My main group are playing The Prestige, a crew of assassins who’ve ended up on The Hive’s bad side. What’s ensued since the first exchanges have been a series of violent killings, including a massacre seemingly perpetrated by members of the Imperial Military in broad daylight (Brogan, the commander of the suspect squad, has just been broken out of prison by a mysterious group of smugglers looking for a bargaining chip), the burning-down of the Archaeological wing of Charterhall Uni, and culminating in the brutal stabbing of mercenary captain Karth Orris, his corpse left cooling on the cobbles of an obscure square deep in the tangle of the docks.
Now, The Hive are getting desperate, and they no longer have Karth’s mercenaries on tap due to enmity between Djera Maha and the mercenaries’ new commander Alma Critch. So, Djera and her remaining inner circle are sequestering themselves aboard a fortified train perpetually criss-crossing the city (think the Iron Council, but hyper-capitalist), and have decided to hire assassins to take out the assassins.
I’ve been introducing new factions as needed in my game, so I decided to have a little fun with this one. What with all the public killings and disguise-based misdirection The Prestige have been using, I decided to create a crew of assassins to be their match. Of course, I had to get creepy with it – enter The Waxmen, a nasty Tier II death cult devoted to The Thousand Faces, who perform their ritual killings almost exclusively in public, and wear horrible wax death masks with rearranged features. The image below is what they look like right now in terms of clocks.
TL;DR, introducing new or subsidiary factions as needed is super fun, you should try it sometime. Small ones work best, especially ones who are part of existing factions. Kath Orris’ mercenary company (I’ve called them The Frozen Dawn) have recently split off from the Hive to form their own Tier III, weak hold faction, for instance. It’s pretty sweet.
Also, feel free to use the Waxmen yourself. I might properly write them up at some point following the canon examples in the book.
The game I’m running have the Hive involved. Cool to see how there’s familiar names are shaking out on other tables. Sounds like a bunch of fun.
Yeah, I added a few new lil factions, like a sisterhood of occult witches that work and own some brothels in Silkshore called “The Banshees”.
Love the shared space, yeah. Even tighter/ more shared than Apocalypse World. “What’s Dog Head like in your game?” Not so big as with something like “The Forgotten Realms.” Everyone playing Blades is playing their version of Lankhmar or The Isle of Dread or some such and can share stories with common threads.
My current crew wanted to have their hunting grounds in Nightmarket and spent both of their starting Coin placating the Hive so they’re in the sweet (dangerous?) spot of having a Helpful faction status with them.