"The bad guys, make the best good guys."



Tired of just hacking and slashing in your RPG? Wouldn't you actually like to use your brain a little more? Well read on, my friend.

The rich and powerful, they take what they want. You steal it back. You and your Crew used to be the bad guys, but there are worse people out there. The weak and the helpless need you. You provide... leverage.

Based on TNT’s hit show, The LEVERAGE Role Playing Game puts you in the middle of a dysfunctional but highly specialized group of con artists, criminals, and crooks who are trying to turn over a new leaf. You protect the victims of corporations, mobsters, and corrupt politicians by using your expert skills to outwit and overcome the real bad guys.

Using the award-winning Cortex System as its foundation, LEVERAGE: The Roleplaying Game includes all the rules you need to create a high-voltage team of rogues, plan the perfect job, and get it done.
Characters are broken down into the following traits:

* Ability scores like Strength and Willpower, rated from d4 to d12.
* The five core roles (Hitter, Hacker, Grifter, Mastermind, Thief), from d4 to d12. Your highest one is your primary role, so if you Hitter is d10, you are the group’s Hitter.
* Specialties that help when you use one of your roles for a specific thing, like “close quarters fighting – hitter” gives you an extra die when being a Hitter in close quarters.
* Distinctions, which are statements about your character. If you’ve played FATE, these are the closest to Aspects, where they are parts of your character that can potentially help you in some situations and make your life more complicated in others. A good example of this is Nate Ford’s “Drunk” distinction, where it can be used to make his life more complicated if he’s been drinking too much (a player can invoke it to add a d4 to a roll but gain a plot point in the process) or help him (if he were Grifting and pretending to be drunk.)
* Assets, which are both signature items or anything else working in your favor. Often, these will stick around for either a scene or an entire job, and can be something like “length of lead pipe” or “helpful janitor” that you can consistently call on.
* Talents, which are like feats in D&D that let you break the rules in different ways.
* Your rap sheet, which lists your past adventures, explained below.
* Plot points, which are given throughout the game to help add to rolls, add assets, and more.

In addition to the mechanical benefits like adding more dice, keeping more dice, and activating talents, you can also spend them to make up an asset like listed above, or engage in a “flashback.” Fans of the series might recognize this idea immediately, as they are a key component in turning what was apparently a failure, and revising it to actually be for the best. Maybe when being beaten up by the bad guys, your Hacker managed to slip a tracer onto one of them. At the time of the scene, that didn’t happen. But by spending a plot point, the Hacker could reveal in a flashback that it happened, so now the bad guys can be tracked.

In Leverage, Characters have the customary Cortex primary Attributes; Agility, Alertness, Intelligence, Strength, Vitality, and Willpower, plus ratings in each of the Roles needed for a ‘Leverage’ Crew; Hacker, Hitter, Grifter, Thief, and Mastermind.
Like other Cortex games, these are rated by die-type. A character’s primary Role in the Crew is rated as a d10; their secondary role is rated as a d8. Their other roles will get a d6 or a d4, depending upon player preference and the outcome of the Recruitment Job.

One great part of the book gives you tables to generate everything you need to generate a job on the fly, from who the client is to the Mark to a major complication.



GRIFTER ------ HITTER ------ MASTERMIND ------ THIEF ------ HACKER