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“Once I thought I was out … they pulled me back in”
Crime Network is a modern-day mafia role playing game. In it, the players are mobsters trying to work their way up the family ladder while keeping themselves from being whacked. As the characters rise in rank, the opportunities become fewer and those that the character originally counted on as friends, may start to work against them. A healthy dose of paranoia and tension should flow through the game as the characters go about the business of the family.
“Keep your friends close…but your enemies closer.”
The basic mechanic in the game is a dice pool versus a target number. A player will roll a certain number of d10s (depending on their skill level being tested) and try and have at least one roll equal to or greater than the target number. Rolling a 10 indicates something unusual or great happens depending on what the character is doing at the time.
The target number is either set by the GM (if the characters are interacting with their environment) or based on a character’s opposing skill (such as in combat). In order to succeed the highest rolled die must equal or beat the target number.
Combat uses the same mechanic with each success indicating a wound. Take enough wounds and the character is either incapacitated or dying. Similarly, if the character is wounded, they lose a die per wound level from all of their actions.
One aspect of the system that is interesting is assassination. Assassination is a skill and, like it sounds, it deals with taking people out. The assassin tells the GM he wants to whack someone and lays out the basic plan and time. The GM assigns various modifiers and the character rolls his skill vs. a target number based on the opposing character. If the assassin succeeds, the character is dead, no questions asked. What makes this particularly tricky is that assassinations can be taken out against other characters. Depending on your gaming group, this could be looked on as an exciting role playing opportunity or a divisive mechanic.
The resolution system is fast and easy. It doesn’t do anything particularly new or exciting, but it works fine and keeps the game moving.
“Made, it Ma! Top of the world!”
Character creation works smoothly with skill purchases taking up the most time. An interesting note is that the game recommends making two or three characters because of the lethality in the game. That seems a little extreme, but when the bullets start flying, people do start dying.
The skill lists are reasonable, being neither too broad nor too narrow. With only three levels of proficiency, it can be a little tricky to show a difference between a skilled and a highly skilled individual, but the game does have an Expertise mechanic to help deal with that issue.
“Leave the gun, take the cannolis”
The last half of the book consists of setting information and a sample adventure. Here I think the authors did an excellent job by spelling out in detail what they expect you will do in the game. The sample adventure is fairly straightforward but it incorporates a lot of the issues of honor and respectability that the game tends to focus on.
The sample setting works well and the list of the various families helps to cement the world and the characters’ rivals. One mildly tricky issue is that for the game to flow smoothly, the characters all have to be from the same family, or at least from allied families, so this needs to be discussed before the actual character creation begins.
One section would have liked to see would be a couple of dozen adventure seeds. Just a paragraph or two that outlines a scenario and helps spark the imagination of the GM. Still the background given does a good job of setting up what is going on around the characters.
“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster”
Overall, Crime Network accomplishes what it set out to do, create a reasonable quick playing and satisfying mobster RPG. While there are not very many surprises in the rules, the set as a whole works well together and doesn’t get in the way of gameplay. The book is laid out pretty well and the art is satisfying and inspiring. One odd aspect of the book is that in the middle of the character creation rules is a summary sheet, but the sheet interrupts the creation rules so you end up turning two pages over to continue on. It is not a big deal, especially in a PDF, but it was a little confusing for a minute.
So if you have a desire to play a mafia-based game, Crime Network does a good job of that, especially with all of the setting information included. So if you want to play on the wrong side of the law, check out Crime Network.
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