Session 4 of the Glitter Ponies

Session 4 of the Glitter Ponies

Devils in the detail

Cast:

Operant – Cutter – Terrence

Ghost – Lurk – Charlie

Grandma – Cutter – Patrick

Drake – Spider – Antonio

Crow – Whisper – Nicko (Away this week)

Professor – Leech – Nick

Before I start, holy crap this week. With this crew it doesn’t matter how dark I make it they drive it even darker.

I had intended to introduce the demon Tyraxis to slowly seduce the crew but, well you’ll see.

So we ended the episode on the demon Tyraxis approaching Drake with an offer for work.

We cut to Drake describing the job. Tyraxis wants the Glitter Ponnies to smuggle a load of Hollows from the basement of the Devil’s Tooth in night market to Mistshore Park. It is critical that no one know what they are transporting or for whom, especially the authorities. The why Tyraxis was not willing to say, however he was willing to provide six coin for the task. Again where a demon get six coin is yet another mystery.

Paranoid that it sounds too easy the crew attempted to gather information about the route and the risks (rolls that they did terribly at). Still not certain it would be a cake walk the crew organised a massive parade/flotilla heading in the opposite direction to them to give them some cover.

With no intel on who would try to stop them nor why the Crew made the simple plan of have the parade as a distraction and then go straight from Devil’s Tooth to Mistshore Park.

Unfortunately halfway there they were ambushed by followers of the Night Mother a cult who is opposed to whatever Tyraxis’s true intention is.

The cult had set up a net with boat rendering hooks on it which caught on the boat, locking them in battle with the cultists.

The crew first tried to burn the net nearly burning their own ship, a brief firefight broke out and the crew made their escape to Mistshore Park.

A quick downtime occurred, and we had plenty of time left for another score.

As an important background note my clocks for City Council (Strangford being a close ally of the Glitter Ponies it felt like a useful clock to fortune roll) were on 5 for Strangford is removed from council and 7 for Strangford eliminates threats. In other words each clock was one away from completion.

So when the crew wanted to check in with Strangford it was too good to be true.

Strangford’s quarter master (the intermediary Strangford uses when dealing with the Glitter Ponies) told them Strangford didn’t have any smuggling work for the crew. However if they were interested he did have another task in mind for them.

Basically Strangford only had one person left outside of his control in the city council, Lady Penderyn. To make matters worse at the end of the week Lady Penderyn is leading a vote to ratify removing Lord Strangford from the council.

Now with her things were tricky, she needs to ‘disappear’ and permanently. Now killing her is a problem, as the Penderyn family will link it to Lord Strangford and vote in a replacement to seek vengeance on Lord Strangford (by kicking him out). So the crew need to kill her in such a way that it would be impossible to to figure out she had actually died.

The crew then started burning through rep to do extra downtime actions in preparation.

The crew contacted Tyraxis and asked if he would be interested in hollowing Lady Penderyn and adding him to his collection. Tyraxis was very happy with this arrangement. The crew then contacted the Architect who works in chatterhall (nailed the gather information consort roll) and they found out that Lady Penderyn would often go to Vreen’s Hound Races in nightmarket.

They then monitored number of bodyguards using survey while another prowled behind her.

All these gather information rolls had a risky consequence that she would netice, but the crew kept on getting sixes.

The Leech the profession crafted a ‘bomb’ to fire trance powder over an area wide enough to hit all of the guards. The roll wasn’t great, but it was enough to give them an items which if held and manually triggered would hit the area, but the user would also be hit (and need to resist).

Additionally one of the crew had a bluecoat contact, who he used to make an acquire asset roll of two off duty bluecoats thugs and an extra uniform to help them out.

So the crew roll their engagement, get a 5. Drake is waiting with the bluecoats to tell them about the delay. Gets a 6 in sway, delaying the carriage.

Then shadow pops his silence potion, pushes himself for Ghost veil, adding an extra stress for invisible rather than shadowy, walks but to the guards and detonates the trance powder bomb.

Because he was invisible not shadowy and not making noise and they had made this bomb which I had said would be great effect I said it was controlled with great effect, Ghost rolled 5 and chose to push it too risky extreme effect which he crit.

At this point my whole seduction to the dark side fell about as the crew decided to sell the rest of the guards to Tyraxis to be hollowed out as well. In fact the only thing that stopped them also selling the bluecoats helping them was the concern that it might get back to the bluecoats that they did this.

So the crew delivered the Lady and her 9 servants to Tyraxis to be hollowed in exchange for another 6 coin in addition to what Lord Strangford was paying them.

The scene ends on Tyraxis burning out the souls of Lady Penderyn and her servants.

Lessons learnt.

Oh my god guys. So first thing’s my players need zero encouragement to go dark.

Second I played the second score as a tier V, the only reason they were able to pull it off is because they had a tone of rep they used to scout out and prepare. I didn’t pull any punches and I’m so proud of them pulling it off. And when they were like, change of plan let’s sell these guys to Tyraxis as well my jaw droped.