The Oblique Angles: Session One

The Oblique Angles: Session One

Character Creation

This weekend I ran character gen and a first session for some of the folks from my bi-weekly gaming group. I’m extremely fortunate to have a super solid group of folks for this – we’ve known each other for almost 20 years now, all of them are practiced roleplayers and most are also practiced GMs. The session was a big hit, and I will likely slot it into our off-weeks as a regular thing!

Our crew consists of:

– Vale – the Whisper. Vale is a Tychorosi with six fingers on each hand. During the Unity Wars, he served as Whisper for a unit in Skovland… at some point he went missing. Somehow in his past he became wrapped up in the tug of war between Lord Scurlock and Setarra (he managed to blindly pick Scurlock as his rival and Setarra as his ally).

– Snake – the Leech. Severosi. HIs clan dedicated itself to preserving medical knowledge after the cataclysm. When his clan was wiped out, he was adopted by Rail Jacks, and spent a portion of his previous life guarding the rails as one.

– Weaver – the Slide. Akorosi. Weaver was a barrister, well known for his dramatic style. In one fateful case, he purposefully didn’t defend someone as well as he should have… and there were repercussions.

– Agerine – the Spider. Iruvian. An exiled scientist, forced to leave over his dangerous experiments. In his past life as an academic studying civil engineering and energy, it’s rumored he managed to set off a volcano. If you ask Agerine the truth of this, he just shrugs.

– Gentile – the Hound. Akorosi. The 9th son of the current Lord Strangford. Gentile is currently 7th in line to the title. The two spots he jumped? No one could tie him to those accidents but… he’s not welcome around the family anymore.

Together, they make up the Oblique Angles, a crew of Shadows with a reputation for the weird. They took Ghost Echoes as their first (and signature) playbook power – the high concept is that they’re spies with one foot firmly in the supernatural world.

For a base, they are working out of an old Strangford manse in Six Towers. They specialize in espionage, and their hunting grounds are in Charterhall. The area they are working is under the control of the Imperial Army; their presence and activities are condoned by Imperial Intelligence because they’re considered useful – their abilities with the ghost field mean they can do things others can’t.

To start, they’re at a -1 with Lord Scurlock, a +1 with the Dimmer Sisters, a +2 with the Imperial Army, and (with their agreement) a -2 with a faction unknown to them.

The Setup

To set up the first score, we used Sean Nittner’s excellent Duskwall Riots of 847 pdf. After talking things over, the crew decided that the conscripted leviathan hunter crews were the ones rioting (Gentile knew Kolin from his time spent on the same ship; he’d actually dragged Kolin out of a bad situation in a brothel at one point, as well), and that the cause had been the arrest of a Charterhall academic, a student that (it was rumored) had dug up some legal references invalidating the practice of press ganging.

As we talked about what score this might actually set up, one of the players had an idea: what if the Oblique Angles had, at the behest of Imperial Intelligence, let it be known she’d been taken? And what if she were actually an Imperial agent? And what if the score was to free this “student” from wherever the Bluecoats had taken her and get her to the organizers of the Unchained, the faction pushing to end press ganging? This would serve two aims from the Imperial Army’s perspective: make the Bluecoats look bad, and help aim or defuse the Unchained. The Unchained could be a long term threat to the flow of electroplasm, and so a riot or two in exchange for a stronger hold over them was quite worthwhile.

Everyone thought this was a great idea. And so, still in Free Time, a couple people did some info gathering to figure out where the Bluecoats had stashed our student, Carissa Basran. Weaver, the Slide, donned a disguise as a Bluecoat messenger and went seeking their crew’s contact in the Bluecoats, Laroze. Weaver found her, but his situation was complicated when a Bluecoat officer grabbed him and told him to hand over whatever message he had. Weaver managed to confuse at the officer well enough with some rapid-fire nonsense that they lost their patience; instead of forcing Weaver to hand over a message he didn’t actually have, he instead yanked Weaver’s (fake) badge off his uniform and stalked off, muttering about how he’d deal with this idiot later. (A complication that may come up in a future session…)

As Laroze heard Weaver’s request, she paused… and then a bead of sweat ran down the side of her face as she realized what was being asked. But she gave Weaver the info – Basran was being held in Ironhook Prison.

(Side note – I didn’t actually play Ironhook as a Tier IV; it didn’t even occur to me until much later. The retcon is that they were operating at Tier II because of the riots; this will be reflected in the crew’s rep gain for the score.)

With that, the score could begin!

The Score

The approach and the detail were almost trivially easy – the Oblique Angles would come in using their Ghost Echoes power to find a ghost door, and unlock it with Vale’s ghost key. Once past that door, we began the score with Vale needing to disarm a warded door. With that, they were into an old unused sub-level of Ironhook Prison.

They made it up a level to where they needed to be – now they just needed to get one cell block over. Sadly, the entrance to the next cell block was guarded by a group of four Bluecoats. After some hemming and hawing, plus some helpful info from the GM, the Angles headed the other way – towards the laundry. With a quick flashback by Agerine, they came to the conveniently abandoned laundry facility. Agerine dropped off his bottle of whiskey as payment, and the crew quickly donned prison uniforms and grabbed laundry carts. With those, they were easily able to bluff their way past the guards.

Once in the correct cell block, the team had to somehow get Carissa Basran out of her cell and into a cart without attracting attention to that fact. Several people attempted to either block lines of sight or attract the inmates’ attention – most of these failed and/or cause complications. When a Bluecoat guard got close enough to try to stop them, Gentile quickly chloraformed them and dumped them into a cart. As Snake got Basran’s cell open, the rest of the guards at the far end of the block came running. The team then switched to Plan B. Or rather, as Vale put it, Plan F.

Vale quickly raised a viscous fog, and several of the other team members helpfully started screaming about how the death fog was going to kill them all (it turns you inside out!). Agerine threw a lantern into one of the unoccupied laundry carts and shoved it on down the hallway. Under cover of the chaos, the team ran back the way they’d come.

Weaver took the lead, and fell through the door into the arms of the Bluecoats guarding that section, choking and screaming about the death fog. The Bluecoats grabbed him, shook him, and demanded to know what was going on. Weaver then blew his trance dust into their faces. It was at such a close distance, though, that it caught him as well. Happily, though, the rest of the crew threw him into a laundry cart and Snake administered an antidote while they ran.

Once they exited Ironhook, our scoundrels made their way back towards the drop-off; they needed to bring Carissa to a Unchained safe house in Crow’s Foot. One of their main assets is a very complete set of maps of the various underground byways of the city – they were able to stay below ground most of the way and to avoid trouble as they went.

But as they closed in on the tunnel exit they needed, a lamp lit up in the darkness ahead of them. Much to everyone’s chagrin, it was Bazso Baz – and his Lampblacks had them surrounded. Bazso wondered idly (but cheerfully) what they were doing on his turf, and who the cloaked figure with them was. When asked how they could get by, he said they could hand over Weaver (apparently he and Bazso have some bad history – perhaps he represended Bazso in court once?). When asked what he’d do with Weaver, he smiled and said, “I’m going to put a bullet in his head, of course.”

After a quick flashback to his earlier discussion with the team’s contact in Imperial Intelligence, Agerine warned Bazso: “I don’t think you want to mess with us. Not with our friends coming up behind you.” Bazso laughed – but then had to duck a sword coming in from behind. A larger force of Red Sashes had snuck up behind the Lampblacks and was now cutting a swath through them.

Bazso made a dash for it past the players. Weaver did his best to put a bullet in Bazso as he went, but Bazso was too fast for him.

As the Red Sashes chased the Lampblacks south into Crow’s Foot, the Angles were clear to finish their delivery. When they dropped Carissa off, the confused members of the Unchained asked, “Who the hell are you?”

“We’re the Oblique Angles,” Gentile said with a grin. And then they were gone.

—

(Please pardon my lack of proofreading this post – I wanted to get it done and up before any more time had passed.)

Well, THAT was a hell of a thing. Overall, everything went super well.

I was taken sideways to realize I had a crew of Shadows working out of the center of government – what the heck gang works that turf, for them to pay up into? Once I settled on the Imperial Army, everything quickly settled into place.

I absolutely loved how we ended up tweaking the Riots score to make sense for our crew. That is a great jumping off point, Sean Nittner!

I’m now going to start running this game for my folks every other Tuesday – everyone had a great time. Thanks for an awesome game, John Harper and everyone else involved!