Scum and Villainy “playtest” session 2

Scum and Villainy “playtest” session 2

“Mind the oranges, Marlon!”

This week’s session was a bit abbreviated due to club business (voting for games for the next block), so we didn’t get too much done.

We opened with characters having spent one Downtime action recovering from last week’s escape from the Vigilance and planting of a fake Aleph Key on some members of Drexler’s Raiders. Before they finished Downtime, I threw three follow-up jobs at them:

* A plea from Citani to hand the Key over to the Nightspeakers, or rescue him from them. He was scared as they’d already used their Way gravity-powers to crush one of his feet.

* A lead on Hicks, an expert on Way artefacts who could tell the PCs more about the Key, complicated by Hicks being the chosen enemy of the Mystic PC.

* A call from Manda, the Speaker’s friend, to smuggle some information to Mem in the Holt system. As they PCs want to get to Holt an the Hantu gate (connected to the Aleph Key), this seemed like a way to make some money doing what they wanted.

We “discovered” that Mem communicate by changing patterns of bioluminesence rather than sound.

The PCs decided to leave Citani to his own devices and take the job from Manda. She said she’d heard reports of the unscrupulous owner of a water-treatment plant on Warren using Mem slave labour (perhaps child slaves). She wanted the PCs, as trusted friends, to sneak in and obtain evidence of the slavery, then smuggle Manda and the evidence to Mem.

The PCs got some evidence of the slavery, did some background research on the layout of the water treatment plant, and acquired a stealthy drone for the infiltration. Opening with a Desperate situation meant they almost triggered an alarm as soon as they started, but they were quickly able to get some more PCs into the compound, get secret files from the office, found the slaves and took some photos of them.

At this point, the slaves exclaimed/flashed, “It is the Chosen Ones! As fortold, they have come to save us!” and promptly burst out of their enclosure.

This is when they did a flashback to hiding a bomb as an orange, and earlier delivering that to the compound as a potential diversion (hence the subtitle, which caused some hilarity at our table). That was the first major flashback they’ve done, and took some prodding from me to convince the players that planting the bomb could be done in the flashback as well as preparing it.

The bomb went off, some guards were liberally sprayed by sewerage by crashing the drone into a pipe, and the PCs escaped with a few dozen Mem ex-slaves in tow.

Some playtest thoughts:

GM Reference sheet 4 is really useful, especially the aide memoire of Devil’s Bargains.

I struggled to make the Jobs interesting and engaging. Given that the Job-creation tables are the same structure as the ones in base Blades, I thought about why that is. One reason, I think, was because I wanted to keep the Factions to the small number already on the table, so didn’t use that part of the tables. But another was the lack of tables/inspiration for people, buildings, and locations. On reflection, a lot of what was engaging about previous Blades jobs was the other fictional positioning that came from those tables.

Those tables will be much harder to create for S&V, mainly because there’s just one Duskwall and many different places in S&V. To have all the S&V places feel distinct, you really need a separate table for each location, and that’s a lot of work to do!