So this past Friday I took a second group into Duskwall for their first mission.

So this past Friday I took a second group into Duskwall for their first mission. This group consisted of 2 players who had some experience with Pathfinder and Dungeon World and 2 players who have 0 tabletop RPG experience. I was able to draw in these two new players by describing the setting, because they are huge fans of victorian steampunk and firefly and I focused on those elements of the setting. All in all the session was a rousing success, and all the players were gushing afterwards. That may have been partly because they had amazing luck throughout the session. Over the course of 3 hours there were 4 partial successes, a half dozen crits, only 1 fail and the rest complete successes. I’ve never seen rolls quite like it. Fortunately the fail was at a very dramatic moment and gave the end of the score some nice tension.

So now I have an unnamed cult that worship the leviathans set loose in Duskwall. Currently they are Boulder the Cutter, Shiv the Lurk, Tumbler and Leech and Wraith the Whisper. They took a job working for Bazso because they are pretending to be an ordinary gang that takes on odd jobs until they grow in power. Also they’re hoping that the Lampblacks will eventually support them in their goals of ridding the city of electroplasm since the Lampblacks were once a powerful non criminal guild before leviathan blood was readily available in the city. 

Baszo gave them a strange artifact that looked like a Palentir and told them to hide it in Mylera’s office at the red sash headquarters. They chose an infiltration plan and decided to sneak in through a backdoor in an alley. Flashback to Shiv’s locksmith friend Frake who installed the locks at the Red Sash compound and critically succeed a consort roll. Frake gives them a master key to the whole compound, but because of a devils bargain he requests the PCs steal a valuable sword called Crimson Moon from the Red Sash Armory. They enter through the kitchen and make quick work of two guards with help of the Lurk’s  silence potion and ability to phase through walls, and the cutter’s fine heavy spiked mace (who he calls Mr. Prickles). The Leech flashes back to when he created an alchemical agent that will completely dissolve the bodies so they don’t have to waste time hiding them. Another flashback to intimidating Petra the city clerk into giving them the blueprints for this building on record in city hall. They discover that there is a heavily fortified basement floor, and decide that’s likely where the office and the armory would be. Another flashback to the Leech’s Psychonaut friend who spends several days in an adjacent building mentally observing the building, trying to discover how many guards they could expect, and where they usually are. The psychonaut informs them that at least a dozen novices tend to sleep in the barracks on the second floor, while 5 guards patrol the ground floor, and a variable # of guards are in the basement. All of the basement guards have the minds of cold hard killers. 

At this point the Wraith the Whisper asks what a ghost key does. I tell her they open ghost doors and then I ask her to tell me what a ghost door is. She decides ghost doors can be used as shortcuts throughout the city by entering the ghost realm. This is always dangerous because ghosts don’t suffer humans lightly in their realm, but it’s extremely dangerous if you don’t already know the locations of both doors. She also decided that ghost doors form over the bodies of the dead, to allow their passage to the ghost realm. The more horrific the death, the longer the door exists. Luckily they just created a couple of doors right by the exit, and they had plans to create more in the basement soon.

The evade the guards on the first floor and enter the basement. Two guards obliviously play cards in one room, and the Whisper notices that two doors have ghostly wards on them. She attempts to attune to them and discovers they doors require passwords to open or they will unleash a psychic attack on anyone nearby. She suffers a minor psychic attack during the probe, but using her resolve she shields her mind and takes a little stress. They decide to open one of the doors without the password, and the Whisper will try to contain the blast with her mind. She does manage to contain the blast, but it makes enough noise to rouse the guards. Three critical rolls later one guard has his head caved in, the other has a broken spine and will never walk again, and they have obtained the password to the second door. The artifact is hidden, and the sword is retrieved along with about 2 coin worth of silver.

To escape the decide to set off an alarm bring all the guards to the basement and use a ghost door to slip out the back unnoticed. The Whisper leads a group action to attune to the ghost door they just created, and all the other members take a devils bargain for the extra die. The Leech sees his brother on the other side and discovers that his death was not, in fact, an accident like he originally believed. The Cutter sees the ghosts of everyone he killed tonight and they will haunt his dreams during the next downtime, he’ll take -1d to vice rolls because of the nightmares. The lurk will be possessed by a spirit that has been watching him for sometime, the next time he tries to walk through walls with ghost veil he may lose control of his actions for a brief time. With that they have 5 dice to roll in a desperate position (don’t mess around with ghost doors man), and they roll 5 ones. I was so happy to see the first failure of the night (after 2 hours) that I jumped up and shouted. They enter the ghost realm with the whisper describes in detail, but then the spirits of the dead Red Sashes kick them out and shut all the ghost doors in the building permanently. In addition a psychic attack hits everyone in the building, waking up all its inhabitants as an alarm goes off in the basement. Needless to say a very intense chase ensued as the gang only barely made it out alive, thanks to a timely flashback where the Leech created a small portable shield that could deflect bullets, but only for about 30 seconds. Fortunately that was enough, and the group made it out alive, mostly unharmed and significantly richer.