HEEST COMPLETE!
In the I’m Getting Too Old For This Shit Caper, the Dead Setters took over the Coalridge spirit well from the skeleton crew of Bluecoats who were guarding it while the Wardens assigned to it were investigated for artifact smuggling (see last issue – Smilin’ Stan Lee).
They did this without killing any cops for once! Instead they turned to that nugget of film perfection, the height of Norm MacDonald’s career: Dirty Work.
Three Easy Steps to Make Bluecoats Hate Their Job and Screw Off Instead of Patrolling
1. Send Rook the Cutter into the sewers to Wreck the pipes underneath the Bluecoats’ hastily-erected watch station, flooding the area and soaking the ground with filth. Watch out for giant albino eels, Rook!
2. Now that the entire neighborhood smells like a Preakness portapotty on a humid August day, Richter the Spider riles up the local taverngoers and blames the problems on the Bluecoats. With a crit, he manages to keep them right on that line between undisguised malice without crossing over into outright violence.
3. Then all you have to do is have Teatime the Whisper magically suborn flocks of ravens to make pinpoint shit-airstrikes on the Bluecoat cohort at the spirit well. All the time. In their lunches. On their heads. Whenever they’re outside.
The beleaguered Bluecoat skeleton crew essentially does as little as possible while still technically remaining at their posts. The crew easily sneaks onto the crumbling manor house grounds and they disable the lightning field. Technically, Deemo the Leech was going to temporarily disable and then reactivate it, but the field flickering out caused Rook to flashback to his time as a Railjack, when the fields failed and ghosts swarmed his crew. He ended up wrecking the field pylons in an impressive Devil’s Bargain.
Turn In Your Gun and Your Badge! You’re Off the Case!
While this chicanery was afoot, I had a clock running for two Spirit Wardens, disgraced by the recent allegations and yearning for justice despite their suspensions, to track down what was really going on. My not-Riggs and not-Murtaugh were waiting inside the manor house and pulled guns on Raven the Hound just as she walked in. Everyone pulled guns, in most cases multiples, and we had ourselves a boss fight.
I used a six-segment clock for the pair of Wardens, but with a crit the crew blasted poor not-Murtaugh to bits right off the bat, his ruined corpse bouncing down into the sinkhole-exposed basement where the spirit well waited. It was in the general shape of a drainage pool, its surface glass-smooth and frozen over, with writhing angry spirits clawing at the eldritch ice from underneath.
Not-Riggs tackled Raven off onto scaffolding that had been erected around the spirit well (a Devil’s Bargain to make it a mano-a-mano knife-fight in true Lethal Weapon fashion). Raven blew through her armor quickly, but managed to take herself and the Warden off the scaffold right onto the spirit well’s frozen surface, which started to crack. It was looking bad until Deemo spotted a huge mirror on a crane/pulley (used to extract spirits from the well), and sent it hurtling down on top of the Warden. Bad luck for him.
The Dead Setters added a piece of Turf, maxed out their Rep, and filled their crew XP tracker to boot! There wasn’t any Coin to be had, but I ruled that a downtime action could easily create or repair a way to extract and bottle spirits, thus fulfilling their contract with the Dimmer Sisters. We didn’t quite get to downtime this session, so we’ll begin with that next time.
#heestcomplete
Killin’ it, as always. This series is so good!