Turf War system for RPGs

Elliott Ness smashes open booze barrels in a warehouse that wasn't specifically mentioned prior to that scene. Fancy camera fades give us a montage of gangsters firing tommy guns at each other in what must be at least a dozen different hits over a two-week period. The CIA crashes through the entrances to several different terrorist cells simultaneously, but we really only see the details of the one Sydney Bristow and Jack Bauer break into. Then we cut to a shot of judge banging their gavel and ordering the villain's assets frozen.

There's a lot of different versions of this plot device, but the point is the main characters interfere with and strike at each-others resources in a quick-and-dirty method that's intended to show the passage of time and indicate nastiness is afoot without bogging down the storyline too much. It puts pressure on one or both sides, denying them access to certain resources, but does so without spending much time on specifics and planning. And while it's a common theme in crime dramas and espionage films, it's kind of hard to do in RPGs.

The players usually don't know where to start. (Well, Rob Daley does, but he's an anomaly.)

Even when the players do have a good idea how to strike against the mob, their ideas often require the GM to know a lot of niggling little details about the villain's power structure. You could spend weeks of your life generating lists of businesses, floorplans for said locations, NPCs to stock said floorplans, etc. Great amounts of effort for something that takes 20 seconds in the movies.

And then all that work is wasted when the players say:

"Aw, screw it! This is taking to long. I drive over to Capone's house and shoot him and Bin Laden while they're having dinner!"

I currently have a "Turf War" going on in my Scion game. I knew it was coming, and had the option to start brainstorming niggling details and battlemaps. But instead I decided to work on the framework of a system I could adapt to other campaigns later to prevent all that effort being wasted ever again. A tool to jumpstart my wild improvisation, and to give my players a place to start.

I had my players make an extended Intelligence+Investigation roll. Then those were followed up by a Wits+Politics roll. This simulated digging up dirt on the Titanspawn Mafia, and then working out a plan of how to assault their powerbase politically and financially. A couple o' die rolls, instead of hours of logistics.

Each success got them a card. The cards do fun and evil things: close a business, tap a phone, ruin a marriage, arrest a henchman, etc. You can download one page of them here (there's a lot more in my deck, but many were tailored to the specific characters and NPCs of my campaign). The download's a low resolution jpeg, since the Mac Quark original wouldn't play nice with most people's computers. It's intended more for inspiration than direct unaltered use. EDIT: There seems to be problems with the server hosting the downloadable file, so I'll include the text of the cards in the comments on this post.