So, I made a dungeons and dragons mistake.

There’s some DMing advice that I adhere to pretty closely, when you’re characterizing an NPC or a group of NPCs, you can kinda just file the serial numbers off of something you’re already very familiar with and run with it.

I’m not that experienced with “organized crime”, haven’t watched anything conteporary so, in our Dragon Heist campaign, I decided that a good analogue for the Zhentarim would be “the mafia, specifically from the movie The Godfather”.

The problem, though…

It was a fun characterization. It added a lot of depth and interest to the local Zhentarim. They’re not good, but they’re honorable, they have a code. And if you’re good to them? They’ll be good, reliable allies.

This went over entirely too well, this was the first major Waterdeep faction my players encountered, and whoops, my players are just fully aligned with the Zhentarim now.

I mean, the players are good, there were lots of local “good” factions, but the local Zhents, with their friendly, accessible low-rent evil - well, it’s just hard to say no to them. They keep making offers my players can’t refuse. Players don’t mind paying a little protection money or shaking up some locals now and again. A quest is a quest, even if it’s to intimidate a potential witness.

Their capo, Urstul Floxin, his “friendly and helpful in a very threatening way” shtick, is actually very convincing. The person who keeps talking the party into doing shady stuff is ME, actually.

I love how even in the D&D art provided by Wizard of the Coast he kinda looks like Luca Brasi.

I don’t think this is really even a problem: Waterdeep Dragon Heist is a heist story where the players operate a tavern, the players are naturally going to find themselves way more aligned with local organized crime than the constabulary.

ed: Months later, Urstul has provided the players with their own goons, Guido and Nunzio, a little dumb one and a big gentle one, and they’re already productively contributing to schemes and nonsense.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/nunavik-dog-slaughter-apology-1.7391834

Canadian government apologizes to Inuit in Nunavik for mass killing of sled dogs

Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Gary Anandasangaree has formally apologized to Inuit in Nunavik for the federal government’s role in the mass killing of sled dogs in the region in the 1950s and 1960s.

…

“Without investigation and without asking the owners about the importance of the dogs they wanted to kill, without inquiring whether the dogs they wanted to kill constituted a real, serious and current danger to the people.”

There are not a lot of things that can get through to my hard, black little heart, but this still made me go “What the fuck, Canada”.

People alive today still remember an era where the RCMP was cheerfully murdering puppies at scale for what we now admit was basically no reason.

I really like Brooklyn Nine-Nine because it’s a fun show with a charming ensemble cast, but they’re not very believable as cops on account of their being effective at solving a lot of crimes

the Doug Judy episodes of Brooklyn 99 are just Lupin III from the perspective of Inspector Zenigata

Doug Judy is charming, brilliant, and by playing along with him Jake always ends up taking down a bigger, nastier foe while Doug Judy rides off into the sunset scot-free.

Zenigata is legitimately a very good cop, you have to expect he’s quite successful when he’s not getting bamboozled by Lupin, and the two of them have great chemistry.

once you know about the past exonerative tense, you start to see it show up all over the place,

particularly in news stories where the Manitoba police definitely nearly beat a shoplifter to death