#AgeOfBlood

#AgeOfBlood

Age of Blood v0.5 / Playtest 1, Session 1: “Better Ask Mom”

Our characters are:

– Kasseri, the Voice, a Nun on the Run.

– Lord Eddard Baldwin, the Captain, who now has a first name that should basically sign-post everything you would ever need to know about the character.

– Eberhard Monheim, the Cultist, who lowkey knows a little blood magic and stuff but is keeping it on the DL.

– John Comber, the Ascendant, whose last name was changed between sessions in order to protect the privacy rights of dead Romantic-era poets.

Fresh from checking the Old Fort and negotiating an understanding with it’s former squatters, John leads his new best friend Lord Baldwin (and that suspicious Gannic fellow, Eberhard) back down the hill to the rotted Chapel that represents the civic center of town. There they are introduced to Kasseri, who we decide had been busily ordering the chapel’s meager library this whole time. Kasseri showed up unannounced on the chapel’s steps one day a week or so back and while she hasn’t said much about her past she won’t stop talking about Coroz, which fortunately is an interest she and John share.

As discussion turns to next moves to secure the region, John realizes with a guilty start that he needs to consult with the local authorities. It’s time to call mom.

After a hand-waved time skip for John’s request for audience to reach it’s destination and come back, Inquisitor Malencia arrives off the road with a small entourage of acolytes. She is greeted by the most royal welcome Wygrove can offer: Lord Baldwin’s banner flying in front of his half-dozen strong militia cohort and 3 of the 4 erstwhile adventurers arrayed out front. Malencia, we establish, is the source of John’s authority but a distant figure who must oversee the sanctity of countless Vanderian souls scattered across a large frontier. She is also on the lookout for Kasseri, who fled a nearby convent under suspicious circumstances a few weeks ago (Given ample warning of the Inquisitor’s arrival, Kasseri called in sick that morning and stayed back at the chapel. This is an awesome relationship triangle that we will definitely explore but we weren’t in a rush to throw that at the wall just yet in session 1).

John eagerly and a bit nervously introduces Eddard and Malencia, stuttering out his hope that this noble knight commander (who he has by now realized was not actually sent by the Church) can be allowed to stay and keep being his cool friend driving back the darkness. The Lord drops to a knee and greets her, leading off with his admittedly-storied lineage and pledging his faith and devotion to the crown and Church. This is an Influence roll, which gets the 6. Makes my job easy!

Inquisitor Malencia, a taciturn woman shaped by her former life under a vow of silence with the Quiet Sisters, instructs Lord Baldwin to rise with a curt hand gesture. She motions up her scribe, who one signet ring later presents the Lord (via John) an official Letter of Cachet giving Baldwin broad remit to Secure Wygrove and the Lands Thereupon from Corruption and Deliver Them Unto King Valten III’s Rightful etc. signed, sealed, and so forth. Malencia knows not to look gift horses in the mouth, and this one is convincingly promising to secure a lawless border town nobody else can be bothered to spare resources for. Seems like a slam dunk. She stays just long enough to ascertain that the people of the town don’t look any worse off than the last time she visited, and hits the road again to leave our party safe in the comforting knowledge that they have a very official scrap of paper to back up their authority with.

Eager to maintain the momentum of the nascent crusade that he hopes will save the beleaguered hamlet, John seizes the opportunity to mention that travel on the roads is very difficult for people who aren’t heavily-armed Inquisitors. You know, what with all the bandits around. Just look north, at Wygrove’s closest neighbor! Crumble used to have another name, we think, back when it was a place where respectable people lived. Now it’s just a nexus of bandit, or even worse, tribal activity. John whispers this last bit to Lord Baldwin, eyes askance at Eberhard who is jotting notes in a journal and fixing the Lord’s maps with accurate assays of the local geography.

Lord Baldwin keeps his thoughts about all of that to himself but happily agrees to flex muscle in the region. More local Control would be good! (it replaces Rep as the mechanism for Tier level-up for Age of Blood).

Information-gathering leads us to believe that a prominent temple of the faith was overrun there, and it’s a current hub of activity for highwaymen restricting traffic on the King’s Roads. Candidates for approach include Assault, Stealth, and, uh, Social? Yes, Kasseri insists we should come as friends! Unfortunately for how amazing that might have been, she is outvoted by the hawks in the room who are eager to test the town’s Militant special ability (+1 die to assault plans). Although we discuss the possibility of using the town’s Underground Maps to stage a daring assault via the abandoned aqueduct system that once linked the rivers in the region, Lord Baldwin insists on a bold approach: straight through the front gate to fly the banner high and dare defiance of the new order. John backs him up and Eberhard pragmatically agrees. Everyone decides on their loadout, and while the town’s coffers are completely empty and thus unable to augment the baseline Provisions set for the party the journey is within a day’s comfortable march anyway. I won’t demand any action rolls for overland travel… perhaps we’ll get to explore that mechanic later.

The 4d Engagement Roll comes up a critical. Word of Lord Baldwin’s arrival must not have spread very far yet or the rumors were simply discounted as too ridiculous to be credible, as the lawless vultures dwelling in Crumble are completely unable to muster even a token of resistance on the road: just outside their target the party sees an abandoned pile of wooden stakes clearly meant to barricade the road. The sheer audacity and swiftness of the party’s approach simply catches their targets out.

The overgrown tenements of Crumble come into view through the encroaching tree-line. At the center of town is a great circular stone structure: the open-air temple to Coroz that once burned an eternal flame, now guttered out for a decade or more. All around in the woods on the outskirts of town can be heard hasty movements, fires being doused and tent camps struck. The cockroaches are choosing to scatter into the woods rather than face justice. Lord Baldwin marches his troops (and the other PCs!) straight up to the ancient chapel and loudly proclaims his intent to secure the roads and instill order. Who here has the will to resist the imposition of rightful Law?

Right as the evening sun begins to sink to the trees, finally some organized resistance makes itself known. A knight dressed in the ignoble colors of House Vert marches out of the treeline at the head of a band of masked footpads to confront the invaders. The brigand-knight rudely questions the lineage of “Lord Baldwin” and suggests that they offer up the church’s writ of authority for display, so that he may wipe his arse with it.

Before words can turn to weapons however, Kasseri squeezes her way out of formation and bubbles over to the newcomers with a suggestion that a peaceful solution may be possible yet! After all, we’re not really super threatening and couldn’t possibly maintain an offensive war against you given the forces we have available (the Demon’s Bargain here is that Kasseri inadvertently reveals information about Wygrove’s forces and the extent of Lord Baldwin’s martial command: You’re looking at the entirety of it.). While Kasseri’s words are perhaps poorly advised from a strategic sense, they do de-escalate tensions and open the door to something more reasonable than a mutual slaughter.

Her optimism strikes a chord with House Vert’s lawless champion, who was starting to suspect his bandit band’s shaky morale wasn’t going to be quite up to open warfare against this organized force. Trusting in his own skill at arms more than the flaky cowards he leads, the knight raises his flail to point at Lord Baldwin.

“She’s right, no one else’s blood needs to be spilled here. A duel then: your pretend lord against ME.”

Lord Baldwin is completely powerless to resist such a challenge (it’s possible that the GM knows this particular player’s weaknesses a little too well). Drawing sword and shield, Eddard Baldwin prepares to defend his honor and establish his right… via might. Baldwin is no slouch, boasting 1 action dot for both Skirmish and Sunder (the pair of actions most directly tied to melee combat in AoB), but he’ll be cut off from Assistance unless the party wants to risk accusations of cheating the laws of the duel. The Brigand meanwhile is a towering presence with a casual command of his chosen weapon, a cruel spiked flail.

Pushing himself up to a 2d Risky/Standard Skirmish roll to start the fight on cautious footing and find a weakness while keeping his skull safely intact, Baldwin gets a 1 and a 2. I cackle at the opportunity to finally do something to the players (6s are so boring, guys! Nobody ever listens to me though..) and narrate the frighteningly formidable brigand-knight’s fighting technique: the flail is a clear and present threat which will of course devastate a fool if you’re not paying attention, but the primary tool here is the knight’s mastery of offensive shield techniques which are being used to hedge out any attempt at counter-attack and bully Eddard all around the impromptu dueling circle. A cruel shield bash (level 2 harm) is resisted, as is the flail trip (worsening position!) that is the knight’s cunning follow-up. Baldwin is suddenly running hot on Stress, beads of sweat pooling in his helmet as he stays inches ahead of his adversary’s overpowering combat style.

Seeing their champion being pushed to the limit, John and Kasseri begin praying to Coroz. Perhaps the PCs didn’t intend to interfere with a duel, but the players are definitely clear: it’s way too soon for Lord Baldwin’s career to end on as abrupt a note as flail spike introduction to the inner cranium. They Channel the last rays of the setting sun, which flares bright with Coroz’s blessing, blinding the knight of House Vert at a crucial moment in the duel.

Baldwin seizes this opportunity to turn the tables and throws everything at a Risky/Great Sunder roll, which gets a 4. Trusting in his Marshal’s Armor to save him from a retaliatory flail strike, he takes his longsword in both hands and steps into the brute’s reach to deliver a critical strike and end the duel. The glass-jawed brigand crashes to a knee and raises a hand for clemency. Eddard Commands the thug to depart these lands and bother not the fair people of Wygrove again, terms the humiliated knight is hardly able to refuse. I mark House Vert Bandits on the ever-growing Faction sheet; their story is linked to the region’s precipitous decline and will be an interesting foil to explore and compare against the noble mission the PCs have set for themselves. He and his brigands slouch away to spread the word that the roads around Wygrove are no longer a soft target for their kind.

The rest of the expedition is clean-up, really: Kasseri uses her Spirit Ritual to relight the eternal flame of Coroz at the center of the abandoned temple while Eberhard takes the opportunity of the events in the town center to stealthily scout around the woods and observes some Harthkin outriders from the clan of Edric Stonehand watching the duel from afar. Both events start long-term clocks so that the players can have some things to think about going in to their first downtime.

Our last act of the session was to try out the rules for the Loot roll, which in it’s current version is pasted below. This was a pretty low-stakes job so didn’t amount to a ton of dice, and the luck wasn’t with the party on it. So they didn’t get a chance to choose any fun results this time unfortunately (I chose “+2 Control and -2 Coin” result for them because I felt it represented the fiction well. Crumble is a target of value for it’s strategic and symbolic importance only).

The swinginess of the Loot roll is something I’ll be searching for feedback on as we go further: it’s positioned right now as a way to spice up the payoff structure, put the “where are my Magic Items” question squarely in the hands of the players, and let the GM recuse themselves of the incessant decision-making about how much Coin/Heat a given score was worth (I didn’t mind it in Blades but I sort of wanted to explore the space here, especially given the dungeon-crawling touchstones). I set up the math so that a firmly moderate baseline of Coin, Control, and Threat is always generated (based on the Tier of the target of the expedition) so that a bad Loot result doesn’t rob the players of the fundamental Coin they need to play the game, and on the high end a lucky Loot roll can be a big boost of value and story opportunities. It’s something I’ll have to monitor as we go, especially given the opportunity the lower rolls give a GM to mess around with the players. What do you think?

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Session Thoughts : Eberhard’s player (who is new to this BitD thing) did not earn a lot of XP at the end of the session, which is certainly at least somewhat on me as GM for failing to properly convey a.) the full details of the Action Roll system, which I think might have lead to hesitance to engage with the mechanics until later on in the expedition, and b.) the player-driven nature of how our group runs a table. I feel a little bad but I hope they’ll forgive me, expressions of continued interest were made and the veterans at the table assured them that it can take a little time to hit the stride of what Blades in the Dark asks of a player.

Communication distance with Balfar came up even sooner than I expected when John’s player decided we wanted to have a scene with the positive contact on his playbook (Inquisitor Malencia). As GM I eagerly hand-waved us forward in time to get there because I absolutely wanted to explore that scene but I can already foresee the possibility of some narrative dissonance arising from the question that is bound to get raised at some point or another: Just how far away is that place anyway? The answer, for now, is “as far away as the story wants it to be for dramatic purposes”. Balfar shouldn’t feel like it’s breathing over the player’s shoulders but it’s basically the closest point of light on the map to realistically base a number of middle-tier factions. This is an inherent tension between the design goals of a game that is Forged in the Dark and at least somewhat faction map-driven, but also wants to be a sandbox of medieval lawlessness and conveniently loot-filled Dungeonz ™. It’s something I think about often. An answer that ties the whole room together exists I’m certain, just needs more thoughtful care.