The Dead Setters dealt with the aftermath of the Slaughterhouse Slaughter Caper, where they Fistful of Dollars’d both factions of the Billhooks into wiping each other out at the gang’s slaughterhouse as a favor to Ulf Ironborn.
I have to say, the Shadows ability Slippery feels wonkier now that the entanglements roll can be skewed along a curve instead of a flat distribution. Still, when you have 3 Wanted levels, perhaps rolling twice should still result in Show of Force no matter what. Instead, I gave the crew two options for the show of force – either the Bluecoats raid their gambling den (the Dead Setters have terrible luck with keeping gambling dens) or the Spirit Wardens finally move on their spirit well. They chose to give up the gambling den, although Rook the Cutter was perfectly fine with going to war with the cops.
Lots of long term projects got finished off, and I think we saw our campaign reach the point where there’s a race to some kind of finish or finale now. The crew’s Tier III now, with 11/16 Coin in their vault and Lord Scurlock as a Patron. They could go to Tier IV before we’re done.
Deemo the Leech finished her spark-craft rotor drone, the Motorized Alchemical Application Device (MAAD). It’s an unreliable little machine designed to drop alchemical charges from a distance and return to Deemo. She immediately used her free ticks from Analyst to start designing a new creation, and we got to fully engage with the v8 crafting rules, which are pretty nice. This idea’s a soft filter powered by a bit of leviathan lung and electroplasm that will help resist side effects from using alchemicals (and we ruled it could be burnt like special armor to prevent such a consequence outright). It requires rare components. She also brought back Chokedust (the precursor to Drown Powder) to be her signature move. 🙂
Raven the Hound, working with Mara Vale, a rogue architect, finished her tomb of horrors, the “Crow’s Coffin”. It is where Raven plans to spend eternity, and it is an old-school D&D dungeon lair underneath Crow’s Foot.
Teatime the Whisper finished his series of LTPs, restoring Tinriver House (his family estate) to its former glory and legitimizing his family name with Duskwall nobility once again – with the assistance of Lord Scurlock and his distinguished Hull manservant, Mr. Clicks.
The Dead Setters learned that Ahazu, a mirror demon they unleashed a while back, has been slowly possessing notable figures in the city. That fact struck home when Richter the Spider met with Laroze, their Bluecoat contact, and saw that the cop had mirror-silver irises. Teatime plans to create a trap for Ahazu at his upcoming inaugural ball to celebrate the reopening of Tinriver House.
Secondly, the crew’s One Last Job is coming together. Rook brokered an alliance between the Reconciled and the Skovlanders in the city. The Setters need the Skovlanders’ muscle and the Reconciled’s secret to retaining their faculties in death is a key part of the Dead Setters’ ultimate heist – they’re going to steal immortality.
#heestcomplete
I love Ulf. What’s his situation in this storyline?
Getting to the endgame is so exciting. I wonder what their friend Mr. Scurlock will think of this immortality scheme.
Way back when, I treated Ulf as a single person equal in scale to a Tier I gang, because there was that example for Scurlock-as-solo-Tier-III. I figured he was just this huge Zangief/Karnov motherfucker, and that stuck even as we learned he actually has a gang.
Well, Rook, our Cutter, is also Skov, and he ended up befriending Ulf (in a fistfight naturally). The crew ended up going to Skovland to break Ulf’s wife, son, and sister out of essentially a Russian gulag, they got Ulf to +3 status, and well, Ulf and the Dead Setters don’t have a lot of overlap. Ulf is about carving out territory and rampaging on Skov-haters, and the PCs have more supernaturally-oriented goals, so they don’t conflict, and Ulf’s a huge friggin’ serial crusher (who NOW has a gang too!) who they can call in if they need. Most recently they worked together to help Ulf knock the Billhooks out of the docks area, and they’re building this Skovlander power bloc in Duskwall between the refugees, Ulf, and they’re getting the Reconciled in on it too. They’re not friends with the ghosts, but we’ve established months ago that the leader of the Reconciled is the spirit of the last queen of Skovland, who saw her country fall to the Empire. They’re bonding over shared cultural ties.
The Whisper has Scurlock as a friendly contact, but as a gang they’re still neutral. Scurlock would probably allow them to cultivate that relationship but he’s not going to go out of his way to assist them unless they help him with his debt to Setarra, because in the past the gang’s forays into demonic stuff have gone so well… That said, Scurlock has no love for the Emperor, and however he’s maintained his longevity might be at cross purposes with whatever scheme the PCs invent.