So, on friday we ran our third session of the ratpack. We didn’t have as much time as the first two sessions, and we had some administrative work to do as well, because we switched playbooks and crew over to v8 and discussed some of the changes.
Then, we first did some stuff outside the normal sequence of score and downtime. Our whisper, called raven, investigated a strange faceless amulet we recovered from lord phelps in our very first score. It seem to a be associated with a forbidden god that advocates loss of identity and is somehow related to spirits that have lost most or all of their personality, having gone feral, eternaly lusting for the lifeforce of the living. And, our whisper seems to have been infected by the amulet somewhat, beginning to hear whispers about occult stuff. Sometimes she can actually glean some useful information from the whispers, other times it distracts her or irritates other people when she answers aloud to whispers nobody else hears.
Next up the whisper was contacted by a bat from Lord Scurlock, who wanted to meet in a dream. There he told the whisper that there is a complication regarding Roric’s ghost, as some members of the dinmer sisters caught it. He suggested we go and rescue the spirit and even suggested some details of the plan and where the witch-cult had taken the spirit.
Apparently he also convinced our whisper of his good intentions apparently (she didn’t want to resist). Actually he is not that nice of course.
So off we went on our only score that evening. I won’t go into too much detail here, but we had a blast and confronted crazed witch-women, enslaved spirits and destroyed a strange demonic underground tree. In the end everybody was at their very limits of stress, but we had roric’s ghost, strangely bound into the heart of a pig. And we had quite a lot of occult paraphernalia we could sell to Lord Scurlock for a tidy profit. We also had killed an entire witch-coven, but since we left no living witnesses we can quite possibly avoid a war or any such serious repercussions. I actually tried for some tense negotiations but my players were like “ach, I can’t do social very well, I’ll just shoot her in the face”
It does seem the dimmer sisters tried to feed roric’s ghost to some strange otherworldly entity to have it regurgitate a “doppelganger” of roric, with whom they wanted to take over the crows.
There are two possible pitfalls now: One, when we fled through underground tunnels, we met some poor laborers delivering coal. And one of them know our leech from his old teaching days. While that allowed us to take a ride in their coal boat, it also means that this guy could possibly make a connection between us and all those dead witches.
The second one comes from entanglements. Our crew is slippery, so we get two results, but finally ended up with demonic notice. Apparently a foul water demon named setesh took an interest and basically blackmailed us into giving money to a cultist group that fights the leviathan hunters. According to the whispers our whisper keeps hearing, setesh may be the father of the leviathans, but that does not need to be true. Maybe he only wants to stir up trouble and if the supply of leviathan blood dwindles, that does indeed mean trouble in the long run.
We still have to do downtime and xp for that session, but it was good solid fun. But it does seem my players are very reluctant to take trauma for their characters. Understandable, but we are now three sessions in and still nobody has any trauma. Maybe i have to be a bit meaner as a GM, and put some massive trouble their way even if I know they don’t have much stress to spare. So far, it just happened that most of trouble was over by the time the stress bars got filled up, and even if there was some trouble, those people with little stress did their utmost to deal with it.
I am looking forward to our next session and hope that we will have some more time then.