Session 2 for The Other Hand
This was a short session because one player wasn’t feeling it. I think they felt the game lied to them a little; “I thought it was going to be about doing sweet heists, but it’s really about these complex political machinations and betraying people, and I’m not really sure I’m in the mood for that. I feel like everything I do is going to wind up with everyone turning on me and I don’t like that”
So after some discussion, they mostly sat back while Xaro and Carmen took center stage. Since they’d received some aid from the Weeping Lady in the previous session, Carmen went and gathered information at a Weeping Lady-run flophouse to see if they needed any favors done. Xaro told everyone he was going to see what Baszo Baz was planning, and instead went and snooped around the Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh.
Meeting back up at their lair, they decided to help the Weeping Lady smuggle in one of their acolytes from another city, who was stowing away on an incoming freight train. They decided to go with the Social Plan, using a customs inspector as the social connection.
Carmen demonstrated the power of Elite Shadows, as she used Command, and had them break into the inspector’s house and kidnap him. I had it be a controlled situation; Sloane’s shadows were in their element, and the customs inspectors had no reason to suspect this attack was coming. Sloane (the NPC leader of the shadows) convinced the PCs to disguise themselves as Lampblacks; he was still out for revenge, since the Lampblacks had tried to kill him in the previous session.
So they got him, and took him to a quiet spot under a bridge. Carmen called in her extortionist friend Grace, who helped Xaro break this poor customs inspector. The roll was risky not because there was any real risk of failure, but because they were in a public space and someone might walk in at any time.
But the players were rolling like crazy today, and completely got the guy to let them take whatever they wanted off the train, because “Baszo Baz is real unhappy with you”.
We ended the session after they succeeded at taking no heat, and their complication was #4, “The Little Guy”
I decided that the guy they had smuggled in, (Dygnen, a ghost summoner), wanted their help getting set up.
We ended there!
Two sessions already! I’m jealous 🙂
I hope the Blades marketing isn’t leading anyone to think that the game is about being daring scoundrels in a city that doesn’t care about being robbed. That’s not my intent. 😉
But seriously, if you don’t want the political consequences, you can play to mitigate them. Just work for hire, do the jobs, and keep Heat as low as you can. Invest in high Consort so you can repair relations when a status is dinged. “Hey, it was just business, we can still be friends.”