Hey Blades

Hey Blades

Hey Blades

Just come away from a great first session with a new group. I’ve recently turned some friends onto the metaphorical crack of rolling dice and doing silly voices, and BitD really got their creative juices flowing.

We ended up with a The Everyn Trading company, a crew of ‘professional’ smugglers. It was a whole mess of fun. I’ll try and post the play report at some point. I ended coming away with reams of questions from play that I thought I’d share/get your thoughts on:

– Smugglers seem to interact with Duskwall in an inherently different way than other gangs do; by their nature they need to cross boundaries. At first glance this has them going much further afield than your average thief/breaker (across lighting walls / into the void sea / on the rail lines).

Can smuggling work entirely effectively within Duskwall? What boundaries exist within the city? What’s taboo/illegal/frowned upon? Can you smuggle between wards/turfs? Can smugglers be the illicit equivalent of a man with a van for other gangs/spirits/other weirdness?

– The vehicle they chose was a old ex-fishing skiff, which raised some interesting questions about Duskwall’s canals.

Do the Bluecoats have patrol boats? What sort of control the Gondoliers/Canal Dockers have? Who owns the water? When you gain turf/smuggling routes could that be a controlled section of water your gang owns? Are there other watercourses around Duskwall (vast cyclopean sewers from an age before)?

– When determining starting faction status, we ended up with +1 for the Bluecoats and the Inspectors (one had done some bounty work and the other was related to an inspector). When we rolled entanglements, someone’s contact got rolled by the Bluecoats. How can the characters leverage their faction status with them to make sure the interrogation goes their way?

I ended making a quality roll for the contact. In this case, does a +1 give them the opportunity to lean on their Bluecoat relationship to interfere? Is that an action roll [sway/consort/command] or would you modify the quality (major advantage?). How would you run it?

I suppose it all comes back to the fiction. If there’s a mark on a sheet, that

means something. +1 with Bluecoats comes from a character’s relationships, so who are those people? What went down? Can they help without risking their own neck? What do they want?

Also could wanted level deteriorate these relationships?

This got me thinking about gang leadership. Conceptually could you have a situation where a gang is pretty chummy with the crew whilst their leadership actively wants them fucked with? Who’s loyalty wins out? Sounds like a potential power keg around leadership.

Stream of consciousness over. Thanks.

8 thoughts on “Hey Blades”

  1. To deal with smuggling I think it can be really useful to sketch out the arms race, then locate the characters within it (cutting edge? Old fashioned methods that work again as countermeasures moved past preventing them? Etc.)

    So, the first question is, how did smuggling become profitable. At that point it can be useful to think of a number of reasons the city government would outlaw substances or impose punishing taxes on them.

    Reasons include a politician making a distracting point out of an issue (like ink mussels) and directing free-floating outrage (racial or economic) towards that trade. It gets outlawed, but both those who like the thing and those who want to rebel against the politician and related policies keep the trade going.

    Or, Iruvians successfully capture two leviathans, and now they can provide leviathan blood cheaper than Duskwall’s fleets, so a massive tariff is applied against Iruvian leviathan blood. Still, the businessman who can buy low and sell high can make a hefty profit if avoiding capture.

    Or maybe a recreational substance is BOTH dangerous AND the powers that be can’t figure out how to monetize it themselves, like a syrup made from bone marrow and melted spirit well crystals that, when ingested, merges your nervous system into the Ghost Field so you can feel it as though you were moving through water, and you flare and spark with dimensional friction; popular at dance parties, but dangerous with permanent nerve damage possible, and naughty adepts weaponizing the stuff. 

    Once you’ve got some substances, and the reasons they’re illegal, that points towards how they are moved. Is the focus on the docks, or the deadlands beyond the wall? is there a cottage industry that makes stuff in the poor parts of town that needs to be moved to the rich part of town? Is Duskwall the bad actor creating things to be smuggled past customs to other countries, or does it import? 

    You also have a sense of the enthusiasm of enforcement. Is it a stupid law for political points and nobody really cares? Or do the bluecoats take it very seriously because it is a drug that makes one scoundrel capable of taking out an eight man squad, and that’s piling casualties on the watch in that district? Is the substance morally repugnant to the enforcers, but a religious necessity for another group? What is public opinion of the smuggling, and how much support can rogues expect to get if they smuggle it through?

    There’s also the question of why everyone doesn’t smuggle stuff. Does the material have a distinct scent that’s hard to mask, and the bluecoats use sniffer bats to locate it on the dock? Or must it always be in contact with a life field, so it must be carried internally or it spoils? Maybe the cargo is eggs, and they need to get where they’re going before they hatch or they’re more danger than profit. Are there specialized nationalities or skills that lend an advantage in the actual smuggling or in the perceived competence of the smugglers? 

    Then there’s how the smugglers fit into the criminal ecosystem. Do they smuggle respected materials that show they have some craftiness and pride? Or are they the farm team for real criminals? =) Or do other criminals feel they bring the tone down for everyone? 

    To sum up: why is it illegal? Who is the target market? Why is it hard to move? How enthusiastic is law enforcement about stopping smuggling? What is public perception?

    A little worldbuilding can go a long way in setting this sort of thing up, whether you figure it out on your own or involve your players. Having some questions to walk the players through can organize some cool smuggling materials that both align with their interests, and save you the work. =)

    This isn’t really coherent enough to serve as that “worksheet” to figure out smuggling trade issues, it’s all just a flow of thought, but I hope it helps get some ideas.

  3. About smuggling inside of Duskwall:

    1) moving messages and small goods like knifes and drugs into Ironhook Prison

    2) rescuing ghosts from the spirit wardens before the body is destroyed in the crematorium

    3) having a way of transportation through the lightning barrier to smuggle things for scavengers right outside of Duskwall

    4) having a reliable and unique way of moving unnoticeable from any point in the city to another; maybe a small submarine or a carriage that can go through the ghost field. Customers could be gangs that need a messenger or getaway driver.

  4. * A people-moving network funneling refugees into the city past customs processes, especially political refugees. A heist could involve publicly embarrassing a new screening method to force the law to back off of it. Another heist could involve meeting an exiled dignitary and getting her to a safehouse, with the tipped-off law gunning to intercept.

    * The law has developed drug sniffing bats that roam the city, and keen or report back when they find some drugs. Heists involve destroying the sensory glands of hives of bats, getting the specialty kelp to grind up to conceal the sensory presence of the drugs, and arranging a dance of misdirection to slip a big shipment past customs.

    * The barrier to cross is the Mirror, the membranous edge of the Ghost Field. Ghosts want to come back to flesh, and are insured against destruction; get them into hollows or hulls, and back into the city. There could be ranch-like “stations” in the deathlands where the wealthy go to die beyond the reach of the Spirit Wardens, so their spirits can return to their beloved city. But they need transport out and back, and protection from dissolution on the way.

  5. I always worried that smuggling crews would start to have jobs that felt too same-y after a while. Clearly I needn’t have worried after reading all this.

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