I ran my first session of Blades last night via Roll20 and it seemed to go well, despite my nervousness beforehand.
My crew of Assassins consists of:
– a Skovland ex-soldier Cutter
– a Tycherosi Whisper with dagger like long fingernails
– an Iruvian bounty hunter Hound
– an Akorosi Leech who grew up in the Docks district of Duskvol
– a dashing rogue Lurk who was disowned by his (minor) Duskvol noble family
The currently un-named crew was hired by their contact Lady Iremina Kinclaith to enact revenge upon the Dunfield noble family after Iremina’s husband and son were killed and their family holdings were taken from them by the Dunfields.
Initially, she wanted the crew to slaughter everyone at the Dunfield manor, but they argued that their Honorable reputation of not killing innocents would mean that would be too far.
Settling for them killing Lord Dunfield and his eldest son Timoth, she offered them a bonus if they “made the deaths spectacular” and a second bonus if they returned a stolen heirloom sword from the Dunfield vault.
The Lurk used his remaining noble contacts to find out and confirm some of the background between the two families and the Hound tracked the route that the Dunfields took between their manor and their businesses.
Rather than ambushing their targets as they travelled, they instead chose to infiltrate a party at the Dunfield manor as, in the words of the Leech, “it’d be more spectacular if they died in front of all those other nobles”.
The Leech, with assistance by the Lurk, forged a party invite and the group proceeded to the manor house, the Hound taking up overwatch position in a nearby abandoned building.
At the gates, their forged invite was noticed and they were pulled aside by guards (they got a 1 on their engagement roll) by a great Command roll from the Cutter forced their way past the guards.
Inside the party, they split up a little to track down their two targets and to try to find where the heirloom was. The Leech got noticed poking around and was being “escorted” in the direction of the guard house when he jabbed the guard arresting him with a syringe of a paralytic poison, escaping to rejoin the group.
The Lurk decided that the best way to locate the vault was to sweet talk one of the residents and set his eyes on Lady Dunfield. Whether due to it being a loveless marriage or some other reason, she took him up to one of the bedrooms for a little “chat”, not knowing that her husband had seen them heading into the room.
After pumping the Lady for information, Lord Dunfield was about to charge in and demand a duel from the caddish Lurk, but the Cutter decided that this was a perfect opportunity. He grabbed Lord Dunfield as he stormed towards the bedroom and flung himself and the Lord off the upper floor balcony, avoiding harm on impact but seriously hurting Lord Dunfield.
At the same time as this occurred and the panic started, the Hound shot at Timoth through the window, almost taking him out in a single shot while the Whisper summoned a ghost, ordering it to scare the guards away.
The Cutter finished off Lord Dunfield, taking the man’s head off but receiving a slice to the side in return and the Hound attempted to finish off Timoth but missed badly killing a young noble woman accidentally (this will come back to haunt them in the future).
As the Lurk and the Leech headed off to open the vault and recover the heirloom sword, the Whisper headed over to Timoth as he lay on the ground in pain and finished him off by gouging the young man’s eyes out.
Under the cover of smoke bombs, a ghost swooping around and a general screaming panic of nobles, our crew made their escape barely ahead of the Bluecoats arriving on the scene.
———
Unfortunately, we ran out of time to run downtime in the first session, but we’ll do that at the start of the next one whenever we have time to schedule it.
I know that I messed up a few rules along the way, especially with forgetting to let the players know they could resist some of the consequences for some early rolls, but people seemed to have fun and I enjoyed reacting to the insanity that the players came up with.
I also realise that 5 PCs is a lot to manage when figuring out what opposition there will be for a score.