Blades in the Dark: Shy Boys
Ok so I’m 3 sessions behind in my reporting so I’ll just hit the highlights.
Session 2
Shadow (the Hound) finds the Cabbies daggering a big paper banner on their door bearing their logo, a big wagon wheel. He follows their gold-trimmed black coach with his bloodhound Rolly. He hears “just shoot the f*cking dog”. Shadow is serious about his dog. He pushes himself, and takes a Devil’s Bargain: if the guy dies, his ghost WILL come back and haunt him. Shadow fires on the coach, but not before a cabbie gets off a shot at Rolly (complication). He resists with Vigor (it was before the GenCon update) and takes Stress, using his preternatural rapport with his dog to make him take evasive action. The cabbies drive off into the night, and the Sly Boys have a new target.
Seasnake (the Lurk) goes to his Bluecoat friend to find out about the Cabbies, finding out that their main depot is in Six Towers, and that their full name is the Municipal Carriage Union.
Tick Tock and Shadow head to Six Towers to find out more about the drivers and their patterns, drawing some attention in the process, and leaving their new calling card- an actual Ace of Spades with an ornate SB scrawled on them, around Cabbie bars and cafes.
NOTE: Some of these rolls were Fortune rolls. It seems a lot of the time when we make Fortune rolls, it’s with the same dice we’d roll for an actual action, just with different repercussions. Does anyone else find that?
They’ve gathered a lot of info and they’re ready to make a move. They’ve found the route of Tassen, the Cabbie that was driving the coach the other night. Shadow and Seasnake are in position, ready to bottleneck the coach in Nightmarket. The Engagement roll separates TickTock from the group: a meeting with a contact went overlong and he had to run across town.
Without TickTock, Seasnake tries to stop the carriage by acting crazy. The coach keeps going, Tassen smacks him with a horse whip, Seasnake resists, grabbing it out of his hand. He hops up onto the coach and jabs his big hook into Tassen’s hand. Shadow jumps up too and pistolwhips him into unconsciousness. Inside is a paying passenger and another Cabbie, which is weird because they learned that Cabbies ride solo.
With Tassen out, Seasnake and Shadow each take a door. On Seasnake’s side is the passenger, an older man. In his typical insane fashion, Seasnake tries to get the man to run while simultaneously trying to rob him. The man pulls a tiny pistol and fires! Seasnake resists: he is so slight, and his cloak so billowy, that the bullet misses him. But the stress puts him over the top and he is Traumatized, deafened and stunned.
NOTE: Trauma. In the rules it says “You may choose to be “left for dead” or otherwise dropped out of the current conflict, only to show back up later, shaken and drained.” What’s the option here- to be left for dead and dropped out of the conflict OR just… not? If so, why would you choose left for dead if not to just avoid more damage or complication? We were sort of reading that sentence as left for dead OR still up, but totally out of it. What’s up?
TickTock nearly catches up to the coach, but I make him roll to be able to get in the action quicker. He’s not a physical guy, and the Nightmarket street is bustling. He Pushes Himself and I offer him a Devil’s Bargain: knock over the sweet old baker lady crossing the street in front of him to get a clear run to the coach. He takes it, knocks over the lady, loaves of bread litter the street, he makes the roll but still gets a complication: a big burly laborer sees what he did and confronts him, “Oy! That’s someone’s grandmother you just knocked down!” TickTock resists the complication with Resolve, but still takes enough stress to become Traumatized as well. He flicks a gold coin to him, “She’s your Grandmother now!” and keeps running, catching up to the coach just as the passenger shoots at Seasnake. TickTock is functioning on instinct at this point, and joins his mates in the coach.
The passenger runs off, and the group run the other Cabbie off as well, giving him a message for the rest of the Union: your coaches aren’t safe, watch the f*ck out. But as he runs, he rings the coach’s bell to alert the Bluecoats.
They drive the coach as fast and evasively as possible, tipping it over, releasing the horse, and setting the thing ablaze (the coach, not the horse). They tie up Tassen nearby and leave a Sly Boys card in his hatband, just above the Cabbies wheel logo.
They melt off into the night and regroup back at the warehouse.
SESSION 3
Downtime consists of some recovery but mainly information gathering and downtime projects. They want to make connections with some stronger factions, so Seasnake goes to the Dockers to find out who their enemies are. (He uses his friend Telda the beggar down on the docks to help him blend in and overhear dealings). Turns out the Foxhounds are jacking shipments that the Dockers are supposed to be protecting. TickTock uses one of his contacts to make an appointment with Oorby Roy, an Inkrake, to start an info/intelligence exchange. Shadow successfully locates where the Deathlands Scavengers hole up, and who their leader is. He also starts a project to build a rifle scope that helps target ghosts.
The Cabbies have been taken care of for now, so the Sly Boys turn their eye to a piece of turf adjacent to their warehouse, a large, raised park controlled by the Red Sashes.
We gather info. Seasnake finds that there is an old municipal storeroom the Sashes use to sell drugs out of. Shadow sets up on an overlooking building and sees the patterns of citizens walking through and getting shaken down by the Sashes. TickTock talks to Nyryx about mobilizing her fellow prostitutes and lowlives to start making Brackett Park a more frequented area.
NOTE: We’re still wrapping our heads around the idea of just going into the plan without planning. I love the idea, but we can’t help coming up with an actual plan, however simple. We Gather Information but it’s all based on making the steps of the plan we’ve come up with work. Anyone else have trouble? Tips? It almost seems like, if we’re just supposed to go right in and do the job on the fly, and to accomplish support stuff with flashbacks, that there maybe shouldn’t be Gather Info pre-plan at all? If anyone could post an AP of how they make this work, that would be great.
The operation starts with a Social plan. TickTock enlists Bazso to relight the broken lamps around the park. He also has Nyryx encourage her street people to encroach. Seasnake finishes the job by calling in his Bluecoat buddy to bust the drug shack and sweep the park.
This is followed by an Infiltration plan, with TickTock and Seasnake traipsing through the park, luring out any remaining Sashes to try to rob them. Shadow is across the street in sniper position. The boys attract attention, but a complication arises- hiding behind a set of statues are two Sashes, poised to strike. Seasnake resists, and we go into a paroxysm of “how does this work”…
NOTE: Most of the complications we’ve faced, when resisted, were woven into the fiction and more or less handled by the PC. But if I’m not mistaken, aren’t resistance rolls/stress used to basically cancel complications too? Like, nope, that doesn’t exist?
GM “Ok, you’re acting like drunk rich assholes, and’s it’s working pretty well, but you see just up ahead two Sashes hidden behind statues…”
SEASNAKE “I’ll roll to resist, ok, I pay Stress… Nope, those guys aren’t there.”
Is that how it works?
They get into a brawl with a couple more Sashes, with Shadow shooting two of them, despite an unexpected visitor…. remember that Cabbie he killed? Well he’s back, and he’s trying to pry his mouth open with his freezing fingers.
Down below, the boys have their gang come in and route the remaining Sashes (a flashbacked plan) and the Bluecoats come in (another flashback) as Seasnake suggests to make it appear as if the entire job was a police raid.
While the park buzzes with activity, Shadow pulls his spirit bane charm from inside his shirt and presses it to the ghost’s wrist, who’s clawing fingers leave frostbite wounds. The charm holds the ghost at bay, who stands, angrily shouting oaths, while Shadow raises a pistol loaded with electroplasm rounds. He fires, nailing the ghost while sharp white light arcs between barrel and slug. He fires again, the electroplasm webbing into the ghost’s blackish, semi-translucent body before reducing it to a cloud of black dust. Shadow takes Trauma to get through the attack, and lays, wiped out on the roof, for half the night.
The operation was a success and the Sly Boys gain the turf.
NOTE: As I write out the above operation, it all seems to make sense. But when we were playing it out, we felt like “well how is this supposed to work?” We always choose the plan type and fill in the detail, but in the end, does it matter what type, besides for tone/color? I’d like to see a couple mechanics in there to differentiate the plan types, or to help with steps of the plan. In the above situation, I feel like we could skip plan type and just get right to it.
I also had trouble setting the clocks. It’s a great mechanic and I feel it should be easy and helpful. I like that they can be used to gauge the done-ness of a job, but i’m having a hard time. I don’t know whether I’m making the clocks too hard or too easy.
Does anyone else have trouble? Does anyone have great results?
I have more notes that I’ll include in the AP for tonight’s session which is forthcoming. Thanks for reading!
Great report, Eric Swanson. I have some ideas about your questions.
What happens when a character takes Trauma during a heist? From my perspective, the question is not “are they out of the mission, or do they want to keep going?” The questions is, “are they left for dead, or do they face some other fate?” and they are without question out of the rest of the mission.
So if a character takes trauma trying to catch up to the coach, then the character fails, and disappears for a few days, and when the character shows up again you can find out what happened (but it leaves a lasting impression.) If someone is fired upon and becomes traumatized avoiding it, the character is still knocked loose and falls out of the mission.
The flexibility is there so you can have someone carted off to jail, lost in a bunch of back alleys, or whatever other way to get them out of the mission. It doesn’t HAVE to be left for dead, but they ARE out in some appropriate way.
Stress can counter lasting CONDITIONS, but not all CONSEQUENCES. You can use stress to avoid picking up a clock of a lasting condition that will penalize you until it is erased by down time actions. You don’t spend stress to prevent complications from appearing if that’s what the dice call for.
Clocks can be complicated. If you don’t want to use them, you don’t have to, which is one of the great things about the game’s rules toolbox. Start with the assumption they are an extra tool to help you model a challenge.
Clocks should be used for difficulties that are not expected to be sorted out in one round or one roll. So for me, that’s the first yes/no question; should they be able to clean this up in one go? If it’s possible or likely, no clock.
One way to use clocks is to let the players tell and pace the story. If you put a clock out for “Patrols and Guards” and one for “Magical Traps” and one for “Vigilant House Staff” and one for “Hidden Treasure” each with 3-6 segments, then you could let the players build from there.
Depending on what they pick, you describe it with them as the next challenge they deal with. So maybe they want to start with Patrols and Guards, then do a roll for Vigilant House Staff, switch over to Hidden Treasure, back over to Patrols and Guards (because they aren’t finishing with one roll each) so by having access to all the clocks at once instead of working them one at a time they can change up what they’re dealing with.
Then, as they roll complications, you get to pull in other unfinished clocks, or use their flavor text for inspiration.
Clocks are abstract, and they are for pacing.
This is probably already too long, but I hope it is helpful.