Hello outlaws,

This past Sunday, my primary Copperhead County gaming group wrapped a complete campaign. This was a long-term project; we started this campaign in July 2018, and keep it going until now, through periods of hiatus, inactivity, and those stretches where your game just becomes impossible to schedule for a while.

I've had one-shots and smaller campaigns that have petered out, as campaigns do, but this campaign has been by far the most instrumental to the development of Copperhead County. My development process on this game is heavily play-driven, because Copperhead County is a campaign game where, ideally, your characters and their crew will develop over a good long while. So it's important to make sure that the game, you know, works, and that CC's many deviations from the Forged in the Dark core work, and that it all works over a long campaign.

The Saga of Slayton Hospitality

The tale of Slayton Hospitality could fill several posts, but in summary: this crew of Hellraisers based in the depressed mining town of Slayton started a marijuana business, took over a Zip Burger franchise, and successfully got their dim-witted accomplice in the Sheriff's department elected County Trustee. After their political success, they decided to sell off most of their illegal business to their criminal allies, and concentrated on expanding their fast-food empire and getting their Trustee elected Sheriff.

This all culminated in a late-night raid on the County GOP HQ, during which they stole a ledger of the party's secrets and burned down the building. In response, a GOP fixer named Paul Potts ensnared them into a trap by blocking their Zip Burger with road construction, leading their Brick, Karla (played by Calum Grace, and by that point the only original member of the crew, due to two PC retirements and one PC death) to inadvertently confirm to Potts that they were responsible. To fix this, Karla decided to break into Potts' office, in what we originally thought was just going to be a fill-in side adventure. But after a struggle, Karla threw Potts out of a window, then couldn't resist the resulting consequence because she was already stressed out and burning out—so he survived the fall and was able to identify Karla not only for the burglary and arson, but for trying to kill him.

That led the crew to max out their Raid level, which triggered Copperhead County's fail state. Yep, this was totally unplanned—it came about as a completely natural, fiction-appropriate culmination of a campaign's worth of bad decisions. The TBI raided the crew's HQ, arresting their treacherous Stringer, Prosper (played by Michael Crowley), who decided to sell out and pin all of the crimes on Karla and their other underworld allies. That left Karla, their Cleaner Ivy (a new PC whose first job with the crew was the ill-fated Potts confrontation!), and their Mover Dix, to escape the county and go on the run. In his last noble act, Prosper critically Hustled the TBI to cover up for the crew's political ties, and handed over their dirt on the GOP.

We ended with a Wire-style montage set to Dolly Parton's classic "My Tennessee Mountain Home", seeing our fugitives escape to New Orleans, Las Vegas, and California, and seeing their candidate successfully get elected Sheriff—just way too late to help them. The only real criminal power left in Copperhead County were the crew's former allies, the Heathens MC, and life in the hills continued on much the same as ever.

Onward to Tortuga County

What's next? If you follow Friend of Copperhead County Calum Grace on Twitter, you might have seen that he's working on an official setting hack for Copperhead County, Tortuga County. So our group is now going to transition to a new Tortuga County campaign, run by Calum, starring our Cleaner, Ivy, and her new friends (with, perhaps, some old faces popping up on the margins). I think I'm probably going to play a Stringer. This will be my first time playing Copperhead County for more than a couple of sessions, so I'm very excited. I suspect that our group may, Better Call Saul-style, even eventually come to regard this spin-off series as superior in some ways to the original, since we'll be playing with the benefits of hindsight and stable rules.

Tortuga County is totally Calum's project, with some occasional ideas and feedback from yours truly, so if you would like more news on that, follow Calum, and support him on Patreon, where he posts many brilliant in-the-works projects.

Tortuga County isn't the only official setting-drift project for Copperhead County: when I'm done with the main project, I'll also be releasing my own setting drift, Copperhead '77, in which you can explore a version of Copperhead County 40 years before the main setting, in the year of Star Wars, punk rock, and Jimmy Carter. And who knows, maybe we'll do some other shit after that! Settings are fun.

Sheets Update and Characters Chapter Preview

Hey, you deserve a reward for reading or scrolling down this far. I've also just completed a clock to polish off the Characters chapter of the Copperhead County book, which is now text- and art-complete (the Crews chapter is text-, but not art-complete, so no preview there yet). I've also updated the PDF sheets to reflect my final-ish edits (it will take a little while for me to update the online sheets).

Download the new sheets at the main game page, and check out the full Characters chapter preview here, where we explore each PC playbook in-depth.

The End

That's all for now! Stay tuned!