A friend of mine passed his BITD campaign over to me after Season One so that he can actually play in the game he helped in Kickstart. For good or ill, he really made it easy on our group in terms of the odds stacked against our gang. We started the sample scenario with two PCs, a Leech and a Whisper, and as we added more players to the Stygian Suns, a Bravos crew, we picked the Crows as the gang to side with, and clumsily manipulated the Lampblacks against the Red Sashes until their numbers were whittled down to nothing and the Lampblack leader was dead.
When I finally got my hardback copy, I realized that he’d completely breezed past scale, magnitude, potency, effect, and risk during our war, and that there was no way we should have been punching up out of our league as often as we did without serious repercussion.
The first session was far more difficult than any other session this group of PCs had experienced before. The players received a better understanding of the setting and the faction gameboard, and realized that they had eliminated the “heroes of the working class” in favor of Lyssa’s ascension and strengthening the hold the Crows had in Crow’s Nest, and made unwise decisions antagonizing, and killing two of, the Red Sashes. Yet the crew, having changed their playbook to Shadows, hadn’t quite gotten the scope they were working in. At Lyssa’s invitation,they were allowed to eavesdrop on a conversation between Mylera and Lyssa from a salon with a two-way mirror, wherein the latter was told to convey a message that the Red Sashes wanted to talk to the Suns about how the Lampblacks’ turf was going to be divvied up in the wake of their demise, and that if they didn’t give a reply in two hours, it was going to be war between the Sashes and the Suns.
Instead of replying, they decided to try to discredit Mylera by planting stolen art in an Iruvian mosque that she frequented on holy days. As part of a two-score plan, they chose an art collector acquaintance of hers who was also a ex-gangster to steal from, the two Lurks barely getting out alive from a confrontation with his formidable Whisper-for-hire, and that Whisper’s pet, a bar-geist, with nothing more than a concussion. Their Slyde kept the art collector busy with a very… Slavic seduction, complete with knives, leather, and public sex. Still, as they made their escape, the Suns realized that they’d missed the deadline for the meeting with the Sashes, and now they were at war.
When I read aloud the consequences for a crew being at war, the realization dawning on their faces was priceless. The Suns had an ally in the Crows (+3), and their Leech had rallied a gang made up of their former Elite Thugs Skovlander cohorts (The Bludbruderschaft) to come to their aid defending the turf they held, but it wasn’t going to be enough to hold off not only the Red Sashes, but the noble families whose younger scions they’d killed, with all the political influence their embassy held.
In their downtime, they finally elected to try to take the Sashes’ attention off of the Suns, by…framing the Gondoliers (III) for the disruption of the imminent truce between the Lampblacks (II) and the Sashes (III). They are counting on the mysterious reputation of the Gondoliers as a secret society as sufficiently alienating to be a believable antagonist, but now I feel they’ve absolutely picked the wrong target to mess with, especially as their Whisper (my PC) is in absentia after the Lampblack devastation. They managed to complete a 12-clock to initiate the frame in their downtime, but as their information about the Gondoliers’ capabilities was incomplete, they have no control over what happens from their “success”.
So the Stygian Suns came out of the first session with a Wanted level, 8 Coin, and a war with a Tier III gang of noble ne’er-do-wells.
From the e-mails I received, they thought it was a great first session full of learning opportunities about the system as well as action and suspense. I believe they’re going to be smarter about planning their scores, as the Stygian Suns started their Bravos careers as academics in the throes of post-adolescence anarchy and violence.
And the faction clocks are all counting down… Can’t wait until the next session.
Have you talked to the players about the change – the way risks will be tougher?
That might be a difficult transition.
Before I started the first session, we went over what systems of checks and balances we had been overlooking during the first season. I had to be delicate, since the first gm was there, but they seemed rather ready until actual gameplay started.
And then…?