Glitter & Gold: Empire of Dirt is a crime-empire drama in the Grand Theft Auto tradition — five cities, one climb, and not a single spell in the world. You play a nobody with a hustle in a modern American metropolis: the dock that never files a manifest, the club whose bottle service launders the night, City Hall's donation ledger, the corner that needs a name before it needs you. The world runs on tribute, vouches, and heat. It is gritty in consequence and wry in voice — the satire lives in the institutions, the stakes live in your body.
The five cities
Each city is a flavor of American vice, and every one is fully furnished with its own houses, slang, and power map: Freeport (New York graft — the Machine, the docks, the envelope parade), Palm City (Miami neon — go-fast boats, velvet ropes, exile politics), Los Beatos (Los Angeles — permits, sets, one-word stage names), San Cristobal (San Francisco fog — contraband, clinics, euphemism), and Las Doradas (Las Vegas — chapels, comps, the skim). Read the City Primers in the Lore folder before you pick a home. Your Home City runs fully live; the other four tick by headline until you visit. Beyond the mainland, Hawaii, Cartagena, and the Caribbean wait as smaller endgame theatres — open for travel, not for starting out.
The arc
This is the promise the campaign is built on: you start as one character, become a character with a crew, and end as a character with an empire. The rules grow with you — personal hustle at the start, crew resources and turf in the middle, holdings, faction turns, and a Heat ladder that ends in a courtroom when the empire gets loud. Nothing hands you the empire. The Vouch Ladder earns you into every house, and every rung has a name attached to it.
How a session runs
The loop is simple: the GM describes the world, you say what you do, and a d20 settles what neither of you can. Dice come out only when the outcome is genuinely uncertain, and you see every roll — this table is dice-forward, dice shown. Speech goes in quotes. When you need to talk to the GM rather than the world, use [OOC: ...] — that freezes time entirely.
What to expect
- One roll to learn. A D20 Test is 1d20, a modifier, and a target number — Easy 10, Medium 15, Hard 20. Advantage and disadvantage cover circumstance; nothing stacks.
- The body is the health bar. No hit points, no armor class. You have wound tiers, a Defense of 10 + DEX, and armor that soaks damage instead of dodging it. Getting hurt is a condition with a price, not a number going down.
- Consequences compound. Loud actions raise Heat. Heat never just fades — it gets spent, shed on the road, or cashed in against you at Heat 10: a courtroom arc. Payday comes Sundays; shortfalls don't make debt, they burn holdings.
- The world doesn't pause. The people you're not watching still have their day. Bonds you don't tend cool on their own.
Where things live
The complete rules sit in the Rules folder (the Realm Realistic Flow package's Rules section) — the Core Rules Primer opens, the named rules (Wounds & Gunfights, Crew Resources, Milestone Picks, Vouch Ladder) are the canon, and the Glossary answers alphabetically. The Lore folder holds the cities, the faction indexes, and the GM dossiers. Everything you can play exists as a record the sheet can read.
