The Brass Outfit

🎷 Role & Nature: The Brass Outfit is the Forge-Wheel’s dominant criminal enterprise—a jazz-era syndicate turned industrial cartel. They don’t just sell illegal goods; they control flow: scrap, permits, black-market upgrades, and forbidden Vault schematics. In a city run on quotas, they are the unofficial economy.

⚙️ Behavior & Personality: Smooth, transactional, and brutally practical.

• The Rule: “Business first. Always.”

• Their Religion: Leverage. Debts. Favors.

• Their Style: Polite voices, sharp smiles, and violence that arrives right on schedule.

🪝 Appearance & Design: “Working-class royalty.”

• Look: Pinstripe coats, brass cufflinks, watch-chains, soot-stained dress shirts, fancy boots.

• Iconography: A small brass lapel gear stamped with an “O” (Outfit)—never flashy, always present.

• Weapons: Concealed pistols, weighted canes, spring-blades, and “toolbox” guns.

🔥 Abilities: Control through logistics and intimidation.

• Smuggling Network: Hidden routes through boiler tunnels, cargo elevators, and rail lines.

• Fixers & Forgers: They can acquire permits, stamps, and “official” paperwork… for the right price.

• Industrial Muscle: Enforcers who fight like dockworkers with polished manners.

• Information Brokers: They buy secrets from workers, automatons, and desperate clerks.

🗣️ Dialogue Samples:

• “Relax, pal. This is a friendly conversation. Until it isn’t.”

• “Everything’s legal if the paper says it is.”

• “Ford owns the lines. We own what falls off the truck.”

🌐 Narrative Use:

• The Hook: The Outfit offers jobs: theft, sabotage, escorting contraband, blackmailing a foreman.

• The Pressure Valve: They’re a way for players to get gear/upgrades without Ford’s permission—at a cost.

• The Rivalry: Constant tension with Wardens, Ford’s quota police, and competing shop guilds.