The Dead Setters had their first gameplay session last night after last week’s crew/character creation.

The Dead Setters had their first gameplay session last night after last week’s crew/character creation. Rook the Cutter, Mr. Teatime the Whisper, Deemo the Leech, Guilty the Spider, and Raven the Hound accepted Baszo’s job to steal a specific carved bone idol from Mylera’s art collection. The crew could keep the ruby hidden inside, Baszo said, he just wanted Mylera off-balance at her lair’s weakness and the violation of her personal stuff.

Given that the PC crew was -1 faction status with the Lampblacks as well as the Red Sashes, well, I think they’re expecting a screwjob but it might be a way to earn their way into the Lampblacks’ good graces before they repay the inevitable betrayal.

I felt most adrift during the nebulous setup portion of the session. We fell into this half-planning, half-acting miasma where the actions were framed too theoretically, too loosely to lock it down into “yeah this is a heist”, but felt too risky to just handwave away? I guess a potential answer is “If A (finding the name of Mylera’s “art dealer”) leads to B (kidnapping her and learning the location of the idol) leads to C (stealing the idol), then start with C and use flashbacks”, my question would then be how does one pick a starting situation for C?

We were almost into a Deception plan where Guilty, posing as an art dealer, was distracting Mylera while the rest of the crew snuck in when Deemo’s player helpfully pointed out the “Linked Plan” section. We immediately switched into an Infiltration plan, using the deception as a Setup action, and everything seemed to click.

Once we were in “heist time”, so to speak, things moved a lot more smoothly. The crew snuck into the Red Sash’s base/temple using ghost-infested catacombs. Although their “clean” way through was blocked by a recent cave-in not listed on Guilty’s blueprints, Teatime led them through the haunted tunnels and into the lair proper. A Desperate stick-up ambush/murder and one captive fed to the hungry ghosts beneath the laundry room later, and the Dead Setters were ably disguised as Red Sashes and heading up through the temple.

Rook’s player chose “Stras, a clever blade” as his rival, and earlier he said Stras was a Red Sash. Turns out the dude was hanging out in a common room with a few other Sashes and spotted Rook. Rook blew his Command roll to try to bravado his way through, ended up in a Desperate skirmish with Stras’ sash wrapped around his throat, but managed to put his meat hook (no, not his hands, a literal meat hook) through Stras’ hand and into his eye. One recurring eyepatch villain left for dead: check!

Raven had a knife to Rook’s throat and Teatime managed to Sway the other Sashes with what was essentially the Chewbacca gambit. “Oh, he’s our prisoner now, we’ll take him to get what’s coming to him” and so on. It worked, and the other Sashes gathered up Stras. No doubt they’ll discover their comrade was only horribly maimed at an inopportune time.

Plus, there’s probably a new vampire lurking in the catacombs now.

We stopped there, but I’m confident we’ll be able to finish up this heist and probably get to downtime next week. Roll20 didn’t work for all of us, so we fell back to Hangouts. Those of us that could used Dicestream and anyone who had trouble just used real dice. Screw it.

Reception was overwhelmingly positive, so good job John and Andrew and Adam and Stras and whoever else played the crap out of this game well before my group got to it. 🙂

Feedback of note:

– You get a lot done with a single roll.

– It’s a decent game to play over Hangouts or similar.

– It really does try to minimize planning agony. I think we probably bogged down there this time, and perhaps the wishy-washy shaky feeling I got was warning that we needed to move to the heist itself.

– There are a lot of different sliders for the GM to adjust difficulty without actually changing the rules the players use.

– I felt a little lost again gauging how “tough” to make NPCs. Maybe I should’ve called for a resistance roll before Rook could get close enough to Stras. Maybe? I figure that’s something that comes with practice.

– Assist actions are awesome and fast in play.

– We’re all Fate guys, and we love love love Devil’s Bargain. It’s hard to *not* offer it sometimes, simply to make sure everything doesn’t degenerate into “GTA run from the cops game”.