# Cartel tags: #game/rpg/cartel ![[Cartel (cover).jpg|600]] **Cartel** is Mark Diaz Truman's **[[Powered by the Apocalypse|PbtA]]** game for Magpie Games, and it's what happens when someone points the telenovela dial at the Mexican drug war and refuses to flinch. Its great, grim trick is that the cartel isn't the villain — it's the *ecosystem*. You don't ride into Durango to clean house; you're already inside the house, and everyone you love is on one side or the other of somebody's blood money. It's *telenovela* in the truest sense — love and betrayal wearing the same face — and the ratings would be amazing if anybody survived to watch. ## Setting The world is **Durango, Mexico**, and *la guerra antidrogas* — the war on drugs — has been the weather over it for so long that nobody remembers clear skies. The **Sinaloa Cartel** moves heroin, marijuana, cocaine, and meth from Central America out to the world, and it doesn't need to announce itself to run the town; it's the gravitational center every ordinary life is caught in. Your characters are the wife, the informant, the enforcer, the cop, the lookout, the trafficker — people whose families and loyalties got tangled in the same wires as their livelihoods. The book is frank that this is difficult, and it ships with real **safety tools**, because the harm here isn't cartoonish. And yet it's unmistakably a drama about people — the way *chisme*, gossip and obligation, binds a community together as surely as violence pulls it apart. ## Mechanics The engine is the standard **PbtA** move roll — **2d6 + a stat** against the 10+ / 7–9 / 6− ladder — run by **El Maestro de Ceremonias**, the game's name for the MC (a title you feel in your bones). Characters come from **seven core playbooks** — La Esposa, El Halcón (the lookout), El Narco (the trafficker), La Policía, La Rata (the informant), La Sicaria (the hitwoman) — each with its own moves and its own particular way of being in too deep. The dice are a standing reminder that *la guerra antidrogas* is unpredictable and inescapable: the story doesn't get to stagnate, and nobody gets off the hook, because in Durango the hook is usually family. ## Editions - **Cartel** (2019) — Mark Diaz Truman / Magpie Games. *In the library* (core book, plus its play materials and map). ## References - [Cartel — Magpie Games](https://magpiegames.com/cartel/) - [Cartel — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/273101/cartel)