Author: Adam McConnaughey

Session 2 for The Other Hand

This was a short session because one player wasn’t feeling it. I think they felt the game lied to them a little; “I thought it was going to be about doing sweet heists, but it’s really about these complex political machinations and betraying people, and I’m not really sure I’m in the mood for that. I feel like everything I do is going to wind up with everyone turning on me and I don’t like that”

So after some discussion, they mostly sat back while Xaro and Carmen took center stage. Since they’d received some aid from the Weeping Lady in the previous session, Carmen went and gathered information at a Weeping Lady-run flophouse to see if they needed any favors done. Xaro told everyone he was going to see what Baszo Baz was planning, and instead went and snooped around the Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh.

Meeting back up at their lair, they decided to help the Weeping Lady smuggle in one of their acolytes from another city, who was stowing away on an incoming freight train. They decided to go with the Social Plan, using a customs inspector as the social connection.

Carmen demonstrated the power of Elite Shadows, as she used Command, and had them break into the inspector’s house and kidnap him. I had it be a controlled situation; Sloane’s shadows were in their element, and the customs inspectors had no reason to suspect this attack was coming. Sloane (the NPC leader of the shadows) convinced the PCs to disguise themselves as Lampblacks; he was still out for revenge, since the Lampblacks had tried to kill him in the previous session.

So they got him, and took him to a quiet spot under a bridge. Carmen called in her extortionist friend Grace, who helped Xaro break this poor customs inspector. The roll was risky not because there was any real risk of failure, but because they were in a public space and someone might walk in at any time.

But the players were rolling like crazy today, and completely got the guy to let them take whatever they wanted off the train, because “Baszo Baz is real unhappy with you”.

We ended the session after they succeeded at taking no heat, and their complication was #4, “The Little Guy”

I decided that the guy they had smuggled in, (Dygnen, a ghost summoner), wanted their help getting set up.

We ended there!

Just finished running my first session with the quick start!

Character creation was a breeze. Wound up with: Xoan the Slide, a former advisor to a demon lord; Carmen the Cutter, a Tycheroi stevedore with a forked tongue; and Asher the Lurk, a wreck diver from the Dagger Isles.

They called themselves The Other Hand.

The Other Hand wound up immediately siding with Baz and agreeing to go raid the Red Sashes’ vault. The first roll of the game was Asher’s player Gathering Information for the heist with Discern. With a result of 4, they asked “What does Baz want us to do with the money we get?” which is kind of a weird question, maybe? Anyway, I said he wanted them to bring him all of it, and then he’d pay them from it. They were like “Yeah, right”.

So they then started to plan, and I was like “This game doesn’t want you to do any pre-planning except deciding which of these five plan types you’re doing”. So they chose the Infiltration plan, with a tended garden stream as the entry point, and Asher took point. The first obstacle was a locked grate where the stream flowed out of the monastery proper. Their player immediately called for a flashback scene and used Supply to get some keys off of their good friend Frake. They got a 1-3, so they knew the Red Sashes were planning an ambush behind the door.

The fiction got a little confusing here. Asher decided to abandon this line of attack, but instead sneak into the building and leave some doors unlocked in order to divert the attention of any Red Sashes on guard. So it seemed like they were acting as though the Red Sashes were planning on ambushing them, even though they wound up abandoning the angle of attack? I basically treated it like they upgraded to a risky move.

Once the heist got rolling, the teamwork moves worked like a charm. The players passed point around like nobody’s business. I was unclear whether players not on point could make rolls other than backup rolls, and in what situation that might happen.

Anyway, Carmen and Asher raided the vault while Xoan wound up embroiled (due to devil’s bargains) in a theological debate with a Servant of the Ecstasy of the Flesh in the Red Sashes’ courtyard. Carmen tried to set a fire to help Xoan escape, rolled poorly, and left him to deal with the result. Asher stayed behind and used climbing gear to get Xoan out.

So here I think I made a mistake. I was thinking “No planning during a score!” and immediately cut to them attempting to bilk Baz out of the contents of the vault. I was thinking of it as an extension of the same score, but I think it should have been a separate score, using the Deception Plan. Anyway, Xoan took point, and immediately decided to take the desperate action of saying “Sorry, we didn’t get anything” and using a flashback to declare that their elite gang of shadows was hiding the loot.

I said the danger was Baz figured out their plan and had sent goons to intercept their haul. Of course, when they got a 5 on the roll, that became a problem, as the danger (they lose the money) and the effect (they get the money) directly contradicted. So I changed the effect to “Sloane (the leader of the shadows) dies fighting off the Lampblack goons”. Which Xoan soaked.

So yeah they got away with stuff, and wound up with only 1 heat to show for it.

Suggestions/Wrinkles

People were confused by the Effect rules; they were giving themselves the stress AND filling segments when rolling effect, instead of just filling segments. Maybe an “or” between the two would make it clearer that you don’t do both options?

I’m assuming Renown/Wanted actually have mechanical effect in the full game, so not worried about that.

Heavy armor lets you avoid the effects of 3 separate physical attacks, yeah?

One player filled stress and ticked a Trauma during the first session. Is that normal? Also,  I’m reading it right that you can have your stress gauge entirely filled. It’s just when you take more than that that you have to take Trauma, right?