Had another session of my “Age of Blades” game last night. I’m still happy with the AGE system, but, as others have commented on, the exploration and roleplaying stunts are pretty weak. Given that the stunt system is this game’s “killer app”, it needs some work. I haven’t had a chance to really dig into the new Modern AGE yet, but I think it has some more focused stunts for non-combat/magic stuff.
The crew finally settled on a name for themselves, so future posts will chronicle the exploits of the Silk Hats. They also leveled up to level 2, and picked up some stat bonuses, new focuses, and new Talent levels, but no new Health as I’m using a grittier variant of the rules. Last session, they had made a very good “growth roll” for the crew, and got stunt points that allowed them to go from Tier 0 to Tier 1.
In our last game, the Dimmer Sisters (weird, occult recluses) had called in a favor from the crew’s Whisper, Moon Eye, and asked them to plant a (fairly obviously) explosive artifact on board one of the Fog Hound’s boats. This was fine with the Silk Hats, since they were on the verge of war with the Fog Hounds anyway due to past run-ins, but this score was to prove a lot more challenging than their previous jobs. Also, Saiya’s (the crew’s Slide) player couldn’t make it, so she missed the score.
The crew sent Jailiya, their Skovlander Cutter, to a bar where the Grinders (a vicious gang of Skovlander refugees) were rumored to hang out to set up a diversion. Despite her almost total lack of social skills, she managed to convince the Grinders that she wanted revenge on the Fog Hounds, and was willing to give the Grinders intel on a valuable shipment going through the Hounds’ warehouse the next night. The Silk Hats wanted the Grinders to raid the warehouse as a diversion to draw the Fog Hounds off the boat so they could get in and plant the bomb. They had also cased the Hounds’ warehouse themselves earlier, and saw crates of something valuable being loaded on the boat, so they wanted to steal those while planting the bomb.
As usual, Hishan, the Hats’ Spider, was on lookout duty, and Moon Eye and Noggs Keel, the crew’s Lurk, approached the Fog Hound’s steamboat from the water side in a dinghy under cover of magical shadows. Eventually, the Grinders’ raid started, but it was going too well (and too quietly) to be a good diversion, so Jailiya, who had been watching the warehouse, fired off a pistol, which got the Hounds on the boat’s attention.
Goldie, the Hounds’ navigator, sent half his men off to the warehouse to investigate, and Noggs and Moon Eye clambered aboard. They quickly made their way into the cargo hold, but didn’t find the crates they were seeking. Coming back up on deck, a Fog Hound sailor spotted them, and they let loose with spell and crossbow, but didn’t manage to kill him before he raised the alarm.
A fairly tense cat and mouse chase began on the ship (BTW – the soundtrack to Usual Suspects was playing in the background, so I was totally envisioning the action on the ship from that movie as we played), as Moon Eye and Noggs searched for hidden compartments while the ship’s crew searched for them. Cornered in a small cabin, the infiltrators were forced to start a gunfight with their pursuers, and Moon Eye blew the head off one of the Hounds with his carbine (a roll with lots of stunt points). The other Hound got away, so the entire boat’s crew was on high alert at this point.
While Moon Eye and Noggs kept frantically searching for the crates, Hishan and Jailiya, not seeing any Hounds on deck, came aboard and climbed up to the bridge where they burst in on Goldie before he could pull a weapon. They marched him down to the cargo hold, planning to force him to reveal where the smuggled cargo was, but were surprised by one of the Fog Hounds who winged Hishan with his pistol before viciously double slashing Jailiya with a nasty fighting knife. Jailiya is a serious bad ass, though, and crushed the Hounds’ skull with one blow of her mace (another good roll, with 6! stunt points). During the scuffle, Goldie jumped overboard, and took off down the docks.
Meanwhile, below decks, Moon Eye figured out how to open the hidden door to the Hounds’ smuggling compartment, and he and Noggs, not the strongest pair, lugged the two crates of potentially magical loot (Moon Eye had attuned to the ghost echo and noticed a faint glow about them) up on deck. The Hats were reunited on deck, and loaded the crates onto their dinghy. It looked like they crew would get away, beaten up, but alive, when Hishan asked Moon Eye how planting the bomb (the actual main mission) had gone…
While the others piled into the small boat, Moon Eye rushed back down to the engine room, cracked the thin clay tablet covered in snakelike runes that Rosslyn, the Dimmer Sister’s maid had given him, tossed the fragments into the room, and scrambled back up on deck just in time to have two Fog Hounds shoot at him, and miss. Diving into the boat, the crew escaped under cover of more magical darkness. A moment later, a muffled “whoomp!!!!” sounded from the boat, and they saw flames showing through portholes.
We ended there, with the crew battered but alive, and sitting on two crates containing 12 bottles of refined spirit essence.
Next time we’ll make the roll to see how the raid impacted the Hounds (I’m treating the PC scores as “plot actions” on the crew level, using the organization rules from the FAGE companion book.