Criminal Groups

Posted by: Factotum, Firewall Proxy

Criminal factions thrive in the post-Fall era. You may recognize some cartel names, but most of the major syndicates arose to prominence after the Fall. As transhumanity spreads across the galaxy, criminals find new ways to profit off misery and greed. Cartels and syndicates earn vast wealth by exploiting weaknesses in different polities. Every banned good or service is a new market. Every gap in a habitat’s security is an opening. Every desperate person is a customer or tool. Most criminal outfits are parasitic entities, leeching off the systems around them, but a few are powerful enough to run their own habitats. The major syndicates have spread across the Solar System and to distant exoplanets. While they have many enemies, the discord and corruption among transhuman polities prevents them from being stomped out. The cartels are also useful tools and cat’s paws to those in power.

While some factions are outlawed or branded as criminals in certain regions, only the following are universally viewed as criminal.

Gangs

Firewall is most concerned with cartels that exert influence over many habitats, but local gangs in specific areas have gotten our attention.

Les Goules

This Martian gang specializes in auctioning illegal morphs to the highest bidder. They can acquire any kind of biomorph a customer could imagine, including ones with illegal combat mods and implants, clones of popular celebrities made from stolen genetic samples, or just human steaks for the discerning cannibal. The truly desperate can get a loan from Les Goules if they offer their body as collateral. They are infamous for their depravity, conducting business deals over feasts of living humans. They are rumored to have exhuman sympathies, which may explain their preferences.

St. Catherine Tongs

This gang exploits the “One Mind, One Body” policy of the Titanian Commonwealth for profit. Using agents inside the morph vat farms, the tongs steal and smuggle new biomorphs for sale throughout the outer system. These morphs are bought by other cartels who need morphs for prostitutes or customers who want a biomorph on the cheap. Some are loaded with illegal mods and implants.

The tongs are known for their brazen and violent nature. Enemies have been publicly assassinated, sometimes with extensive collateral damage. Captured opponents have been tortured in horrible ways. Lately, the tongs have branched out into TITAN artifact smuggling, as police have seized caches from tong safehouses. No one knows where the artifacts are coming from or who’s buying them.

The Wild Hunt

This tight-knit gang of ego hunters, forknappers, and assassins began on Luna. They turned to psychosurgery early on, improving their own teamwork and loyalty to protect themselves. Soon after, they began exchanging memories and personality traits. The reasoning for this is unclear, but in part seemed to be a way of preserving their identities should they be captured and subjected to penal psychosurgical editing, and in part a way of altering their brainprints to be less easily tracked. Over time, this mental editing has grown more extreme, and with the inclusion of several new members from the Lost Generation, the group has taken a turn towards weird and disturbing behavior. They seem to revel in taking on more violent jobs and anything that let's them chase their prey. Working in packs, they have been known to prolong a pursuit for sport. Reports indicate they have trapped some of their victims' forks in a simulspace with a fantastic mythology theme in order to extend their torment.

Hidden Concern

The dwarf planet Ceres is prime real estate, the largest planetary body between Mars and Jupiter. It is also throroughly entwined in the tentacles of the Hidden Concern, a mafia entirely composed of neo-octopi. They run protection rackets on every business operating on Ceres and smuggle contraband between the inner and outer system. Anyone who sets foot on Ceres lives or dies at the Concern’s discretion. They have links to the mercurial movement and are invested heavily in cephalapod morph development, such as the takko synthmorph. Their recent expansions beyond Ceres now pit them against other cartels.

Intelligent Design (ID Crew)

Intelligent Design, also known as the ID Crew, is best known for their digital crimes. They formed when several different hacker cliques allied to maximize their profits. The ID Crew has their virtual fingers in digital theft, hacking, fraud, malware, credit and rep laundering, software piracy, darknet services, troll farms, and ego-trafficking. The demand for egos “finessed” by the ID crew is incredibly high. They are known to edit the memories of stolen egos to suit the needs of their clients. Sometimes, the victim does not even realize they have been trafficked, having been fed an entirely false life.

The ID Crew has a small physical footprint compared to other cartels, preferring to do business on the mesh rather than in meatspace, although they can be contacted in nearly every major habitat in the system. Nevertheless, they have provoked a major turf war with Nine Lives. Both organizations sell stolen egos and despise how the other conducts business.

Night Cartel

The Night Cartel's roots are in a pre-Fall alliance formed between multiple mafia groups of different ethnicities to cooperate in opening new markets in space. One of the drivers of this initiative, Domenico Tavano, saw that the old way of doing business would not work in the rest of the Solar System. The older leaders were too paranoid and too conservative to adapt. Maintaining ethnic mafias was absurd when resleeving was upending cultural norms. When the Fall wiped out the leadership of these syndicates, Tavano convinced enough gangsters to follow his lead and establish a new cartel. At first, Tavano struggled to keep the Night Cartel working together. Old rivalries and beliefs hampered efforts. However, the realities of criminal enterprise in space has methodically broken down these barriers and prejudices. Now the Night Cartel is the largest in the Solar System, rivaled only be the triads.

The Night Cartel's headquarters is on Pallas, a major asteroid habitat in the Main Belt. In some regions, the Night Cartel operates as a legitimate hypercorp, but their main lines of business are illegal in most habitats: drugs, prostitution and sex trafficking, extortion, nanofab piracy, gambling, insider trading, darknet operations, and racketeering.

Nine Lives

The villains of choice in many XP thrillers, Nine Lives is a soul-trafficking syndicate infamous for their cruelty and ruthlessness. New members are forced to prove themselves by torturing innocent egos through psychosurgery or in meatspace, a hazing called “The Rite.” The gang appropriates and twists the trappings of Vodou to intimidate its rivals. Their sophisticated egonapping operations employ thieves and forknappers from around the system, sold in auctions and to private collectors. Nine Lives is known for sleeving their victims into a variety of morphs for brutal pit fights to entertain bloodthirsty crowds.

Roland Nazon, one of the most feared gang lords in the Solar System, once kept tight control over Nine Lives operations, but he has recently become reclusive. Rumors abound that he has descended into madness or that one of his lieutenants has usurped control, but no one knows for sure.

Pax Familae

Many crime outfits are rooted in cultural groups or species, but the most restrictive one, by far, is Pax Familae. Every member of this cartel is a fork or clone of its founder, Claudia Ambelina. From her private habitat on Venus (called Ambelina), Claudia creates clones from her original genetics or through sexual reproduction, thanks to sex-switching biomods. All egos are forks, though she does use psychosurgery to vary her skills for certain tasks. Loyal to herself, Claudia's methods mean she needs not fear traitors or undercover agents. Pax Familae uses ego merging and XP recordings to keep every fork up to date with the activities of the others. Unlike some other multiples, Claudia always refers to herself in the singular. She has a wide portfolio of operations throughout the system: fraud, stock manipulation, reputation gaming, info brokerage, and loan sharking, among others. She also maintains a number of legitimate businesses as cover. Claudia isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty if someone gets in her way.

Pirates

The major polities of the inner system deploy drones and ships to keep space transit and habitats relatively safe. In the vast outer system, many pirate gangs thrive by plundering the vulnerable, particularly automated ships and remote brinker habitats. This is less an organized criminal conspiracy and more a way of life. Automated drones are the targets of choice because they are easier prey than manned ships but remote mining operations and outposts are valuable as well. Pirates sell off their victims’ egos to soul-traffickers like Nine Lives. Some pirates also smuggle contraband from scum swarms into more lawful habitats or trade in pirated software from the inner system.

Pirate gangs are known to fight each other as much as they steal from freighters and drones. They typically fight over turf, but feuds can start for the pettiest of reasons. One gang, Ned Kelly’s Own, noted for their impractical and unique synth armor designs, accused another gang, Chrome Legion, of stealing their armor designs. The two have fought ever since, resulting in dozens of resleevings, three lost ships, and one destroyed tin-can habitat.

Some pirate groups are closely linked to extremist factions, like the infamous Fomorians, known for their ties to the exhumans. They force any captives they take into a simulspace hunting arena, where they face torture and deletion unless they can prove their strength to the exhumans. A sufficiently brutal captive who survives the hunt can join the clade. After only a few months, any captive who survives long enough becomes indistinguishable from the original Fomorians.

Triads

Most of Earth’s syndicates died in the Fall or were subsumed into the Night Cartel. The Triads survived both events intact, in part due to early initiative in expanding their operations into space before the Fall. Many smaller triad gangs exist, but the four surviving major triads conduct business throughout the system.

14K

Supposedly named from the fourteen original members of the anti-communist Kuomintang, the 14K dates back to the mid-20th century. Today, they focus on gambling, whether running illegal casinos or rigged lotteries. The 14K owns a legal casino and gambling hypercorp, Galaxy Entertainment Group. They also deal in money laundering, credit/ID fraud, and loan sharking.

Qing Long, a major cylinder habitat in the Martian Trojans, with a population of over two million transhumans, is considered a 14K stronghold. While other triads maintain a presence in the habitat, the 14K bases its headquarters there and has deep ties to the habitat’s leadership. The Pai Gow (Double Hand) security force there is an extension of their operations.

Shui Fong

A smaller triad than 14K, Shui Fong sells vice to the desperate, especially indentured workers and other poor laborers. They offer drugs, narcoalgorithms, prostitution, and illicit XPs. Once in debt, the indenture is forced into working for the Shui Fong, whether that’s pit fighting or transporting drugs. They carry deep grudges against the 14K, which the 14K reciprocates.

Sun Yee On

In any habitat where IP laws protect the rights of manufacturers over users, the Sun Yee On are there, selling cheap knockoffs of popular nanofabbed items. The triad often jailbreaks nanofabbers so they can manufacture weapons and tools without paying royalties to the original designer. These items are laundered through their front company, Wushuang Corporation. The Sun Yee On also sell counterfeits of Earth relics, a market growing in popularity.

Big Circle Gang

The smallest of the four major triad factions, Big Circle designs and sells drugs for distribution throughout the Solar System. Their drug labs lie hidden in isolated habitats dotted throughout the system. They maintain a low presence for a major triad, leading us to suspect they have something big planned and don’t want to attract attention. They prefer to sell wholesale to other dealers, but they have teams on every scum swarm to sell new product to diehard junkies. The swarms are the best place for Big Circle to try out their latest experimental drugs. Products that first appear in a scum swarm can be found on the streets of New Shanghai a month later.