All right, I’m gonna try to post an “actual play” post.
The Crew: The Coffin Street Killers (Breakers)
HQ: Abandoned mortuary and coffin shop in The Drop.
Members In Good Standing:
Timothy “Tiny” Happ, an enormous Skovlander, addicted to the dice and hurting people, not necessarily in that order. A Cutter.
Punchinello, a grim and silent Akorosi, with a weakness for the bottle. A Lurk.
Menti, Iruvian Swordsman, formerly of the Red Sashes. Hates cats. A Cutter.
Jenner, Skovlander safecracker. Obsessively collects masks, wearing a different one each score. A Leech.
All right, so first off, Breakers can be really hard to GM for, because all their scores tend to go downhill really fast. These are not stable people. Two Cutters is a lot of violence. Also, I just have to thank the wonderful person in this community who who suggested that a cohort could be a pack of fighting dogs. Thanks a bunch. They decided to take them in addition to the thugs they got for free, so manpower was not an issue. I should have known something was wrong when the first discussion they had was “Who do we go to war with first?”.
They decided that the Fog Hounds looked a little too big for their britches, so they decided to try and make their bones by seizing one of their gambling operations, a dice game run by Rufus Spogg. They raided the place, but do to bad placement and communication, they attacked at the worst time, namely, when an entire squad of Bluecoats raided the game, intent on gaining the profits of the illicit operations. The two sides clashed amidst the startled gamblers, and culminated in the murder of a Bluecoat Watch officer named Tom Shandy by Tiny Tim, who chopped off one of his arms. There was a hilarious tug of war over the cash box, and money spilled everywhere, adding to the chaos. The crew made a break for it, with the dogs scattering to the back alleys, having been weakened by last ditch gunfire from the Fog Hound guards. They regrouped at the coffin shop, licking their wounds (love the recovery rules, by the way).
Downtime
Everyone tried to recover, taking advantage of their physicker friend, Mr. Scissors (don’t ask). Tiny Tim gathered information using Wreck (“Tell me or the vase gets it!) trying to find info on Fog hound activities in the surrounding area. Punchinello tried to reduce heat by talking with his Bluecoat contact, arranging to pay the widow of the officer blood money, somewhat easing pressure from the law. Menti indulged his vice, visiting his favorite cigar shop. Jenner started a long term project to create poison bombs for the next stage of their war.
Good session, a lot of fun, these guys are not sneaky or subtle at all, compared to the other group I have played with.
Best Line of the Night: “Hey, Don’t be afraid to be the first to resort to violence”.
Sounds cool! And hey, you get what you call for. Breakers are Breakers! 🙂
My group was almost Breakers. I think sometimes they still want to be. Then you can hit them in the talking and the faction politics once they GTA one too many As. 🙂
They just got fine weapon upgrades, and just declared war on their third faction. Sigh.
But at the same time, it’s kind of awesome, right? Simple brutality has an elegance of its own. They catch people off guard who are used to “how things are done”. They’re like the Joker that way.
Or not. Maybe it’s annoying that they approaching things like murderhobos, but honestly it sounds awesome to me. Maybe they’ll burn too bright and leave Duskwall’s criminal landscape a radioactive wasteland.
You can have some fun figuring out how their enemies would deal with this all-barbarian D&D party running roughshod over everything in their path. Do they petition larger allies for “specialists”? Form truces to hunt down the PCs? Bribe the cops to actually do their jobs for once?