Session 5 of the Glitter Ponies
Cast:
Operant – Cutter – Terrence
Ghost – Lurk – Charlie (Away this week)
Grandma – Cutter – Patrick (Away this week)
Drake – Spider – Antonio
Crow – Whisper – Nicko
Professor – Leech – Nick
Opening theme song, shots of downtime actions, the various crew members healing and taking their various vices, cut with Drake helping Grandma’s orphanage project, cut with the professor researching some mythical leviathan who can devour whole islands, cut with Drake building a luxury vice den under the orphanage.
We open to the Professor, Operant, Crow, and Drake around the table discussing the next score. “Im telling you Stranford has taken over the city its marshall law out there, and with the blood shortage we don’t even get revenue from smuggling blood as it’s all dried up.”.
In fact quite a lot had happened since the last episode, and in no small part due to decisions the crew had made. Quite a few clocks had been filled with quite a few impacting results. Thanks to the crew’s efforts Lord Stranford had eliminated his enemies in the city council effectively allowing him to seize control. Also at the same time the leviathan hunters reserve of leviathan blood ran out at the same time that the hunters found new hunting grounds. The leviathan hunters would have in fact failed to find new hunting grounds in time, if the crew had not retrieved the nautical map for Lord Stranford. As a result my call was that the hunters had found new hunting grounds, but Strangford was the only one who knew how to find them and was forcing the other leviathan hunters to go through him to find them.
All of this has allowed Strangford to seize control of doskvol, he is trying to use the as leverage to become the governor of Dosk Vol seizing control for himself. For the crew this is a problem because Strangford is under pressure to refill the reserves and make sure the lightening barriers are never short. This means in a time of rationing where having access to leviathan blood would be most profitable for our crew, their supply has dried up.
The crew however seem to always find a silver lining to every cloud. Drake and Operant have been wanting to get turf for the longest time. They haven’t been able to because, at tier 0 and with no gang they wouldn’t be able to keep it, also because Ghost and Grandma(Who are not here today) are more interested in other scores. So with the crew tiered up, the recruited a cohort (they also had an unclaimed crew upgrade). The cohort was actually pretty cool, it is a gang made up of Grandma’s elder grandchildren. They decided they would be loyal because “they do love their grandma so”, and savage because “they just dont know their own strength”. The crew decided that if Strangford couldn’t provide more blood to smuggle they’d use a combination of that and the fact that Strangford currently controls the city to their advantage. They met with Strangford’s quarter master to convince him that he owed them (he kind of did) and to make it up Strangford should use his influence to ‘clean up’ the wraiths currently controlling the turf right next to them. They made their desperate roll, resisting the consequence that he’d help them but then consider himself their gang boss.
The operant then scouted out the turf, looking for bolt holes or any place the Wraiths would hide during the raids to make sure the blue coats would be there waiting for them.
Finally the Professor ‘hacked’, well tinkered the power transformers in the general area to make sure the power around each of those area’s would go out during the raids.
Their plan was to just move in and take over following the raids. The setup actions included a couple of desperate rolls (hacking the power grid is not a very good idea), which the party rolled very well on.
Then after all that they got a 6 on their engagement roll. The walked in and said it’s now boys, played nice. I consider it my general failure as a GM that I couldn’t think of anyway to screw them over, so I declared the score a success and that was that.
During the downtime actions the normal downtime activities took place. However the complication I rolled was retribution. Now this seemed perfect for me, the Ponies had taken the turf without a drop of blood, surely the wraiths would want payback.
Then when the Operant said he wanted to reduce heat by tracking down things stolen from the local citizenry and returning them it seemed to perfect. I asked if anyone wanted to help him, admittedly with a huge GM is going to screw you over grin on my face. Only Drake the slide said he would help, the rest doing their own things.
I set the scene they were entering an abandoned fence warehouse to get an old ladies wedding ring back. When a group of 6 thugs appear, apparently it was a setup.
THey were Wraiths and said something to the effect that they were going to make them pay for what they did.
Right then I was thinking they have scale, the Operant has fine pistols which mean they only have magnitude on Drake. Generally I was thinking this looks like a rock’s fall everyone dies situation.
Then Drake said he would attune to summon Tyraxis, now Drake does not have Occultist or anything like. However Drake had for one reason or the other always been the person who ended up dealing with the demon, so I said, that was fine, but it was a desperate limited action. He rolls, and gets a 6. I then tell them that the demon appears, booming “Mortal’s you dare to presume to summon me? You work for me I do not work for You!”. Drake then replied “Tyraxis, I humbly apologize, I only wished to make a gift to you of these 6 mortals to join your hollow horde”. He then said he wanted to roll sway. I said it was desparate great, because he did have the setup action, and what he said was pretty likely to fit Trayxis’s wishes, but he was still pretty angry about being summoned. Then Drake rolled and got two sixes. Now my possible TPK had turned into more hollow’s for the horde and the players feeling pretty good about themselves.
For the next score the players wanted to make peace with the Gondoliers, see thinking the union was weak they had chosen to generally upset the faction in their setup choices meaning they were at -2 faction with them.
Now my call was any score that involved the canals would be treated us hostile turf and have rivals or enemies messing with it. For smugglers this is poison, so they desperately wanted to no longer have to worry about the gondoliers.
So I let them gather information, they chose to study what the gondoliers traditionally did. They rolled really well (6 or crit on of those two). So I gave the whole history, they were an ancient group, their dependence on the canals which were used to dispose of bodies resulting in wild eels who fed on the bodies and ghosts from said bodies required them to development the skills needed to deal with both the supernatural and the preternatural. Long before the spirit wardens the gondoliers used to defend the citizenry from ghosts, dark sorcerers and demons. Infact even today many prefer to trust the gondoliers as until the spirit wardens they are not influenced by politics and wealth and unlikely the spirit wardens they do not make use of hulls or ghosts themselves. I also mentioned more recent events where spirit wardens had been looking into defiled hollows and destroying ghost wells.
Crow suggested they earn favour by piloting the boat up the canal, looking for ghost wells and try and close them. I said that while that was a good idea, considering that the crew was at -2 faction if the gondoliers were to come across the crew tauning to a ghost well, they might make the wrong assumption and think the crew were creating spirit wells.
The professor then made a fantastic suggestion that maybe they try and contact the gondoliers, apologise and ask what the crew can do to make things right. This prompted the funniest moment of the night for me, as Crow then said “I agree completely we should pilot our boat up the canal, close the wells then tell them what we did”, to which the rest of the crew responded “What?!? No we said we’d do the opposite of that..”.
A couple of social interaction rolls later, the gondoliers grudgingly tell the crew that their is a mad ghost haunting an abandoned manner in six towers, the ghost was a member of the reconciled who kept the ghosts of his servants as pets, however these ‘pet’ ghosts had eroded his own sanity and he was going on a rampage followed by junkies possessed by his servants.
The crew prepared to do some old fashioned ghost busting with the Professor spending downtime actions to craft a ghost scourge. The crew entered the ancient broken down manner. I described it as a bit like the house from fight club, with water running down the walls, open wiring sparking menacingly, despite this the lights themselves failed to work, the floorboards were rotten and untrustworthy.
Crow decided the wiring must be sparking because the ghost is it, he said he wanted to study the wiring, I said fine controlled standard, he rolled a 5, I said, no it’s just faulty wiring the ghost must be elsewhere.
He decided the ghost must be really good at hiding, he said he would atune to the wiring to confirm if there is a ghost in there. I said fine desperate, standard. He then crit, so I told him what he wanted to know, “nope no ghosts in the wiring” and asked him what extra effect he wanted. After much arguing everyone agreed that we wanted it to attract the ghosts attention. Once it appeared the ghost scourge made capturing the ghost almost depressingly easy. Followed by Crow deciding to use tempst to electrocute the possessed junkies (remember they are all standing in water, sparking wires everywhere, enclosed space. The rest of the crew tried to warn him off but he insisted. So we rolled desparate great, with a 5. So I told them that the junkies were dead, as were the crew, as was he. Basically the lightning arced all over the place killing everyone.
The TPK part of the roll was resisted (he had 6 stress when he decided to cast tempst), only for me to point out that although the junkies were dead the ghosts possessing them were still a threat. The rest of the score involved the crew dealing with and/or bottling the remaining ghosts.
Celebrating a successful score the crew had a standard down time, except now he understands the effectiveness on his play book the Professor started working on plans for the ghost scourge to make it multi use per score.
Lessons learnt:
Ok this session was an example of pretty terrible gming from me. It felt flat and broken. Not sure why maybe it’s my allergies which are going crazy thanks to spring, maybe it is because work is hella insane right now and emotionally draining, maybe I’m just a crap gm. Regardless this session wasn’t my best. The good thing about that is I did learn a lot.
I should have made the turf grab a social score. The team wanted it to be social setup with an assault score, but with the setup going so well they had already got Strangford to use his influence to clear out the majority of the Wraiths, they had also ensured there were no bolt holes for the Wraiths to hide in, and cut the power to the last remaining locations, when the crew rolled a 6 engagement I was almost completely out of idea’s of what could feasibly happen. My only hope was as the first action the crew would ruin it .
With this crew that was more than likely. When they were nice to the citizens I just gave up, I mean there was nothing left to make it interesting.
In the future I’ll push for the setup actions (which in this session cost a rep each) to be part of a social interaction score, any fighting that does occur will be a consequence of that.
Another lesson learned; making turf and claim grabs interesting as a dedicated score is both hard and boring, in the future I’ll be allowing the crew to most of the claim grabs as actually building the claims as 12 – 16 clock long term projects and find a way to provide the crew options in standard scores to get turf if I know they want it.
Another lesson learnt bitd is not zero prep, I didn’t have time to prep this week and it did have a negative impact on play.
Final lesson learnt; when members of the crew are completely dead to rights and Im convinced Im going to tpk them, when I’m considering going some on them that is when the game really shines and they pull off legendary actions.