Such a fun session
Originally shared by Robert Bohl
Last night, I played John Harper’s Blades in the Dark with my brother, with Judd Karlman GMing. We’re a group of smugglers known as the Wobbegong Crew* who used to be in the military during the Unity War. I’m gonna talk about my perspective of the events of the evening below; there’s a lovely twist, so read on!
For this session, we got offered a job to steal a boat from another smuggling crew, with whom we had no beef. This job came to us from a group of fancy-pantses called The Hive, who are like powerful old money criminal types. Even though we had no beef, we went for it, because it was just a theft job.
We started out with my ex-spy-cum-Slide, Willoughby, making a Gather Information roll. I met up with my drug dealer Bryl, who knew the Fog Hounds (our victims). Dressing up like a rich lady slumming it and cashing out her stash to ply the Fog Hounds, she discovered over the course of the night that they were anxiously looking for a reporter, trying to pass some information on to her. But they didn’t let slip what it was.
Come the end of the night, Willoughby decided she wanted to see what the boat they were going to steal looked like inside. She’d been flirting with one of the Hounds, Goldie, who really wanted to fuck her. She proposed this to him, and I rolled badly. He decides to go along with it, and has his crew follow us back to sabotage me and figure out what I’m up to.
My brother played Charming, an ex-Marine-cum-Cutter, had been leaving a bar and wound up seeing the crew trailing us. He follows, sees me slip inside the boat, then sees that they’re on to me and about to take me.
We go from Gathering Information to being in the middle of the job.
The minute we’re inside the boat, Goldie slams Willoughby against the bulkhead and pulls a knife on her, asking who she is. As he does that, Willoughby hears Charming start singing the sea shanty he uses when he’s on his crazy violent blood drugs that turn him into a relentless murder machine.
Willoughby tosses some knockout powder in a fake sachet in Goldie’s face, hauls him to the brig, and comes out on top, to Charming having murdered every single member of the gang (but Goldie), and also being severely wounded (gut shot, among other things).
We pilot the boat to somewhere quiet after dumping the bodies at sea (at Goldie’s request), and I get to talking to Goldie. I apologize, say I’d much rather have fucked him then stolen the ship when no one was around, but alas, his people were too smart, they cottoned onto me, and now everyone he loves is dead and gone and that’s that. I get him to tell me what’s going on, why his people were so worried and wanted to talk to the reporter, and that’s when we get our twist.
Turns out the Hive hired the Fog Hounds to smuggle Skovlander (my people’s) children for sale into Doskvol. I’m told they’re being sold for whatever one buys children for; there are all kinds of uses for orphan children in Doskvol. So the Hive hired us to get rid of people who found out too much.
I talk Goldie into realizing that we’re pissed too, and didn’t know what we were set up for, and we’re not going to let this stand. I have the ability to see if anyone’s lying (can’t not tell if they’re lying), so I wait until I’m sure he won’t come back at us, and let him leave. We deliver the boat, and agree to improve our relationship with the Hive so we can eventually stop this kiddy smuggling.
What a satisfying twist!
Now, a note on violence.
In the first session, I found us in a situation where we were ushering some people off a boat, and the most-expedient and only-reasonable way to achieve what we needed was to murder some people. So Willoughby did. Without thinking about it. Then she took a few weeks off, getting drunk and high and dealing with it.
This time I figured something out. Willoughby’s attitude is violence should be avoided, until it can’t be. Then you do it as quickly and cleanly as you can. People go from being people to being something that needs to be done.
It’s chilling and feels very right to me. I’m very excited to develop this character.
Speaking of which, she can already tell who’s lying and who isn’t, and this session, she gained the ability that when she Sways people, they will forget about it in time. She’s becoming a scary motherfucker. I love her.
Stand-out moment for me: Willoughby has lost both her husbands and all of her children to the Unity War. At some point in the interrogation, Goldie started to blubber and lose it that everyone was gone. Willoughby got hard, quick. “Listen, buddy, you’re not the only one to lose everyone and everything that matters to you. There’s a lot of that going around. So now, take what time you need, accept that this is the world you live in now, and let’s move forward.”
Thanks, Jay and Judd, and also John, for the game.
* Named after a shark that camouflages itself in seabeds
https://githyankidiaspora.wordpress.com/2017/07/10/the-fog-hound-job/