Author: Adam Schwaninger

The Opulence, I Has It Caper isn’t complete yet, but I wanted to share the creativity that came out of having the Leech’s alchemical supply fleshed out in the most recent quickstart.

Ghost Oil. Learn it. Love it.

The Dead Setters were after some faberge-type animal sculptures being transported into Duskwall on one of those Fury Road trains. Once the train was in the city and its own lightning barriers folded in, the Hound snuck onboard using forged inspection papers and a disguise and found that the artwork was being stored inside compartments on a large-scale hull fashioned in a similar, scaled-up style to the artwork itself. Imagine the museum opening gala with this hull prancing up like a giraffe and revealing the actual artwork, that sort of thing.

The Hound poured Ghost Oil on the sucker and with a flashback, the Leech set up a purloined lightning wall across the tracks. The train passed through but the ethereal hull with the prize inside was caught and shunted right out of the train, away from the guards and rail jacks and all the stuff inside.

Things got bad after that – the Unstable Whisper (go trauma!) forgot it was a human spirit, not an animal one, and was disappointed that his Whovian giraffe dance didn’t have the calming effect he’d hoped. The hull’s animating spirit was eaten by hungry ghosts, leaving the crew with a ghostly empty clockwork pseudo-giraffe full of artwork they can’t touch.

That’s okay, though, because they were in the middle of a knife fight with the Red Sashes when we had to call it a night.

HEEST COMPLETE: The And You Will Know Us By the Campaign Trail of Dead Caper

The Dead Setters entered into a Ghost Contract with Ava Dimmer to take over security and transport for the spirit well in Coalridge (the PCs destablized the region in the previous session). The first problem to be dealt with was the small matter of the Spirit Wardens being called in to investigate and potentially exorcise the location.

Time was against them, but they discovered the identity of Warden Grine, who was leading the investigation into the Coalridge well. Rook the Cutter hired his pit fighter friend Marlane and some of her MMA buddies to steal an illegal artifact from the Fog Hounds. This Omar Little-style raid was incredibly successful, and after some reconnaissance work in Nightmarket, Raven the Hound spotted Grine (older guy, prosthetic leg) in the crowd. Richter the Spider and Rook distracted the crowd with Richter’s sudden urge to campaign for public office while Raven planted the artifact (a carved leviathan tusk) in Grine’s bag, then tailed him home and fed his address to Laroze, the Dead Setters’ Bluecoat contact, for the arrest.

With Grine under arrest for corruption, his active cases came under suspicion as well, and the heat was off the Coalridge location. While the Bluecoats and Wardens were able to erect a lightning barrier around the Coalridge spirit well, it’s manned by a skeleton crew instead of being a hotbed of law enforcement activity. It’s uncertain if the city will ever get around to actually assigning resources to wiping out the well.

The Dimmer Sisters still want to move fast – the spirit well isn’t in immediate danger but it’s not yet under anyone’s control except maybe (MAYBE) you could say the Bluecoats at this point, plus they have clients that need their product. Next time we’ll probably stay in “Heist Time” off the bat.

Richter’s player wanted a long-term project to get elected to public office somewhere, which led to our group deciding that it’s more fun if there’s some sort of democracy in Duskwall, it’s more in-theme if it’s ultimately a futile gesture, and it’s more useful to me as a GM if it’s excessively corrupt. I’m treating it as several project clocks Richter can fill in, the first of which is “Recognition as a Legitimate Candidate”.

They were in Nightmarket for Spirit Warden Grimes, for which I pulled liberally from Perdido Street Station’s opening scenes with the transactions performed via baskets and pulleys and the huge, constant press of stalls and traders creating a sea of people between tall rowhomes and apartments crisscrossed with balconies, power lines, and scaffolding. A real Assassin’s Creed parkour playground.

Raven’s nemesis Casta the bounty hunter showed up as well. Our Casta is a female Tycherosi, in black eelskin with vestigial eyes above her normal pair giving her the look of some sort of spider-person. Both she and Raven have project clocks for hunting the other down.

The dice favored the players this session and nearly every action was an unqualified success. I didn’t mind; last session it went the other way so it was nice to get something of a breather in.

Another successful (?) heest!

The Spirit Well Twinkie Caper, or I Have a Victrola For a Mouth and I Must Scream

The Dead Setters went after Turf this time, specifically a spirit well site within Duskwall limits that was controlled by their allies the Dimmer Sisters. They gathered some info and found out that the Dimmers were using the Eels to move freshly-bottled spirits offsite. The Eels and the Dead Setters were direct competitors in the spirit trade, so the plan changed from “let’s take over the turf” to “let’s sabotage the handoff and make the Eels look incompetent by blowing containment on the spirit well!”

The dice were not with anyone, save for Rook the Cutter’s critical Skirmish success after I said “sure, you can attack all four Eels but it’s definitely a Desperate position”. Teatime the Whisper was our first Trauma victim (Unstable of course!) as his dead parents manifested and tried to eat him. A lightning oil mishap left Deemo the Tinker badly burned. Mostly, it led to utter chaos, gunfire, and explosions, which ironically kind of ended up working for the PCs. The Eels definitely were left with egg on their faces, as the Dead Setters got away with the Eels’ wagon, the spirit bottles, and the cargo of whisky that was the cover for the spirit bottles.

While we stuck with the Lampblacks and Red Sashes for our first heest, it was fun to run with the vague suggestions for the other gangs this time. Our Dimmer Sisters, for example, are going to be different from yours, and that’s pretty cool. Random setting bits we came up with that might help someone riff off for their own games:

* Nobody said there were only two Dimmer Sisters: Ava, Talia, Tibia, Sasha, Sorcha, and Henry. Or that they were all female. Or that they were on their original bodies. Or that those bodies were made of meat. They go around fully robed with weird spirit masks, so you’re never sure if you’re dealing with an actual Dimmer or a Dimmer-bot.

* The Dimmers use hulls for servants/muscle. The automatons have wax cylinders or something for voiceboxes, so they sound like olde-tyme record players, crackling and hissing. If you decapitate one, there’s a gout of blue-white sparks and flame as the electroplasmic binding goes up.

* The Eels’ signature is wearing their hair in a long braid, not too unlike Jet Li’s portrayal of Wong Fei-Hung.

*Coalridge is the Dimmer Sister’s stomping ground. It used to be a more well-off section that’s been bought up and built over with great honking refineries. Blade Runner skyline with some Jane Austen-meets-Addams Family manor houses. Dried-up fountains and crumbling, ivy-covered walls give way to belching smokestacks and gargantuan industrial blocks.

My tuesday night Hangouts game (the Dead Setters) successfully went a-heesting, liberating the U’Duashan Moon Pool Ruby from within an idol of a forgotten god, which was itself located inside Mylera Klev’s personal vault/gallery, which was all up inside the Red Sashes’ lair.

* The Spider posed as a new art dealer and ended up in a brief but bloody fight, tumbling off a balcony with Mylera onto the cobbles. In my head, I mixed up the mechanics I wanted to do. I wanted a resistance roll as a gateway to the Spider’s attack, because Mylera is no pushover, but I screwed up. It’s okay, though, because the Spider was so battered that he was captured and taken up to the Red Sashes’ dungeon…

*… Where the group’s Cutter was just finishing up with what was left of the Sashes’ torturer. We had a brief Pulp Fiction “Butch and Vic” moment. Party gathered, they ventured forth!

* We used our first Flashback to great effect. Our Hound player was absent last night, so the players flashed back to her avoiding guards and inscribing the bottom of Mylera’s vault floor with acid so when the guys cleaned out the ruby (their payment) and trashed Mylera’s art (what they’d been hired to do by the Lampblacks), they were already standing on their escape route. Through the floor and out the door (well, the canals).

* Downtime is brilliant. I really like throwing choices at players, and injecting some Devils’ Bargains into downtime keeps it engaging while really allowing people to get into the sandboxy nature of the game. They paid off their Bluecoat contact to free their broker, who had been taken in for questioning. They set up a long-term project to identify or create a spirit well in the city limits where they could bottle and sell spirits (devil’s bargain: hell yes, and you’ll have to take it from an ally). Finally, the best entanglement wasn’t on the chart: It’s a giant magic ruby. No normal fence can move that kind of thing without heat coming back on them. Someone will have to use their precious downtime actions to find a broker, or they can keep the ruby and figure out how to use it, or do the latter and then maybe the former?

The Dead Setters had their first gameplay session last night after last week’s crew/character creation. Rook the Cutter, Mr. Teatime the Whisper, Deemo the Leech, Guilty the Spider, and Raven the Hound accepted Baszo’s job to steal a specific carved bone idol from Mylera’s art collection. The crew could keep the ruby hidden inside, Baszo said, he just wanted Mylera off-balance at her lair’s weakness and the violation of her personal stuff.

Given that the PC crew was -1 faction status with the Lampblacks as well as the Red Sashes, well, I think they’re expecting a screwjob but it might be a way to earn their way into the Lampblacks’ good graces before they repay the inevitable betrayal.

I felt most adrift during the nebulous setup portion of the session. We fell into this half-planning, half-acting miasma where the actions were framed too theoretically, too loosely to lock it down into “yeah this is a heist”, but felt too risky to just handwave away? I guess a potential answer is “If A (finding the name of Mylera’s “art dealer”) leads to B (kidnapping her and learning the location of the idol) leads to C (stealing the idol), then start with C and use flashbacks”, my question would then be how does one pick a starting situation for C?

We were almost into a Deception plan where Guilty, posing as an art dealer, was distracting Mylera while the rest of the crew snuck in when Deemo’s player helpfully pointed out the “Linked Plan” section. We immediately switched into an Infiltration plan, using the deception as a Setup action, and everything seemed to click.

Once we were in “heist time”, so to speak, things moved a lot more smoothly. The crew snuck into the Red Sash’s base/temple using ghost-infested catacombs. Although their “clean” way through was blocked by a recent cave-in not listed on Guilty’s blueprints, Teatime led them through the haunted tunnels and into the lair proper. A Desperate stick-up ambush/murder and one captive fed to the hungry ghosts beneath the laundry room later, and the Dead Setters were ably disguised as Red Sashes and heading up through the temple.

Rook’s player chose “Stras, a clever blade” as his rival, and earlier he said Stras was a Red Sash. Turns out the dude was hanging out in a common room with a few other Sashes and spotted Rook. Rook blew his Command roll to try to bravado his way through, ended up in a Desperate skirmish with Stras’ sash wrapped around his throat, but managed to put his meat hook (no, not his hands, a literal meat hook) through Stras’ hand and into his eye. One recurring eyepatch villain left for dead: check!

Raven had a knife to Rook’s throat and Teatime managed to Sway the other Sashes with what was essentially the Chewbacca gambit. “Oh, he’s our prisoner now, we’ll take him to get what’s coming to him” and so on. It worked, and the other Sashes gathered up Stras. No doubt they’ll discover their comrade was only horribly maimed at an inopportune time.

Plus, there’s probably a new vampire lurking in the catacombs now.

We stopped there, but I’m confident we’ll be able to finish up this heist and probably get to downtime next week. Roll20 didn’t work for all of us, so we fell back to Hangouts. Those of us that could used Dicestream and anyone who had trouble just used real dice. Screw it.

Reception was overwhelmingly positive, so good job John and Andrew and Adam and Stras and whoever else played the crap out of this game well before my group got to it. 🙂

Feedback of note:

– You get a lot done with a single roll.

– It’s a decent game to play over Hangouts or similar.

– It really does try to minimize planning agony. I think we probably bogged down there this time, and perhaps the wishy-washy shaky feeling I got was warning that we needed to move to the heist itself.

– There are a lot of different sliders for the GM to adjust difficulty without actually changing the rules the players use.

– I felt a little lost again gauging how “tough” to make NPCs. Maybe I should’ve called for a resistance roll before Rook could get close enough to Stras. Maybe? I figure that’s something that comes with practice.

– Assist actions are awesome and fast in play.

– We’re all Fate guys, and we love love love Devil’s Bargain. It’s hard to *not* offer it sometimes, simply to make sure everything doesn’t degenerate into “GTA run from the cops game”.