Hello outlaws,

Exciting news out of Coppperhead County HQ this weekend. My Sunday gaming group, which assembled some years ago to play a complete Copperhead County campaign (weathering the ups and downs of constant updates and developments, me inventing the Trouble system, etc), and then transitioned into playing Tortuga County for a while, had largely been on hiatus during 2023.  Finally, we committed to get our shit together and play again, and then resolved to start an all-new, all-different Copperhead County campaign. I thought about GMing it again, but  ultimately M. Crowley took the reins, freeing me to play a dang PC. Crowley is currently responsible for a bunch of random text throughout Copperhead County, principally the action example pages, and is also my primary sounding board for all CC-related thoughts. You may have been lucky enough to play CC with Crowley at Big Bad Con 2018, or even with both of us at Go Play NW 2019. (Christ! Those were a long time ago. Remember those days before a pandemic ate fucking everything?)

Anyhow, I'm not really planning on doing AP write-em-ups or anything, but we had a very successful Session 0 and it gives me the opportunity to pontificate on creating characters and crews.

Our RPG Could Be Your Life

My method of envisioning a new PC, especially for Copperhead County, is to consider all the stuff I've been into lately. When we started Tortuga County, the best TV show, Reservation Dogs, had started recently, and so my Stringer, Bobby Hicks, was essentially a grown-up Oklahoma rez dog. (Sadly, Bobby would later abandon his California dreams after his best friend was killed in a Chinese restaurant shootout, his overbearing ways alienated the only other member of the crew, and Ukrainian gangsters threatened his wife and kid. At least he made it out alive!) When I replaced him with a new Stringer (actually a kind of Hazard-Stringer hybrid using the Outlaw playbook), I had just been watching The Dropout, and created a horrible millennial Silicon Valley mogul who repainted the HQ lobby with Yoda quotes.

This time, we quickly discovered that both Calum and I had bars on the brain, me from watching Justified: City Primeval and him from watching The Drop. My mind turned to a location I had recently written about in the Glad Ave setting chapter:

(Those proficient in Tennessee Lore may recognize the H&L as a barely-disguised version of Memphis' dearly departed P&H Cafe.)

We also wanted to play a Blood crew, so our premise became clear. We would be a family who owned the H&L and had to keep the bar afloat despite competition, extortion, gentrification, and our own failings. (At this point, we realized we were also doing The Bear.)

For my own PC, I turned to my other recent cultural consumption. I've been on a 90's music kick, having just read both Dan Ozzi's Sellout: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore and Michael Azerrad's Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. So: I would portray a shithead young musician, maybe with actual talent, but young and dumb enough to be stuck writing terrible juvenalia instead of songs about feelings. Obviously, he would be a Mover, the most rock & roll playbook. Because I'm now currently reading Jamie Loftus' Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, this guy's band is named Raw Dog. And finally, because I'm also obsessed with 2023's best Replacements song, MJ Lenderman's "Knockin'", my dude would basically look like MJ Lenderman and maybe, one day, write a song like that, if a life of crime didn't claim him first. (There ain't no good life down at the Ford plant. Three guitars or a life of crime.)

What I want to communicate here is this. When you play a game like Copperhead County, one of the chief pleasures is incorporating all the random detritus from your real life. Sure, you can play an elf bard inspired by Kurt Cobain, or whatever, but being able to interface with Earth in a TTRPG, without the filter of fantasy or science fiction, is a rarer pleasure. Noir is a relatively underexplored topic in TTRPGs, which remain dominated by elf games (no judgement from me; I currently play two Pathfinder 2e games a week), despite the genre's rich literary history. If TTRPGs are fiction engines, I want them turned towards a wider variety of fiction. I think there might sometimes be a perception that playing a "modern" TTRPG is restrictive, but noir is an extremely mutable and expansive genre. You can bring your myriad interests into it and play a game that's part restaurant simulator, part musical, part family drama. To paraphrase another Michael Azerrad book, Our RPG Could Be Your Life.

A Boom Boom Boom Boom

Speaking of the mutability of noir, I just saw that the film HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE is now available on Hulu / digital rental in the US, and I think is on Netflix in the UK. I was lucky enough to see this movie at Nashville's Belcourt Theatre when it released, and I strongly recommend it: it's basically a Forged in the Dark score turned into a very economical, timely thriller. And it's set in Texas, my second-favorite Southern state.

Noir is political. Noir is about your life and the world where you live. Noir can be about a lawyer defeated by his own demons, a woman whose unsurmountable student debt leads to her true calling in crime (btw, Emily is a great example of a Mover), or the moral necessity of sabotaging fossil fuel infrastructure. Copperhead County doesn't have oil pipelines, but it does have mountaintop removal mining, environmental devastation, and capitalist boots stamping on human faces, and your crew is encouraged to blow all of those up.

Stay Tuned

That's enough devlog for a Monday morning. Stay tuned for more news.