The year is 1966. A cold rain falls on a city that built America and was then forgotten by it.
St. Ambrose rose on steel and iron. The furnaces burned for a century — good jobs, fat unions, immigrant families climbing into the middle class one payday at a time. Then the furnaces died. The jobs vanished. The promises made to the men who built this city turned to ash in their mouths.
What remains is hunger. And hunger, in St. Ambrose, is the mother of crime.
What This Is
This is a game about crews — organized criminals carving up a dying industrial city block by block. You play a character in the life: a soldier running collections for the Commission, a wheelman driving getaway for the Donnelly Brothers, a hustler working the corners in Ashburn, a fixer who solves problems for whoever pays. You claim territory. You run rackets. You fight rivals. You deal with heat from cops and feds who range from corrupt to crusading. And you try to survive long enough to build something that lasts.
What a Session Feels Like
A session opens in a specific place — a social club on Mulberry Avenue, a chop shop in The Ironworks, a pharmacy on Harlow Street, a dive bar in Hell's Half Acre. Your crew has a job: a heist, a shakedown, a smuggling run, a sit-down with a rival outfit. You plan it, you execute it, and you deal with the fallout — the money, the heat, the bodies, the betrayals.
Between jobs, you manage your territory. You collect from your rackets. You handle the weekly crises — a cop who needs paying off, a soldier whose loyalty is cracking, a rival crew probing your borders. You advance your character: new skills, new connections, a reputation that opens doors or paints a target on your back.
The dice decide outcomes, but you decide the play. Every choice has weight. Violence is fast and lethal — a single gunshot can end a character. Loyalty is fragile — the man you trust today might flip tomorrow if the feds lean on him or a rival offers him more. The law is for sale, but the price keeps going up.
The World
St. Ambrose is eighteen neighborhoods, each with its own smell, its own sound, its own rules. Mulberry smells like olive oil and old violence. The Narrows smells like chemicals and desperation. Cathedral Hill smells like incense and rain-soaked stone. You learn the borders with your senses before you learn them with your mind — cross the wrong intersection and the air changes, the faces change, and what was permitted on the last block will get you killed on this one.
Thirteen crews control the city. The Commission — the old Italian families — claims dominion over everything, but their grip is slipping. The Donnelly Brothers run the waterfront. The Ivory Tower Syndicate owns the nightlife. Los Exiliados del Puerto control the smuggling routes. The Volkov Bratva operates out of The Ironworks. The Jade Circle Society has been here longer than anyone. And a dozen smaller outfits — the West Indian Iron Posse, the Route 66 Reapers, the Holy Communion, the Shadow Collective — are all fighting for their piece.
The year 1966 is a pressure cooker. Vietnam is escalating and the draft is pulling sons out of the neighborhoods. Civil rights protests are growing and the old ethnic hierarchies are cracking. Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department has declared war on organized crime and federal investigators are in the city, building cases. Something is going to give. When it breaks, which side will you be on?
How to Use This Book
Read The City at a Glance to understand the neighborhoods and the power map. Read Making a Character when you're ready to build someone who belongs in this world. Read Dice and Skill Checks to understand how the game actually works at the table. Read the rest as you need it — combat, jobs, territory, heat, loyalty, advancement. Read The Crews of St. Ambrose last, when you know what kind of character you want to play and need to find the crew that fits.
This world is gritty. It is violent. It deals with racism, corruption, addiction, and the human cost of poverty and neglect. It does not sanitize these things. It treats them with the weight they deserve. If you are looking for heroes, you are in the wrong city. But if you want to play men and women doing whatever it takes to survive in a world that gave up on them — welcome to St. Ambrose. Watch your back. Count your money. Trust no one.
