The Underset

The Underset

Hey how about another play report? I spend enough time reading them I might as well post my own. First time actually starting a thread on Google+ so please forgive me if I don’t get it quite right (I have no idea if I’m posting in the correct sub-heading, for example, and I don’t see a wysiwyg to make pleasant bold bits and italics (hey look I figured out bold at least))

So we’re two sessions in at this point and things are going well, at least from a player perspective. The Underset are a gang of Shadows working out of the dilapidated ruins of the long-abandoned Mistshore Asylum, a place they should all really be inmates of. They consist of disgraced professor of medicine Renwick the Spider; a deformed, disowned, and mildly deranged scion of a noble house known only as Liam, a Leech; a particularly cheerful if clearly mad Whisper artificer named Sara; and the nearly-sane Lurk, a former Wraith named Una.

Their primary M.O. is boating in under Doskvol’s built-upon bridges and climbing up to break in without exposing themselves on the streets. “Underset” is essentially a pun referencing an archaic word for “undertow” and Renwick’s obsessions with societal roles, particularly regarding the importance of “deviant” groups, ie criminals and psychopaths, the “underset” of society.

First session I presented them with a fairly simple set up for a starting scenario. They are based in Six Towers. The Gray Cloaks and the Silver Nails are also based in Six Towers, and those two factions are about ready to start really fighting over territory. The Cloaks hired the Underset to rob a fence that’s holding a bunch of jewels for the Nails. A fence conveniently established in a shopfront on Bowmore Bridge.

The engagement roll was awful and it all went downhill from there, as desperate roll spawned desperate roll and complications piled up at an incredible rate. A gondolier (-1 faction standing) spotted my scoundrels and started putting up the alarm, just to ruin their day. By the time they got inside, the fence was waking up and had to be harshly (but non-lethally) put back to sleep. By then the Bluecoats were ready to knock the front door off its hinges.

But where it gets interesting is that, despite almost every roll going wrong during the job, a lot of rolls had gone REALLY well during the Planning phase while gathering information. Between a lot of sixes and a couple criticals on the info gathering, my scoundrels already knew exactly where to find the safe with the fence’s ledger, exactly where to find the other valuables stored in the building (and how to crack them out of their secure container), and that there was a ghost somewhere in the vicinity. The ghost is important because that’s how they got the Bluecoats to back off, when a roll finally went the right way and, as one of my players said “We threw a ghost at them.”

Narratively, the story the mechanics ended up telling is a score where literally everything went wrong, but the careful gang had prepared and planned so meticulously that it FELT almost effortless. Which I think is an awful neat effect.

The second “score”, earlier tonight, did not go nearly as well, although nothing of real value was lost. The ghost from the fence’s followed my scoundrels home (devil’s bargain for the whole “threw a ghost at them” bit) and Sara the Whisper decided to try contacting it, to see if it could be useful. Summoned it up easily enough, but it turned out to be mad and volatile, nearly possessed our Whisper and froze our Leech, and after a mechanical failure with a spirit bottle the wretched thing escaped into the night. Also the asylum got lit on fire somehow.

My scoundrels have spent almost as much time on Downtime as on scores. They have elaborate plans and many projects on the go already. The Whisper is absolutely full of artifact ideas that straddle the line between witchery and sparkcraft, and Renwick the Spider is obsessively pursuing plans to restore his place on the medical register and acquire legal (or at least convincing) ownership of the ruined asylum. Liam the Leech is starting to set up a drug empire and poor Una the Lurk is left trying to figure out how they’re going to pay for all this nonsense.

Next week they plan to rob a newspaper. Quote of the night “plus if we play our cards right we might get the oppurtunity to kill someone with a printing press ”

There’s virtually no interest in the Gray Cloaks and Silver Nails, who can sort their own mess out apparently, and that is one hundred percent fine with me. This game is ridiculously fun and I’m finding it startlingly easy to run.

Sorry, edited to add:

I meant to mention that the whole “Instead of the character failing to do something and looking incompetent, introduce a complication instead” philosophy of the game is brilliant. Both these sessions would have consisted of a lot of “sorry, you fail to do that, maybe falling comically on your face as well” if I hadn’t held myself to that bit of advice. Instead of a failed roll being a disappointing failure, every one of them was an escalation of an increasingly out-of-control situation. Which it turns out is way better.