The Pack
Written by: Null Kit
Despite having been given Madame's blessing to share information about the Pack in this data-cache, I only do so with the greatest of caution. Cartels have always been notorious for their disproportionate retribution to percieved disrespect or 'snitching', and the Pack do nothing to challenge this stereotype. Operating out of the Neuse Districts of Raleigh, the Pack are a matriarchal gang of Ork and Troll bikers, holding the lion's share of drug manufacturing and distribution in the Wake County area. Despite the narrow standards for recruitment limiting the numbers of the cartel, the Pack hold a disproportionately large amount of territory within the Juno Residential Complex owing to their strong leadership and liberal use of combat cybernetics and stimulants, making each individual member enough of a force to be reckoned with that even the ever zealous Lone Star units orDragoon asset-reclamation teams reluctant to enter Pack territory unless absolutely necesarry.Kind of hard to miss when you're in their turf, mind you. Packmembers use the same purple luminescent paint in their graffity that they paint themselves with. Not a subtle gang, this one.
It's for your safety, omae. The sooner you spot us, the sooner you know not to piss us off.
Oh sure, because I was totally gonna antagonise the dozen or so roided up Orks and Trolls carrying automatic rifles, if they didn't have scary facepaint...
Touché.As a word of caution: If the Pack hire you for whatever reason, it's not unknown for them to intentionally complicate your job or leave an important detail out the first time round, and you might find your prospects for continued employment will be influenced on your ability to respond these unexpected obstacles. It's unpredictable work at the best of times, but the payment is worth the extra hassle.
Structure
As mentioned above, the Pack is a highly matriarchal cartel that favors metahumans of the Troll and Ork varieties, with female humans and elves having limited promotion opportunities and males kept at the bottom of the food-chain as decorative 'boy toys'. Madame rules unchallenged at the top, conspiring with four underbosses who in turn delegate work to their subordinates and so forth.
Identifiers
Whilst the Pack has no hard dress-code (beyond a cultural ideal of dressing sufficiently 'Orky'), Pack members and their turf can be easily recognised by their affinity with shades of purple and magenta, usually painted onto their belongings or in large murals within their territories, but most commonly seen in the form of bioluminescent 'War Paint' applied to the head, arms and upper-body of Pack members. Freshly initiated members typically sport 'disruptive' patterns made to interfere with automated facial-recognition algorithms in security devices, whilst higher-ranked members often apply intricate patterns and animal-skull motifs.I've head of some of 'em try to mix in NoPaint, but something about the stuff that makes their warpaint glow doesn't play nice with novocain, makes the skin crackle up like soybacon. Smells like it too...
Funny enough, none of their rides are painted purple, only the trims and lighting. Unusually subtle, considering they drive tricked-out bikes and SUVs big enough to park smaller SUVs on top.
Culture
Unsurprisingly, the intracultural interactions of the Pack are heavily influenced by the Cartel Narcoculture of their predecessors; glorifying individual wealth, achievement and power, particularly the power to fight and destroy as they please. Unlike the Los Decas, however, the Pack have cultivated a strong culture of loyalty and protection towards one's family, be it biological or the 'family' of one's fellow gang-members, emphasizing that while they are expected to compete with oneanother on a casual/social level, outright attacking or betraying other members for personal gain is strictly forbidden and punished harshly.
Before any you get the idea that this is some kind of progressive thing, lemme remind you: The Pack might have a monopoly on Ork and Troll women in the organised crime business, but that's still a pretty small recruiting-pool compared to the more equal-opportunity gangs. Encouraging solidarity and discouraging infighting are just common-sense steps to keep numbers high enough to hold their territory.The other foundational aspect of Pack culture is Chaos: Violence has long been a mainstay of cartel culture, but the Pack actively cultivate an image of tearing through targets like a natural disaster, taking the most destructive path to a target and leaving everything adjacent either broken or stolen, and going so far as to smash through walls in lieu of using doors even when there is no tactical advantage in doing so. While this is in part a means of emphasizing the disproportionate strength and capability of individual Pack gangers, I suspect it also serves to throw off suspicion from the Pack when they do engage in more clandestine movements, and cast aspersions on their talents in doing such.
Public Agenda
Madame has stated that the 'official' purpose of the pack is giving a place of belonging to ork and troll women, demographics who have been victims of bigotry and chauvanistic cultures in the cartel's early history. Whether this is a facade to gloss over the less savoury side of the Pack's drug-running operations or if Madame legitimately believes that what she is doing is beneficial to the lady-tusk communities of Raleigh is still debated.
Not debated loudly, mind you.
Assets
With quantity something of a pipedream, the Pack do their best to augment the quality of their individual gangmembers with heavy use of cyberware/bioware enhancements, tailor-made combat stimulants and the boatloads of firepower and armor pinched from their Los Decas roots. Each fully-initiated packmember can be expected to have access to civilian-grade body armor and automatic weaponry, while higher-ranking members have been seen wearing corpsec-grade suits of ballistic plating, spraypainted in garish shades of purple and violet.
Most vehicles in the Pack's convoy are motorcycles and milsurp off-road vehicles - easier to modify for larger metahuman frames, in my experience - and Madame herself is chauffeured from place to place in a luxury-SUV that has some serious defensive measures under the armored hood. Windows hold up to antimateriel rounds, at the very least.One of the Pack's more unique offensive assets is a homebrewed combat-stimulant nicknamed 'Primal' by its enthusiastic users. I've yet to decipher the specific formula, nor do I have much desire to do so, but the symptoms and side-effects of use bare strong resemblance to the popular military-grade stimulant Kamikaze.
History
The bulk of current and former members of the Pack all share blood and marrital relationships to members of Los Decas, a ghost cartel operating in northern Aztlan. Ultra-traditionalist to a fault, the Los Decas refused to change their modus operandi to meet the modern demands and refused to see the various wives and daughters of cartel-members as assets, only as trophies and incubators for male heirs. When Aztechnology began cracking down on Los Decas in earnest and civil-wars began brewing within, Madame and several other women she deemed 'strong enough' (possibly setting up the Pack's current nature as a primarily ork and troll gang) took advantage of the chaos and made off with a shockingly large share of Los Decas slush-funds and hardware across the border into the CAS. Supposedly, they initially had plans of splitting the loot and going their seperate ways free of the old cartel's clutches, but the sentiment lasted all of ten seconds as they realised how green the grass was on the other side of the border. Armed with the experience of their ex-husbands and fathers, the Pack quickly formulated into their own fledgeling cartel and began staking their claim in Raleigh's narcotics trade. As of writing this article, the Pack have taken a cautious approach to staking their claim in Raleigh, starting with their new home territory of the topmost floors inside the Juno RA-0 Residential Complex, and are engaging in ongoing diplomatic meetings to size up and assess where they stand compared to the others. No attempts at retaliation have been made by current or former members of Los Decas so far, but we're going to wait and see on that.
"Get some!"
Founding Date
2069
Type
Illicit, Gang
Alternative Names
The Raleigh Pack, La Mananda
Predecessor Organization
Demonym
Tusk, Sister
Leader
Location
Friendly
The Pack have loaned one of their enforcers, Ripshot, as a Shadowrunner to fill the Cabinet's need for combat-expertise in exchange for favourable contract-conditions.
Trading
Nobody in the Pack would be caught dead associating with the Devils of Durham, but money is blind, and the Devils are happy to pay way above cost for the Pack's lesser narcotics, which the Pack are content in supplying so long as their customers remember what cartels do with snitches should they get caught.
Neutral
The Pack don't have much of an opinion on the Corsairs and vice versa, on account of one being a gang of violent drug-dealers and another being a school of kid racers without too much in common ground. Occasional conflicts of interests keep the official relationship a little frosty, but that doesn't stop them from occasionally goading eachother into races.
Cease-Fire
Although none of the CMNG's founding members are connected with the Pack's predecessor group, Los Decas, relations between chilly at best despite growing business relations between the two.
Open War
A lot of the biker-oriented gangs in Raleigh only tolerate the Children, seeing them as poseurs but not much more than that, but the Pack are completely open about wanting to turn them into a fine red smear, even going so far as to publically aggravate and harass anyone so much as wearing their colors.
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