Creating a Geist antagonist using Deviant rules

[Lady Gray]

So I had an idea for a campaign involving the player characters having to oppose a Krewe of Bonepickers who had successfully taken control of the magical underworld of the city they're in. They have leverage over most every Krewe, they've got unscrupulous Krewes, necromancers and maybe even a Reaper or two on the payroll, and basically ghosts and the powers of death are just a commodity for them to exploit. I was mulling over how to put them together and I had a great idea; I'd backed Deviant: The Renegades on Kickstarter and decided to use the rules for building conspiracies to create the Krewe. Here's what I have so far:

Name: The Bonepickers (pending rename)

Virtue: Cunning Vice: Avarice

Concept: Backroom puppeteers manipulating their city for money and power

Standing: 2

Principles: Everything has a Price, In Shadows Lie Power, Never Break What You Can Use.

Nodes:

1. Hierarchical: The inner circle. Linchpin: The Founder of the Krewe
2. Exploitative: A network of Krewes in their debt/under their thumb Linchpin: Slick Face of the Bonepickers.
3. Temporal: A comprehensive memento stockpile. Linchpin: The caretaker of the collection, a member of the inner circle.
4. Temporal: Agents in the local city council. Linchpin: A city council member
5. [Node]: Necromancers. Linchpin:

Icons: Leverage: Attempts to interrogate individuals about the Krewe’s business suffer a -2 penalty. The Krewe’s next surveillance roll enjoys a +2 bonus after any chapter during which the characters attempted to research the conspiracy by talking to people the Bonepickers has a hold over.

Attributes

Power: 2
Finesse: 5
Resistance: 3

Feel free to toss me your thoughts and comments, as well as suggestions, on how to improve this all, it's my first time using these rules for anything so I'm sure there's a lot of ways I could be using them better.

[Primal Zed]

Don't forget Giest: The Sin-Eaters 2nd edition also has a ruleset for Krewes. It looks very similar to what you have here, just with different terminology ("esotery" instead of "standing", "doctrine" instead of "principle"). I don't think Geist mentions anything similar to the Nodes, though, so that seems neat.

[Lady Gray]

I remember the Krewe rules for Geist but I went with the Conspiracy system for a few reasons. First was that Conspiracy rules are explicitly more built around creating antagonists and actions against the players flowed more naturally I felt. Second was that while technically the antagonists are a Krewe, in terms of how they operate I realized they were more like a conspiracy in that they're trying to worm their way into the workings of the city they're in whilst only caring about the mystical aspects of their nature in as much as they can profit off of it. Thirdly I liked the nodes and icons system because they helped me flesh out the members of the inner circle a bit more. So ultimately I decided going with conspiracy rules matched what I wanted this group to be more. Which is one of the great things about Chronicles of Darkness, being able to transplant systems like this is incredibly helpful and it means that every book they release potentially becomes an asset to use with any game.