Knives, Guts, & Coin – A Bravos’ Tale

Knives, Guts, & Coin – A Bravos’ Tale

So, I was insane and decided “Well, I’m already running the brand new session so why don’t we run another one for other folks!”. So I started a game on Thursday and it went much smoother now that I’m used to it and much quicker since I did some “Executive GM Decision-Making” (it is a trademark).

Originally, when we got to who gets pissed and who gets irritated from upgrades to the lair and what have you, I let the players decide. My players, how I still love them though, are terrible about reading up on the setting and things break down quickly and then they want to hear every option. This time, I just told them who was mad, who wasn’t, and let them decide how they wanted to handle it. It went far smoother doing that.

So in this game, we have three players who weren’t involved with the 1st character generation and two players who’re very new to tabletop gaming in general. What we ended up with was…

A Tycherosi Slide who was a former carnie/con-man who venerates an old Forgotten God. Taking the “Cloak & Dagger” setup, he is an expert in makeup and surprise attacks.

A Tycherosi Whisper, a former student at Charterhall who has been dallying into strange and mysterious forces. Taking “Strange Methods”, he has learned how to create a wand capable of creating electroplasmic-lightning capable of destroying ghosts, spirits, and harming even demons. He is looking into the history of his people, trying to learn why the Tycherosi bear the marks that they do. His friend, Setarra the Demon (who I decided hungers for knowledge), gave him this formula as the “first step” of learning his heritage. This makes the Whisper both excited and uneasy.

We have an Akoros Hound who was once as simple laborer working in the eeleries who just wanted more. He learned the trade of a bounty hunter but was blacklisted when his bounty was assasinated before he could hand them into the Bluecoats.

There is another Akoros, this one playing the Spider. She changed her playbook from Slide to Spider near the end of the session so I haven’t had as much time to flush out her character’s ideas. She was an info broker that got burned pretty bad, sold out a drug dealer who came back and hit her hard enough that she has to start over.

Lastly, we have our Leech. He was going to be a Tycherosi but decided not to when he heard there were other Tycherosi in the party. His character’s goal is to find a way to achieve true immortality, not the hollow existence that Hulls and Vampires survive in. He believes it can be found from the blood of the Leviathans, even in the leftover slag.

That makes up our crew of scoundrels. We moved onward to crew generation and that is when things got great. People were looking through the crew sheets and they decided to ask me which ones I liked. The only one not available was Hawkers (since I’m already running Hawkers at the moment) so I told them that my personal favorite was Bravos. I enjoyed the very “Gangs of New York” feel and it was one of the crews I felt resonated strongly with the game’s themes. To my surprise, they all agreed as well and decided to be a group of Bravos. I think only one of them actually had Skirmish so the group wisely decided upon “Dangerous” as their special ability.

They decided that they were going to specialize in Crow’s Foot, staying in a series of stacked railcars that were once tenement buildings after the initial Leviathan attack and had been left there ever since. They decided the heart of Crow’s Foot would be their stomping grounds and they specialized in Extortion, being a group of ruthless gangsters looking for coin any way possible. I voted that the group would’ve pissed off the Bluecoats that use that area for their own extortion racket. To my surprise, the group paid the coin to maintain a neutral relationship with them and carried on.

We did their upgrades, Bravo’s Rigging and Workshop, and I decided that the group received help from the Lampblacks (the Slide used to work marks with Bazso back in the day) to get their rigging all sorted. They attacked a small, independent smuggler who was bringing a slew of supplies and things for themselves. What they didn’t know was that was meant to go to the Dimmer Sisters, who know hold a very serious grudge (the group spent their coin to ensure that the Lampblacks were good friends with them).

As for their contact, they decided on Lutes the tavern owner. I decided to get a little frisky with the situation and had them become better friends with the Crows (who they pay up to) since the guy was a former Crow before he went straight sailing. However, they took a hit with the Leviathan Hunters, since Lutes was part of some “ordeal” that occurred offshore. I gave the group the option of +2/-2 and they eagerly took it. That meant the Crows thought big of them when a group of well-armed thugs showed up at Lutes’s business and the crew kicked them out. What they didn’t know was that group of thugs was a vice-captain and a handful of sailors, so their relation to the Hunters has dropped hard.

I’m going to be running them through the starting situation in the book with the War in Crow’s Foot. I think I’ll have them take the drug den raid first and do some initial fortune rolls to see how things are currently going in the war.