Today was one of our best Blades sessions so far. Instead of our fairly usual planning-score-downtime deal, I had the Red Sashes react to one of their provocations and initiate a counterattack at their de facto staging ground – the Leaky Bucket. The Red Sashes were pretty desperate at this stage and pulled out all the stops – firebombs, chokedust, rage essence, the works.
The crew Cutter killed off most of the rank-and-file, whereas the few remaining master swordsmen actually died to gunfire from the new party Hound and a neat ambush by one of Ulf Ironborn’s better men.
Heavily outnumbered, Mylera used a combustible packet of Ghost Oil and slipped a region around her into the Ghost Field, Ulf and a lot of his less competent lackies included. I was perhaps aiming a little bit towards a vaguely dream-sequence-ish fight in the ghost field between our Cutter and Mylera, but what happened instead is that the Hound simply sicced his creepy ghost lizard into the opening of his natural habitat.
We don’t know what happened inside there, but no one came out alive, and the Hound has been having disturbing dreams since.
So they basically got rid of two gangs in one swoop, and have been looting the Red Sashes dojo since. This is the greatest score they have ever pulled off financially, and with the Sashes’ out of the picture, they naturally get more turf and their own hunting grounds grow bigger.
And while not really a highlight of the session, I am really glad our crew has finally got a gang of their own – a bunch of Expert Shadow street orphans. We have a nice low-grade simmering conflict between the Cutter’s attempts to introduce military discipline, the Lurk’s continued need to evade authority and have a good time with the lads, and even the Hounds abortive attempts to introduce the kids into his eerily creepy human sacrifice cult (and I do mean eerily creepy – there were pamphlets involved). The players chose Principled as their cohort’s flaw, so I basically got to play a religious no-nonsense scoutmaster type as the “second in command”.
I feel like having a cohort gang really livens up the game, but maybe that’s just from my perspective as the GM – I can npw play an NPC I can be pretty certain will see recurring airtime in a situation where I don’t need to think in terms of opposition or parsing difficulty. Until someone in the party decides that having a principled gang isn’t quite what they wanted after all, I can rest into this NPC like a comfy armchair. Fun!