Session 7 of our ongoing playtest / beta was this past Saturday (prior sessions here…

Session 7 of our ongoing playtest / beta was this past Saturday (prior sessions here https://plus.google.com/109896206941346348750/posts/5G3chRgAKRe and onward). In this session, the Blackstone Outfit (Cutter, Lurk, Whisper) made good on a promise to Baszo Baz and a long simmering crisis boiled over.

Play notes:

* Contrary to last session, I felt very comfortable with my handling of the rules this time. Maybe I was better fed and rested; maybe I’m improving my hold.

* Question on trading coin for downtime: coin can be spent in downtime to either improve results by one notch (4-5 becoming 6, 6 becoming critical, etc) or to buy another action. This past session, we froze up a bit as our Whisper, recovering from two Harm clocks, did the math on whether it’d be more effective to spend coins bumping up his Recovery roll or buying additional Downtime actions (used in further Recoveries). In other words, was it more cost-effective to buy two actions or to invest more heavily in the one?

It’s the sort of min-maxing that I don’t think the game is meant to encourage, and it felt like a weird little exploit. Are we missing something? Will this be ironed out?

* For those newer to or struggling with Fiction First gameplay, a principle that helped me this past session was that no player action is wasted. I didn’t prep anything beyond knowing what the PCs’ target was. Almost everything that unfolded from that unfolded in response to a player’s question or choice. The Whisper wants to investigate the basement? Then there’s something ominous in the basement! The Lurk wants to tail one of the escaping guards? Then that guard’s headed somewhere important and the Lurk had better stop him! And so on. 

This is old hat for PbtA veterans, where structured GM Moves enforce this sort of thing, but I’m still growing into it.

* New setting elements determined this session: rage essence is somehow distilled from the blood of a great warrior in their death throes, and sometimes communicates visions; spirit bottles are lined with the same sort of wards that people put on doors to keep ghosts out, so releasing a ghost from a bottle into a warded area will frenzy it like a cornered rat.

As for the story:

The Outfit had promised to help Baszo Baz finish off the Red Sashes once and for all (an Entanglement last session). Baz’s plan was to disguise the Outfit and his own thugs as Iruvians, raid the Sashes’ new headquarters, and massacre everyone within. The Cutter kicked in the front door with a raiding party and laid waste with his leviathan hammer. The Lurk snuck in through the roof and found that the Lampblacks had reinforcements: armored mercenaries with silver gauntlets (a complication on the Engagement roll). The Whisper snuck in the back door and explored the basement, where he found one of these gauntleted mercenaries imbuing a fresh corpse with the spirit of the Red Sashes’ former swordmaster, Carvalho!

Their massacre successful, the Outfit took some downtime. When they returned to Crows Foot, they found riots breaking out. Apparently, the Iruvians were threatening to blockade the harbor (long-term clock The Iruvian Crisis had filled), and angry mobs were using it as an excuse to wreck and burn local shops. The Outfit checked in on the businesses they “protected.” They then decided to take advantage of reduced Bluecoat presence (they’re temporarily operating at a lower Tier thanks to the Lurk’s long-term project) and the citywide chaos by planning a grand heist: robbing the Bluecoats’ payroll.