Utility Cartels

The street-level tier of Los Angeles's market for hired muscle, and the answer to what a gang is here: a group that controls something that produces money. Not territory in the sense of a neighborhood claimed by whoever grew up there. Territory here is infrastructure: a water riser, a power tap, a hole in a fence, a stairwell, a salvage route. People fight over things that produce income, and in this city those things are utilities and access.

Four of them recur across the campaign:

• The Risers: water and power in a set of Koreatown stacks.
• The Gaps: specific holes in the El Infierno cordon.
• Salvage crews: territorial about buildings inside the cordon rather than blocks.
• Pump crews: the vaults and injection wells that keep Long Beach above sea level.

What the crew knows#

• None of these are villains. They're the only functioning infrastructure their neighbors have, they charge for it, and they hurt whoever competes. Small businesses with a monopoly and no oversight, because that's what they are.
• Each cartel can be bought off with the thing it actually wants, and it's rarely money. A part it can't get, a favor, a name kept off a book.
• They trade with each other more than they fight each other. A pump crew's parts problem and a salvage crew's scrap glut solve each other faster than either side's cash would.
• Metatype composition here is occupational, not identity-based: a crew that's mostly trolls is mostly trolls because of the work, not because of who they are. See docs/setting/portrayal-audit.md.

Standing with the crew#

Neutral, and local. Standing with one cartel says nothing about standing with another; each one only cares about its own tap.