Okay here’s something for discussion. How does your crew deal with dead bodies?
There’s lots of ways to deal with this. Like don’t kill people, or don’t let the victim know who killed them, or don’t kill people in your hidden headquarters… The crew I run with ritually sacrifices in an ancient arena under their headquarters. The ritual involves one on one combat with the “anointed one.”
The gondoliers are a big faction in our game. So dumping in the canals is a bad idea. Especially since we’ve established ghosts can’t lie. The cultists know they could setup a long term project to deal with this problem, but their short term solution is interesting. They smuggle the body across Silkshore to throw it into the lightning wall. Avoiding spirit wardens and distracting blue coats along the way. They’ve done a lot of sacrificing, and have gone through this rigamorole three times. The last time they decided to cut up the body and smuggle parts across individually. The Cutter decided to eat his portion. That will probably have some interesting side effects later.
Anyways, I’ve setup a clock for this each time. Several dangers manifest and while there have been some interesting complications they’ve never been caught. There’s a collective sigh when it comes time to clean up after a killing. They also have had no time to work on a long term solution. At this point I can’t really think of a more interesting way to slice it and my instinct is to breeze over it. But at the same point I don’t want to walk away from the precedent of the danger of killing somebody.
Anyways love to hear how your crew deals with dead bodies, and any advice for a threat that’s become rote and predictable. The stakes have been raised, the spirit hunters have hulls in the area hunting down the various occulstist factions. Maybe I should just make them do it again with higher stakes. But my instincts are to downplay it and focus game time elsewhere on more interesting things. I’m just unsure how to do that with the set precedent of the danger.
Our Whisper used to normally rip the souls from the newly dead in order to create more newly dead. We just mostly rolled it all into Heat.
If they kill someone, even as part of a ritual, deathseeker crows will fly over the area where someone died. This is a massive hint to factions that dislike your crew, and also the Spirit Wardens and the Bluecoats, as to where the crews hidden base is.
Easy fix to this is to pick up Crow’s Veil so the crows don’t come when they kill. Otherwise its killing somewhere away from the base (LTP to find a safe place) and scampering before the cops show.
My crew personally doesn’t give a damn about dead bodies due to Crow’s Veil, and they’re gonna be in some deep mess because of it. There is a Claim called “Hagfish Farm” I think. It lets you dispose of bodies easily.
The only other way is to drown them so the crows dont come.
Yeah, hagfish farm is run by the Spirit Wardens in one of our previous games – they extract spirits from recently died folks (instead of buying them with electroplasmic fire as expected), retaining them for the immortal emperor.
The bodies are flung into hagfish farm where they are re-processed Soylent Green style for consumption in dubious pie shops around the city.
Pieshops are really popular with low class folks as a quick and easy means of a fast meal.
Slang for pies is great terms like ‘maggot bag’.
They’re based in U’Duasha. It’s significantly less of an issue …
Antimatter, why would drowning prevent the crows from coming? If that were the case, the canals would be choked with corpses! 😉 I would agree that when a crow circles over the filth-choked canals of Crow’s Foot, the new guy begins cursing as he dresses down in preparation of retrieving the corpse.
I really like exploring the idea of destroying a body with a lightning barrier. I would imagine that some kind of measure might be in place to make such a thing more difficult, which could make for some interesting moments as scroundrels try to bypass the measures.
The book talks about how the dead leader of the crow’s body was lost in the canals. The spirit wardens are after the body specifically since their main concern is to stop the manifestation of any ghosts. The canals though are the territory of the gondoliers who are rivals with the spirit wardens in our game. They usually don’t appreciate people making more work for them.
I think the easiest option is to suggest crow’s veil as the next crew special ability.
The maggot pies are an amazing bit of fiction.
Our Whisper makes sure he’s never without a couple of vials of electroplasm.