do in a moving vehicle with no room to walk away from each other.
ConnectionsC31 REPOSSESSION the orders she filed ·
DR_SILK two of her patients ·
BODY_ECONOMY what an assessor is ·
C26 SLACK WATER the Low Coast end
89 · MB-01
The Jobs
Cluster
THE RAZECratered ground where the city put the things it did not want to look at. Something has been tidying it for thirty years.
Half industrial ruin, half whatever grew back. People live along the north edge because the rent is nothing and the ground is free, and salvage crews work the craters, and nobody official has surveyed any of it since the forties.
A private remediation contract cleared this ground in the forties and was abandoned mid-schedule when somebody deleted a line item. The machines were never decommissioned. They are still working.
Who runs it
Petrina, at the scrap gate · twenty years buying salvage off this ground and the closest thing the Raze has to an institution.
The co-operative · about ninety people farming remediated crater ground, unlicensed because nobody can hold title to the Raze.
The schedule · nineteen surviving reclamation units running a contamination protocol on a grid that stopped meaning anything thirty years ago.
What it costs to be here
Tyres, and patience. The ground eats undercarriages, the water table moves on a timetable everyone local knows, and nothing out here is where the map says it is.
Contracts in this cluster
GROUND TRUTH p.92 · THE CRATER LOT p.94 · BURN NOTICE p.96 · WHAT GREW BACK p.98
MB-01 · 90
RAZE
ON THE STREET RIGHT NOW Open
| d10 | What is happening as the crew arrives |
|---|---|
| 1 | A drone unit is working a treeline, slowly, and does not react to being watched. |
| 2 | A crater lot has two salvage crews in it and one deadline. |
| 3 | The water table comes up on Thursday and everybody is working late. |
| 4 | Somebody is burning something at the industrial edge and the smoke is the wrong colour. |
| 5 | A harvest is moving. Three trucks, the same three trucks, at the same hour. |
| 6 | A household on the north edge has lost another dog and has stopped reporting it. |
| 7 | A survey stake has been driven into ground nobody has surveyed in thirty years. |
| 8 | Children are playing on a machine that is dormant and charging. |
| 9 | The co-op's kitchen is feeding forty people and four of them are strangers. |
| 10 | Nothing at all, for two hours, which out here is a warning. |
Rumours
| d6 | What people are saying |
|---|---|
| 1 | It takes animals and it does not eat them, and nobody will say what that means. |
| 2 | The cheap produce on the Barricadia stalls comes from out here and it is better than the licensed stuff. |
| 3 | A High Top family's name is on the machines and they have spent thirty years not mentioning it. |
| 4 | The line is moving forty metres a week and it is going to reach a house. |
| 5 | Petrina's father told her which ground never to walk on and she has never repeated it. |
| 6 | There is a decommissioning code. Somebody has it. |
Two contacts
Petrina, scrap gate · pays cash, knows every crater, and will tell the crew the truth if they tell her one first.
The co-operative · ninety people who will talk rather than run, because ninety people cannot run.
The Raze cluster is one situation told four ways. GROUND TRUTH p.92 explains the machines, WHAT GREW BACK p.98 explains the ground, THE VIEW p.112 explains who stopped paying, and THE CRATER LOT p.94 is the funny one. Any order works.
91 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 14 · THE RAZE
GROUND TRUTHSomething is taking dogs off Ring Road. Clear it.
RB:3
EXPOSURE E3 · CUT AND POSTEDCLEAR › TRACE
Eleven dogs in six weeks off the north edge. Two goats. Nobody has seen it. It takes them at the treeline and there is never blood on the ground, which is the part that is wrong.
We have all put in. There is also a set of tyres, barely run, which we are told matters to one of you.
— four households and Petrina at the scrap gate, who wrote it and who signed for everyone.
The Situation Open
The Raze is cratered ground on the city's edge, half industrial ruin and half whatever has grown back, and it is where Lost Angeles puts the things it does not want to look at. People live along its north edge because the rent is nothing and the ground is free.
Something has been taking animals at the treeline for six weeks. No blood, no drag marks, no remains. The households have decided it is a predator. Everyone who has looked at the ground knows it is not moving like a predator, and nobody has said so out loud because the alternative is worse.
Objectives Open
Primary · Stop whatever is taking animals off the north edge. Say it plain at the table: they are being hired to kill an animal and there is no animal.
Secondary · Establish what the ground is doing, because the ground is doing something.
The Leads Open
- The treeline. Eleven sites in six weeks, and Cas will map them in an evening and find they are not scattered. They are a line, moving at about forty metres a week.
- No blood. Nothing is being eaten here. Something is being taken, which is a completely different verb.
- Petrina's scrap gate. She has been buying salvage off the Raze for twenty years and she has stopped buying from the north edge. She will not say why until she trusts the crew.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Four households who cannot afford this and a scrap dealer who can, and who quietly covered most of the fee. They want a body brought back so people can stop being frightened.
Sealed. Petrina already knows roughly what it is, because her father dealt salvage here in the fifties and told her which ground never to walk on. She is not withholding it to be mysterious. She is withholding it because saying it out loud commits her to a version of this place she has spent twenty years not believing.
MB-01 · 92
The Raze
The Truth Sealed
Not a predator. A reclamation drone swarm — eleven surviving units of a pre-Upheaval remediation system, still running a contamination protocol on a grid that stopped meaning anything thirty years ago. They remove biomass along a survey line because a decommissioned database says the line is hot. Slow, patient, nearly silent. They do not distinguish between a goat and a person. They have simply not reached a person yet.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Line. 0–4. Forty metres a week. At 3 it reaches the first occupied structure; at 4, a house with people asleep in it.
Second · The Swarm. 0–3. Ticks per unit destroyed. The system reallocates: fewer units, same schedule, faster movement each.
Tail · The Story. The north edge believes it is an animal. Every day spent learning otherwise is a day somebody sets a snare or sends a child to check the goats.
Leverage Sealed
Petrina · twenty years of salvage knowledge and one thing her father told her. She gives it up if the crew tells her the truth first.
A unit, intact · Cas reads its schedule off it, which turns a hunt into a logistics problem with a map.
The database · the decommissioned survey still exists somewhere. Finding it is another contract; they do not need it tonight.
Opposition Sealed
The swarm · eleven units, unarmed, non-hostile, and utterly indifferent. They will remove a crew member with the same procedure they used on a goat. Nothing here can be intimidated, negotiated with, or made to stop.
The households · want a body. A crew that comes back with a drone chassis and an explanation has, from their point of view, failed.
The Turn Sealed
Land it when Cas reads a unit's schedule and finds the line runs through the north edge, through Petrina's gate, and out the far side — eleven weeks from a district of four thousand people. The contract stops being about eleven dogs.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | On the line |
|---|---|
| 1 | A unit is mid-procedure on a dog when the crew arrives. It does not stop and it does not hurry. |
| 2 | There are not eleven units. There are nineteen; eight are dormant and charging. |
| 3 | Destroying units accelerates the rest. The line moves a week's distance in a night. |
| 4 | Petrina walks out to the treeline herself, at night, to find out if her father was right. |
| 5 | A child from the north edge has been following the crew for an hour. |
| 6 | One unit's schedule holds a decommissioning code. It can be told to stop, and it takes all night. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Stopped the schedule properly | +0 / +4 · the north edge is safe for good and nobody understands what you did |
| Destroyed the units | +1 / +3 · it works for four months. Volume Two opens with a line moving faster. |
| Brought back a chassis and an explanation | +0 / +1 · half the clients are relieved and half feel cheated |
| Posted it as a monster hunt | +1 / +4 · enormous clip. The Raze fills with people looking for a creature. |
| Left it | +0 / −3 · the line reaches a house in three weeks and everyone knows you were asked |
Pay: 1,800 cr and a set of barely-run tyres Danka will value above the credits. Non-money: Petrina, the north edge, and the first hard proof the Raze is running something nobody switched off.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/018
"it's not a thing. it's a schedule."
@razeedge so what do we tell the kids
WARRANTY VOID tell them it's a machine. machines you can turn off.
WARRANTY VOID tell them it's a machine. machines you can turn off.
The Not-LineNot a monster hunt, although the clients think it is and the clip will look like one. It is a contract about an automated process nobody remembers commissioning, which is the Raze's whole thesis, and the horror is that it is not malicious.
ConnectionsC17 WHAT GREW BACK the same survey, farmed ·
C15 THE CRATER LOT Petrina's gate ·
CAS reading the schedule ·
C10 DARK TRANSIT the Raze as an exit
93 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 15 · THE RAZE
THE CRATER LOTStrip the vehicle before the water table comes up. Someone else is already in it.
RB:2
EXPOSURE E4 · PUBLIC AND EXTREMELY FUNNYRETRIEVE
Interceptor-pattern chassis, north crater, went in during the March rains and has been dry since. Water table comes up Thursday and after that it is nobody's.
Seven hundred flat or forty percent of weight, your choice, and I will know if you weigh it somewhere else first.
— Petrina. The bolt was unnecessary and she used it anyway.
The Situation Open
A crater in the north Raze with a genuinely good vehicle chassis in the bottom of it, forty percent buried, and a water table that comes up on a schedule everybody local knows. It is a straightforward salvage job with a deadline, which is the most honest contract in this book.
It is also the single most desirable object Danka has been within a hundred metres of this year, and Ozzy has already priced it out loud, twice, in front of the client.
Objectives Open
Primary · Get the chassis, or the valuable parts of it, out of the crater before Thursday. Say it plain at the table: this is a heist against mud and a clock.
Secondary · Come back with all five crew members and no new enemies. This is harder than it sounds.
The Leads Open
- The crater. Steep, soft on three sides, and one approach that will take a vehicle if the driver is very good and slightly unwell.
- The water table. Thursday is not a guess. Petrina has watched this ground for twenty years and she is never wrong by more than a day.
- The other lot. Somebody has been down there. There are fresh cuts on the chassis and a tarpaulin that is not weathered.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Petrina, twenty years at the scrap gate, pays cash, never haggles twice, and offered the crew the percentage option because she thinks they will take the flat fee and she is being fair about it.
Sealed. She knows about the other salvage crew. She has posted this to two crews on purpose, because a contested lot gets stripped faster than an uncontested one, and Thursday is Thursday.
MB-01 · 94
The Raze
The Truth Sealed
The Interceptor chassis is not abandoned salvage. It went into the crater during the March rains with a Jaguario runner in it, and the runner walked away and the vehicle did not, and Jaguario have not claimed it because claiming it means explaining what it was doing on the north Raze in March. The moment it comes out of the ground where people can see it, that becomes a question with an audience.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · Thursday. 0–4. Ticks per hour of work and per complication. At 4 the water comes up and the lot is gone.
Second · The Other Crew. 0–3. Four of them, competent, and they were here first. At 3 they stop being polite about it.
Tail · The Plate. There is a chassis number under the mud. The Warden knows what it is. Nobody has looked yet.
Leverage Sealed
Danka · can get a vehicle to the crater floor on the one soft approach, and everyone including her thinks this is a bad idea.
The other crew · can be worked with. Two crews and one Thursday is a better arithmetic than either of them has alone, and neither will suggest it first.
Petrina's weighbridge · the percentage option is genuinely better than the flat fee and Ozzy will calculate this at volume.
Opposition Sealed
The other salvage crew · four people from the Low Coast, hungry, unarmed, and here first. Nobody in this contract wants a fight and the mud will start one anyway.
The ground · soft on three sides, and everything the crew brings down there has to come back up.
The Turn Sealed
Land it when somebody clears the mud off the chassis number. It is a bad number. The correct play stops being get the vehicle out and becomes get the vehicle out before anyone else reads that, and the crew now has two hours and a rival crew who are about to have the same realisation.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | In the crater |
|---|---|
| 1 | The water comes up early. Everyone finds out at the same moment, at the bottom of a crater. |
| 2 | The other crew's vehicle goes over on the soft side with two of them under it. |
| 3 | A Jaguario runner arrives, alone, and does not want the chassis. He wants the plate. |
| 4 | The chassis is better than advertised. Danka stops being a professional. |
| 5 | One of the drone units from GROUND TRUTH p.92 arrives on schedule and begins removing biomass from a crater with eight people in it. |
| 6 | Theo's footage of the recovery is spectacular and the plate is legible in three frames of it. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Chassis out, plate destroyed | +0 / +3 · a clean payday and a joke the district repeats for a month |
| Chassis out, plate legible | +3 / +3 · Jaguario now has a reason to look at this crew |
| Split it with the other crew | +0 / +4 · the Low Coast owes you, and that pays out in SLACK WATER p.122 |
| Lost it to the water | +0 / +1 · Petrina pays a kill fee and tells the story for years |
| Somebody got hurt in the mud | +1 / −1 · it was avoidable and everyone watching knows it |
Pay: 700 cr flat, or forty percent of weight, which is between 400 and 2,600 depending on how much of it comes up. Non-money: whatever Danka quietly keeps, and Petrina, who is the Raze's only real institution.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/020
"we got a car out of a hole. that's it. that's the video."
@petrina_scrap forty percent of that is MY forty percent
WARRANTY VOID we know. we counted.
WARRANTY VOID we know. we counted.
The Not-LineNot a race and not a fight. It is a comedy about mud, a deadline everybody agrees on, and a chassis number nobody has thought to clean, and it should be the funniest ninety minutes in the book right up until somebody wipes the plate.
ConnectionsC14 GROUND TRUTH the schedule, still running ·
C26 SLACK WATER the other crew, repaid ·
DANKA_IVEL ·
C18 RENTAL SOUND where the chassis ends up
95 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 16 · THE RAZE
BURN NOTICEBurn the depot. The client does not care about the depot.
RB:5
EXPOSURE E1 · DARKBREAK
A bonded storage depot on the Raze industrial edge. Empty of anything anyone will miss. I need it to have burned, thoroughly, in a way that reads as electrical, before the end of the month.
Twenty-six thousand. I am not going to explain, and if you take this you should not ask, and I am telling you that because you are going to ask.
— she did not give a name and the crew already know her employer's logo from four other contracts.
The Situation Open
A bonded depot on the Raze edge: concrete, forty years old, half-empty, and insured. An adjuster is offering more than the crew has ever been paid to make it burn convincingly, and is being unusually honest about the fact that she will not explain why.
It is the cleanest, best-paid, most professional job in the cluster and it is arson for an insurer, and everyone at the table will feel the shape of that immediately.
Objectives Open
Primary · Burn the depot before the end of the month in a way that reads as electrical. Say it plain at the table: the money is real, the client is competent, and nobody will get hurt if this is done properly.
Secondary · Find out what is in the building, because empty of anything anyone will miss is a sentence with a shape.
The Leads Open
- The bond. Bonded storage has a manifest and the manifest is lodged. Cas can pull it. It lists eleven pallets of nothing very much.
- The eleven pallets. They are there. They are exactly as described. The building has forty more that are not on the manifest.
- The adjuster. She has been driving out to look at this building at night for three weeks, alone, which is not what an adjuster does.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Mid-forties, precise, tired, and completely in control of the conversation. She has done the risk assessment on hiring this crew and she will say so if asked.
Sealed. She is not defrauding her employer. She is destroying her employer's evidence — the depot holds recovered augment hardware from four years of repossessions, stored off-manifest, awaiting resale, and its existence would end the recovery contractor her firm underwrites. She has decided that burning it is the only version of this that ends with nobody being prosecuted and nobody being killed, and she has thought about it longer than the crew will.
1 This is the volume's largest fee and its darkest contract, and the two facts are the same fact. If the table takes it and does not look inside, that is a legitimate outcome and the Warden should let it stand.
MB-01 · 96
The Raze
The Truth Sealed
The forty off-manifest pallets are stripped augments, catalogued by account, some of them belonging to people still alive in Barricadia. Burning the depot destroys the only physical record of four years of recovery — and also the only chance any of those people have of ever getting their hardware back, which is not a chance, but is not nothing either.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · End of month. 0–4. Nine days. At 4 the adjuster's window closes and she does it herself, badly, and she is not a professional.
Second · The Night Watch. 0–3. One man, sixty-one, does a walk-through at 02:00 and again at 05:00. He has worked there eleven years.
Tail · The Catalogue. There is a paper catalogue in the office. It is the only list of names. It burns with everything else unless somebody takes it.
Leverage Sealed
The catalogue · names, lineages, dates, and what was taken. It is worth more than the fee and it is a grenade.
Dr. Silk · will recognise names on it inside a minute and will not be able to unread them.
The night watchman · knows exactly what is in the building. He has known for years. Nobody has ever asked him.
Opposition Sealed
Nobody, physically · one elderly watchman and a fence. This contract has no fight in it at all and that is the design.
The recovery contractor · not present, not reachable, and will investigate the fire with real resources afterwards. The opposition in this contract arrives after the job.
The Turn Sealed
Land it in the racking, when somebody reads a pallet label aloud and it is a name — a person, a lineage, a date, and a serial. Forty pallets. The crew is standing inside the inventory of everything Volume Two is about.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | On the night |
|---|---|
| 1 | The watchman is early and does not run, and asks them what took so long. |
| 2 | The catalogue is not paper. It is on a terminal, and the terminal is networked, and copying it is loud. |
| 3 | One pallet is labelled CASELINE. |
| 4 | The adjuster is in the building. She came to do it herself and lost her nerve at the door. |
| 5 | The fire reads as electrical perfectly and the building does not burn, because concrete does not burn, and now there is a scorched depot full of evidence. |
| 6 | Somebody outside is photographing the crew arriving. Not police. A rival. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Burned it, took the catalogue | +4 / +0 · paid in full, and holding the worst list in Lost Angeles |
| Burned it, catalogue destroyed | +3 / +0 · clean, professional, and four hundred people never learn what happened to them |
| Refused | +1 / +0 · she does it herself in nine days and the watchman is inside |
| Gave the catalogue to Dr. Silk | +5 / +3 · Barricadia finds out. All of it. At once. |
| Posted any of it | +6 / +4 · do not. The fallout is Volume Two and it is not survivable in this one. |
Pay: 26,000 cr, cash, staged, and it is the largest payday in this volume by a factor of two. Non-money: the catalogue, if they take it, and an adjuster who will answer a call for the rest of her career.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // —
nothing was posted. E1.
THEO i didn't film it. first time. ask me about it in six months.
— —
— —
The Not-LineNot an arson job and not a betrayal. It is a contract where the client is right, the crime is real, the money is enormous, and the only genuinely difficult decision is whether to save a list of names from a fire that has to happen anyway.
ConnectionsBODY_ECONOMY what was in those pallets ·
C04 GOOD PRESS the other register of names ·
C31 REPOSSESSION ·
CAS the pallet labelled Caseline
97 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 17 · THE RAZE
WHAT GREW BACKThe contaminated ground is producing. Somebody is harvesting it.
RB:6
EXPOSURE E2 · QUIETCLEAR › TRACE
Produce entering the Barricadia and Center Point markets at forty percent under floor price, at volume, year-round, with no declared growing site. We have tested it. It is not merely cheap. It is good, and it should not be possible.
Locate the growing operation and bring us documentation sufficient to have it closed. We will not be pursuing this through the district boards.
— a factoring house that supplies half the stalls the crew's family works.
The Situation Open
Someone is growing food on the Raze at commercial volume and selling it forty percent under the floor, and it is better than the licensed produce, and it has been on Barricadia stalls for two years including the ones the Okonkwo-Cruz family works.
A factoring house wants it shut down. Their laboratory report says the produce is clean. Their complaint is not that it is dangerous. Their complaint is that it is cheap.
Objectives Open
Primary · Find the growing operation and document it. Say it plain at the table: the client is a cartel and the target is feeding the district.
Secondary · Test the produce independently before you believe anybody's laboratory, including your own client's.
The Leads Open
- The stalls. Ozzy's family sells it. So does half of Barricadia. Blessing Okonkwo has been buying it for two years and has an opinion about the flavour.
- The survey line. Cas's map from GROUND TRUTH p.92 and the growing sites are the same geography, because the drone units have been clearing biomass on a grid for thirty years and cleared ground is prepared ground.
- The volume. Nobody moves this much produce without vehicles, and vehicles leave a route, and Danka has been noticing the same three trucks for a month without mentioning it.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. A factoring house, entirely legitimate, that finances half the licensed produce in two districts and is being undercut into insolvency by something it cannot find.
Sealed. Their laboratory report is honest and their motive is not. They know the produce is safe. They have known for eighteen months. They commissioned three more tests hoping for a different answer and are now buying an enforcement outcome because they could not buy a scientific one.
MB-01 · 98
The Raze
The Truth Sealed
The growing operation is the Raze co-operative: about ninety people, mostly orphanware and mostly unemployable, farming remediated crater ground that the drone units have been cleaning for three decades. It is unlicensed because licensing requires a land title and nobody can hold title to the Raze. They are not undercutting the market to be predatory. They price at forty percent under because that is what people on the north edge can pay, and the surplus is what they sell to the stalls.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Season. 0–4. A harvest is running. At 3 the co-op moves its volume and the trail goes cold for four months. At 4 the client hires somebody else.
Second · The Client's Patience. 0–3. At 3 they file a contamination complaint with Monitor Central regardless of evidence, which triggers an involuntary clearance of the ground and everyone on it.
Tail · The Drones. The survey line from GROUND TRUTH p.92 runs through the co-op's best ground and is still moving.
Leverage Sealed
Blessing Okonkwo · has bought this produce for two years and knows the woman who delivers it, and will introduce the crew, and will want to know why they are asking.
The lab report · the client's own document proves the produce is clean. Handed to a district board it destroys the complaint before it is filed.
The co-op · ninety people who will talk to the crew rather than run, because ninety people cannot run.
Opposition Sealed
The factoring house · lawyers, a filed complaint, and no physical presence whatsoever. They will never appear in a scene and they will win if ignored.
The co-op's own security · four people with agricultural tools who have been expecting this visit for two years and have agreed among themselves how it goes.
The Turn Sealed
Land it at the growing site, when the crew sees the scale: hectares of cleared crater ground, ninety people working it, children, a kitchen, a school of sorts. They were hired to document this so it could be destroyed, and the documentation is already in Theo's camera.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | At the site |
|---|---|
| 1 | The co-op offers the crew the documentation themselves. All of it. They are done hiding. |
| 2 | The drone line reaches the best field during the visit and begins removing the crop. |
| 3 | The client has already filed. Monitor Central clearance is nine days out and nobody told the crew. |
| 4 | A co-op member recognises Cas's lineage markers and asks, in front of everyone, whether she is orphanware too. |
| 5 | Ozzy's mother is at the site. She has been coming for a year. She buys direct. |
| 6 | The client offers double for footage of anything unsafe, and there is nothing unsafe, and they know that. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Delivered the documentation | +2 / −5 · 38,000 credits and ninety people cleared off the Raze. Barricadia works out who did it. |
| Refused and returned the brief | +1 / +1 · the client hires the next crew within a month |
| Used the client's own lab report against them | +3 / +4 · the complaint dies. The factoring house does not forget. |
| Got the co-op a title | +3 / +5 · the hardest outcome in Volume One and it takes two sessions |
| Stopped the drone line for them | +1 / +4 · not what anyone hired you for, and the only thing they actually needed |
Pay: 38,000 cr on delivery of proof, and the crew should read the fallout table before deciding how they feel about that number. Non-money: ninety people, a food supply, and a factoring house that now knows the crew's name.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/023
"it grew back. that's the whole crime."
@barricadia_stalls wait the cheap stuff is the GOOD stuff??
WARRANTY VOID it always was
WARRANTY VOID it always was
The Not-LineNot an investigation into a poisoning and not a raid. The produce is clean, the growers are decent, the client is legitimate, and the crew are being paid a fortune to be the enforcement arm of a price floor.
ConnectionsC14 GROUND TRUTH the same survey line ·
C15 THE CRATER LOT Petrina buys from them ·
THE_ORBIT Blessing Okonkwo ·
C32 THE WHOLE QUEUE
99 · MB-01
The Jobs
Cluster
RING ROADA racing circuit that is also a road that is also where everybody's paperwork ends up.
The Ring is a raid-race circuit and a working road at the same time, and the people who race it earn on it. A vehicle here is not a possession; it is a livelihood, and every dispute in this cluster is ultimately about a title.
It is also thirty cars at speed on any given night, which is the best moving cover in Lost Angeles, and more than one institution has noticed.
Who runs it
The independents · eleven jockeys who between them decide what the Ring is, and who have never organised and would be formidable if they did.
Kavast · has been posting purses and taking an interest in the tarmac itself, which nobody has thought to question.
The finance houses · hold paper on half the vehicles running tonight and are entirely lawful about it.
What it costs to be here
A car, and a reputation for driving it well. The Ring does not care where anyone is from and cares enormously how they take the seawall cut.
Contracts in this cluster
RENTAL SOUND p.102 · THE LONG WAY p.104 · PACK FREQUENCY p.106 · TITLE AND DEED p.108
MB-01 · 100
ROAD
ON THE STREET RIGHT NOW Open
| d10 | What is happening as the crew arrives |
|---|---|
| 1 | A vehicle has been taken off somebody at the cut and the whole Ring knows whose. |
| 2 | Kavast are broadcasting an open purse for the sixth day running. |
| 3 | A recovery firm is parked at the Ring Road cut, waiting, legally. |
| 4 | A new driver, first season, very good, and nobody knows who backs them. |
| 5 | A section has been resurfaced and no one asked for it to be. |
| 6 | Thirty cars on the grid and one of them is not racing. |
| 7 | Somebody is filming the mid-field instead of the leaders. |
| 8 | A jockey is asking, publicly, for help, in the crew's replies. |
| 9 | Two crews who have history are gridded together. |
| 10 | It is dry, it is dark, and everyone is going to go too fast. |
Rumours
| d6 | What people are saying |
|---|---|
| 1 | Kavast do not want to win the race. They want the road. |
| 2 | Half the vehicles out here are running on titles that would not survive an afternoon in an office. |
| 3 | Somebody is being paid to arrive ninety minutes late, once a week, and nobody knows why. |
| 4 | The recovery firms have started taking cars from the cut directly, which used to be off limits. |
| 5 | There is a driver on the Ring who has been in Service and came back. |
| 6 | The Salt Wake committee has known about the four-minute car for months. |
Two contacts
The independents · eleven jockeys who will back the Ring against outsiders if somebody asks them properly, and nobody ever has.
A finance house compliance desk · staffed by people whose entire job is not being sued, and reachable by anybody holding a document.
Every contract in this cluster is a question about who owns something. TITLE AND DEED p.108 is the quietest and the worst.
101 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 18 · RING ROAD
RENTAL SOUNDGet the car back. It was not theirs either.
RB:2
EXPOSURE E4 · PUBLIC. IT IS A RACE ROAD.RUN › RETRIEVE
they took my car off me at the Ring Road cut on tuesday. four of them. i know exactly where it is and i cannot go and get it because i am one person and they are four.
i have five hundred. i know that's nothing. i also have every route on the Ring memorised and a favour is a favour.
— posted publicly, in the crew's replies, where nine thousand people could read it.
The Situation Open
A jockey lost their vehicle to a four-person crew at the Ring Road cut, and instead of going to anyone who could help, they posted it into Warranty Void's replies, publicly, where the whole district watched the crew read it.
The car is thirty minutes away in a yard everyone can find. This is not a difficult contract. It is a test with an audience, and the audience is the actual client.
Objectives Open
Primary · Recover the vehicle and return it. Say it plain at the table: everybody already knows they took this job, because it was asked in public.
Secondary · Do it in a way that reads well, because nine thousand people are going to see the clip either way.
The Leads Open
- The yard. Known, unfenced, and four people are usually there. Nobody is hiding.
- The four. Not a crew. A crew's worth of people who took one car once and have not thought past that.
- The car itself. Danka will want to look at it before it is returned and this is where the contract goes wrong.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Twenty-two, broke, and out a vehicle, which on the Ring means out of a livelihood. Knows every route on the Ring Road and is offering that, correctly, as worth more than the credits.
Sealed. The car is not theirs. They have been running it for eight months on a handshake for an owner who went into Service in March and has not come out. They are not lying to the crew; they simply think of it as theirs now, because the alternative sentence is one they cannot say.
MB-01 · 102
Ring Road
The Truth Sealed
The four who took it did so because one of them is the sister of the man in Service, and as far as she is concerned the jockey has been driving her brother's car around the Ring for eight months while he sits in a facility having his hardware assessed. She is not a thief. She is next of kin with no legal standing whatsoever, which is the entire body economy in one vehicle.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Clip. 0–3. It is already public. At 3 the district has decided what happened without the crew's input, and whatever it decided is now true.
Second · The Yard. 0–3. The four know the crew is coming, because everyone does. At 3 they move the car somewhere the crew will have to actually work for it.
Tail · Danka. She will open the bonnet. She will find the title paperwork in the door pocket, because that is where people keep it.
Leverage Sealed
The audience · nine thousand people watching means neither side can behave badly, which is the crew's biggest advantage and their biggest constraint.
The door pocket · the registration is in it, and it names a third person, and it takes about four seconds to change this contract.
Ozzy · can find out who is in Service and on what account in one afternoon of asking around a market.
Opposition Sealed
The four · not fighters, not organised, and entirely in the right by every standard except the legal one. They will not swing first and they will not give the car back.
The clip · whatever the crew does becomes the story. There is no dark option in this contract.
The Turn Sealed
Land it on the registration. The name in the door pocket is neither the client's nor the sister's, and once it is read out loud in a yard in front of two parties and a camera, the contract stops being about a car.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | At the yard |
|---|---|
| 1 | The sister explains, in one sentence, and the client cannot answer it. |
| 2 | The client arrives, uninvited, having followed the crew, and it goes badly in public. |
| 3 | The car will not start, and fixing it in the yard takes an hour with everyone standing around. |
| 4 | One of the four films the crew for their own channel. It is a better angle. |
| 5 | Someone offers to buy the car on the spot for more than either party has ever had. |
| 6 | Danka refuses to hand a car to somebody who cannot produce a title. Nobody expected this and everyone should have. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Returned it to the client | +0 / +2 · fast, clean, popular, and wrong, and the sister posts her side |
| Gave it to the sister | +0 / +1 · correct, unpopular, and the district argues about it for a month |
| Got both parties to an arrangement | +0 / +4 · the hardest ninety minutes in this cluster |
| Kept it pending the owner's release | +1 / +3 · the crew now stores a car for a man in Service |
| It became a fight | +2 / −2 · nine thousand people watched a splice crew beat up four civilians |
Pay: 500 cr and a Ring Road favour that is worth considerably more. Non-money: whichever party the crew did not choose, who now has an opinion about them, publicly.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/025
"whose car is it. nobody asked that. we asked that."
@ringroad_cut so who got it
WARRANTY VOID the guy in service. when he's out.
WARRANTY VOID the guy in service. when he's out.
The Not-LineNot a recovery job. It is a two-hour argument about ownership between two people who both lost something, conducted in front of nine thousand spectators because the client asked in public on purpose.
ConnectionsBODY_ECONOMY why the owner is in Service ·
C15 THE CRATER LOT where the chassis came from ·
CLOUT asking in public as a tactic ·
DANKA_IVEL titles, and what they mean to her
103 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 19 · RING ROAD
THE LONG WAYDeliver it late. Exactly ninety minutes late.
RB:4
EXPOSURE E2 · QUIETRUN › DELIVER
Standard parts run, Ring Road, depot to depot, one pallet. The pallet is genuinely parts and you may inspect it.
The delivery must arrive between 90 and 110 minutes after the scheduled slot. Not later. Not earlier. Ninety minutes is the number. The fee reflects the difficulty of doing something badly on purpose without it looking deliberate.
— a logistics coordinator whose name is on the depot's staff board.
The Situation Open
A pallet of legitimate parts and an enormous fee to arrive with it ninety minutes late, in a way that reads as ordinary bad luck on the Ring Road, which is the most credible thing in Lost Angeles.
The client has been honest about everything: the parts are parts, the route is a route, and the only unusual instruction is the lateness. They have not said why and have made it clear the fee is for not asking.
Objectives Open
Primary · Arrive between 90 and 110 minutes after slot, credibly late. Say it plain at the table: they are being paid nine and a half thousand credits to be bad at their job, convincingly.
Secondary · Work out what happens at the receiving depot during those ninety minutes.
The Leads Open
- The slot. Depot receiving runs to a schedule and the schedule is posted. What else is scheduled in that window is a matter of public record.
- The coordinator. Salaried, mid-thirties, and has not slept. They chose the crew because the crew are known for improvising, which means late is plausible.
- The window. Ninety minutes is not arbitrary. It is exactly the length of a shift handover.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. A logistics coordinator with a staff badge and a personal phone, paying a fee that is obviously not theirs, and doing a very poor job of appearing calm.
Sealed. The fee is not theirs. They were approached three weeks ago, they said no twice, and the third approach mentioned their daughter's clinic account. They are not a conspirator. They are being leaned on and they have decided the least harmful thing they can do is hire competent people and hope the competent people notice.
MB-01 · 104
Ring Road
The Truth Sealed
During the shift handover, the receiving depot's augment-scanning gate runs on the outgoing shift's credentials and logs nothing. A ninety-minute delay creates a documented, blameless reason for a specific vehicle to be in the receiving yard during the only unlogged window of the week — and it is not the crew's vehicle they need in there. It is the one behind them.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Window. 0–4. Ticks per delay the crew manufactures. At 4 they arrive and the window has been used, whatever they decided.
Second · The Coordinator. 0–3. They will crack. At 3 they tell the crew everything, in a car park, badly, and then they are exposed.
Tail · The Vehicle Behind. It has been three cars back since the depot. Theo has already noticed and has not said anything yet.
Leverage Sealed
The schedule · public, posted, and Cas will find the handover overlap in four minutes.
Being early · the one option nobody has considered. Arriving on time closes the window and breaks the whole arrangement without a confrontation.
The coordinator's daughter · the actual lever, and the crew can take it away by dealing with the clinic account, which costs about a third of the fee.
Opposition Sealed
The vehicle behind · two people, professional, patient, and entirely uninterested in the crew unless the crew becomes a problem.
The arrangement · whoever bought this window will buy another one. Breaking tonight costs them a week.
The Turn Sealed
Land it when somebody works out that the contract has been designed so the crew cannot fail. Late is paid. Early is paid, technically, at a penalty. The only outcome that is not paid for is the crew understanding what the delay is worth, and the fee is sized to make sure they do not bother.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | At the receiving yard |
|---|---|
| 1 | The vehicle behind pulls in while the crew is unloading, and nobody looks at anybody. |
| 2 | The coordinator is at the gate, having driven out to watch, which was not the plan. |
| 3 | The crew arrives on time and the window closes, and the vehicle behind simply drives past and away. |
| 4 | The unlogged gate is not for cargo. Somebody walks out through it. |
| 5 | The pallet is inspected at the gate and it is exactly what it says it is, and that is somehow worse. |
| 6 | Danka can make ninety minutes look like an accident, and can also make it look like a message. She has to pick. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Delivered late as briefed | +3 / +0 · paid in full, and the crew is now part of a standing arrangement |
| Delivered on time | +2 / +0 · half fee, a broken window, and somebody very calm asks for a meeting |
| Cleared the daughter's clinic account | +1 / +1 · the coordinator quits within a month and sends nothing but a note |
| Followed the vehicle behind | +5 / +0 · you now know what came through the gate and you cannot unknow it |
| Told the depot | +4 / +1 · the window closes permanently and the coordinator is fired first |
Pay: 9,500 cr for a 400-credit delivery, which is the loudest fact in the contract. Non-money: a coordinator who owes them, and knowledge of a weekly unlogged window in a scanning gate.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/027
"traffic."
@ringroad_cut ninety minutes on that route? on a tuesday?
WARRANTY VOID traffic.
WARRANTY VOID traffic.
The Not-LineNot a delivery job and not a heist. It is a contract about being paid extremely well to not be curious, and the entire test is whether the crew can afford to be.
ConnectionsBODY_ECONOMY what a scanning gate is for ·
C13 ONE-WAY FARE the other end of the same trade ·
C30 SERVICE NOTICE ·
THEO_ASHE the car three back
105 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 20 · RING ROAD
PACK FREQUENCYVroza's pack has been calling the crew out on an open channel for a week.
RB:5
EXPOSURE E5 · BROADCAST. BOTH SIDES WANT IT SEEN.RUN › TRACE
GRAVA PACK INVITES ANY UNAFFILIATED CREW OF LOST ANGELES TO A SANCTIONED DEMONSTRATION OF PACK DOCTRINE ON THE RING ROAD. PURSE: 40,000 CREDITS. NO ENTRY FEE. NO CONDITIONS.
COHESION IS NOT A STYLE. IT IS A RESULT. WE WILL DEMONSTRATE THIS AGAINST WHOEVER ATTENDS.
— broadcast on repeat for six days. The crew's channel is not named once, which is how everyone knows who it is for.
The Situation Open
Commander Ilya Vroza's Kavast pack has posted an open purse for a Ring Road demonstration and has spent a week not naming Warranty Void, which the entire district has correctly read as naming Warranty Void.
It is a recruitment advertisement with a race attached. Kavast do not need forty thousand credits' worth of publicity from beating five freelancers; they need footage of mono-type doctrine beating a splice, and they have built an event to obtain it.
Objectives Open
Primary · Decide whether to attend, and survive the decision. Say it plain at the table: not going is a legitimate strategy and it costs Clout, publicly, every day.
Secondary · If they go: find out why the purse is this large, because Kavast do not overpay for anything.
The Leads Open
- The purse. Forty thousand is four times what a Ring event pays. Ozzy will find that offensive before he finds it suspicious.
- The route. Published, sanctioned, and it runs three sections the crew know and one they do not, and the one they do not was resurfaced last month.
- The pack. Six vehicles, mono-type wolf, drilled, and genuinely excellent. This is not a contract where the opposition is secretly incompetent.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. There is no client. The purse is real, escrowed publicly, and Kavast will pay it, because paying it is cheaper than the footage is worth.
Sealed. Vroza does not expect to win the race. She expects to win the cut: Kavast public affairs has a production crew on the route, and whatever happens will be edited into a recruitment spot by Thursday. She has already commissioned the voiceover.
MB-01 · 106
Ring Road
The Truth Sealed
The resurfaced section is not resurfaced. It is instrumented — Kavast has laid a sensor strip and a comms overlay under a Ring Road section on a municipal permit, and the demonstration exists to give them a legitimate reason to run six vehicles over it at speed with everyone watching. The race is the cover. The road is the objective, and after Thursday Kavast will have a live telemetry corridor through the middle of the Ring.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Route. 0–4, one per section. At 4 the demonstration ends and the footage exists whatever the crew did.
Second · The Cut. 0–3. Kavast's production crew is filming. At 3 they have enough usable material regardless of the result.
Tail · The Strip. Hidden. Only Theo's receiver or Cas's forensics finds it, and only if somebody looks at the road instead of the race.
Leverage Sealed
Theo's receiver · in range of a Kavast comms overlay, it will catch fragments of the pack's own channel, which is an enormous and unrepeatable advantage and a security breach the crew still has not discussed.
The Ring's own crews · eleven independent jockeys who have all read the same broadcast and none of whom want a Kavast telemetry corridor on their road.
Danka · was bred by these people. She knows the doctrine from the inside and it is the only unfair advantage anyone in this contract has.
Opposition Sealed
Grava Pack · six vehicles, drilled cohesion, and a doctrine that is genuinely superior in a straight contest. They do not cheat. They do not have to.
Commander Ilya Vroza · the only person on the Ring Road who is not enjoying any of this. She is working.
The Turn Sealed
Land it mid-route, when somebody realises the pack is not racing the crew. They are running a formation pass over one section, repeatedly, at speed, and the placings do not matter to them at all.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | On the instrumented section |
|---|---|
| 1 | The crew can win the race or expose the strip. Not both. The timing makes it exclusive. |
| 2 | Vroza pulls alongside Danka and says one sentence about her litter. |
| 3 | The Ring's independent jockeys pile in uninvited and the demonstration becomes an actual race with thirty cars. |
| 4 | Kavast's production crew is filming the road, not the race, and Theo notices where the lenses are pointed. |
| 5 | The purse is paid mid-event, publicly, before the finish, which is a message the crew will take a week to decode. |
| 6 | Ozzy is on the Kavast channel. He got on it four hours ago. Nobody knows how. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Won the race | +3 / +5 · enormous, and the strip is live by Thursday |
| Exposed the strip | +6 / +4 · Kavast loses the corridor and Vroza now has a personal file |
| Both, somehow | +6 / +6 · Volume Two opens with a pack at the garage door |
| Did not attend | +0 / −3 · a week of Kavast content about a crew that would not come |
| Took the purse and said nothing | +2 / +2 · forty thousand credits and a telemetry corridor through the Ring |
Pay: 40,000 cr, publicly escrowed, paid on attendance rather than placing, which nobody notices until afterwards. Non-money: the Ring's independents, and whatever Theo's receiver caught.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/029
"cohesion is not a style. it's a road."
@grava_official RUN IT AGAIN
WARRANTY VOID check under your own tarmac
WARRANTY VOID check under your own tarmac
The Not-LineNot a race, although there is one and it is excellent. It is an infrastructure grab with a sporting event stapled to the front of it, and the crew's feud is being used as the advertising budget.
ConnectionsVROZA PACK p.150 the pack, in full ·
DANKA_IVEL bred by these people ·
THEO_ASHE the receiver, spent in public ·
C32 THE WHOLE QUEUE
107 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 21 · RING ROAD
TITLE AND DEEDCollect the debt. Bring the vehicle or bring the man.
RB:3
EXPOSURE E2 · QUIETCOLLECT
Account in arrears 14 months. Secured against one vehicle, Ring Road registered. Debtor has not disputed the debt, has not responded to eleven notices, and has not moved address.
Recover the vehicle. If the vehicle is unrecoverable, obtain a signed acknowledgement of the balance. Physical force is not authorised and will void the fee.
— a licensed finance house that does this eleven times a week and has never once been in the wrong.
The Situation Open
A fourteen-month arrears account, secured against a Ring Road vehicle, with compliant paperwork and a debtor who has not disputed anything. It is the most legally clean contract in this book and it pays fairly.
It is also the first time the crew has been hired as the sharp end of somebody else's ledger, and the fallout table is the only one in Volume One that opens with a Clout penalty printed on the card.
Objectives Open
Primary · Recover the vehicle, or obtain a signed acknowledgement of the balance. Say it plain at the table: the debt is real and the paperwork is perfect.
Secondary · Read the account history before you knock on the door. All eleven notices.
The Leads Open
- The address. He has not moved. Fourteen months of notices and he has not moved, which is not what avoidance looks like.
- The eleven notices. All delivered, none answered, and the ninth is a different template from the other ten.
- The vehicle. On the Ring most nights, working, earning, and Danka can find it by sound in an evening.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. A finance house with a licence number, compliant paperwork and a reasonable fee structure. They have done nothing wrong at any point and will say so, politely, with documents.
Sealed. The ninth notice was a settlement offer at forty percent, sent in error by a junior, and withdrawn by phone two days later. He accepted it in writing. The acceptance is in the file, unactioned, and nobody at the finance house has looked at the file in eleven months because the account is automated.
MB-01 · 108
Ring Road
The Truth Sealed
Ruben Casta accepted a settlement he was legally entitled to accept, in writing, and has been driving on the Ring for eleven months believing the matter closed. He has not answered the notices because he thinks they are an error, and he is right, and he has no idea that the automated system has been accruing interest on a balance he settled. The debt is real, the paperwork is perfect, and he does not owe it.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Fee. 0–3. The finance house wants a result this week. At 3 they reassign the recovery to a firm that does authorise physical force.
Second · The Vehicle. 0–3. He works nights on it. Every night the crew spends reading a file is a night the vehicle is out earning and easy to take.
Tail · The File. The acceptance letter exists. Nobody finds it unless somebody reads all eleven notices in order, which takes a scene and looks like nothing.
Leverage Sealed
The ninth notice · the settlement offer, on the finance house's own letterhead, in the crew's own brief.
Ruben · has kept every piece of paper. He is that kind of person. That is why he answered in writing in the first place.
The finance house's compliance desk · separate from recovery, staffed by people whose entire job is not being sued, and reachable by anyone with a document.
Opposition Sealed
Ruben Casta · forty-eight, works nights, will not fight, will not run, and will hand over the keys if the crew ask properly. He believes he is in the right and he is, and he cannot prove it without help.
The automation · the actual antagonist. There is no villain in this contract. There is a system that has not been read by a human being in eleven months.
The Turn Sealed
Land it on the ninth notice. Somebody reads all eleven because they are being thorough, finds a settlement offer in the middle of the run, and the entire moral position of the contract inverts while the crew is already parked outside his flat.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | At the door |
|---|---|
| 1 | He invites them in and produces a folder with everything in it, filed by date. |
| 2 | The vehicle is already gone. A different recovery firm took it three hours ago. |
| 3 | He signs the acknowledgement without reading it, because he trusts them, before anybody can stop him. |
| 4 | The compliance desk answers, listens, and asks the crew to put it in writing, which takes a week he does not have. |
| 5 | His daughter answers the door and knows exactly who the crew are from the channel. |
| 6 | The finance house offers double to take the vehicle tonight and stop asking questions. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Took the vehicle | +1 / −3 · full fee and ten percent, and Ruben loses a livelihood he had already paid for |
| Got the settlement honoured | +0 / +3 · no fee, three weeks of paperwork, and one man keeps his job |
| Got the signed acknowledgement | +1 / −2 · legally clean, technically correct, and the worst thing in this cluster |
| Escalated to compliance and stayed on it | +1 / +2 · half fee as a kill fee, and the finance house audits eleven other accounts |
| Walked away | +0 / −1 · reassigned within the week to a firm that is authorised |
Pay: 2,900 cr plus ten percent of recovery, and every credit of it is contingent on doing the wrong thing. Non-money: a compliance desk that now knows this crew reads files.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/031
"notice nine. read notice nine."
@ringroad_cut how many of these are wrong
WARRANTY VOID we're asking. they're not answering.
WARRANTY VOID we're asking. they're not answering.
The Not-LineNot a shakedown and not a mystery. It is a compliant, licensed, fairly-paid recovery job against a man who does not owe the money, and the only obstacle is whether anybody at the table bothers to read the paperwork they were handed.
ConnectionsC31 REPOSSESSION the same machinery, applied to a body ·
BODY_ECONOMY arrears, notices, recovery ·
C18 RENTAL SOUND titles on the Ring ·
C32 THE WHOLE QUEUE
109 · MB-01
The Jobs
Cluster
THE HIGH TOPNobody up here raises their voice. That is the entire threat model.
The High Top is money: funds, holdings, freeholds, and the people who administer them. It is not a fortress and it is not hostile. It is a set of rooms where things get decided by people who are pleasant to the crew and will remain pleasant afterwards.
There is almost no violence available in this cluster. Every contract here is won or lost in conversation, in paperwork, or in the four seconds after somebody reads a name on a document.
Who runs it
The fund · never named, never present, holds positions in four districts, and has already watched the channel for eleven months.
Private security · contracted, monitored off-site, professional, and not part of anybody's arrangement.
Hosts · individuals with houses and guest lists, most of whom are exactly what they appear to be and are being used.
What it costs to be here
An invitation, or a very good reason. The High Top is not gated; it is simply somewhere nobody arrives by accident, and a hot pink car parked in a High Top street is an event.
Contracts in this cluster
THE VIEW p.112 · CLEAN HANDS p.114 · PATRON p.116 · THE INVITATION p.118
MB-01 · 110
TOP
ON THE STREET RIGHT NOW Open
| d10 | What is happening as the crew arrives |
|---|---|
| 1 | A car has been parked outside a residence for two hours with somebody in it. |
| 2 | An evening is being held and the guest list has been augmented. |
| 3 | A courier is waiting for an answer and will wait as long as it takes. |
| 4 | Somebody's adult child is watching the street from a landing window. |
| 5 | A private security patrol is running early, which they never do. |
| 6 | A heritage review has begun asking who commissioned something in the forties. |
| 7 | An offer is being made in a room somewhere and it is generous and it is honest. |
| 8 | A household is being politely relocated and nobody has used the word eviction. |
| 9 | Somebody is having a plinth unbolted from a stair hall at four in the morning. |
| 10 | Nothing. It is very quiet. It is always very quiet. |
Rumours
| d6 | What people are saying |
|---|---|
| 1 | A fund up here has been buying the Low Coast freeholds for a decade. |
| 2 | Somebody paid for a whole evening just to get five names onto a list. |
| 3 | A family name is attached to the machines on the Raze and they are trying to lose the paperwork. |
| 4 | The recovery contractor is underwritten from up here. |
| 5 | There is a covenant that would cost somebody four hundred thousand a year and nobody can find the second copy. |
| 6 | They do not want to hire the crew. They want the crew booked. |
Two contacts
A media buyer · pleasant, professional, empowered to say yes, and increasingly aware of what she is being used for. See SIX MINUTES OF FAME p.76.
A host · who has been sponsored without quite understanding it, and who will hand over the correspondence out of embarrassment.
PATRON p.116 is the highest-Band contract most tables will play and it has no fight in it. Run it late, when the crew is broke.
111 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 22 · THE HIGH TOP
THE VIEWSteal it off his own wall. He is watching from the stairs.
RB:4
EXPOSURE E3 · CUT AND POSTED, WITH PERMISSIONLIFT
I own a thing I no longer wish to own and cannot be seen to sell, give away or destroy. I would like it stolen. Convincingly, on a night when I am at home and visibly elsewhere in the building, by people whose reputation makes the theft plausible.
I will pay you and you may keep it. My only conditions are that the security is genuinely defeated and that nobody in my household is frightened.
— an address on the High Top and a note that the gate code is included and should not be used.
The Situation Open
A High Top residence, a private security contract, and a client asking to be robbed of something he legally owns, on a night when he will be at home, with the household present and unaware.
It is a beautifully paid job with a client who has thought of everything, and the only genuinely hard part is that it has to be real: a defeated system, a plausible entry, and five people who are already famous for exactly this.
Objectives Open
Primary · Steal the object convincingly, without the household being frightened. Say it plain at the table: the client is helping, the security is not, and the household must never know.
Secondary · Find out why he cannot sell it, because a man on the High Top can sell almost anything.
The Leads Open
- The object. A pre-Upheaval survey theodolite on a plinth in the stair hall. Ugly, heavy, and worth about nine hundred credits.
- The security. Genuinely good, contracted, monitored off-site, and not in on it. Defeating it is the actual work.
- The household. A partner, two adult children, and staff. Six people who must not be alarmed and who all live in the building.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Sixty-ish, wealthy, courteous, and enjoying this more than he should. Will answer every question except the one about why.
Sealed. The theodolite was used to survey the Raze remediation grid in the forties. His father operated it. It is the only object that physically links his family name to the survey line in GROUND TRUTH p.92, and a heritage review has begun asking who commissioned the remediation and who was paid for it.
MB-01 · 112
High Top
The Truth Sealed
He is not disposing of an heirloom. He is disposing of evidence of a lie his family has told for thirty years — that the Raze remediation was a public work. It was a private contract, badly done, abandoned mid-schedule, and the machines were never decommissioned because decommissioning them was a line item somebody deleted. The drones in GROUND TRUTH p.92 are still working because his father's firm stopped paying.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Window. 0–4. The household's evening runs to a routine. At 4 somebody comes downstairs and the theft is a home invasion.
Second · The Monitor. 0–3. Off-site security responds to alarms in about nine minutes and is not part of the arrangement.
Tail · The Review. The heritage review sits in three weeks. Nobody in the crew knows this contract has a deadline that is not theirs.
Leverage Sealed
The client · will hand over floor plans, routines and the gate code, and has explicitly asked them not to use the last one.
Ozzy · can price the theodolite at a glance, will announce that it is worth nine hundred credits, and will not let it go for the rest of the session.
The plinth · has a brass plate on it with a date and a firm's name, and the client did not mention the plate.
Opposition Sealed
The security contract · professional, monitored, and entirely real. This is a genuine burglary against a genuine system, which is the point of the fee.
The household · six people, asleep or reading, none of whom deserve a fright. The difficulty of this contract is entirely about not frightening anyone.
The Turn Sealed
Land it on the brass plate. The theodolite is worth nine hundred credits and the client is paying fourteen thousand, and Ozzy will have said so out loud twice before anybody wipes the plinth and reads a name and a date that connects a High Top family to a machine that has been eating dogs on the Raze for six weeks.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | In the stair hall |
|---|---|
| 1 | A member of the household comes down for water and the crew has nine seconds to be furniture. |
| 2 | The off-site monitor calls the house phone. The client has to answer it in front of them. |
| 3 | The plinth is bolted through to a joist. It was never meant to leave. |
| 4 | The client's adult daughter is awake, has been watching from the landing, and is not frightened at all. |
| 5 | Theo's camera is running and the plate is legible, and the client asked for the theft to be posted. |
| 6 | The security contractor's patrol is early, and Danka is parked in a High Top street in a hot pink car. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Stole it clean, posted the clip | +1 / +4 · fourteen thousand credits and the best burglary the Feed has seen |
| Kept the plate and its meaning | +2 / +4 · the crew now holds the Raze's origin document |
| Frightened the household | +3 / +0 · full fee withheld, and the client is genuinely, quietly devastated |
| Gave the plate to the heritage review | +4 / +3 · the family name is in the record and the drones become somebody's legal problem |
| Sold it back to him | +0 / +2 · he pays. He is not even annoyed. He expected slightly better of them. |
Pay: 14,000 cr and a theodolite worth nine hundred. Non-money: the plate, which is the single most useful object in the Raze cluster and which the client did not know he was handing over.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/033
"we stole a nine hundred credit paperweight. do not ask what we got paid."
@hightop_watch that plinth is BOLTED. how
WARRANTY VOID joist. it's always a joist.
WARRANTY VOID joist. it's always a joist.
The Not-LineNot a caper against a mark. The client is an ally, the security is the obstacle, and the real content of the contract is a brass plate nobody was supposed to read.
ConnectionsC14 GROUND TRUTH the machines his father stopped paying for ·
C17 WHAT GREW BACK the ground they cleared ·
C08 SIX MINUTES OF FAME the same media buyer ·
C24 PATRON
113 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 23 · THE HIGH TOP
CLEAN HANDSGet the witness out before the hearing. The witness did it.
RB:6
EXPOSURE E1 · DARKEXTRACT
Protected witness, currently held under a private security arrangement on the High Top, due to give evidence at a closed hearing in nine days. Our client requires the witness removed from that arrangement and delivered to a neutral party of the witness's own choosing.
The witness is willing. The arrangement is not a prison and the people running it are not criminals. This is a contested custody of a person who has changed their mind.
— a legal firm with an address the crew can walk to and a name on the door.
The Situation Open
A witness in a closed hearing is being held in comfortable protective custody by a private security arrangement, and wants out, and has instructed lawyers, and the lawyers have hired a crew because the arrangement will not release a person on a letter.
Everything about the contract is clean: the escrow is real, the firm has a door, and the witness is willing. It pays more than everything the crew has earned this volume combined.
Objectives Open
Primary · Remove the witness from the arrangement and deliver them to a neutral party of their choosing. Say it plain at the table: nobody in this contract is a criminal and the money is enormous.
Secondary · Find out what the hearing is about, because nobody has said, and eighty-five thousand credits is a lot of not saying.
The Leads Open
- The arrangement. A serviced apartment, four rotating security staff, a doctor twice a week, and no locks on anything. It is not a prison and the witness could walk out of it at any time and has not.
- The nine days. The hearing is scheduled. Everything in this contract is arranged around a date that nobody will explain.
- The neutral party. The witness's own choice, named in a sealed instruction, and the crew is not told who until they have the witness.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. A legal firm, licensed, with a real address and real people who will meet the crew in a real office and answer procedural questions precisely and substantive ones not at all.
Sealed. They represent the witness. They are not lying about anything. They have simply not been told by their own client what the neutral party is for, and they have decided that not asking is the professional position.
MB-01 · 114
High Top
The Truth Sealed
The witness is Halvard Ness, and he is not a witness to the thing at issue. He is the person who did it. The hearing is a licensing review into a recovery contractor's conduct, he is scheduled to give evidence that will end it, and he has changed his mind because ending it also ends him — his signature is on four years of recovery orders. The neutral party of his own choosing is the recovery contractor's counsel. The crew is being paid eighty-five thousand credits to deliver the only witness in a licensing review to the people being reviewed.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Hearing. 0–4. Nine days. At 4 it sits, and either he is there or the review collapses for want of evidence.
Second · The Arrangement. 0–3. Four staff who are not criminals and will not be hurt. At 3 they escalate to their own client and the apartment is no longer soft.
Tail · The Sealed Instruction. The crew does not learn who the neutral party is until the handover. That is in the contract they signed.
Leverage Sealed
Halvard himself · will talk, at length, and is not defending himself, and is the most articulate frightened man in this book.
The security staff · four people on a rota who like him and have worked out roughly what he is. They will not stop the crew if the crew is honest with them.
Dr. Silk · if the crew reads the four years of orders, one call to her converts an abstraction into eleven names they have met.
Opposition Sealed
The arrangement · professional, decent, and doing a legitimate job. There is nobody here to fight and hurting them is the fastest way to lose the contract's entire meaning.
The escrow · eighty-five thousand credits that release on delivery, and the crew has already been told that refusing after acceptance is a breach with named consequences.
The Turn Sealed
Land it at the handover, or one scene before it, when somebody reads the sealed instruction. Everything up to that point has been a clean, well-paid, morally simple extraction of a willing man, and the name on the paper reframes every hour of it.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | At the handover |
|---|---|
| 1 | The neutral party is waiting, polite, with a vehicle, and greets Halvard by his first name. |
| 2 | Halvard tells the crew the truth himself, in the car, unprompted, because he cannot stop. |
| 3 | The security staff followed. They are not there to recover him. They want to know what he is. |
| 4 | The hearing is moved forward. It sits tomorrow. The crew has one night to decide. |
| 5 | The legal firm calls, having just worked it out themselves, and asks the crew to stop. |
| 6 | He asks to be delivered to the review instead, and means it for about four minutes. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Delivered as instructed | +3 / −4 · eighty-five thousand credits, the review collapses, four years of orders stand |
| Delivered him to the hearing | +6 / +4 · escrow breached, a recovery contractor loses its licence, and the crew is now in litigation |
| Let him choose, honestly, with everything on the table | +4 / +2 · he chooses the hearing about half the time and it is the best scene in the volume |
| Walked away mid-contract | +4 / +0 · breach. Another crew completes it in four days. |
| Took the money and told Dr. Silk everything | +5 / +3 · the names get out even though the review does not |
Pay: 85,000 cr, escrowed, released on delivery, and it is the largest legitimate sum in this volume. Non-money: whichever institution the crew did not choose, which will remember.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // —
nothing was posted. E1.
OZZY eighty five. i'm just saying the number. someone else say something.
— —
— —
The Not-LineNot a rescue and not a kidnapping. It is a clean, legal, extraordinarily well-paid job whose only flaw is a name in a sealed envelope, and the crew will have done ninety percent of the work before they can possibly know.
ConnectionsC31 REPOSSESSION the orders he signed ·
C16 BURN NOTICE the same contractor's evidence ·
BODY_ECONOMY ·
DR_SILK eleven names
115 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 24 · THE HIGH TOP
PATRONNot a contract. A retainer. Say yes and you never take an open-board job again.
RB:7
EXPOSURE E5 · THE OFFER IS MADE IN PUBLIC ON PURPOSEHOLD › PERFORM
You are invited to discuss a standing arrangement. There is no job attached and no obligation, and the invitation does not expire.
We have watched the channel for eleven months. We are not interested in changing what you do. We are interested in paying for it.
— an embossed card with a fund's mark on it, and no name, and a car outside.
The Situation Open
A fund with High Top money has spent eleven months watching the channel and is now offering the crew four hundred thousand credits a year to keep doing exactly what they do, with no notes, no branding and no scripts.
It is more money than every contract in this volume combined. Nothing is being asked. That is the contract.
Objectives Open
Primary · Attend the meeting and come out of it with a decision. Say it plain at the table: this is a session with no combat, no clocks that tick fast, and the largest consequence in the book.
Secondary · Establish what the fund actually buys, because it is not content.
The Leads Open
- The eleven months. They started watching after a specific artifact. Ozzy can work out which one from engagement data and it is not the one anyone expects.
- The terms. Four pages, plain language, genuinely fair, and the only unusual clause is a right of first refusal on the crew's availability.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. A fund principal, forties, extremely good company, who has read everything the crew has posted and can discuss it intelligently and without flattery. Will answer any question directly.
Sealed. The fund holds positions across four districts, including the redevelopment in SIX MINUTES OF FAME p.76 and the factoring house in WHAT GREW BACK p.98. They are not buying the crew's work. They are buying the crew's unavailability — a retainer means a right of first refusal, and a right of first refusal means that when somebody in Barricadia needs five people, those five people are booked.
1 This is the highest-Band contract most tables will actually play, and it has no fight in it. Run it late in the volume, after the crew has spent months being broke and useful.
MB-01 · 116
High Top
The Truth Sealed
The offer is entirely genuine and entirely honest and there is no trap in the paperwork. The trap is the arithmetic: a crew on four hundred thousand a year does not take Band 1 contracts, and every Band 1 contract in this book is a neighbour. The fund does not need the crew to do anything. It needs them to stop being available to the district, and it is willing to pay a great deal for that, and it will never once ask them to refuse a job.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Meeting. 0–4. Ticks per topic. At 4 an answer is expected, and we will think about it is an answer the principal will accept gracefully and permanently.
Second · The Crew. 0–3. They will not agree. This is the only contract in the book whose Second clock is an argument between the players.
Tail · Barricadia. The invitation was delivered to the garage by a car that fourteen people watched arrive. The district already knows.
Leverage Sealed
The terms · four pages, and Cas will read all four and find the first-refusal clause, and it is not hidden.
The fund's positions · a matter of public filing. Ozzy can map them in an evening and the map is the whole answer.
Marisol Vega · will say one sentence about it if asked, and will not volunteer it, and it is the sentence that decides the contract.
Opposition Sealed
The principal · charming, honest, patient, and entirely willing to be refused. There is no pressure in this contract at all, which is why it works.
The number · four hundred thousand credits a year against a filtration line that costs money every month. The opposition is the crew's own budget.
The Turn Sealed
Land it when somebody maps the fund's positions and finds the factoring house from WHAT GREW BACK p.98 and the redevelopment from SIX MINUTES OF FAME p.76 in the same portfolio — and realises the fund has never once asked the crew to do anything, and never will have to.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | When an answer is expected |
|---|---|
| 1 | The principal, asked directly about the first-refusal clause, explains it honestly and it is worse explained honestly. |
| 2 | One crew member wants to say yes, out loud, in front of the others, with a good reason. |
| 3 | The fund offers to fund the recycler repairs in THE STANDPIPE WAR p.68 as a gesture, with no conditions, and means it. |
| 4 | Marisol says her sentence. |
| 5 | The offer is raised, once, calmly, at the exact moment the crew is closest to refusing. |
| 6 | They are told they may take open-board work whenever they like. It is true. It changes nothing. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Accepted | +2 / +6 · the campaign changes. Band 1 and 2 contracts stop arriving at the door. |
| Refused | +1 / +2 · the principal is gracious. The invitation does not expire. It will be made again. |
| Refused publicly, on the channel | +4 / +5 · Barricadia knows exactly what the crew turned down and why |
| Took the recycler funding and refused the retainer | +2 / +4 · the fund gets a photograph and the district gets water |
| Split | +2 / +3 · one of them takes it. That is a Volume Two campaign and it is a good one. |
Pay: 400,000 cr a year, standing, paid quarterly, with no work attached. Non-money: everything.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/035
"somebody offered to buy our diary."
@barricadia_lifer take it. take it and fix the 400 block.
WARRANTY VOID that's the trick tho
WARRANTY VOID that's the trick tho
The Not-LineNot a corruption plot and not a trap. It is an honest offer from a polite person that would end the campaign this book is about, and nobody in it will ever ask the crew to do a single wrong thing.
ConnectionsC08 SIX MINUTES OF FAME the same portfolio ·
C17 WHAT GREW BACK the factoring house ·
C05 THE STANDPIPE WAR what the money could fix ·
CLOUT selling it
117 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 25 · THE HIGH TOP
THE INVITATIONFive names on a guest list. One of them is being interrogated.
RB:5
EXPOSURE E4 · PUBLIC, IN A ROOM OF SIXTY PEOPLETRACE
You are invited to an evening at the High Top. Dress is what you wear. Attendance is the entire obligation; there is no performance, no speech and no photography by anyone but yourselves.
Seven thousand credits, paid in advance, for the pleasure of your company. We are aware how that reads.
— the host's name is on the card and means nothing to any of them, and Frequency has never heard of him either.
The Situation Open
Five engraved invitations, five correct legal names — including Caseline-9, which is on almost nothing — and seven thousand credits in advance simply to turn up at a High Top house for an evening.
There is no job. There is a room with sixty people in it, drinks, and an evening to get through. The crew are the entertainment in a way that is not about performing.
Objectives Open
Primary · Attend the evening and leave it having learned more than was learned about you. Say it plain at the table: every conversation tonight is the contract, and there are no dice for most of it.
Secondary · Find out who supplied the guest list, because somebody knew Cas's batch designation.
The Leads Open
- The names. Caseline-9 appears on a liquidation schedule, a notarised title and almost nothing else. Whoever wrote these invitations has seen one of those documents.
- The sixty guests. Four of them are not guests. Cas will notice they never sit down; Theo will notice they never face the windows.
- The host. Genuine, charming, and does not know why his guest list was augmented, and will say so if asked kindly, and will be humiliated by the asking.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. The host paid, the host invited, and the host is delighted they came. He is exactly what he appears to be.
Sealed. His evening has been sponsored. Someone offered to cover the entire cost in exchange for five names on the list, and he took it, because sixty-person evenings on the High Top are expensive and he is not as wealthy as this house suggests.
MB-01 · 118
High Top
The Truth Sealed
The evening is a soft interview. Four people in that room have been briefed to have one conversation each with one member of the crew, in an environment where nobody can reasonably refuse to answer, and the questions are unremarkable individually: where do you live, who holds your lease, what is your lineage, who services your augments, who taught you to drive. Assembled afterwards it is a complete operational profile of five people and one building, obtained legally, at a party, for seven thousand credits.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Evening. 0–4, one per hour. At 4 the guests thin out and the four have what they came for or they do not.
Second · The Profile. 0–5. Ticks once for every substantive personal answer any crew member gives. The Warden tracks it silently and never explains what the number is.
Tail · Splitting Up. The four cannot work if the crew stays together, and staying together for three hours at a party is socially impossible, and they know that.
Leverage Sealed
The host · once he understands he has been used, he will hand over the sponsorship correspondence out of pure embarrassment.
Ozzy · is the only one of the five who can have a three-hour conversation and give away nothing, and it is the only night in this book where that is the crew's primary weapon.
The four · can be interviewed back. They are contractors, not believers, and one of them is bored.
Opposition Sealed
The four · pleasant, professional, and not doing anything illegal. They will not press. If a question is deflected they let it go and try a different one an hour later.
Politeness · the actual antagonist. Every defensive move the crew makes is socially expensive in a room where they are guests.
The Turn Sealed
Land it when two crew members compare notes and find they were asked the same question from different angles by different people — or when Cas realises her invitation used a name that exists on three documents, one of which is held by a liquidation shell she checks every week.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | Late in the evening |
|---|---|
| 1 | One of the four asks Cas directly about the recall option, kindly, as though it were small talk. |
| 2 | The host makes a toast that includes the crew by name and the room applauds and it is genuinely warm. |
| 3 | Theo's receiver catches the four coordinating on a private band from the next room. |
| 4 | Somebody offers Danka a drink and a job in the same sentence and the job is Kavast. |
| 5 | The sponsorship correspondence names an entity from PATRON p.116. |
| 6 | Nothing happens at all. The crew leaves having learned nothing and the profile is complete. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Gave nothing away | +1 / +3 · they leave with an incomplete file and a lot of respect |
| Profile clock reached 5 | +4 / +2 · somebody now has a full operational picture of the crew and the garage |
| Turned it around and interviewed them | +3 / +4 · the crew learns who commissioned it, which is a Volume Two name |
| Exposed it to the room | +4 / +1 · the host is destroyed socially and it was not his fault |
| Left early | +1 / +0 · rude, safe, and the four simply attend the next thing the crew goes to |
Pay: 7,000 cr in advance for turning up, which is the most honest fee in the book and buys the least honest evening. Non-money: a host who owes them, and four faces that will appear again.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/037
"nobody asked us to do anything. that was the job."
@hightop_watch what did they want
WARRANTY VOID addresses. ours.
WARRANTY VOID addresses. ours.
The Not-LineNot an infiltration and not a heist. It is a party the crew were paid to attend, run by people whose only technique is being pleasant, and the entire contract is played in conversation with almost no rolls at all.
ConnectionsC24 PATRON the same portfolio, one tier up ·
C09 THE BOOTH verification, from the other direction ·
CAS the name on the invitation ·
HEAT what a profile is worth
119 · MB-01
The Jobs
Cluster
THE LOW COASTIt floods twice a day because a covenant nobody can enforce says somebody else should have maintained the wall.
The seawall failed in stages and was never repaired, and two hundred households along it live in buildings that are dry for four hours at a time. The people here know the water better than anyone in Lost Angeles and have organised their entire lives around a timetable.
Everything in this cluster is about paper: deeds, covenants, tenancy records, abandonment certificates. The physical danger is real and it is never the actual obstacle.
Who runs it
The households · about two hundred, most without documented tenancy, all of whom have lived here longer than anyone has held the freehold.
A property agent · certifying buildings as abandoned on surveys conducted during flood weeks, entirely lawfully.
The Salt Wake committee · six people who have raced this coast for twenty years and run the only institution here that works.
What it costs to be here
Local knowledge, which cannot be bought. The tide table is public and the reading of it is not. A crew that turns up without a mooring is a crew that gets stranded.
Contracts in this cluster
SLACK WATER p.122 · SALT WAKE p.124 · WHAT THE SEA FILED p.126 · THE LAST TENANT p.128
MB-01 · 120
COAST
ON THE STREET RIGHT NOW Open
| d10 | What is happening as the crew arrives |
|---|---|
| 1 | Slack water. Four hours, and everyone on the coast is working. |
| 2 | A van and a locksmith are parked outside an annexe with a paper. |
| 3 | The archivist is posting her notice again. Fifty-first week. |
| 4 | A race meeting is on and there are thirty cars on the seawall road. |
| 5 | Somebody is diving a basement that has been tidal for eleven years. |
| 6 | A boat is at a collapsed section of wall and it is not a fishing boat. |
| 7 | Forty former residents are in a street and nobody organised it. |
| 8 | The tide turns early. It does that here. |
| 9 | A strongbox that eleven salvage passes could not move is being moved. |
| 10 | A Center Point vehicle is parked where no Center Point vehicle has ever parked. |
Rumours
| d6 | What people are saying |
|---|---|
| 1 | There is a covenant from 2039 that makes the wall somebody's legal problem and one copy is missing. |
| 2 | The Harrow strongbox has been opened once already and put back. |
| 3 | One car in the Salt Wake field is not racing. |
| 4 | The abandonment certificates cover the whole parcel, not just the empty flats. |
| 5 | Something is being landed at the collapsed section on race nights. |
| 6 | The archivist lives in one of the two hundred and has never mentioned it. |
Two contacts
The archivist · unpaid, working from a room above a fish market, and the single most competent researcher in this book.
The Low Coast salvage crew · four people who know the water and will lend moorings to anyone who has been straight with them.
This cluster is a chain: SLACK WATER p.122 finds the deeds, WHAT THE SEA FILED p.126 finds the covenant, THE LAST TENANT p.128 is why it matters this month. SALT WAKE p.124 is the one that connects the Low Coast to the rest of the book.
121 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 26 · LOW COAST
SLACK WATERRecover it from the flooded floors. Three other people want it and none of them will say what it is.
RB:3
EXPOSURE E3 · CUT AND POSTEDRETRIEVE
Third and fourth floors of the Harrow building are dry at low water for about four hours a day. There is a strongbox on four. It has been there since the wall went.
We can get you in and we cannot get it out. Two thousand one hundred and you can use our moorings whenever you like, which if you knew this coast you would understand is the better half of the offer.
— the Low Coast crew from the crater lot, if that happened. Otherwise four people who have heard the crew are reliable.
The Situation Open
The Low Coast floods twice a day. Buildings along the old seawall are dry for four hours at slack water and underwater for the rest, and everything in them has been sorted through eleven times by people with better local knowledge than anyone in Barricadia.
A strongbox on the fourth floor of the Harrow building has survived eleven passes because nobody has been able to move it, and three separate parties have asked about it this month.
Objectives Open
Primary · Get the strongbox out of the Harrow building during a slack-water window. Say it plain at the table: four hours, and the water does not negotiate.
Secondary · Find out why three parties want a box nobody can identify.
The Leads Open
- The window. Four hours, and the tide table is public and Cas will have it memorised by the second scene.
- The building. Structurally poor, silted, and the stair from three to four is gone. Getting up is a problem; getting down with mass is the contract.
- The three parties. A heritage archivist, a Center Point property agent, and somebody who has only ever sent messages. None will say what is in it.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Four people who work this coast, know the water, and are honest that they need outside muscle and a vehicle. Straightforward, warm, and slightly amused by Barricadians.
Sealed. They have already opened it. Two years ago, at slack water, with a cutting torch, and they closed it again and left it exactly where it was because of what was inside, and they have been hoping somebody else would deal with it since.
MB-01 · 122
Low Coast
The Truth Sealed
The strongbox holds the Harrow building's tenancy records — original, physical, pre-Upheaval, and unreproduced. Down this coast, physical tenancy paper is the only thing standing between about two hundred households and a property agent's claim that the buildings were abandoned. It is not treasure. It is the deeds to two hundred people's homes, and everyone who wants it wants it for a different reason.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Tide. 0–4, one per hour. At 4 the water is back and anyone on four stays on four for eight hours.
Second · The Agent. 0–3. The Center Point property agent has hired their own people. At 3 they are in the building.
Tail · The Silt. The stair from three to four is not gone. It is under two metres of silt, and digging it is the fast route and the loud one.
Leverage Sealed
The Low Coast crew · know the water, the building and what is in the box, and will tell the crew everything the moment somebody asks them a direct question.
The archivist · wants the records preserved and lodged, has no money, and is correct about everything.
Danka · a vehicle on a seawall at slack water is a specialist problem and she has been looking forward to it since the briefing.
Opposition Sealed
The property agent's people · four, professional, insured, and here to take a box out of a derelict building, which is not a crime.
The water · on a schedule, indifferent, and the only opponent in this contract that cannot be talked to.
The Turn Sealed
Land it when the box is open, on a fourth floor, with ninety minutes of window left, and it is paper. Two hundred addresses. The contract becomes a decision about who gets handed the deeds, made in a flooding building, on a clock.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | At slack water |
|---|---|
| 1 | The agent's people arrive with a boat and a lawyer and are entirely within their rights. |
| 2 | The box will not go down the silted stair intact. It opens or it stays. |
| 3 | The tide turns early. It does that here and everyone local knows and nobody mentioned it. |
| 4 | The archivist is already on four. Has been since dawn. Has no way down. |
| 5 | One of the Low Coast crew tries to destroy the records rather than let them leave the coast. |
| 6 | The records name the Harrow building's freeholder, and it is the fund from PATRON p.116. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Records lodged with the archivist | +2 / +4 · two hundred households have paper. It takes years to matter. |
| Sold to the property agent | +1 / −4 · a clean fee and the Low Coast finds out inside a month |
| Left in the building | +0 / +0 · the water gets them within two years and everyone knows they were reachable |
| Destroyed them | +1 / −2 · nobody can claim the buildings. Nobody can defend them either. |
| Copied everything first | +2 / +5 · slow, unglamorous, and the only answer that survives Volume Two |
Pay: 2,100 cr and standing use of Low Coast moorings, which is a logistics asset the crew will use for the rest of the campaign. Non-money: two hundred households, or a property agent, and the crew has to pick.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/039
"it was paper. it was always going to be paper."
@lowcoast_night whose names
WARRANTY VOID yours, probably. go and look.
WARRANTY VOID yours, probably. go and look.
The Not-LineNot a dive job and not a treasure hunt. It is a four-hour logistics problem wrapped around a decision about property, and the physical difficulty exists to make sure the decision has to be made badly and fast.
ConnectionsC15 THE CRATER LOT the same crew, repaid ·
C28 WHAT THE SEA FILED the rest of the paper ·
C29 THE LAST TENANT one of the two hundred ·
C24 PATRON the freeholder
123 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 27 · LOW COAST
SALT WAKERun the coast circuit. Something is moving with the field.
RB:4
EXPOSURE E5 · IT IS A RACERUN › CLEAR
Someone is using our race. Every meeting for five months, one car in the field is not racing: it runs the coast road at pace, in a pack of thirty, with every camera in the district pointed at the leaders, and it leaves the circuit at the seawall gap and rejoins four minutes later.
We cannot police thirty cars at speed. You can be one of them. Entry is arranged. Find out which car and we will handle the rest, and if you happen to win we will not object.
— the Salt Wake committee, six names, all of whom have raced this coast for twenty years.
The Situation Open
Salt Wake is a Low Coast raid-race circuit that runs the seawall road, and for five months somebody has been using the race as cover: a single entry that runs with the field, drops out at the seawall gap for four minutes, and rejoins.
Thirty cars at speed is the best moving cover in Lost Angeles. Nobody watches the mid-field. The committee has worked out that it is happening and cannot work out which car.
Objectives Open
Primary · Race, identify the car, and find out what it is doing at the gap. Say it plain at the table: they have to actually race, and the investigation happens at a hundred and forty.
Secondary · Do not tell the field. Thirty drivers who know are thirty drivers who behave differently.
The Leads Open
- The lap times. Four minutes missing, five months running. Cas can narrow it to nine cars off the published sheets before anyone starts an engine.
- The gap. A collapsed section of seawall with a service road behind it, dry at low water, and the meetings are always at low water.
- The field. Thirty drivers, most of whom have raced together for years, and one of whom is new this season and very good.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Six committee members who love this circuit, are furious about it, and have no ability to do anything themselves. Entirely straightforward.
Sealed. One of the six knows. He has known for three months, he is being paid, and he voted to hire the crew because refusing to would have looked strange, and he has been sleeping badly ever since.
MB-01 · 124
Low Coast
The Truth Sealed
The four minutes are a transfer. Contraband comes in by water at the collapsed section, and a car in a thirty-car field is the only vehicle on this coast that can arrive, load and leave at speed without any of it looking like anything. What is moving is not drugs or weapons: it is stripped augment hardware, coming back out of the Low Coast toward buyers inland, and it has been running since about four months after the depot in BURN NOTICE p.96 started filling up.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Race. 0–4, one per sector. At 4 the race ends and the field disperses and the car is one of thirty going home.
Second · The Gap. 0–3. Ticks as the crew narrows the candidates. At 3 the car makes its run, and the crew is either in position or racing.
Tail · The Tide. The service road behind the gap is dry for ninety minutes. That is why the meetings are scheduled where they are.
Leverage Sealed
Danka · can hold a mid-field position and watch a specific car for four sectors, which no other member of this crew could do for four seconds.
Theo · a raid race has cameras everywhere and every one of them is pointed at the leaders. The mid-field footage exists and nobody has ever looked at it.
The new driver · first season, very good, and entirely innocent, and the obvious suspect, and the reason the real one has gone unnoticed for two months.
Opposition Sealed
The car · driven by somebody who has done this eleven times and will not panic. If made, they finish the race normally and never come back.
Thirty other cars · at speed, on a seawall, in the dark, none of whom know anything is happening.
The Turn Sealed
Land it at the gap, when the crew sees what is being loaded. Not crates. Cases, the size of a forearm, catalogued, and Cas will know what they are from twenty metres because she has spent her whole life looking at that packaging.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | At the gap |
|---|---|
| 1 | The car is the committee member's own. He is not driving it. His son is. |
| 2 | The boat is early and the transfer happens with the crew still four hundred metres out. |
| 3 | The new driver follows the crew off-circuit, thinking they are the ones cheating. |
| 4 | The tide comes in over the service road with vehicles on it. |
| 5 | The cases are addressed. Individually. With account numbers. |
| 6 | Winning the race and stopping the transfer are ninety seconds apart and the crew cannot do both. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Identified the car, told the committee | +2 / +4 · the circuit is clean and the route reopens somewhere else in a month |
| Followed the hardware inland | +4 / +2 · you now know who is buying, which is a Volume Two name |
| Won the race | +1 / +5 · enormous clip, and the transfer ran while everyone watched you |
| Took a case | +4 / +1 · you are holding somebody's arm in a box and it has a number on it |
| Said nothing | +1 / +0 · paid, quietly, and it runs for another five months |
Pay: 6,400 cr and a standing Salt Wake entry, which is a Clout engine for the rest of the campaign. Non-money: the case, if they take it, and what the number on it opens.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/041
"we came sixth. watch the mid-field."
@saltwake_official sixth?? you were EIGHTH at the wall
WARRANTY VOID exactly
WARRANTY VOID exactly
The Not-LineNot a race and not a stakeout, but both at once, and the difficulty is that the crew has to do a genuinely demanding physical thing and a genuinely demanding observational thing in the same three minutes.
ConnectionsC16 BURN NOTICE where the hardware was stored ·
C31 REPOSSESSION where it came from ·
C20 PACK FREQUENCY racing as cover ·
CAS she knows the packaging
125 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 28 · LOW COAST
WHAT THE SEA FILEDA pre-Upheaval covenant still binds. Find out who it binds.
RB:6
EXPOSURE E2 · QUIETTRACE › RETRIEVE
I am looking for the second copy of the Low Coast Maintenance Covenant, executed 2039, which obliges the freeholder of the seawall parcels to maintain the wall in perpetuity. The first copy is in my hands and is not sufficient; a covenant of this class requires both executed copies to be enforceable.
I have been asking for a year. I have eleven hundred credits. I know what that is.
— posted every week for fifty-one weeks, by hand, on five boards, in the same typeface.
The Situation Open
The Low Coast floods because the seawall is not maintained, and the seawall is not maintained because the obligation to maintain it sits in a covenant that cannot be enforced without both executed copies, and one copy has been missing since 2039.
An archivist has been posting the same notice every week for a year. Nobody has ever answered it. The crew is the first.
Objectives Open
Primary · Locate the second executed copy of the covenant. Say it plain at the table: this is a document hunt, and the document is why two hundred households are underwater twice a day.
Secondary · Establish who the freeholder is now, because the covenant runs with the land and nobody has checked in twenty years.
The Leads Open
- The first copy. In her hands, and it names the executing parties, one of which no longer exists and one of which was reconstituted twice.
- The Harrow records. If SLACK WATER p.122 happened, the tenancy paper cross-references a deposit of covenants. If it did not, the crew has to do C26 first and the Warden should say so.
- The 2039 solicitor. Dead. The practice was absorbed. The files went into storage. The storage is on the Low Coast and floods twice a day.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Fifty-something, unpaid, working from a room above a fish market, and the single most competent researcher in this book. She has done everything correctly for a year and nobody has helped her.
Sealed. She lives in one of the two hundred households. She has never mentioned this and never will, and if a crew member works it out and says so kindly she will be unable to continue the conversation.
MB-01 · 126
Low Coast
The Truth Sealed
The second copy is in the absorbed practice's deposit boxes, in a basement that has been tidal for eleven years, and it is legible. The freeholder, traced through three reconstitutions, is the same fund that made the offer in PATRON p.116 — and the covenant, once enforceable, obliges them to maintain the seawall in perpetuity at a cost that is roughly four hundred thousand credits a year.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Basement. 0–4. Tidal, silted, and degrading. At 4 the deposit boxes flood past recovery for good.
Second · The Freeholder. 0–3. They have a standing search for exactly this document. At 3 they know somebody is looking.
Tail · Her. She will come with them. She is fifty-something and unfit and she has waited a year and she is not staying behind.
Leverage Sealed
The archivist · knows the filing conventions of a 2039 practice, which is the difference between four hours in a flooded basement and four days.
The Low Coast moorings · if the crew earned them in SLACK WATER p.122, the basement is reachable at low water by boat instead of by swimming.
Ozzy · can find out who absorbed the practice in an afternoon, and will do it for free, and will be unbearable about it.
Opposition Sealed
The fund's search · not violent, extremely well-resourced, and entirely legal. They will buy the document if they can find it, and they will buy it from anyone.
The basement · eleven years tidal. Silt, collapse, and paper that has to come out dry.
The Turn Sealed
Land it when the covenant is out, dry, and legible, and somebody traces the freeholder through three reconstitutions and arrives at a name they were offered four hundred thousand credits a year by, in a nice room, by a person who was polite to them.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | With the document |
|---|---|
| 1 | The fund makes an offer for it. Openly, fairly, and for more than the crew has ever been paid. |
| 2 | The basement gives while they are in it, and the archivist is the one holding the box. |
| 3 | The document is executed but unstamped, and unstamped may or may not be enough, and nobody in the room is a lawyer. |
| 4 | The freeholder's search team is at the practice's storage the same night, politely, with a court order that is genuine. |
| 5 | Lodging it publicly starts a process that takes four years, and the archivist says so, and asks them to do it anyway. |
| 6 | The crew is offered the retainer from PATRON p.116 again, that week, at double, with no mention of the covenant. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Lodged the covenant | +5 / +5 · the seawall becomes somebody's legal obligation and the Low Coast changes |
| Sold it to the fund | +1 / −5 · the largest fee available and the coast floods forever |
| Gave it to the archivist and walked away | +3 / +4 · she does the rest herself. It takes four years. She manages. |
| Lost it in the basement | +1 / +0 · she starts again. She has already started again once. |
| Copied it and sold the original | +3 / −2 · clever, profitable, and a copy is not an executed copy and she will have to tell them so |
Pay: 1,100 cr, which is everything she has, and the crew should not take it. Non-money: the covenant, the archivist, and a direct collision with the most powerful client in this volume.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/043
"the wall has an owner. he's had one since 2039."
@lowcoast_night we KNEW. we always knew.
WARRANTY VOID now you can prove it
WARRANTY VOID now you can prove it
The Not-LineNot an archaeology dive. It is a paperwork contract in which the physical danger is real but incidental, and the actual opposition is a fund that will simply buy the document if the crew gives it the chance.
ConnectionsC26 SLACK WATER the deposit reference ·
C24 PATRON the freeholder ·
C29 THE LAST TENANT why it matters this month ·
C32 THE WHOLE QUEUE
127 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 29 · LOW COAST
THE LAST TENANTStand in the doorway for one morning. That is all.
RB:2
EXPOSURE E4 · PUBLICHOLD
Nadja is 74 and the last one in the Harrow annexe. The agent's people come Thursday at eight with a van and a locksmith and a paper that says the building was abandoned in 2059, which it was not, because she has been in it since 1998.
She does not want anybody hurt and she does not want to be carried out. She wants somebody standing there so that it is not just her.
— written by the neighbour who does her shopping, who has already been rehoused and comes back anyway.
The Situation Open
A seventy-four-year-old woman is the last resident of an annexe a property agent has certified as abandoned, and the certification is legally sufficient, and the van comes Thursday at eight.
There is no trick in this contract and no hidden villain. There is a paper, a schedule, and one person who has decided to be in the doorway when it arrives.
Objectives Open
Primary · Be in the doorway Thursday morning. Say it plain at the table: they are not going to win this with violence, and they are probably not going to win it at all.
Secondary · Find one document, any document, that makes the abandonment certificate arguable before eight o'clock.
The Leads Open
- Nadja. Has lived there since 1998, has a rent book, and the rent book is not a tenancy agreement and everybody has already told her that.
- The certificate. Filed on a survey of the building's condition, and the survey is public, and it is dated during a flood week.
- The neighbour. Rehoused, comes back anyway, and knows every other person who used to live in the annexe and where they went.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Seventy-four, entirely lucid, has made a plan, and the plan is to be in the doorway. She has thought about what happens after and will not discuss it.
Sealed. She has somewhere to go. Her son has been asking for two years. She is not staying because she has no options. She is staying because leaving means agreeing that the annexe was abandoned, and two hundred other households' claims rest on the same certificate. She has worked this out entirely on her own.
MB-01 · 128
Low Coast
The Truth Sealed
The abandonment certificate covers the whole Harrow parcel, not just the annexe, and it is the instrument the agent will use for the other two hundred. Nadja is the only person still physically present, which makes her the only counter-evidence that exists. She knows. The neighbour knows. Nobody has said it to the crew because saying it out loud sounds like using an old woman.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · Eight o'clock. 0–4. Thursday morning. At 4 the van arrives, and it arrives whatever the crew has managed.
Second · The Doorway. 0–3. Ticks on any escalation by anyone. At 3 somebody puts hands on somebody, and after that the crew is the story rather than the certificate.
Tail · The Survey. Dated during a flood week. Anyone who checks a tide table finds it. Cas will check a tide table.
Leverage Sealed
The survey date · a building surveyed as derelict on a day it was underwater is a survey that can be challenged, and challenging it stops the clock for months.
The neighbour's list · forty-odd former residents, contactable, most of whom would come and stand in a street on a Thursday if asked.
The archivist · if the crew has met her, she will drop everything, and she knows exactly which office receives a challenge.
Opposition Sealed
The agent's people · a van, a locksmith, and two staff with a lawful instrument. They are not thugs. They will not force a doorway with cameras on it and they do not have to; they can come back Friday.
The certificate · the real opponent, and it can only be beaten on paper, and the crew has until eight.
The Turn Sealed
Land it when somebody works out that this is not about one flat. Nadja has been holding a doorway for two hundred households for eleven months and has never once said so, and the crew was hired for three hundred credits to stand next to her for a morning.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | Thursday, eight o'clock |
|---|---|
| 1 | Forty former residents are in the street. Nobody organised it. The neighbour made calls. |
| 2 | The challenge is filed at 07:40 and the van comes anyway because nobody told the driver. |
| 3 | The agent themselves turns up, reasonable, and offers Nadja a rehousing package that is genuinely generous. |
| 4 | Theo goes live. Not a cut. Live, unedited, which the channel has never done. |
| 5 | Her son is there. He drove all night. He wants her to take the package. |
| 6 | The locksmith refuses to open the door. He is from this coast. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Challenge filed, van turned away | +2 / +5 · the certificate is contested and two hundred claims survive |
| Stood in the doorway, no paper | +3 / +4 · they win the morning and lose the building by Friday |
| She took the package | +0 / +1 · the certificate stands and the parcel clears in six weeks |
| It became physical | +4 / −2 · a splice crew fought a locksmith on camera and it is the only thing anyone remembers |
| Did not come | +0 / −4 · she stood there alone. The clip of that exists and it was not filmed by Theo. |
Pay: 300 cr and a meal Nadja cannot afford to cook, and the crew should eat all of it. Non-money: forty households who came back to a street once and would do it again.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/045
"she'd been doing this alone for eleven months."
@harrow_annexe i lived at 4b. i'm coming thursday.
WARRANTY VOID bring whoever's left
WARRANTY VOID bring whoever's left
The Not-LineNot a siege and not a standoff. It is a morning in a doorway with a legal deadline, where the fight is a filing office and the only real question is whether the crew thinks to look at the date on a survey.
ConnectionsC26 SLACK WATER the deeds ·
C28 WHAT THE SEA FILED the wall that made it flood ·
C05 THE STANDPIPE WAR the same property holder ·
CLOUT calling the district
129 · MB-01
The Jobs
Cluster
MONITOR CENTRALNot a place. A schedule, a procurement office, and a van that comes on Thursdays.
Monitor Central is the city's administrative presence: notices, assessments, sweeps, and a procurement process that decides which districts get visited how often. It has no headquarters the crew can reach and no individual who decided any of this.
These are the last three contracts in the volume and they are where every thread in it terminates. There is almost no opposition in this cluster and almost nothing that can be solved by being good at violence.
Who runs it
Monitor Central itself · procedural, uninterested, and correct. There is no villain in the department and no meeting the crew can attend.
The recovery contractor · supplies assessors below cost because every default is inventory, and is underwritten from the High Top.
The fund · holds the positions the whole line runs through, and has never once broken a law or raised its voice.
What it costs to be here
Everything the crew has banked. This cluster cannot be played by a crew with no relationships, and that is deliberate.
Contracts in this cluster
SERVICE NOTICE p.132 · REPOSSESSION p.134 · THE WHOLE QUEUE p.136
MB-01 · 130
CENTRAL
ON THE STREET RIGHT NOW Open
| d10 | What is happening as the crew arrives |
|---|---|
| 1 | A public service notice has gone up in eleven locations. |
| 2 | An assessment is being conducted in a street, in front of a queue, and it takes four minutes and it is humiliating. |
| 3 | A van with an assessor in it is parked outside an address on a list. |
| 4 | A procurement officer is having a bad week and would like somebody to ask why. |
| 5 | Dr. Silk has closed the clinic for the afternoon and given no reason. |
| 6 | Somebody the crew warned has already gone. |
| 7 | A recruitment letter arrives at the garage with all five names spelled correctly. |
| 8 | The queue at the standpipe is smaller than it was last week. |
| 9 | A string wall in a garage has stopped looking like a joke. |
| 10 | Nothing happens for nine days and then it all happens at once. |
Rumours
| d6 | What people are saying |
|---|---|
| 1 | Barricadia gets assessed four times a year and Center Point once, and it is not about risk. |
| 2 | The assessors are contracted, not staff, and the contractor is paid per finding. |
| 3 | There is a depot somewhere with four years of recovered hardware in it. |
| 4 | Somebody has a catalogue with names in it. |
| 5 | The whole thing is one line and it always was. |
| 6 | They are not trying to beat the crew. They are trying to hire them. |
Two contacts
A procurement officer · bored, embarrassed by the rate schedule, and the softest link in the entire chain.
An assessor · does eleven a week, is not a monster, has a reason that is not money, and will explain the whole system on a long drive.
Do not run THE WHOLE QUEUE p.136 before the table has played twelve contracts. It is built entirely from banked relationships and a crew without them will find an empty board where the leverage should be.
131 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 30 · MONITOR CENTRAL
SERVICE NOTICEStop the sweep. It is scheduled, legal, and nine days out.
RB:5
EXPOSURE E1 · DARKBREAK
SCHEDULED AUGMENT STANDING ASSESSMENT — BARRICADIA DISTRICT. Residents holding leased or licensed augmentation are reminded that standing certification must be presented on demand to an authorised assessor.
Assessment will be conducted at fixed points and by mobile team. This is a routine public safety measure. NO ACTION IS REQUIRED OF COMPLIANT RESIDENTS.
— posted at eleven locations including the standpipe, where a queue reads it every morning.
The Situation Open
Monitor Central has scheduled an assessment sweep of Barricadia for the end of the month. It is routine, it is published, it is legal, and it is the fourth this year.
Dr. Silk has come to the garage. She has never come to the garage. She treats somewhere between eighty and four hundred orphanware patients in this district depending on how you count, and she has a list, and she has done the arithmetic on how many of them survive an assessment.
Objectives Open
Primary · Stop, delay, or blunt the sweep. Say it plain at the table: nobody involved is committing a crime, and the crew is being asked to obstruct a public safety measure.
Secondary · Do it without any of Dr. Silk's patients being named, because a named patient is a scheduled one.
The Leads Open
- The schedule. Published. Fixed points and a mobile team, and the mobile team's route is the only variable.
- The assessors. Contracted, not staff. A recovery contractor supplies them, and that contractor is the same one in BURN NOTICE p.96 and CLEAN HANDS p.114.
- The register. If the crew took it in GOOD PRESS p.66, they are holding four hundred names that the sweep is going to find one at a time anyway.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. Dr. Silk, unlicensed and better than licensed, who has never asked the crew for anything, who has forwarded them work, and who is now sitting in a garage asking for help with nothing to offer.
Sealed. She has already decided that if the crew cannot stop it, she will close the clinic and destroy her records the night before, which protects her patients and ends the only functioning medical service in the district. She has not told them that and will not.
MB-01 · 132
Monitor
The Truth Sealed
The sweep is genuinely routine and genuinely lawful, and it is also commercially sponsored: the recovery contractor supplies the assessors at below cost, because every default they find is inventory. Barricadia has been assessed four times this year and Center Point once, and the difference is not risk. It is yield. Nobody made a decision to target the poor district. A procurement process did.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Sweep. 0–4. Nine days. At 4 it runs, and it runs for three days, and it works.
Second · The Contractor. 0–3. Interfering is noticed. At 3 the crew has the personal attention of a firm that supplies assessors to four districts.
Tail · Dr. Silk. Hidden. At the end of the ninth day, if nothing has changed, she burns the clinic's records and closes. The Warden should not signal this.
Leverage Sealed
The procurement · below-cost supply is a document, and the document is with a Monitor Central procurement office staffed by people who would be embarrassed by it.
The register · four hundred self-identified names. Warning them is possible, expensive, and turns the sweep into an exodus.
The archivist and the compliance desk · if the crew has met them, this contract has a paper route that does not involve a single crime.
Opposition Sealed
Monitor Central · procedural, uninterested, and correct. There is no villain in the department and no meeting the crew can attend.
The contractor · has commercial reasons and will defend them with lawyers, not people. The physical danger in this contract is nearly zero and the stakes are the highest in the cluster.
The Turn Sealed
Land it on the procurement document, when somebody reads the per-assessment rate and works out that Barricadia is assessed four times a year because Barricadia is profitable to assess, and that no individual in the chain chose that.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | In the ninth day |
|---|---|
| 1 | Procurement suspends the contract pending review. The sweep is postponed, not cancelled, and postponed is nine weeks. |
| 2 | The contractor substitutes its own staff at full cost, out of spite, and the sweep runs anyway and smaller. |
| 3 | Four hundred people leave Barricadia for three days. The district empties. It is the most frightening thing in the book. |
| 4 | Dr. Silk starts burning records early because she has not been told anything. |
| 5 | A crew member is assessed, in the street, in front of a queue, on day one. |
| 6 | The register is published anonymously by someone who is not the crew, and everyone assumes it was. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Killed the procurement, sweep postponed | +5 / +5 · nine weeks, and the same fight in nine weeks |
| Warned the register, district emptied | +3 / +3 · almost nobody is found, and Barricadia knows what it had to do |
| Sabotaged the mobile team | +6 / +2 · effective, criminal, and the contractor now has a crew to find |
| Nothing worked | +2 / +1 · eleven accounts go into Service and the clinic closes |
| Did not take it | +0 / −4 · Dr. Silk closes anyway and never says a word about it to anyone |
Pay: none. Dr. Silk has nothing and the crew will spend money running this. Non-money: the clinic stays open, or it does not, and that decides what medical care exists in every subsequent contract in this book.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // —
nothing was posted. E1.
THEO if we post this they find them faster. that's the whole math.
— —
— —
The Not-LineNot a heist and not a protest. It is a procurement dispute with a body count, and the winning move is almost certainly a document handed to a bored official rather than anything that happens at night.
ConnectionsC04 GOOD PRESS the register ·
C16 BURN NOTICE the same contractor ·
BODY_ECONOMY assessment and recovery ·
DR_SILK
133 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 31 · MONITOR CENTRAL
REPOSSESSIONTwo days' work, good pay, full legal cover. Take the hardware back.
RB:4
EXPOSURE E1 · DARK, AND THE CLIENT WOULD PREFER IT FILMEDREPOSSESS
We are expanding our field recovery capability in the Barricadia and Low Coast districts and are recruiting experienced independent teams on a contract basis.
Work is lawful, indemnified and supervised. Teams accompany a licensed assessor, secure a location, and support the recovery of leased hardware from accounts in default. No team member is required to perform a clinical procedure. Sixteen thousand credits for a two-day rotation, paid weekly.
— sent to the crew by name, with all five names spelled correctly, which is the second time this volume.
The Situation Open
The recovery contractor has offered the crew a job. Not a one-off: a rotation, weekly, indemnified, lawful, well-paid, and requiring nothing of them except that they stand in a doorway while somebody else does the procedure.
It is sixteen thousand credits for two days. It is more reliable money than anything else in this book. And it is the machine that four of the five of them are one missed payment away from.
Objectives Open
Primary · Decide. Say it plain at the table: this contract exists to be refused, and the Warden should make refusing cost something real.
Secondary · If they take it — and some tables will — run one rotation honestly and let it be exactly what it is.
The Leads Open
- The offer. Genuine, lawful, and the indemnity is real. A lawyer would advise them to take it.
- The rotation. Six addresses in two days. Cas can cross-reference three of them against the register from GOOD PRESS p.66 in an evening.
- The assessor. A person, with a name, who does eleven of these a week and is not a monster and will talk to them in the van about anything except this.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. A recovery contractor with a licence, an indemnity policy and an HR process, recruiting the way any firm recruits. Professional throughout, and slightly puzzled by hesitation.
Sealed. They approached this crew specifically. A splice crew with district standing and a channel makes recovery in Barricadia dramatically easier, because the doorways open. They are not buying muscle. They are buying the crew's reputation, and they know exactly what it is worth and exactly what using it will cost the crew.
1 The only REPOSSESS contract in this volume. It should be offered once, late, when the crew is broke, and never mentioned again by the client either way.
MB-01 · 134
Monitor
The Truth Sealed
Every address on the rotation is a person the crew could have met in this book. One of them is on Dr. Silk's list. One of them is a Ring Road jockey. One of them is a name from the register in GOOD PRESS p.66 — somebody who bought a forged certificate for four hundred credits and believed it worked. The contract is not testing whether the crew will do harm. It is testing whether harm arranged into a rota, with paperwork and an indemnity and a decent colleague in the van, still reads as harm.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · The Rotation. 0–4, one per address. If the crew accepts, run all four. Do not skip to the worst one. The point is the fourth one arriving after three that were fine.
Second · The Channel. 0–3. The client would like it filmed. At 3 they ask formally, and the fee doubles.
Tail · Barricadia. 0–2. The district finds out on the second day. It always finds out on the second day.
Leverage Sealed
The assessor · will explain the whole system honestly on a long drive, including the parts she is not proud of, and she has a reason for doing this job that is not money.
The addresses · given in advance. The crew can warn every one of them before the rotation starts, take the fee, and complete four recoveries that find nobody home.
The indemnity · covers the crew for anything lawful. It is the most protection they will ever be offered and it is the reason to say yes.
Opposition Sealed
Nobody · there is no opposition in this contract. That is the entire design. Every door opens, every account is genuinely in default, and every procedure is lawful.
The fourth address · a person the crew knows by name from an earlier contract. The Warden should choose who, from what the table has actually played.
The Turn Sealed
Land it at the fourth door. Three have been strangers, and it has been a job, and the money is real, and then somebody opens a door and says one of the crew's names because they have watched the channel.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | At the fourth address |
|---|---|
| 1 | It is somebody from THE FILTER JOB p.64. They are pleased to see the crew for the first four seconds. |
| 2 | The assessor asks the crew to hold someone. It is the first thing she has asked for and it is not in the contract. |
| 3 | The account is in default by ninety credits. |
| 4 | The hardware is a child's. The lease was signed by a guardian. It is entirely lawful. |
| 5 | Somebody in the crew realises their own upkeep is two months behind. |
| 6 | The client asks, on the spot, for the rotation to be filmed and posted, and doubles the fee, and means it as a compliment. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Refused the offer outright | +0 / +1 · they hire another crew, who are worse, and the rotations run |
| Took it, warned every address first | +3 / +2 · four empty flats, a full fee, and a contractor who will not use them twice |
| Ran the rotation | +0 / −5 · sixteen thousand credits. Barricadia knows by day two. So does Dr. Silk. |
| Ran it and filmed it | +1 / −8 · the channel does not recover from this in Volume One |
| Took the addresses and gave them to Dr. Silk | +4 / +4 · no fee, no indemnity, and every one of them gets a month's warning |
Pay: 16,000 cr per two-day rotation, weekly, indefinitely, which is more stable money than this crew has ever seen. Non-money: nothing. There is no non-money in this contract and that is the tell.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // —
the client asked us to post it. we're not going to.
OZZY i can't scan. they can't take anything off me. that's why they asked us.
— —
— —
The Not-LineNot a moral test with a right answer printed at the bottom. It is a lawful, indemnified, well-paid job offer with no villain in it, and the only reason to refuse is that the crew knows what the building at the end of it is called.
ConnectionsC04 GOOD PRESS the names on the rotation ·
C30 SERVICE NOTICE the same contractor ·
BODY_ECONOMY what happens after the van ·
BURNED and what happens to the crew
135 · MB-01
The Jobs
Contract 32 · MONITOR CENTRAL
THE WHOLE QUEUEIt was never eleven districts. It was one procurement schedule.
RB:8
EXPOSURE E5 · THERE IS NO QUIET VERSION OF THISTRACE › BREAK
FILTER PLATES → LEASE CERTIFICATES → REGISTER (400 names) → SWEEP SCHEDULE → RECOVERY ROTATIONS → DEPOT (40 pallets) → SALT WAKE TRANSFERS → BUYERS INLAND
FUND HOLDS: redevelopment (C08) · factoring (C17) · Harrow freehold (C26/C28) · underwrites recovery contractor (C16/C23/C30/C31)
IT IS ONE LINE. IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN ONE LINE.
— the wall has been there for weeks. Nobody put it up deliberately. It accumulated.
The Situation Open
Somewhere around the twentieth contract, the string on the garage wall stops being a joke. The filter counterfeiter, the certificate register, the assessment sweeps, the recovery rotations, the depot, the transfers off Salt Wake, the covenant nobody could enforce, the co-op that had no title, and a fund that once offered five people four hundred thousand credits a year to be busy.
None of it is a conspiracy. Every link is a separate lawful commercial decision made by a different person for a defensible reason. That is what makes it unbeatable and that is what the crew has finally understood.
Objectives Open
Primary · Break the line, at whichever link the crew can actually reach. Say it plain at the table: they cannot win this. They can make one part of it stop, permanently, and choose which.
Secondary · Survive the choosing. The fallout table on this contract runs the rest of the campaign.
The Leads Open
- The wall. Everything the crew has learned across this volume, and it only works if they earned it. A table that has played fewer than twelve contracts should not run this one.
- The procurement office. From SERVICE NOTICE p.132. Bored, embarrassed, and the softest link in the chain.
- The covenant. From WHAT THE SEA FILED p.126. Four hundred thousand a year in maintenance obligation, aimed at the same fund, and enforceable.
- The register and the catalogue. From GOOD PRESS p.66 and BURN NOTICE p.96. Four hundred living names and four years of recovered hardware, and together they are a scandal that no lawyer can make lawful.
The Client Open Sealed
Open. There is no client and there is no fee and nobody asked for this. It is the first contract in the book the crew gives themselves.
Sealed. If the crew refused the retainer in PATRON p.116, the fund has spent the volume being patient. If they accepted it, this contract is about getting out of it, and it is harder and better.
1 Run this only after twelve or more contracts. It is built entirely from what the table has already done, and a crew that has not banked the relationships will find an empty board where the leverage should be. 2 Volume Two opens the morning after this contract, whichever link they broke.
MB-01 · 136
Monitor
The Truth Sealed
There is no keystone. The line is genuinely distributed and genuinely lawful and cannot be destroyed. But it has four load-bearing links, and each of them is reachable by a crew this size: the procurement rate that makes poor districts profitable to assess, the covenant that puts four hundred thousand a year of unavoidable cost onto the freeholder, the catalogue that turns four years of recovery into a public record with names on it, and the co-op's want of a land title. Breaking any one of them changes Lost Angeles. Breaking any one of them also identifies the crew, completely, to everybody.
The Clocks Sealed
Main · Exposure. 0–5. Ticks with every move. At 5 the crew is Burned, and the Warden should say so, out loud, before the last two ticks, so the table chooses it.
Second · The Fund. 0–4. Patient, legal, and enormously well-advised. At 4 the garage lease is bought, and Marisol cannot stop it, and she will try.
Tail · Everyone Else. Barricadia, the Low Coast, the co-op, the Ring, Dr. Silk, the archivist, ninety farmers, two hundred households. Every relationship the crew banked in this volume pays out here or it does not exist.
Leverage Sealed
Everything · this is the contract where the crew spends the whole book. Every favour, every mooring, every district that owes them, every document they kept instead of selling.
Clout · at 6 or higher the district lies for them, and this is the only contract in Volume One where that is worth more than any amount of money.
The people who owe them · Marisol, Petrina, Razborki, Marco, the archivist, the Low Coast crew, the assessor, the compliance desk, the media buyer, the coordinator. Ten names, and the crew earned every one.
Opposition Sealed
The fund · never appears, never threatens, and never breaks a law. It will simply buy things: the lease, the covenant, the silence, the crew.
The structure · there is no room to enter and nobody to fight. If this session has a firefight in it, the Warden has run it wrong.
The Turn Sealed
Land it when the crew accepts they cannot have all four. Whichever link they break, the other three continue, and the people attached to the other three are people they have met and have names.
Climax Variable Sealed
| d6 | When the crew commits |
|---|---|
| 1 | The fund offers the retainer a third time, mid-contract, and it would solve everything for five people and nobody else. |
| 2 | The covenant is enforceable and lodging it takes four years, and the archivist says she will spend them. |
| 3 | The catalogue goes public and four hundred families learn what happened to their hardware in one afternoon. |
| 4 | The procurement rate is corrected and Barricadia is assessed once a year instead of four times, quietly, forever, and nobody ever knows why. |
| 5 | The co-op gets a title and ninety people stop being trespassers on ground they cleaned. |
| 6 | Vroza arrives, uninvited, on the crew's side, for her own reasons, and it is the worst possible time to owe her anything. |
Pay & Fallout Sealed
| Outcome | Heat / Clout |
|---|---|
| Broke the procurement | +6 / +4 · the quietest win in the book and the one that saves the most people |
| Lodged the covenant | +7 / +5 · the seawall gets an owner and the Low Coast has a future |
| Published the catalogue | +8 / +6 · Burned, certainly, and four hundred families finally know |
| Got the co-op its title | +5 / +5 · ninety people, one field, and the Raze becomes somebody's home on paper |
| Took the retainer | +0 / +2 · the line runs. The crew is comfortable. Volume Two is a very different book. |
Pay: none, ever, from anyone. Non-money: whichever link they broke stays broken, and it stays broken in Volume Two, and Service opens with the crew already known to everyone inside it.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/048
"it was one line. it was always one line."
@standpipe4evr how long have you known
WARRANTY VOID since the filters. we just didn't know we knew.
WARRANTY VOID since the filters. we just didn't know we knew.
The Not-LineNot a finale with a villain and not a heist. It is the contract where a five-person crew works out that everything that has happened to their district was a schedule, and gets to break exactly one part of it, and has to look at the people attached to the other three.
ConnectionsC03 THE FILTER JOB where the line starts ·
C24 PATRON the fund ·
C30 SERVICE NOTICE the procurement ·
BURNED what comes after
137 · MB-01
Part 4
The
Competition
SIX CREWS WHO WANT THE SAME WORK
Grava Pack140
The Bonded142
Sunset Delivery144
Hallim & Hallim146
The Second Unit148
Hearsay150
None of them are villains. Four of them are better at this than you are. Two of them are funnier.
MB-01 · 138
Rivals
How to use Part 4
SIX RIVALSSometimes competitors. Sometimes allies. Eventually, hired against you.
Rival crews are the connective tissue that turns thirty-two contracts into a campaign. They take the jobs the crew refuses, they arrive at the same warehouse on the same night, and when an institution finally decides Warranty Void is a problem, it does not send police. It hires one of these.
Each rival has one method, one philosophy and one signature, and all three should be legible in a sentence. If a player cannot describe a rival to an absent friend in ten seconds, the rival is not working.
The three uses
Competition. They are ahead. Put them one scene in front of the crew on any contract with a Second clock, and let the crew watch a job get done differently.
Complication. They took the other side of the same contract. Both crews are correct. Neither is hostile. This is the best use and the one most tables never see.
Contract. Somebody hires them against the crew, and it is always because of a specific earlier decision. A rival deployed without a traceable cause is a wasted rival.
Refusing generates rivals
Thirteen contracts in this volume are built to be refused. Every one of them has a Fallout row that says somebody else takes it. Name the somebody. Use this part. A refused contract that comes back wearing a rival's face is the single most efficient consequence in the book.
The rule
No rival in this part is evil, and none of them can be solved by killing. Every one of them is a crew doing a job, the way this crew does jobs, for reasons the players would find sympathetic if the book had been written from their side.
See alsoCOMPLICATIONS p.50 entry 7 · And then? p.51 entry 3 · HEAT p.42
139 · MB-01
Rivals
Rival · KAVAST · MONO-TYPE
GRAVA PACKSix wolves, one doctrine, and a commander who is the only person in Lost Angeles not enjoying any of this.
Commander Ilya Vroza's pack is a state instrument on a public road: six vehicles, six wolf-lineage operators bred and trained in the same programme Danka walked out of, running cohesion doctrine at a level no freelance crew can match.
They are not criminals and they are not here to fight. They are a recruitment campaign with a motor pool, and they have been embarrassed by Warranty Void twice before this volume opens.
Method
Formation. Grava Pack does everything as a unit, at the same time, with no discussion, because they were bred to and it works. A pack action is not a tactic; it is a demonstration.
Philosophy
Cohesion is not a style, it is a result — and a splice is five people pretending that mismatched parts are a choice rather than an inability to be issued a matching set. Vroza believes this sincerely and it is why she is dangerous.
Signature
They never chase. They arrive where the crew is going, already parked, already formed up, having worked out the route. Twice in a volume; the third time it should be somewhere the crew thought was private.
MB-01 · 140
Rivals
AT THE TABLE Open
| Stat line | |
|---|---|
| Six operators | FIGHT 2+ · MOBI 6" · AR 2 · FW 3 · MW 2 each |
| Pack Bonus | +1 to any roll made while three or more are within 6" of each other |
| Vroza | FIGHT 2+ · TACT 2+ · GUTS 2+ · AR 3 · FW 4 · MW 3 · and she is never in the first vehicle |
How they open (d6)
| d6 | Their first move |
|---|---|
| 1 | Six vehicles arrive at once from three directions and nobody gets out. |
| 2 | One pack member approaches alone, unarmed, and is extremely polite. |
| 3 | They have already spoken to whoever hired the crew. |
| 4 | A broadcast goes out naming the location before the crew has left it. |
| 5 | They do the job the crew came to do, correctly, and leave the client happier. |
| 6 | Vroza speaks to Danka directly. This is always the worst option for everyone. |
Wounded (d6)
| d6 | When it goes badly for them |
|---|---|
| 1 | The formation breaks and they are visibly worse apart. They know it and hate it. |
| 2 | They withdraw as a unit, immediately, without covering anyone. Doctrine. |
| 3 | Vroza does not withdraw. Twice this has nearly killed her. |
| 4 | They call it a demonstration and post it as a win, and the edit is good. |
| 5 | One of them stays behind to help someone. It is not in doctrine and nobody reports it. |
| 6 | They come back within the week. They always come back within the week. |
What they want from Warranty Void
Proof that a splice loses to a pack, filmed, and Danka's return. Vroza has an open offer for her and has never once made it as a threat, which is what makes it work.
Price to be hired against them
Kavast will not be hired against anyone. They can be pointed. A rival who tells Grava Pack where the crew will be on Thursday costs nothing and is the cheapest way in this book to put six wolves in a street.
If somebody hires them against the crew
They arrive early, take the position, and make the crew's contract impossible rather than dangerous. Nobody is hurt. The job simply does not happen, and it happens on camera.
ConnectionsPACK FREQUENCY p.106 · Danka Ivel p.14 · THE ARM p.74 · HEAT p.42
141 · MB-01
Rivals
Rival · LICENSED · INSURED · CORRECT
THE BONDEDFour operators with a licence, an indemnity policy and a compliance officer. They will beat you with paperwork.
A legitimate contract security firm working the same districts: four operators, a supervisor, full insurance, and every permit Lost Angeles issues. They take the same contracts as the crew and they file returns on them.
They are the most frequent rival in the book because they are the version of Warranty Void that said yes. Two of them are gene-forged with current leases, and their upkeep is paid by the firm, and they will mention this.
Method
Documentation. The Bonded arrive with authority: written instructions, a licence number, an indemnity reference, and the calm of people who cannot be prosecuted for what they are about to do.
Philosophy
Freelancers are a liability to their clients and to themselves. Everything Warranty Void does could be done lawfully, with cover, for better money, and the only reason they do not is vanity.
Signature
They serve paper. Before anything else happens, one of them hands the crew a document, and it is real, and it is correct, and reading it takes ninety seconds the crew does not have.
MB-01 · 142
Rivals
AT THE TABLE Open
| Stat line | |
|---|---|
| Four operators | SHOOT 4+ · TACT 2+ · AR 2 · FW 3 · MW 2 each |
| Supervisor | TACT 2+ · OPINT 2+ · never engages · carries the paperwork |
| Indemnified | They will do anything lawful without hesitating, and nothing unlawful at all |
How they open (d6)
| d6 | Their first move |
|---|---|
| 1 | A document is served, politely, before anyone has said hello. |
| 2 | They are already inside and have been since before the crew arrived, with permission. |
| 3 | The supervisor asks the crew for their licence number. |
| 4 | They have hired the crew's own contact for the same evening. |
| 5 | They offer to split it. The offer is genuine and the terms are fair. |
| 6 | They call Monitor Central and wait, which is devastating and entirely legal. |
Wounded (d6)
| d6 | When it goes badly for them |
|---|---|
| 1 | They stop immediately. The indemnity does not cover improvisation. |
| 2 | The supervisor withdraws the team and files a report naming the crew. |
| 3 | One of them keeps going anyway and is fired within the week. |
| 4 | They escalate to their client, who escalates to lawyers, which is slower and worse. |
| 5 | They ask the crew for help. It has happened twice and both times were sincere. |
| 6 | Their gene-forged operators get assessed on the spot by their own firm as a formality. |
What they want from Warranty Void
Nothing. They do not think about Warranty Void at all, which Ozzy finds more offensive than any threat in this book.
Price to be hired against them
They can be out-documented. A crew holding a compliance complaint, a filing, or a challenged survey can stop them cold, and it takes an afternoon in an office instead of a night with a vehicle.
If somebody hires them against the crew
They will do it lawfully, thoroughly, and on schedule, and there will be a written record afterwards proving that everything they did was permitted.
ConnectionsTITLE AND DEED p.108 · THE LAST TENANT p.128 · REPOSSESSION p.134 · THE BODY ECONOMY p.44
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Rivals
Rival · THREE KIDS AND A CHANNEL
SUNSET DELIVERYThey are funnier than you, they are worse at this than you, and they are gaining.
Three operators, none over twenty-one, running a channel with better numbers than Warranty Void's and roughly a third of the competence. They took the name from a defunct courier firm and they think it is hilarious.
They are not a threat. They are a mirror, eighteen months earlier, and every time they turn up the crew has to decide whether to help them or beat them, and both feel bad.
Method
Volume. Sunset Delivery take every job, post everything, and fail publicly and often, and their audience loves them for it in a way Warranty Void's audience never quite loves Warranty Void.
Philosophy
Nothing is serious and everything is content. They have not yet had the session where somebody they know gets hurt, and the whole crew knows it is coming.
Signature
They post first. Whatever happens, Sunset Delivery's cut is up within the hour, it is badly edited, it is very funny, and it names locations Warranty Void deliberately did not.
MB-01 · 144
Rivals
AT THE TABLE Open
| Stat line | |
|---|---|
| Three operators | SHOOT 5+ · FIGHT 5+ · MOBI 6" · AR 1 · FW 2 · MW 1 each |
| Enthusiasm | Once per scene, one of them attempts something no professional would. It works on a 6. |
| The channel | Anything they witness is public within an hour, always |
How they open (d6)
| d6 | Their first move |
|---|---|
| 1 | They are already there and have already made it worse. |
| 2 | They ask the crew for advice, sincerely, at the worst possible moment. |
| 3 | They underbid the crew by ninety percent and the client took it. |
| 4 | One of them is filming the crew rather than the job. |
| 5 | They have brought a completely inappropriate vehicle. |
| 6 | They are doing it correctly, for once, and it is unsettling. |
Wounded (d6)
| d6 | When it goes badly for them |
|---|---|
| 1 | They run. All three, immediately, without shame, and they are fast. |
| 2 | One of them is genuinely hurt and the other two do not know what to do. |
| 3 | They post the failure and it does better than any of their successes. |
| 4 | They ask Grigor for help and Grigor gives it, which costs the crew a whole session. |
| 5 | They blame Warranty Void publicly and half the district believes them. |
| 6 | They stop posting for two weeks, which is the most frightening thing they do. |
What they want from Warranty Void
Approval, and to be taken seriously, and eventually a collaboration. Ozzy has been quietly managing this relationship for months and has told nobody.
Price to be hired against them
They cannot be hired against anyone. They can be encouraged, which is worse, and any rival who wants Warranty Void embarrassed can simply tell Sunset Delivery a location.
If somebody hires them against the crew
Nobody hires them. They turn up anyway, on the wrong side, having been told a version of events by someone who wanted exactly this.
ConnectionsSIX MINUTES OF FAME p.76 · Clout p.43 · Ozzy p.30 · THE CLIP p.48
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Rivals
Rival · TWO SISTERS · RECOVERY
HALLIM & HALLIMThey do the job in Part 3 that the crew refused. They have never once broken a law.
Ferzana and Yasmin Hallim, sisters, twelve years in field recovery, and the team the contractor calls when a rotation needs somebody who will not hesitate. They are extremely good and they sleep fine.
If the crew refuses REPOSSESSION p.134, these two run it, and they run it that week, and every address on that rotation is a person the crew could have met.
Method
Speed and courtesy. The Hallims are in and out in eleven minutes, they never raise their voices, they explain each step as it happens, and people thank them afterwards, which is the most disturbing fact in this part of the book.
Philosophy
The debt is real, the law is the law, and somebody is going to do this job. Ferzana genuinely believes that people are better off with her doing it than with someone who enjoys it, and she may be right.
Signature
They knock. Always. Every time. They wait for the door to be answered and they have never once forced one, and the district has learned that a knock at that hour means it is already over.
MB-01 · 146
Rivals
AT THE TABLE Open
| Stat line | |
|---|---|
| Ferzana | TACT 2+ · GUTS 2+ · FIGHT 4+ · AR 2 · FW 3 · MW 2 · never improvises |
| Yasmin | OPINT 2+ · SHOOT 2+ · AR 2 · FW 3 · MW 2 · covers, does not talk |
| Eleven minutes | If uninterrupted, any recovery they start is finished in eleven minutes |
How they open (d6)
| d6 | Their first move |
|---|---|
| 1 | They are already at the door and it is already open. |
| 2 | Ferzana explains what is about to happen, kindly, to everyone in the room. |
| 3 | They have the paperwork and they offer it for inspection before anyone asks. |
| 4 | They recognise the crew and greet them by callsign. |
| 5 | They pause. Genuinely pause. Something about this one is wrong and Ferzana has noticed. |
| 6 | Yasmin is on a roof and has been for an hour. |
Wounded (d6)
| d6 | When it goes badly for them |
|---|---|
| 1 | They withdraw and reschedule. There is always another Thursday. |
| 2 | Ferzana asks a question she is not supposed to ask, out loud, in front of her sister. |
| 3 | Yasmin covers the withdrawal and is very good at it. |
| 4 | They complete the recovery anyway, faster, and it is uglier than either of them wanted. |
| 5 | One of them is hurt and the other stops being professional entirely. |
| 6 | They file. Everything. Including the crew's names and what the crew did. |
What they want from Warranty Void
Nothing, until REPOSSESSION p.134. After that: to be understood, which Ferzana will never ask for and Yasmin would find humiliating.
Price to be hired against them
They can be bought out of a specific address, once, for money, and Ferzana will honour it exactly and will never accept a second offer from the same buyer.
If somebody hires them against the crew
They will find the crew inside a week, knock, and serve a lawful instrument, and there will be no way to fight it that does not make everything worse.
ConnectionsREPOSSESSION p.134 · SERVICE NOTICE p.132 · BURN NOTICE p.96 · THE BODY ECONOMY p.44
147 · MB-01
Rivals
Rival · WHAT GRIGOR SURVIVED
THE SECOND UNITFour people who came out of the same Compact unit he did. They have not aged the way he has.
Grigor has outlasted two units. Four members of the second one are alive, working Lost Angeles as a crew, and have been for six years without ever once contacting him.
They are not hostile and they are not friends. They are the answer to a question he has spent a decade not asking, and they have their own reasons for the silence, and those reasons are the best material in this part of the book.
Method
Persistence, exactly as he runs it: absorb, endure, outlast. Watching them work is watching Grigor from the outside, and every player at the table will notice within one scene.
Philosophy
The unit ended and they did not, and the only way any of them stayed intact was by agreeing never to look at it again. Contacting Grigor would break that, and one of them has wanted to for six years.
Signature
They do not acknowledge him. Not once, not by name, not by look, in any scene they share, until the scene where one of them does.
MB-01 · 148
Rivals
AT THE TABLE Open
| Stat line | |
|---|---|
| Four operators | FIGHT 2+ · GUTS 2+ · AR 3 · FW 3 · MW 2 each · Hardened |
| Anchor | Same doctrine bonus Grigor has. They do not know they do it either. |
| Attrition | They cannot be moved off a position by force. Neither can he. |
How they open (d6)
| d6 | Their first move |
|---|---|
| 1 | They are holding the position the crew needs and they were there first. |
| 2 | One of them is cooking. The crew notices before Grigor does. |
| 3 | They take the contract at a lower rate specifically so the crew does not get it. |
| 4 | They are hurt, badly, and have not stopped, and will not accept help. |
| 5 | One of them speaks to Cas instead of Grigor, which is a decision. |
| 6 | They leave without engaging, and afterwards Grigor is quiet for a session. |
Wounded (d6)
| d6 | When it goes badly for them |
|---|---|
| 1 | They hold. They do not withdraw. This has killed people in their unit before. |
| 2 | The youngest breaks formation to help a civilian and the other three cover it without comment. |
| 3 | One goes down and the other three do not react at all, visibly, which is the doctrine working. |
| 4 | They accept help from Warranty Void, wordlessly, and it changes everything. |
| 5 | Their leader says Grigor's callsign. Once. This is the only time it should happen. |
| 6 | They disappear for a volume and come back with one fewer. |
What they want from Warranty Void
Nothing they will admit to. One of them wants to tell him what actually happened at the end of the unit, and has been carrying it for six years, and is running out of time to do it.
Price to be hired against them
They cannot be hired against Grigor. They can be hired against the crew, and have been once, and took the contract specifically so that nobody worse would.
If somebody hires them against the crew
They will do it thoroughly and they will not enjoy it, and at the end of it somebody will have to explain to Grigor why they never called.
ConnectionsGrigor Tam p.22 · And then? p.51 entry 6 · THE WHOLE QUEUE p.136
149 · MB-01
Rivals
Rival · ONE OPERATOR · NO CREW
HEARSAYShe works alone, she has never been photographed, and Theo has four hundred hours of footage she is not in.
A solo operator with a reputation that is entirely secondhand: nobody agrees on her lineage, her age, or whether she is one person. What is verifiable is a decade of contracts completed with no witnesses and no footage.
In a city where the crew's whole identity is being seen, Hearsay is the argument for the opposite, and she has been doing it longer and getting paid better.
Method
Absence. Hearsay is never in a scene. She is in the scene before it and the scene after it, and the crew's experience of her is entirely archaeological: a door already open, a target already gone, a client already paid.
Philosophy
A face is a liability and a channel is a confession. She has watched Warranty Void's rise with what Frequency describes as professional bewilderment, and she has never once been tempted.
Signature
She leaves the job finished. If Hearsay took the same contract, the crew arrives to find it complete, correct, and impossible to attribute, and their client has already been invoiced.
MB-01 · 150
Rivals
AT THE TABLE Open
| Stat line | |
|---|---|
| Hearsay | Do not stat her for combat. She does not have combat. |
| If cornered | MOBI 8" · TACT 2+ · OPINT 2+ · one action to be gone, no roll |
| The rule | She is never in a scene the players can win. If they meet her, she wanted it. |
How they open (d6)
| d6 | Their first move |
|---|---|
| 1 | The job is already done and the client has already paid somebody. |
| 2 | A route the crew planned is closed, cleanly, in a way that helps them. |
| 3 | A message. Not to the crew. To one of them, by name, about something private. |
| 4 | She takes the half of the contract nobody wanted and leaves the profitable half. |
| 5 | Theo's footage has a four-second gap that no edit accounts for. |
| 6 | Nothing. Ever. Some tables should never meet her at all. |
Wounded (d6)
| d6 | When it goes badly for them |
|---|---|
| 1 | Nobody has ever seen this happen and there is no table on this page for it. |
| 2 | — |
| 3 | — |
| 4 | — |
| 5 | — |
| 6 | — |
What they want from Warranty Void
To know how they do it in public without being destroyed. She has been watching the channel for two years and has never left a comment, and she is the reason THE BOOTH p.78's ritual exists in the form it does.
Price to be hired against them
She cannot be hired against anyone. She takes contracts, and if the crew are on the far side of one, they will not find out until afterwards.
If somebody hires them against the crew
They will not know it happened. Something will simply have gone wrong three weeks earlier in a way nobody can trace, and the crew will spend a session investigating themselves.
ConnectionsTHE BOOTH p.78 · Theo Ashe p.18 · Frequency p.36 · THE WHOLE QUEUE p.136
151 · MB-01
Indexes
Back matter
INDEXESThirty-two contracts, four ways in
By verb
| Verb | Contracts |
|---|---|
| RETRIEVE | WHAT THE TUNNEL KEEPS p.86 · THE CRATER LOT p.94 · RENTAL SOUND p.102 · SLACK WATER p.122 · WHAT THE SEA FILED p.126 |
| DELIVER | THE FILTER JOB p.64 · DARK TRANSIT p.82 · ONE-WAY FARE p.88 · THE LONG WAY p.104 |
| EXTRACT | NOBODY'S KID p.62 · ONE-WAY FARE p.88 · CLEAN HANDS p.114 |
| COLLECT | TITLE AND DEED p.108 |
| BREAK | SIX MINUTES OF FAME p.76 · GRID FIRMWARE p.84 · BURN NOTICE p.96 · SERVICE NOTICE p.132 · THE WHOLE QUEUE p.136 |
| HOLD | THE WASH p.60 · THE STANDPIPE WAR p.68 · HOUSE RULES p.72 · PATRON p.116 · THE LAST TENANT p.128 |
| TRACE | THE WASH p.60 · THE FILTER JOB p.64 · THE BOOTH p.78 · GROUND TRUTH p.92 · WHAT GREW BACK p.98 · PACK FREQUENCY p.106 · THE INVITATION p.118 · WHAT THE SEA FILED p.126 · THE WHOLE QUEUE p.136 |
| LIFT | GOOD PRESS p.66 · THE VIEW p.112 |
| RUN | DARK TRANSIT p.82 · RENTAL SOUND p.102 · THE LONG WAY p.104 · PACK FREQUENCY p.106 · SALT WAKE p.124 |
| CLEAR | THE FILTER JOB p.64 · GROUND TRUTH p.92 · WHAT GREW BACK p.98 · SALT WAKE p.124 |
| PERFORM | THE ARM p.74 · SIX MINUTES OF FAME p.76 · PATRON p.116 |
| REPOSSESS | REPOSSESSION p.134 |
By exposure
| E | Contracts |
|---|---|
| E1 | NOBODY'S KID p.62 · THE BOOTH p.78 · GRID FIRMWARE p.84 · BURN NOTICE p.96 · CLEAN HANDS p.114 · SERVICE NOTICE p.132 · REPOSSESSION p.134 |
| E2 | THE WASH p.60 · WHAT THE TUNNEL KEEPS p.86 · ONE-WAY FARE p.88 · WHAT GREW BACK p.98 · THE LONG WAY p.104 · TITLE AND DEED p.108 · WHAT THE SEA FILED p.126 |
| E3 | GOOD PRESS p.66 · DARK TRANSIT p.82 · GROUND TRUTH p.92 · THE VIEW p.112 · SLACK WATER p.122 |
| E4 | THE FILTER JOB p.64 · THE STANDPIPE WAR p.68 · HOUSE RULES p.72 · THE CRATER LOT p.94 · RENTAL SOUND p.102 · THE INVITATION p.118 · THE LAST TENANT p.128 |
| E5 | THE ARM p.74 · SIX MINUTES OF FAME p.76 · PACK FREQUENCY p.106 · PATRON p.116 · SALT WAKE p.124 · THE WHOLE QUEUE p.136 |
Finding a contract in ten seconds
Know the shape of the night you want and use the verb index. Know how big it should be and use the band chart on RATE BANDS p.40. Know where the crew already is and use the cluster list on CONTENTS p.4.
MB-01 · 152
Indexes
PEOPLE, PLACES AND SYSTEMS Open
The crew
DANKA IVEL p.14 · THEO ASHE p.18 · GRIGOR TAM p.22 · CAS p.26 · OZZY OKONKWO-CRUZ p.30
The orbit and standing cast
Marisol Vega p.35 · Frequency p.36 · Dr. Silk p.36 · Marco Cruz p.37 · Razborki p.37 · Bonzer Kabesh p.37 · THE ORBIT p.36
Rivals
GRAVA PACK p.140 · THE BONDED p.142 · SUNSET DELIVERY p.144 · HALLIM & HALLIM p.146 · THE SECOND UNIT p.148 · HEARSAY p.150
Places
THE GARAGE p.34 · BARRICADIA p.58 · CENTER POINT p.70 · THE MUSK TUNNELS p.80 · THE RAZE p.90 · RING ROAD p.100 · THE HIGH TOP p.110 · THE LOW COAST p.120 · MONITOR CENTRAL p.130
Systems
The Board p.39 · RATE BANDS p.40 · HEAT p.42 · Clout p.43 · THE BODY ECONOMY p.44 · THE CLIP p.48 · Downtime in the Wash p.49 · COMPLICATIONS p.50 · And then? p.51 · THE GENERATOR p.52 · BURNED p.54
What is in Volume Two
Service. Monitor Central Asset Recovery and Remand, in full: the facility, the procedure, a hundred accounts, the economy, the staff, and five ways out. The failure state this volume only names.
Thirty-two more contracts across the regional clusters and four cities the line already publishes.
Six more rivals, including whoever the crew made in this volume by refusing thirteen jobs.
The morning after THE WHOLE QUEUE p.136. Whichever link the crew broke, Volume Two opens on it.
◧ WARRANTY VOID // WV/LOG/049
'still here. still broke. tap's still on.'
@standpipe4evr see you thursday
WARRANTY VOID bring a jug
WARRANTY VOID bring a jug
ColophonWarranty Void · The Mission Book · Volume One. Operator Tactics / Terra Conflictus 2066. Built from the Warranty Void origin packages, the Lost Angeles material, and the Mission Board.
153 · MB-01