So, at long last, I held a game of BitD in the game convention of my town, RolEnQuart…
I tried to get up to speed with the modifications of the last qs3.3. I made a translation of the sheets (too rushed) and read the main changes. And so we went ahead…
PREPPING:
-We played the game at night, quite late, and after a long day of work as volunteers in the con by half my players, so most of us were very tired…That resulted in a quite rocky start. There were plenty of jokes, and at first I thought that it was gonna be impossible to play a half serious game… The jokes about the names of some characters or places, and about the sound of “electroplasmic” in spanish were plenty… Somehow, Brynna became Britney Spears… not sure how… We were tired and needed a little bit of fun, but for a little bit I was worried that we were not gonna be able to play properly… But at some point we found balance between the jokes and the seriousnes of the setting…
– It took awhile to create the characters, but it helped me to introduce the setting a little bit, so I think it was worth it. Some of them just rolled a d6 to see their heritage and made things up based on what I told them about the island they got.
– Finally we got to the point of establishing the Score. I used Sean Nittner Gaddoc Rail as a base, because i felt it was quick and quite straightforward to play in a convention. The one in the QS seems too open, and with maybe too many factors to take into account for a first session within a con…
– We didn’t create a crew sheet, mostly for that very same reason. I explained about how the game usually was based around making a name for your gang in the underworld, but just talked a little bit about the gangs when we decided who was the Patron fot the score.
THE SCORE
– I spoke quite a bit about the relevance of ghosts and spirits in this world, and the fact that all the playbooks had some abilities related with ghosts helped a lot. They decided that the score was a she instead of an It. They had been hired by the Crows to kidnap a little girl that arrived to the station aboard the Argonaut. The little girl was the vessel for a very old spirit of noble origin (they compared it to the Queen Elizabeth I of England) that thanks to some magic was still mostly herself, being able to endure for hundred of years inside young girls descended from her original bloodline.The ghost had knowledge that could help to overthrown the empire if it fell in the wrong hands.
– From what they knew, the spirit was contained thanks to an old painting imbued with magic energy that made the spirit dormant if it within eyesight of the girl.
– They decided to approach the station from the canals, by boat, and later getting into the sewer system that would connect to the main station…The entanglement roll was quite good, and they got there without much trouble.
– Eventually the found out that even in the sewers a few security measures had been initiated, and that the the point of the sewers that serve as an entry point to the underbelly of the station had electroplasmatic walls that had been activated recently. They were able to deactivate it, cross it, and activate it again without alarming anyone, apparently.
– Once on the station proper, most of the lights were out, and the ones that were on kept blinking on and off.There were signs of panic everywhere. Luggage spread all over the corridors, stalls taken down… But nobody to be seen.
– They got to the Argonaut. It seemed battered on the outside, and some wagons seemed to have been breached…
– They went inside and found the room in which the girl was supossed to be. The butler/bodyguard of the girl was dead, The eyes somehow imploded, and the mouth stretched and broken… And he had what seemed to be a hole in the chest… alienlike, something had broken out from within…
– They found iron manacles, spread on the floor, near a chair that was facing what used to be a painting, that had been shredded.
– They found bloodied footprints from who they supossed was the little girl. They explored the rest of the train, and found lots of corpses, with the same damage that the butler on their eyes and mouths… but not on their chests.
– Eventually they found the little girl, scared and hidden, in a room used by the railjacks as armoury in the last wagon. She seemed free of all possesion…
– Meanwhile, one of them saw what seemed to be a wave of ghost approaching their wagon. They couldnt go back the way they had arrived, because the ghost wave cut their path…
– Just as in the sewers, an electroplasmatic wall had been activated that made sure that no spirits run out of the station in case of an outbreak…(because.. why not). One of the players decided that it was faster to try to blow out that wall and get out of the station that way that facing the horde of spirits approaching them.. so he took the girl and run out of the train, toward the electroplasmatic field security wall.
– he got quiclky surrounded by the horde, but it seemed that none of them wanted to get too close to the girl. The other pcs took a little bit to decide to go along with them, so when they finally did, they had to cross a wall of howling ghosts.
– The pc that run with the girl had just one arm (because he thought it was cool), and after trying to keep hold of the very nervous little girl and fighting the ghosts at the same time, he decided to first knock out the girl, and then make a path toward the electroplasmatic wall, with the hope that once it was down the ghost would run havok on the city and leave them alone…(open the pandora box!!)
– But once the girl was knocked out, most of the ghost spread away, except an old and dangeorus looking one, that attacked the pcs, especially the one that had hit the girl, of course…
– Eventually they made the ghost to posses the girl again, and knocked her out. That was the moment when a team of rail jacks along with bluecoats started coming toward their position, making a sweep of the station and hunting and destroying any ghost they encountered. – One of the pcs used a flashback to establish that she was ready to look as one of the travelers in the argonaut, another one was able to get back into the sewers with the knocked out possesed girl. and the last two had to run from the bluecoats toward some office buildings inside the station, where they finally got away from the station after blowing up some outside wall, not before being identified and blamed for all that had happened on the station…
ABOUT THE RULES
– I liked the original effect system, but I’ve to admit that the new version is more streamlined and works quite well. It was really easy for the players to grab the action and effect system now.
– They suffered a few consequences, took advantage of the devils bargain, and realized how fast they could lose the pc if they played too loose with the stress system. It was just a one shot, but they spend a lot of stress.
– I never got to the point of asking for Resistance rolls. Didnt feel like I needed them, but I will check the rules again to see when should i have used them.
– I also noticed, almost at the last minute before starting, that teamwork had been changed as well… I waited a little bit before explaining both this and the flashbacks.But they got them pretty fast and used them a couple of times.
– I explained quickly the concepts of Heat and Hold, but barely,and just regarding to the fiction. In case we ever play again maybe we can pick up where we left and see the consequences of what happened, mechanically speaking…
– In general they enjoyed the game, and thought that the system was fun to play.
– One thing I usually do when playing games about tension and scary situations… While they talk about their next move i start to knock on the table, no very loudly, the beat of the master from Doctor Who. Sometimes they dont even notice… But most of the times, when I do this, there’s always someone who starts to get nervous.. I found out that it helps to build up the tension… I let them speak a bit and try to decide what to do, but the beat it’s a reminder that something wicked it’s coming…
