Days & Nights in the Dusk City

From the beginning, one of the most significant goals for Dusk City Outlaws has been to be the kind of game that could be easily pulled off of the shelf at a moment's notice and be ready to play without significant prep work. A lot of the decisions that went into the design of the game come from this root, and one of the most significant one is the decision to break play up into fairly structures daytime and nighttime segments, during which you either do planning, or do legwork.

Another major goal for the game is that I wanted it to be a player-driven sandbox; this goal also ties into the idea of being able to run without prep work, because it means the Judge doesn't need to understand some twisting path of a narrative, only react and allow the players to keep the story moving forward. But sometimes player-driven sandboxes stall out; players have too many options, and don't know what they should be doing. To address this, I knew the game was going to need two things: a clear call to action and a limited amount of time in which to get things done. This is the pull-and-push of player motivation in Dusk City Outlaws.

The Call to Action

The call to action is something that many tabletop roleplaying games that I like get right. Shadowrun, for example, is one of the best examples of this; you need to get a job from Mr. Johnson in order to pay your bills, and that job has a clear goal that you have to accomplish. There's a lot of Shadowrun inspiration in Dusk City Outlaws, and indeed one of the elevator pitches I use when describing the game to my fellow game designers is, "It's the premise of Shadowrun, the strong factions of Legend of the Five Rings, against the backdrop of a fantasy version of New York City." Getting your job from your broker at the beginning is the clear call to action, and I've found that the best successes I've had in scenario design are the ones where there is a clear target (steal this diamond, rob this bank, etc.) with interesting obstacles around them. This is the pull, the thing that lures the players toward it: the clear goal, with a call to action to achieve it.

The Time Limit

It's that second core need of the game, a limited amount of time in which to get things done, that led me to clearly define day and night segments, as well as planning scenes and legwork scenes. Putting a time limit on the Job puts pressure on the players to move forward; it's the stick that puts forceful motivation to the players' actions. But at the moment you put any limitation on the players, you need to also give them a clear sense of what the confines of those limitations are. In the case of putting a time limitation on the Job, that means the ultimate resource the players have is now time itself, and I found quickly that I needed to be able to tell the players now only how much of that resource they had, but how quickly it is expended. That's only fair, and the players won't enjoy their time at the table if they have a limitation placed on their resources but no clearly defined way that they are expended. If it's all arbitrary, they don't get the satisfaction of feeling like they earned their success, or deserved their failure.

Planning

While that realization led clear definitions of time resources (you have X days to do the Job, and each day is divided into one daytime segment and one nighttime segment), players then needed to know what they could actually do with their time. From the start, I said I wanted this to be a game where clever planning is rewarded, and where that instinct to come up with the foolproof plan that many gamers have is both rewarded and prevented from spiraling out of control. I felt strongly that coming up with not only the basic sketch of a plan, but also coming up with all of the details and contingency plans, would lead to a more satisfying payoff. I also wanted there to be a real risk of failure (if not complete failure in the Job, at least failure to account for something in your plans) because I feel like the highs of success are greater when this is the case. But if I was going to let the players do the planning, I had to put limitations on it. We've all played in that game where players dither forever. To keep planning from spiraling out of control, I said that planning consumes your main resource (time, in the form of an entire daytime or nighttime segment) and put a 15-minute real-time limit on planning scenes. This has had the nice effect of spurring the players to the meat of their planning quickly, with little distraction or dithering.

Spencer Crittendon's planning notebook.

Legwork

Looking to the source material for the game, the con/heist genre, it seemed like a common trope is that no plan can instantly be put into motion. The main characters needed to get out there and set things up, meet contacts, recruit allies, set up cover stories, and, in the process, provide lots of opportunities for their opposition to make life more difficult for them. Every time the main characters went out and started putting a piece of their plan into motion, it was associated with a high risk of being caught. The classic con movie, The Sting, is one of the best examples of this, and some of the most tense moments in the movie come well before the climactic final act.

This is where the idea of legwork scenes came from. I found pretty quickly during playtesting that a player-driven sandbox game needed something very important to feel satisfying: a sense of progress. If you're going to ask the players to drive the action, they are going to want to feel like they're actually getting things done. So, I started out allowing everyone to define or participate in one legwork scene. That "or" in there was quickly revealed to be a problem; it led to lots of time spent with the crew divided into smaller groups, which would inevitably result in two or three players sitting around the table doing nothing and waiting for the current scene to play out. So I shifted the rule to say that everyone takes the lead on one legwork scene, and then can participate in as many of the other players' legwork scenes as they wanted. Coupling this with some better guidance for the Judge (focused on introducing complications that encourage many members of the crew to get involved in the scene), the pacing picked up significantly, and the players' sense of progress grew significantly.

There was one final major tweak that I made to legwork scenes, and it came after a playtest I ran at PAX West 2016. After that playtest, some of the players made the suggestion that the one thing missing from legwork was some assistance from the game in helping the players define the scene, a template that they could follow to easily set up the action. This is something tied into the challenge of player-driven games; when the options are too wide-open, players often feel paralyzed by their choices. I then created the template that players use in the game right now to help define their legwork scenes:

“Specify one thing you want to get out of the scene (a specific piece of information, some asset or resource, the cooperation or aid of an individual, and so on), and describe the place you are going to get it. You then explain how you are going to get it and, if necessary, who you interact with to get what you want.”

This turned out to be a great aid in keeping the pacing at the table moving forward. Defining what the player wants to get out of the scene up front sets and end goal for the scene, the "pull" that the player is working toward. This is also nice because, at the end of the scene, the player can look back and see if they got what they wanted, leading to a very clear sense of progress. Describing the place where you are going to get it helps the Judge provide the backdrop and set decoration for the scene, an important part of immersing the players in the setting. Defining how you are going to get what you want helps the Judge not only make the call on what obstacles and challenges are present, it also points to which skills or other mechanics you're going to need to use to succeed, and the option to talk about who you interact with opens the door to introducing recurring NPCs into the game. Best of all, this structure still allows players freedom to drive the game forward in the way they want, and lets them play to their strengths. If you're a Vesper who is good at dealing with nobles and need blackmail material on a noble to use as leverage, you describe your method as interacting directly with the nobility; if you're not good at dealing with nobles and are instead a Mummer who is good at dealing with criminals, you describe your method as seeking out another criminal who actually has the blackmail material already. Players can play to their strengths while still following a template that makes things easier on everyone.

Rogues Gallery

The criminal protagonists of Dusk City Outlaws might have plenty of skill and influence, but they don't go about their illegal business unopposed. In today's installment, we're going to take a look at a few of the groups that provide opposition for your crew while on the Job. Some of these threats are ever-present, while others only pop up from time to time, either in a specific scenario, or when the Judge introduces a plot twist or complication.

Private Security

With all of the money that flows through New Dunhaven, it should be no surprise that the wealthy and powerful spend some portion on that to protect their wealth and power from the cartels. Private security guards are common in New Dunhaven, and their duties range from on-site protection to acting as bodyguards for individual nobles. Private security does not endure the scrutiny that agents of the Crown do, and they tend to be less disciplined, less skilled, and also less restrained in dealing with the Right Kind of People than a member of the City Watch would be. They occasionally have contentious relationships with the Watch as well, and many Crown investigators will turn a blind eye when private security officers get roughed up or humiliated by the cartels.

The City Watch

The City Watch is the primary arm of law enforcement in the city. On the streets, City Watch officers patrol in pairs or small squads, keeping an eye out for criminal activity and responding to citizen complaints. Their role is to enforce the law, and to arrest anyone that flouts the Crown's authority. District precinct houses belonging to the Watch have small jails where criminals are held before being transferred to the Castle, the fortress-like prison overlooking Longharbor. The City Watch also employs investigators whose job is to seek the criminals responsible for breaking the law, collect evidence, and both direct the officers of the Watch to make arrests and provide the Crown barristers with enough evidence to convince a magistrate to convict.

The Spiders

The Spiders are the city's secret police. Before the Arrangement went into place, the Spiders were a criminal cartel. When the Black Council formed, the Spiders refused to abide by the Arrangement and turned Crown, offering their skills and knowledge of criminal methods to the legal authorities in exchange for pardons and employment. This betrayal cut the cartels deep, causing one to flee the city and another to collapse entirely due to having so many of its members arrested and executed. Now, the Spiders use their knowledge and experience as criminals to hunt the members of the cartels and enforce the Crown's authority in secret. They often operate independently, but can predict cartel activity based on their own history.

Bounty Hunters

When a crew avoids justice for long enough, the Crown will frequently put bounties out on their individual members. Bounty hunters are private citizens, licensed by the Crown to hunt down and apprehend criminals and bring them in for arrest and trial. Most bounty hunters are independent operators, though some work in pairs, whose only income comes from cashing in bounties. They are usually highly skilled, well-prepared, patient and well-armed; few bounty hunters would take to hunting down the Right Kind of People without an arsenal of weapons and plenty of rope, manacles, and other tools of the trade. Bounty hunters frequently strike when a member of the crew is isolated from the others; taking on a whole crew at once is a good way for a bounty hunter to get killed.

The Dredgers

The Dredger Detective Agency, whose members are usually just referred to as Dredgers, is a private investigative organization that specializes in detective work and security. Unlike most private security, Dredgers are highly skilled, intelligent, and usually at the top of their field, and they charge a commensurate amount for their services. The Crown contracts the Dredgers when their investigators have failed to apprehend a particular criminal and a bounty has gone unclaimed for too long. Dredgers are also occasionally employed by nobles or wealthy merchants for investigative and security operations where a skilled hand is needed to lead. The Dredgers are also the only private citizens that are allowed by law to carry firearms, a result of a negotiation between the organization's founder and the Crown many years ago.

The Blooded

In many ways, the Blooded are the ninth cartel that rules over the criminal underworld of New Dunhaven, though they do not abide by the Arrangement or respect the authority of the Black Council. The Blooded are criminals who do many of the same things that the cartels do, and their turf covers a large swath of the southern reaches of the city. Yet despite being criminals, the Blooded are not the Right Kind of People; they prey upon the other cartels, fight openly with them, and are enemies to all of the cartels of the Arrangement. They oppose the Crown and the cartels alike, and engage in criminal activity that is more overt, more violent, and more predatory than the cartels typically sanction. They prey upon the law-abiding citizens in their turf with open hostility, and instead of trying to work subtly and stay out of the view of the City Watch, they invite conflicts with the Crown with open antagonism. When a crew is on the Job, the Blooded will often try and steal the score out from under them, and can be disruptive to any crew's plans.

The Endless Dawn

Though they would call themselves "concerned citizens" when asked, the Endless Dawn are nuisances at best and vigilantes at worst. A grassroots organization of private citizens whose stated mission is to keep the streets free of criminal activity, the Endless Dawn began as a neighborhood watch organization that spread throughout the city. Unfortunately, as the group's membership swelled, its mission drifted, and now the Endless Dawn is largely dominated by angry, aggressive private citizens who want to take the law into their own hands. Most of the time, this amounts to little more than busybody neighborhood watches that stick their nose into the cartels' business, but Endless Dawn activity that has gotten out of control has occasionally led to riots and worse. Reckless in their supposed righteousness, the Endless Dawn occasionally harasses law-abiding citizens suspected of being criminal informants or cartel agents, though often this is just an excuse for one citizen to take out a grudge on another.

The Heat is On

Since Dusk City Outlaws is based on sandbox-style play, and knowing that I wanted the game to be one that required a minimal amount of prep work to start playing, I knew that I wouldn't be able to include a lot of plot or narrative in the scenarios, and would need a mechanic in the game that carried the weight of providing dramatic twists. That mechanic is called heat, and it represents the severity of the reaction of the city's law-abiding citizens to the criminal activities of the cartels. Heat is also a resource that the Judge spends to create impromptu challenges that the members of the crew need to deal with in order to succeed.

Reaching to drop some heat into the heat pool during a playtest.

Lots of thing generate heat; just by being on the job, the crew generates heat, representing the ever-present pursuit of the Crown's investigators and the officers of the City Watch. The players can also generate more heat by being sloppy or unlucky when committing crimes: leaving behind lots of evidence, stealing objects of exceptional value, causing collateral damage, killing or kidnapping someone, etc. Crew members generate a small amount of heat by being conspicuous in certain areas of the city, though they do not generate heat for most crimes by default, only when the crimes are egregious or reckless enough to draw the attention of the Crown. Heat can also be generated as a negative consequence of rolling drawbacks on the game's challenge dice.

The Judge spends heat to introduce complications during legwork scenes, or when the climactic scene of the scenario is going down. For small amounts of heat, the Judge can add private security guards into a scene on the fly, introduce hazards and obstacles that pose a physical threat, or cause a mark to become exceptionally suspicious for one scene. Greater expenditures of heat can have a bigger effect: a district of the city is plastered with wanted posters featuring images of the crew, the citizens of a district grow suspicious and are less susceptible to being fooled, or a more significant antagonist, like an investigator or bounty hunter, enters the scene.

Removing some heat from the heat pool just before ruining the crew's plans.

When the heat pool grows large enough, the Judge can spend a large chunk of it all at once to introduce a plot twist. Plot twists are major shifts in the scenario that might recontextualize the entire affair. A plot twist could reveal that one of the crew's allies is actually secretly an agent of the Crown who has been spying on them, or it could cause the City Watch to scoop up that ally in a raid and imprison him or her in the Castle, far from where they can be of assistance. A plot twist can introduce a major villain, like a member of the city's secret police or a Dredger investigator, or it could be used to place an entire district of the city on lockdown, making it impossible to move in and out of that district without having to deal with the City Watch.

The Judge makes the call as to the nature of the complication or plot twist that gets introduced. It always needs to make sense in the context of the scenario's narrative, and some scenarios come with special plot twist suggestions specific to the circumstances of that particular Job. This also allows players to replay previously-played scenarios, as plot twists and complications can drastically alter the way the Job plays out. Heat reduces the need for advanced prep work by allowing the Judge to read the current situation and make things more interesting on the fly instead of requiring the Judge to follow a script laid out in the scenario.

The Right Kind of People

From the beginning, I knew I needed character creation to be fast and easy in Dusk City Outlaws. I also knew that I wanted a game where most characters were composed of only two major elements. The roots of this are in Dungeons & Dragons (race and class), but in the last few years there have been a few games that have taken the A + B approach and refined it so that each of the two halves is weighted about equally in terms of their importance in character creation. The two that inspired me the most in the early days of Dusk City Outlaws were the edition of Gamma World I worked on at Wizards of the Coast and the Iron Kingdoms Roleplaying Game that came out a few years back. I loved character creation in those games, and they use one of my favorite techniques in games as a whole: asking the player to creatively interpret the combination of two static game elements. I love this game element because it lets players put a little bit of themselves, something uniquely their own creation, into the character before the first die is even rolled.

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Gravediggers concept art by Joy Ang.

Another thing I knew from the beginning is that I wanted these two character elements to be on cardboard mats that you put out in front of you, similar to how board games like Arkham Horror or Shadows Over Camelot give you character cards. If I wanted there to be a short time between opening the box and being done making characters, I didn't want players having to copy information out of a book, or sharing books, or doing any of the other things that takes a while. Since I wanted to do the "pick A + B" style of character creation, I didn't think a character folio would work as well, so I settled on two cards that, when placed next to each other on the table in front of you, would take up about the same amount of space as a sheet of 8 1/2" x 11" paper. This decision later ended up being a real boon to making the game easy to play; I was able to put rules and gameplay reference information on the back sides of those sheets, meaning my players did not need to be constantly referencing a rulebook when they had simple rules questions.

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One of the v0.1 prototype cartel aspects. The Laughing Men cartel would eventually become the Mummers. In this iteration, the cartel sheet still possesses skills and there was more than one aspect for each cartel.

For the sake of reducing analysis paralysis, I decided to make two distinct types of character aspect cards, which also had the added benefit of making it easier for the group to make characters; the players on one side of the table would choose from one set of character cards while the players on the other side of the table would choose from the other set of cards, and then swap. The decision to make one type based on the cartels, and the other type based on what you contribute to the crew, was in from the very beginning; the very first "version 0.1" prototype character aspects had this split.

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In this v0.4 prototype sheet, the Laughing Men have evolved into the Mummers, but there were still multiple aspects per cartel. Appearance and Thing You Know About debut in this iteration, and though skills have moved onto specialty aspects in this version, equipment still lives here. Second Story Work is a thread connecting back to the original Tumbler.

Cartel aspects tell you about the larger organization of which you are a part; they also give you information on where you and your cartel-mates are conspicuous, what kinds of things you know about, and they give you some examples of how you can use your influence and connections to get things done on the Job. Each cartel aspect also has one special benefit that broadly defines the kinds of things the members of that cartel are good at. For example, the Circle, a cartel often used as the "muscle" of the crew for the Job, has a special benefit that makes it so that they can be more guaranteed to succeed when fighting with fists, knives, swords, and other melee weapons.

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This v0.6 cartel sheet continues the evolution of the Mummers. Equipment is gone off of this sheet, and many of the exceptions-based benefits are moved to a bulleted list of suggestions for ways the player can spend their resources.

Specialty aspects tell you what your role is on the crew and on the Job. They give you your equipment, provide you with multiple special benefits, and also list your skills. If the cartel aspect tells you who you are, your specialty aspect tells you what you do. The Specialties in currently in the game include:

• Alchemist
• Assassin
• Basher
• Boss
• Brawler
• Cleaner
• Dabbler
• Fixer
• Grifter
• Mastermind
• Mole
• Poisoner
• Runner
• Sharpshooter
• Thief
• Trainer

Because a major goal of the game is to have minimal prep work to get going, that means that a lot of the interesting narrative twists and turns that a roleplaying game normally takes need to come from the players and the mechanics they use. The dice system discussed in the previous blog post is one method, but the specialty aspects carry some of this weight in their special benefits. Most specialties have one or more benefits that allow them to twist the narrative in unexpected and exciting ways. They rely on player creativity to use, and are often left intentionally open to interpretation, a necessary requirement for being flexible enough to be broadly applicable in many different situations.

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A v0.5 prototype specialty sheet. Skills and equipment have both moved exclusively onto specialty sheets. The On the Inside Ability proves to be a popular, narrative-bending ability that also has the positive gameplay benefit of letting the player join into a scene even on the spur of the moment in a fun, dramatic way.

The end result is a fast way to create characters that give the chance for players to engage in some creative interpretation. I think it also results in players spending more time thinking about the things that make their characters unique, since the bulk of the character creation process is thinking about how the particular combination of cartel and specialty manifests itself.

The Dice Have It

I figured out pretty early on in the design of Dusk City Outlaws that, if I was going to have a game that's easy to pick up and play on the spur of the moment, I was going to need mechanics that are easy to teach and understand, but that could have a big, and varied, impact on the narrative of the game. Today, I'm going to talk about how the game's streamlined narrative dice system came about.

There have been a fair number of games released over the last few years that use unique dice mechanics, and sometimes unique dice, as a means of introducing more narrative variability and interpretation into task resolution. I love this idea; you roll the dice, and then you interpret the results and what they mean for the narrative. It's like watching the High Aldwin consult the bones in Willow (and yes, I unironically love Willow).

Playing with prototype dice during the filming of an actual play session. Left to right: Rodney Thompson, Sam Witwer, Elisa Teague. Photo by John French.

But I'm a tinkerer at heart, and I had in mind some additional goals for a narrative dice system that I wasn't quite getting out of everything that was out there, or at least everything I'd played. First, I wanted a dice system where your chance of success was immediately obvious to even the most casual player. This is something that I think many dice systems, both traditional and modern narrative systems alike, struggle with. There's an interpretation layer the player has to pass through to understand just how likely they are to succeed. Even looking at your character and evaluating how good you are at something is an exercise in system mastery and relative interpretation.

There is one common die system that does do a good job of making it very clear how good you are at something, and how likely you are to succeed on any given task: percentile systems. It's easy to translate a percentile chance of success into a practical understanding of how likely you are to succeed. Saying, "I've got a 75% chance of success on this" is a very comprehensible statement to most people. Unfortunately, percentile systems don't stand up as well when you start adding in modifiers or shifting difficulties.

Sam knows his die roll was good enough to succeed, but Elisa sees the twist of negative consequences on the horizon. Left to right: Rodney Thompson, Sam Witwer, Elisa Teague. Photo by John French.

The second goal I had is that, for all of the awesomeness that narrative dice systems provide, sometimes you just want to roll some dice quickly for a succeed/fail result. During the development of D&D 5th Edition, we often referenced situations where the Dungeon Master would call for a roll to get some guidance on how to proceed when they didn't have strong feelings about a task or situation. More complex narrative die systems often result in situations where every die roll becomes an exercise in interpretation, but I wanted a system where the rules said that it's OK (and easy) to have a quick die roll to determine success or failure, then move on.

My last goal is that I wanted interpretation of results to be simple and fast, even if it's the first time you're sitting down at the table to play, no matter how complex the situation is that triggered the die roll. Symbol-based narrative dice systems actually have some elements that make this easier, and some that make it harder. Counting symbols is, in general, easier than doing even simple math. It's just easier to look at a die and count the number of visible symbols, even over looking for some number of dice with an X or higher showing.

With all of these goals in mind, and knowledge of how the various die systems I've played with interact with those goals, I settled on a few things. First, I wanted to go with a percentile system. However, instead of modifying your chance of success based on the situation, the system would assume that your base chance of success for any task never changes (with a few caveats about impossible or automatic attempts). Instead, to represent things that increase the challenge or tilt things in your favor, the player adds narrative dice to the roll. These dice would come in two varieties, one positive, and one negative, and with only a single type of symbol on each type of die.

Challenge dice (left) and advantage dice (right), with the drawback and boon symbols, respectively.

This results in a system where, on any given die roll, you can have:

• Success
• Success, but something goes wrong in the process
• Succcess, and you get an unexpected additional benefit
• Failure
• Failure, but there is some upside to the attempt
• Catastrophic failure with unintended consequences 

I felt like that was a pretty good starting spectrum of results, but these starting decisions did have some consequences for the kind of game I'd be making. These basic design decisions meant that the game wouldn't focus very much on the granularity of its challenges, and combat probably wouldn't be dependent on any target's defenses. Any enemies that are particularly defensive, or particularly vulnerable, would need some other way to indicate that.

The prototype advantage and challenge dice used in playtesting.

Once the game came together, the die system worked surprisingly well for a first draft. New players, and players less experienced with roleplaying games in general, were able to quickly identify what they were good at and make and interpret rolls quickly. While running the game, I found that it was really easy to just throw advantage and challenge dice into the roll based on the circumstances. Best of all, the spectrum of six possible results ended up doing a lot of the heavy lifting in providing exciting, diverse narrative beats during game play.

So, what changed during development? Mostly things surrounding the system, while the core system stayed intact. Early playtests weren't seeing advantage and challenge dice have a big impact, so I doubled the number of symbols on each type of dice. The unfluctuating percentages for skills left players feeling like they didn't have a lot of control over the game, so a mechanic for spending luck (the players' hit point-like resource) to guarantee success, but at the cost of adding challenge dice to the roll, was introduced (this mechanic is called pushing your luck). I originally had a rule that said that you can only have 3 advantage or challenge dice on any roll, unless a game mechanic says that you can have 4; that mechanic wasn't worth its complication, and while running the game I found myself ignoring it frequently, so it was cut.

The most recent prototype advantage dice.

Other than that, the system has worked pretty well. I avoided trying to tie too many mechanics to boons or drawbacks (the symbols on advantage/challenge dice) because I wanted them to be largely in place for the players to interpret based on the situation, not the system itself. I think it hits my three goals rather well, and I think people will find it to be a nice, lighter narrative die-rolling system that moves quickly from the time the roll is announced to the point where the players are done interpreting the results.

Dusk City Outlaws Actual Play Videos

In December, we recorded an actual play session of Dusk City Outlaws with some friends of ours in Hollywood. After putting some small editing touches on the video, it's finally time to show it to the world!

This video was recorded at the awesome livestreaming studio of the Saving Throw show, and was made with the help of players Sam Witwer (Being Human, Star Wars: Rebels, Smallville), Elisa Teague (Geek Out!, Girls on Games), Tom Lommel (The Dungeon Bastard), and Spencer Crittendon (Harmonquest, the Harmontown podcast), with Dom Zook (the Saving Throw show) acting as our engineer, and John French as our B-roll photographer.

Watch Part 1 above, or jump straight to Part 2 or Part 3 of the heist!

Cartels of the Arrangement

New Dunhaven's criminal underworld is ruled over by eight cartels, organizations of diverse backgrounds and philosophies with one similar goal: get rich by any means necessary. These cartels control the vast majority of the city's crime, and each cartel has its own turf, its own preferred illicit operations, and its own value when coming together as a crew to pull off a job. Here's a quick look at each of the cartels, what they specialize in, and how they relate to the other criminals of the city.

A Wolf of the Circle.

The Circle

The Circle is a cartel that often chooses violence over finesse, and its members have a reputation for being tough brawlers and cold-eyed muscle. One of the youngest criminal organizations in New Dunhaven, the Circle was founded by refugees from the collapsed Vladov Empire, from far across the ocean. Most of the members of this cartel have done hard time in the city's jails or prisons, a result of the Crown's mishandling of their arrival on New Dunhaven's shores. This unfair incarceration only served to harden them into a band of criminals that is as tough as iron and as frosty as the snow-covered landscape of their homeland. Of all of the cartels, the Circle is the only one that is frequently accused of being a threat to the Arrangement, and with good reason. Most of the leadership of the Circle agrees that the Arrangement has made the cartels soft, and believe that it is their duty to toughen up the criminals of the city in order to stand up to the Crown and take their rightful place as the city's most powerful organization. Though they have not yet been bold enough to violate the Arrangement and engage in outright turf war with the other cartels, they push the boundaries of the truce between the cartels on an almost daily basis. 

One of the Family's enforcers.

The Family

The oldest, most connected, and wealthiest criminal organization in all of New Dunhaven, the Family also controls the largest swath of turf in the city. The Family treats crime like a business, and business is good. The only cartel to openly reveal its intentions to law-abiding citizens, the Family is deeply connected to the city's commoners, and its members act like the sometimes-unwanted champions of the lower classes; many of the criminal endeavors the Family undertakes are justified as "just watching out for the good people of our fine city." The Family shakes down local businesses for protection money, profits off of merchandise that "fell of the back of a cart," and runs illegal gambling dens in the back rooms of shops throughout the city. Yet despite the fact that they prey on the law-abiding citizens in their turf, they are also fiercely protective of the people that live within their domain; some would even say that living in an area controlled by the Family is safer than living anywhere else in the city, due to the low frequency of random crimes. The Family believes strongly in respect and a twisted sort of honor, and any sign of disrespect, both from other Family members and those not in the cartel, is a grave offense, one that can earn the enmity of the wealthiest cartel in the city in the span of a heartbeat.

The Forgotten

Less a true cartel and more a collection of street gangs, independent thieves, beggars, and other criminals that don't have anywhere else to go, the Forgotten are criminals that have slipped through the cracks of the Arrangement and of society itself. The cartel has no real leadership, and instead members of the Forgotten agree simply to back each other up when threatened and stay out of each others' way when not. One of the most fractious cartels, the Forgotten count among their number many of the city's roving street gangs, and though infighting between members of the cartel occasionally comes to violence, it lasts only until someone from outside of the cartel attempts to intervene. The Forgotten actually have the most members of all of the cartels, owing to their blanket acceptance of criminals that the other cartels would not admit, and as such they have an extremely vast and valuable information network that can get news and information from one side of the city to the other in mere minutes. Members of this cartel tend to be fiercely independent and identify less as Forgotten and more as individuals or by their street gang. 

A Gravedigger assassin in plague doctor garb.

The Gravediggers

Formally known as the Honorable Order of Cemetery Caretakers and Groundskeepers, the cartel known as the Gravediggers controls the city's mortuaries, funeral parlors, cemeteries, tombs, and catacombs. The cartel's legitimate face gives them the ability to deal with law-abiding citizens directly and discretely, and during some of their most vulnerable times. The Gravediggers believe in hiding in plain sight by involving themselves with business that most Dunhaveners find distasteful or disturbing; the cartel's unofficial motto is, "You can't see someone clearly if you won't look them in the eye," meaning that they reduce the risk of being caught in their criminal endeavors because they shroud themselves in death. The Gravediggers are also closely tied to the city's physickers and ward houses, and a large number of the city's plague doctors are actually corrupt and in the employ of the cartel.

A Laughing Lady of the Mummers.

The Mummers

In many ways, the Mummers are the cartel that holds the Arrangement together. Its members include many of the city’s artists and entertainers, from actors and musicians to storytellers and street performers. Unlike the other cartels, the Mummers do not have large areas of turf that they control. Instead, the Mummers’ turf consists of the city’s taverns, inns, ale houses, theaters, and other entertainment establishments. They operate these establishments like embassies inside the turf of the other cartels, and within them the rules of the Arrangement are enforced with extreme strictness. Any one of the Right Kind of People who finds themselves inside another cartel’s turf can make their way to a Mummer-controlled establishment and receive sanctuary and respite until members of their cartel can come and reinforce them. As a result, the Mummers are on friendly terms with each of the other cartels, and its members often have the charisma that makes bringing together a crew of members of different cartels just that much easier. Additionally, as entertainers, the Mummers have two unique advantages that makes them valuable on any job: they can draw attention to themselves easily, and away from the rest of their crew, and they have a legitimate inroad into almost any social function or event where entertainers are expected to be found.

A Red Lotus Society gunslinger, flintlock pistols at the ready.

The Red Lotus Society

The Red Lotus Society is a cartel that has cornered the market on a single, extremely valuable type of contraband: black powder weapons. The Society controls all manufacture and illegal firearms sales in New Dunhaven by controlling the secret formulas used in the creation of gunpowder. The Society is also the only cartel to have any significant naval presence, having invested in ships both large and small over the years, which they use for everything from smuggling contraband into the city to fighting off the pirates that plague the islands off of the city’s coast. As such, the cartel’s turf is composed of two largely contiguous areas of the city: the docks that stretch up and down the city’s eastern seaboard, and the districts of the city collectively known as Little Taona. The cartel’s roots are in criminal organizations that originated in distant lands, which came to New Dunhaven as people from the nations of Taona emigrated to the city and banded together to form the Red Lotus Society. Of course, this deep history brings with it some inherent conflict; though they came together on arriving in the city, those criminal organizations fought to retain their own identities as schools within the Society, and their differing traditions, philosophies, and methods sometimes come into conflict with one another and lead to infighting between members of the Society.

A Vesper grifter blends in to noble society.

The Vespers

As a cartel, the Vespers stake their claim on the city’s nobility. Focused on high society crime, elaborate confidence schemes, and the art of subtle manipulation, the Vespers are exceptionally good at blending in with nobles, wealthy merchants, Senators, and other members of the aristocracy. To the Vespers, everything comes down to manipulation; where other cartels might take a direct approach to the job, a Vesper seeks to gain leverage over someone and have them do the dirty work for them. The Vespers highly value secrets, especially those that can be used for blackmail, and many of their criminal endeavors are specifically designed to either bring other people into the cartel’s debt (for example, their high-stakes gambling dens), to expose secrets (such as their poppy dens and private clubs), or to put people into compromising situations so that they can be blackmailed (as is the case with their brothels and pleasure houses). From time to time the cartel must rely on more direct methods, but even then they choose subtlety: the Vespers have a number of expert poisoners in their employ, who can craft concoctions that can, kill, maim, intoxicate, and everything in between.

The Wardens of the Night

The Wardens of the Night are likely the only cartel that sees themselves as having a truly noble mission, and are only bound by the Arrangement because the Crown has declared them outlaws, not out of any camaraderie with the city’s criminal element. The Wardens of the Night believe that the government of New Dunhaven is corrupt and tyrannical, and they rebel against it in an attempt to protect the common citizens of the city against the injustices they believe are inflicted upon those people by the aristocracy and the Crown itself. Nearly every member of the cartel has a story about how they came to be an outlaw, almost all of which involve some grave personal injustice for which they now seek revenge. The Wardens of the Night call the city’s Reserves, massive forested parks within the city, their turf, and they hide inside the Reserves and emerge to strike swiftly out at their targets. They take to the city’s rooftops and alleyways the same way that scouts and rangers take to tracts of forest, and are skilled survivalists and trackers. The Wardens prefer to work under cover of night, where they blend into the shadows and stalk their marks like a predator stalking prey.

New Dunhaven

New Dunhaven is the fantasy city that serves as the backdrop for capers, heists, and other thievery in Dusk City Outlaws. The digest-sized book that comes with the game, The Traveler's Guide to New Dunhaven, goes into detail about the city's locales, inhabitants, quirks, and dangers in detail, but we thought it might be a good idea to summarize some of the basic information about the setting here, so you can get an idea of what the city is like.

New Dunhaven is a sprawling urban environment covering a landmass about the size of modern-day New York City. It is home to over 3 million people, and is a center of culture, commerce, and crime for the entire world. Its technology is comparable to that of Renaissance Europe, though the prominence of alchemy in the city has allowed those with wealth to make some exceptional leaps forward. The City Watch and certain criminals have access to black powder weapons, though most violence in the city happens at knifepoint or with bare knuckles. A network of deep canals crosses back and forth through the city, serving as a convenient way to carry large amounts of cargo or people from one side of the city to the other.

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Canals in a merchant district, by Jordan Grimmer

Though the city's laws are largely egalitarian, there is still a stark class division between nobles and commoners. The city is a democratic oligarchy, with a citizen-elected Senate balancing the powers of the royal family and the city's monarch, the Regent. The upshot is that the nobility is a protected class (crimes against nobles are punished more severely, and the nobility receives far more lenient sentences for nonviolent crimes), causing a deep divide between many of the people of the city. Between them sit the merchants, wealthy commoners who have amassed enough money and power to be able to rub elbows with the nobility, even if they do not have the birthright to call themselves nobles in truth. Of course, with enough money and influence, the line between nobility and commoner becomes invisibly thin.

The city's criminal underworld is ruled over by eight major cartels. These cartels have a loose peace agreement, known as the Arrangement, that keeps the cartels from doing more than bickering occasionally over small patches of turf. In order to make sure that the Arrangement is kept, when one of the cartels wants to pull off a major crime, they bring together a crew consisting of members from multiple other cartels and put them on the job. When the job is done, the cartel gets a cut, as does each member of the crew, and everyone goes on their way until the next job.

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Commoners district by Jordan Grimmer

Of course, things aren't that easy. The southern reaches of the city's underworld are controlled by a group known as the Blooded, a band of criminals that refuse to abide by the Arrangement and prey upon the eight cartels as much as they do on law-abiding citizens. Then, of course, there are the Spiders, the city's secret police force composed of criminals that have turned Crown, offering their services and knowledge of the cartels to the city in exchange for a pardon for their crimes. Sometimes the Crown turns to freelancers, bounty hunters or members of the Dredgers, a tenacious and savvy company of private investigators that are the bane of the Right Kind of People. Then there's the City Watch itself, always vigilant and looking to snap up cartel members and prosecute them for their crimes. Those found guilty are often imprisoned in the Castle, a huge, fortress-like prison overlooking cliffs dropping off to the ocean, a despairing place where prisoners and guards alike take out their frustrations on one another.

The people of the city come from lands the world over, and people of hundreds of cultures, creeds, identities, and origins live side by side. Long ago in the city's past, a tragic fire nearly wiped the settlement out, and it was only by putting aside all petty differences that the city was rebuilt. Now it has risen to prominence on the strength of its peoples' unity, and for the most part the Crown has welcomed people from the world over into the city, encouraging them to add to the city's culture. The citizens of New Dunhaven pride their city on being the only place where anyone can regularly have access to the art, fashion, food, learnings, and ideas of dozens, if not hundreds, of different cultures. 

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The docks, by Jordan Grimmer

The city's size and population guarantees a wealth of possibilities for enterprising criminals. Despite the dense, urban environment, the city is so large that there are plenty of dark alleys, remote warehouses, and nearly abandoned neighborhoods that skullduggery can take place away from probing eyes. The prime targets, though, are in the more populated areas; the counting houses, noble estates, and gambling halls, all flush with the wealth of nobles and merchants, are simultaneously heavily guarded and in areas where skulking criminals would be conspicuous.

New Dunhaven is big, sprawling, and full of possibilities. It has wealth, yes, but is also has the poor, the downtrodden, the ignored, and the unscrupulous. It's a place where you can make your fortune or lose your life all in the span of a single night. The pickings are prime, the risks high, and the rewards for the bold, the audacious, and the daring enough to fulfill the dreams of any would-be criminal.

What is Dusk City Outlaws?

The first game from Scratchpad Publishing will be Dusk City Outlaws, a tabletop roleplaying game set in the sprawling fantasy city of New Dunhaven. Dusk City Outlaws is an out-of-the-box game, designed to be pulled off of your game shelf and played on short notice, with little prep work and time required by the players. One player takes on the role of the Silver Judge (in the vein of the Gamemaster from traditional tabletop RPGs), while the rest create characters that are members of the city's criminal underworld, drawn together to pull off daring, dangerous, and lucrative heists and other crimes.

Each player makes a character by picking one of the city's eight cartels, and one specialty role on the team. These two aspects of the characters are represented by 4" x 8" cardboard player mats that, when placed next to each other on the table in front of you, give you everything you need to play your character. You'll also want a character sheet, which you can use to write down your character's name, aspects, and track resources, so that if you end up playing another session and want to continue with the same character you can pick up right where you left off.

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Character concept art (The Circle) by Joy Ang

On the Judge's side of things, the game comes with 10 scenarios, some of which can be played in a single session and some of which are more complex and require the players to work over multiple sessions to complete them. Each scenario provides the basics of the job (the objective, the target, time limitations, etc.) and a wealth of information on the things that might stand in the path of a bunch of clever criminals trying to pull off an elaborate scheme.

Of course, only half of running a successful roleplaying game is having the information on the setting and the antagonists; the other half is knowing how and when to introduce new challenges and unexpected twists to heighten the dramatic tension. Instead of asking the Judge to simply know when and how to do this, Dusk City Outlaws provides a resource that the Judge can spend to introduce complications. This resource is Heat, and it represents in abstract the reaction of the law-abiding citizens of the city to the criminals' deeds. As the players generate more Heat through their actions, the Judge can spend that heat to ratchet up the tension and provide new challenges in the middle of the action, forcing the players to stay on their toes and improvise.

Dusk City Outlaws is a game drawing inspiration from lighthearted crime thrillers and the heist genre; if you've seen movies like Ocean's Eleven or The Sting, seen the TV shows Leverage or Firefly, or read books like The Lies of Locke Lamora or The Great Train Robbery, you should have a good idea of the game's tone. It's less about hard-edged crime drama, and more about outlandish confidence tricks, elaborate heists, and reckless risk-taking.

The game's setting is the city of New Dunhaven, a fantasy metropolis that sprawls across an area the size of modern-day New York City, but with a culture and technology more analogous to a combination of Renaissance Europe and 18th Century London. It's a dense urban world where thousands of stories are taking place all at once, a city of infinite possibilities for the enterprising thief. It is a city where alchemy makes wonders possible, and whispers of sorcery are used to frighten and tempt. It's a city where proud bravos strut about with swords at their hips and elite squads of the City Watch patrol the streets with flintlock firearms. 

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New Dunhaven cityscape by Waclaw Wysocki

Most of all, Dusk City Outlaws is a game where the players are in control of the plan and executing it. There's no "correct" way to pull off the job. There's no "right" plan that the Judge leads the players to execute. Instead, the Judge merely lays out the facts before the players, and it is up to these fine, capable criminals to come up with a plan, do the legwork to put it into motion, and then execute the plan if they can. The game's environment and scenarios are an urban sandbox, giving the players both freedom and creative control over the nature of the setting.

Lastly, Dusk City Outlaws is a game meant to bring players together for fun, laughter, challenge, and excitement at the table. We sincerely hope that you find as much fun in playing it as we have had in making it.