Willard skrev:Can you clarify Chicago's political situation with regards to the North American states? Not looking for an essay (I guess we'll get that when the world stuff arrives pretty soon), but a little guidance would be nice.
We'll see whether the IZ2 setting information adds any further canon on the topic, but IZ1 is fairly sparse beyond the basics: During the Second Civil War 25 years ago, both the GLU and NAC tried to claim Chicago for themselves, but the locals wouldn't have any of it and fought against both sides until three nukes were set off and a NATO peacekeeping force stepped in. GLU and NAC would both still love to annex the city, but neither can gain a clear upper hand and, if either of them were ever to get close, the other former American states would intervene to preserve the balance of power.
Relations with non-bordering regions are left completely undefined, but I would expect them to be cordial, or even friendly, even if only on an "enemy of my enemy" basis. The one exception is New Texas, which one of the IZ1 supplements (probably Zeeks or Zeeks Expanded) describes as "NAC Lite", so I figure there would at least be some tensions there.
Willard skrev:There's still the mech-guy that I want to take down, but he might be too dangerous this early (not sure how level scaling works in this campaign).
Level scaling generally isn't that big a thing in Savage Worlds in general, as the system tends to lead to characters diversifying as they advance rather than becoming super-powerful within a specialization.
That said, most golemmechs (and certainly any combat mech) tend to have Heavy Armor, which you don't even get to roll damage against unless you have a Heavy Weapon. At the moment, Paladin's monofil butterfly swords and Ryder's BlasteX charges are the only Heavy Weapons your group has and none of you are licensed to buy Heavy Weapons legally. So fighting him in his golemmech, at least, seems like a bad idea.
One other side note on bounties: The bounty generator rules in IZ1 state that all bounty targets are automatically wild cards. (And, yes, I completely forgot about that last time... Connie is a wild card and a professional bodyguard. I guess she must have been in shock from her encounter with the gangers, since she didn't do anything in the fights after you found her.)
Willard skrev:Good hacking is also something we could really use, no one has that yet to my knowledge.
Ryder has Hacking (Data Mining) at d6.
Willard skrev:
There are plenty of fixers around, and a PC one is going to be hard to mesh with the Chicago Free Press in a meaningful way.
CFP only carries the stuff that's relatively public and low-end. When you start getting to Seasoned rank, the better-paying jobs will start to come in from your contacts. Even before that, I'll start throwing in some direct requests from contacts, now that I know who all your contacts are. So having someone with plenty of contacts and/or a Connections edge or two would generally mean more private jobs to choose from.
And a clarification: Although the books seem to treat them as interchangeable, I'm making a distinction between Contacts and the Connections edge. Contacts are individual people you know and you get new Contacts based on in-game events. (Melissa Lancaster and Connie Acosta at least know you exist and have helped them, so they're essentially minor Contacts already. Do a couple more runs for Melissa and she's likely to start coming to you with bigger jobs when you hit Seasoned.) Connections, on the other hand, can only be gained by spending an Edge, but it gives you a general familiarity with an organization and its people, so you can go to the organization as a whole (or it can come to you) when needed.
For example, Almighty currently knows a specific race queen (Aiko) and the CEO of Englewood (Jack Evans), but (at least on a game-mechanical level) he isn't terribly active in either the racing community or Englewood's daily operations. If you later want him to develop a lot of racer friends, you could add Connections (Jump Racing) or if he starts to take an active enough role in Englewood that he knows most of the employees and would call on them for assistance, you could get Connections (Englewood Dynamics). But if he just develops additional specific friends in either group, that's done through roleplaying with no game-mechanical cost.
What kind of character are you thinking about making?
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d6 is certainly better than nothing and good enough for everyday use, but it's not enough for us to go for hacking jobs in any serious way.
