Stagsfire

Basic Information
The story goes that the day Bjorn Larsen’s father was killed, in the chemical attacks that wiped out his entire train en route to Finland, the 21-year-old heir to the Stagsfire empire stood outside the company HQ skyscraper in Oslo with a shotgun to deter looters.

Today Larsen runs one of the most powerful organisations in northern Scandanavia. He has coal mines as far out as Svalbard (which has just recently been abandoned due to poor weather) with SCB Enterprises, under the control of Kjellfrid, his –stepsister, logging work in Nordmarka…and on the streets and in the towns, his men known as ‘Bjorn’s Boys’ sell heroin and cocaine, scaring off the competition with knives, lead pipes and home-made flamethrowers.

Recently, Stagsfire has attempted to extend its influence into northern Sweden, SCB buying up what few logging mills remain and Larsen’s gang members selling their product in settlements. The latter, so far, has had limited success – the Ostling syndicate and other smaller gangs are too deeply entrenched, and the Boys are too thinly spread in these early days to make a full-on war a viable possibility. As the groups clash more and more, however, this course of action seems more and more likely…

Larsen himself, a small, wiry, elegantly suited man, has pretensions towards being seen as a cultured gent – a successful capitalist and a benefactor of Norway; a man who rarely resorts to violence. Certainly he has been known to give bread and wood freely to the locals in and around Oslo, where he remains enduringly popular and keeps himself clean. But in the countryside, his reputation is less pleasant; when his thugs force a man or woman to guzzle petrol before setting them alight, they’re sending a message in two very different senses – the fuel is, of course, incredibly expensive to most Scandanavians.

Loyalty, however, Larsen rewards above all – a lesson he was taught by his father. In turn, his troops, lieutenants and ordinary workers take pride in their ‘Papa Bjorn’…though this is a loyalty that has recently been sorely tested. Refusing to focus on the coming war with the Ostlings, Larsen spends a great deal of time alone in his partly ruined headquarters, obsessively attempting to build a bunker to protect him and his family against the Ice Age which he claims is on the way.

Aims
An appropriately ‘large-scale’, complex criminal organisation. Not…y’know, the Black Hand Gang, where every member is a rogue, and they all wear the same outfit and don’t seem to do anything apart from fight the City Watch.