So a few friends and I started playing Blades in the Dark a little while ago. We didn’t have a full description of the canon factions, we only had the names, so some things may be different from the 7.1 descriptions.
The Cult, known as “The Queen’s Hand”, began with its two founders, Cyrene the Whisper and Phaya the Leech. The two of them serve an enigmatic deity known as “The Siren Queen”. The Queen has tasked them to recover some relics to perform a ritual, the exact nature of which She has not disclosed.
The first relic set before them was a complicated acquisition. They knew where and when the artifact would be there, but they didn’t know exactly what it was. They knew it was in possession of the Ink Rakes (who in our campaign took on the role of censoring the media).
So our crew began. They infiltrated the Ink Rakes headquarters through an arcane ritual, allowing them to temporarily pass through solid objects akin to taking on a ghost form. The Whisper was told this would have repercussions down the road, but chose to take the risk. Once inside the HQ, the crew obtained disguises, in order to try to blend in with the Ink Rakes.
The crew explored for a bit, searching for a vault which they believed would hold the artifact. In their journey they found a few old tomes, which the Ink Rakes had not yet been able to censor. Our Leech, who is an ex-Iruvian Scholar, delighted in this, and could not wait to get back to their lair to begin translating them.
The crew’s disguises held up, at least for a while. One guard managed to see through the disguise, though she was quickly dealt with, as the Leech blew some trance powder into her face, while our Whisper subdued her. They left her be once she was no longer a threat.
The Queen’s Hand finally found their way to the basement, where there stood a vault, behind which they were certain their artifact stood. There was only one problem. Well, two, actually, and those were the armed guards standing in front of the vault entrance.
After a long and brutal fight, in which our Whisper was badly injured (Shot, stabbed, and nearly traumatized), the two guards were dead, and the crew was (miraculously) alive. Our Leech then pulled out their surefire way into the vault: a bomb she had built beforehand. They made sure the bodies were near the bomb, to hide as much evidence as possible.
The crew was in the vault, but everyone in the building now knew that something had just happened in the basement due to the sound of the explosion. They had only a few moments before the rest of the guards would be here. They searched and didn’t know what they were looking for, until our Whisper put on her spirit mask. In the vault, there was one item radiating with such intense arcane energies that there was no way it wasn’t the artifact. A paintbrush, of all things, which seemed incredibly mundane to anyone not looking at it with a spirit mask.
Upon grabbing the brush, Cyrene felt filled with awe. Like she had just seen the infiniteness of the universe. Like she had seen just beyond the cusp of our limited knowledge and known all that ever had been, that was, and that would be. Like she was climbing a mountain, and had just reached the summit, and beyond the summit she saw the vast expanse of Everything. This feeling passed as she put the brush in her pocket, and stopped touching it with her bare skin.
The crew tested their disguises one last time, as the guards rushed into the basement. Due to an incredibly lucky crit on Phaya’s part, they succeeded in persuading the Ink Rakes that the explosion had come from inside the vault, and that an artifact must have exploded. While the guards investigated the explosion, our crew managed to quietly slip out the now-unguarded front door.
The crew resolved that, after how badly their fight had gone, they needed to bring more muscle with them. As such they sought to hire new muscle (AKA we’re getting a new player). The crew waits and rests as they lick their wounds, and await the Siren Queen’s next command.