Session two! This time around, we had one new player, but two other players couldn’t make it for a variety of reasons, so we just stuck to playing with four players. It was a very interesting session, as I decided to create a couple of scenarios that the players could ‘trigger’ by speaking with the correct people, so it gave them freedom to speak to whomever they wanted, but then I already had a preset idea for the person to send them on. It actually worked out really well!
At the beginning of the session, I worked to incorporate how our new character, a very charming, 6′ 10″ hulk of a female Tycheros native. Named Sitre Caedis, the player decided when he sat down with me that a nickname / alias of “Gore” would be the characters nickname. Gore is a Cutter (if you haven’t figured that out) and has quite a drinking problem, and her place of choice is usually the Leaky Bucket. As our Lurk passed by on the way back to the crew headquarters, she noticed people flying out the door and across the street, with whom she soon discovered to be Gore yelling profanities and being kicked out of the tavern for the evening. Pretty commonplace apparently, but Gore was sent by Lyssa to find one of the members of the crew, as Lyssa was hoping she would be a welcoming addition for them in getting up off their feet and building a name for themselves.
So with the four members back at the crew hideout, they all went their different ways for a few. Our Hound and Cutter decided to go speak with the Hound’s bounty hunter connection for any leads she may have (she actually told them to go speak to Lyssa, as it seemed like she had an “itch” that she needed scratched upon their last interaction). The other two characters just sort of went off to a library to do some personal research or whatever they wanted, but after it was all said and done, the four of them met up and decided it would be best to go speak to Lyssa to see if she had a job for them to do.
So, they all headed to the headquarters of the Crows, and after a few friendly shenanigans with the two guards that were on duty at the front door, they head in and find Lyssa, looking like she was ready to murder someone herself, staring thoughtfully out a window. Upon speaking to her, the crew discovered that Lyssa had been constantly wronged by a man named Alexey Mirovich, a deck captain for the Dockers who had mishandled her boats so many times that it was actually beginning to hurt her wallet. She gives them a reference for what she looks like, and very plainly says that she “wanted his skull to be sprayed across the deck” that they found him on, and that she was willing to pay a good amount for the completion of this.
So the group gets together again and decides to do some spotting / information gathering. The Hound and Lurk both head down to the Docks at two separate times, the Hound looking to spot the dock that the target worked on with his pet falcon, although in the end only narrowing down which of the docks he could be located on. After he leaves, the Lurk heads in to sort of deceive (pretending to be a historian / record keeper for a head clerk down in City Hall) her way into finding out the next shipment of a specific boat that, through some rolls, she discovered from a clerk would be handled by Mr. Mirovich. So, after rolling a six, she found out that the next shipment in was due in two days, and that she was more than welcome to come down and “gather the information she needed.”
Now comes the fun part. The group decides to go with an assault plan, as that would make sense for Lyssa’s wants while also using the new Cutter to a greater effect. They all headed on down to the Docks and went up to a booth at the end of the dock that they had discovered the target would be on, speaking to a woman to tell them as to why they were there. She questioned why the Lurk had brought a few other people with her, and she decided to deceive again and state that it was standard practice for a member of City Hall to bring protection and help with her in case of emergency. The worker wasn’t really too skeptical, but by standard practice, sent a hulking guard to escort them to the incoming shipment. The Hound, during all of this, prowled up onto a building across the street with his fine hunting rifle, taking a great position that gave him a full view of the dock (rolled a six).
Low and behold they make a few more rolls to fully discover which of the supervisors present was their target, and the Lurk takes point and asks Mirovich if they could step aside and speak about a couple of questions that she had for him regarding some shipments over the past couple of months. He accepted, but brought another supervisor looking fellow to assist him, and they all stepped off out of the way of everything so that they didn’t interrupt the process of receiving the shipment.
From here, the Hound ends up taking a shot and injuring the main target, while Gore injures him some more and then he proceeds to take another shot to the head to get finished off. While not very quickly, some grunts sort of discover what’s going on, and a panic starts to ensue. The other large guy that came along with Mirovich eventually gets taken down as well, and the group heads down the main deck on their escape, meeting the guard who had escort and engaging him in combat as another grunt comes up to assist him. After some struggle and missed shots, the Cutter ends up landing a 6 on her Mayhem action, and proceeded to roll a crit on her Force effect roll. So she basically went ahead and described how she slammed the sharp side of her hammer-like weapon down through this guys skull, ripped his skull off and then kicked his corpse off the side of the deck and down into the water. At this point as well, the other grunt, through a feat of athleticism from the Lurk, actually got kicked down into the water himself instead of getting killed. The group then made some rolls to make their escape through a smokebomb unseen, and they did so successfully, while the Hound rolled a six and quickly scaled down from the building he was on and headed on his way back to the lair.
From there they just met up with Lyssa, got their rewards, we did some progression and then the session was over. The group had a blast yet again and we finished up (not including the total of about 45 minutes we spent just waiting around for a variety of reasons) in just about 3.5 hours. Overall, was a hell of a session and felt like it went a lot more smoothly than the first session, having a heavy focus on combat instead of sneaking around. I certainly had a blast GMing, as I’m going to be scaling up the difficulty pretty much from session to session, and a lot of the group said that this was the perfect difficulty for the task at hand and really thought that it was more difficult than the first session was.
Will write another post after we complete our third session in two weeks!
