Corpathium in the Dark – Session 0

Corpathium in the Dark – Session 0

Hello everyone! This is the report for our first session of Blades in the Dark! I GMed for my wife and two friends we played D&D with for years now. Our sessions are played though Roll20.

Setting is a modified version of Logan Knight’s Corpathium ( https://www.lastgaspgrimoire.com/in-corpathium/ ) enriched by pieces of Vornheim, Doskvol, Dark Souls, Kingdom Death, Planescape, Qelong, Midgard, Lovecraft, Book of the New Sun, Thief, Dishonored and so on. It’s a weird fantasy megacity (each district could hold one or two “normal-sized” cities) where you can find literally anything sooner or later. The setting will be developed ingame with the help of my players!

The party decided to focus on time theft, literally, as in they aim to steal other people’s time to use for their dark desires.

Cast

Kyu: Kyu is a bird woman, a young race of anthropomorphic birds (she’s similar to a bird of paradise), a burlesque dancer who found she could steal other people’s time through dancing: while they’re enthralled, they literally miss minutes of their life she can then use (to prolong her life, since bird men live very short lives). Oh, bird men (and women) cannot talk with their own word, they can only perfectly mimic noises and other people’s phrases. She’s a Coiner.

Shi Weilong: A qeleng (read: inhabitant of Qelong or the Plateau of Leng) human once married to a beautiful young woman. Together they decided to leave their boring farmer lives and take a ship to Corpathium, where he became a journalist and she an inventor focusing on time manipulation. One day, Shi’s wife simply disappeared, but her notebook kept getting filled with notes about her inventions and her travels outside time, so he decided to follow her tracks and build a “Timehouse” (a lighthouse for time… Cronofaro, in Italian, is better!) to let her come home. He of course needs a lot of “time”, borrowed or stolen from other, for his project. He is a Leech.

Serrathio: He is a serpent man, a member of the oldest of races, and he himself is millennia old. Serpent men as old as he hibernate for centuries at a time, and while they’re sleeping they rearrange their memories, to avoid cluttering their mind. They also have a whole book inscribed on their skin, that only with a special ivory lens you can read. Serrathio is a Spider.

Members of the party knew each other from before the game started (they still have to define exactly how) and met at the Burning Man tavern to pick the place that will become their Lair (they still have no Crew as I decided it was best to introduce things slowly). In the past weeks each found a couple of potential lairs, and they discussed which ones were more interesting: the skeleton of Ashtongue Inc., the biggest coal-based factory in Corpathium, nearly abandoned tens of years ago because of lack of profits (and because of too many work related incidents giving birth to lots of ghosts), or a section of the tunnels under the city, used centuries ago by a paranoid member of the Corvuscult to move troops stealthily and quickly though the city, or the subterraneans of Lord Scurlock’s manor, which lay mostly empty as the lord is dead and only his debt-ridden heirs live there?

Kyu danced for Quess, her gondolier friend, who told her Foghounds have a small base under the manor that they use for smuggling (city canals run under the manor somehow), and Serrathio learned from Salia, an information broker, that some of those smuggler go drink at a local pub.. while Kyu was enthralling the audience with her risqué dance, the snake was heard saying, casually close to a young Foghound, that Lord Scurlock’s manor would probably collapse soon because of water infiltration from the canal. So convincing was he (a critical) that the Foghound ran to warn his friends. Kyu’s action was an Assist action for Serrathio, who was making a Setup for their Engagement roll.

Here we started the Score: they decided they wanted to sabotage the Foghounds’ base to convince them again and definitely that they had to leave the place. The Engagement roll decreed they would start in a Desperate position, but since the Setup maneuver from Serrathio was a critical, we decided they’d start as Controlled.

Guided by Quess, they navigated the dark canals under the manor and found themselves at the entrance of the section the Foghounds claimed as their base: a couple of smugglers with rifles, illuminated by lanterns, ahead of a corridor with a pair of portcullises(?) they could quickly lower to trap intruders. Shi found another way around, a nearly submerged tunnel that let them get behind the smugglers. Here things started going downhill: Shi went back to the entrance, trying to lure the guards by sabotaging a portcullis, but was nearly noticed (he partially resisted the consequence of his failure and hid). To try and help him, Serrathio quickly peered through dimensions to see a couple of seconds in the future, to guide Kyu in her performance: she would mimic rocks falling to trick the guards in thinking the complex was collapsing. Unluckily, she wasn’t so convincing, so she had to quickly hide too as the guards split to check on both noises.

…and there’s where we stopped, as it was getting late! We’ll start from here next week to see how the party manages to earn their own lair!

I hope this was at least half as fun to read as it was to play! Thanks!