My players upon selecting to play as a gang of shadows posed me an interesting question.
“What is there to steal and who do we steal it from?”
Now I began to explain that there are rival gangs, nobles, cults and the general citizenry to steal a variety of items from when a player asked.
“What about banks, art galleries and museums?”
So my questions are:
1. What sort of banks and other institutions are present in Duskvol?
2. What Duskvol specific cultural items would be worth stealing from these locations?
3. Is it worth it to represent banks and other financial institutions as factions on the list?
My thought is that things like banks and art galleries are controlled by one faction or another, even if that faction is something like the Doskvol City Council. “Who has a controlling interest in the First Bank of Doskvol?” “Oh crap, it’s Lord Scurlock!”
Sub
So, we tend to think of art galleries and museums as public institutions these days. For Duskvol, you’re probably better served by thinking of them in the Medici-style: cultural wealth that belongs to the rich and the powerful, and is put on display out of the “goodness of their hearts” or whatever. So, the Iruvian Consulate — for example — is probably the Faction you might look at during a museum heist.
Thanks for the replies now that i though about it having the players rob a bank vault only to find that it belongs to someone else seems like a great compilation to add to a score.
I feel it would be useful to point out the Duskwall Heist Deck here.
https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/2016/01/21/duskwall-heist-deck/
The deck has “important people” (powerful enough to hire thieves, or be targeted by them) as well as treasures, and obstacles that could make the heist difficult. These are specifically tuned to Doskvol.
With banks, the first three intriguing ideas that present themselves are these:
* Aristocrats run banks. A number of families create a fortress and put their goods there, and then open the security to the less-wealthy, charging fees for the security. An outgrowth of the aristocratic hoarding of wealth, unregulated and with no financial services; to get loans and so on, approach an aristocrat discreetly. Now you can get your family jewels locked up near some of the juiciest and most horrible secrets of the city’s aristocracy–things so horrible their fortress homes are not secure enough to protect the secrets and wealth (so often intertwined.)
* Guilders run banks. A group of guilders or crafters doggedly put together a network of financial institutions to practice usury, preying on the cash-flow-deprived aristocrats, the beyond-their-means middle class, and the desperate poor. They hate the poor and never want to be connected to them (again) and they hate the aristocrats for their detached arrogant greed. Once the bank gets you in their pocket, they’ll keep you there. Now the bankers are using their secret knowledge of debt and liquidity to blackmail aristocratic families into arranged marriages, forcing their way into the nobility. Maybe they underestimate what aristocrats will do to fight back.
* The government runs the banks. This is a service that was an outgrowth of having armored hard points for armories in case of invasion; the banking business started on the side. Now it is a big deal and a significant part of the city revenue and infrastructure, governed by the Council. After banks were popularized, the process of seizing assets as a punishment for crime was popularized, and banks used to both target certain vulnerable victims, and also to make seizure easier. Now after the war the city is responsible for more money than they have (since they “borrowed” from wealth in the banks to prosecute the war) and the whole banking system, which must survive or the government falls, is at risk.
You could have all three kinds of banks in the city at once, and vary their flavors. For factions, you could have the bankers from a cluster of noble families (reads like a law firm) or a guild in a neighborhood, or a city in a neighborhood, as a faction.
Interestingly, I played an early play test of Blades in the Dark a couple years ago before the Kickstarter was even a thing (the system was a shadow of what it is now) and we played thieves breaking into a museum to steal a painting. The museum was rumored to be haunted at night and guarded by wards. Of course it turned out to be that the painting itself was of the ghost haunting the museum and attached to it.
Andrew Shields is pretty right on here. I would lean towards several different interests too. Even in our day an sage there are different interests controlling banks from large corporate banks and credit unions only for specific industries which basically are guild banks.
I recently finished the fantastic DLC for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and it got me thinking: What version of the Palisade Blades server-vault might exist in BitD? Instead of cyber security, it would be ghostly security, of course. Highly-trained guards, defensible architecture, to boot. But how awesome might a magically protected “super vault” be? It could reside in an Iruvian city, complete with the newly-bound demon-guards. The payout, in both rep and coin, would be immeasurable.