Author: Jacob Kent

Here is a write-up of session two of the Low Hangers from last Wednesday!

Our game began with resolving previous session downtime activities. Bartholomew used his connections with some urchins from a Weeping Lady orphanage to spy around the Gaddoc Rail Station where a terminal is under Bluecoat quarantine after an Electrorail pulled in with a car full of passengers sick with a Slumber Plague outbreak. One child finds a service tunnel and sees that the Bluecoats are not delivering the aid brought by the Weeping Lady to the affected train passengers, instead they are waiting for them to die. There is also a Spirit Warden present who has set up wards and an anchor to cordon the souls on the rail car. The boy leaves the station but not before he notices a trio of Whispers slipping into the same service shaft he used. He listens as much as he can without being caught and determines that this is a new crew of spirit traders that are going to attempt to nab these souls for themselves before the Spirit Warden can dispose of them all.

The crew meets up with their broker Amancio and gets word of a new job that came down from some powerful folks, a job with absolutely no room for mistakes. In the cellar of the Mansion of the Duke de Mondallet in Six Towers Ward there is a safe that contains heirloom jewels and a large book. The book is very important to the client, but the crew can have the jewels. The job comes with info; the house is very heavily guarded and warded but there is a ball to be held and it is the perfect opportunity to strike. 

The plan chosen is deception and they will walk right in the front door. Edlun dresses in his finest formal-wear with Bart and Skovi disguised as his servants. The first flashback is to their newly promoted “friend’s” office, Inspector Orlan. The Crew asks if he might know of anything that could defeat wards. Orlan, still thinking they might be involved with the Spirit Wardens somehow, provides a spiritbane charm that looks like a silver ingot with baby teeth imbedded in it at strange angles and a small vial of electroplasm. Bart will carry them. Back at the front door, the butler asks for an invitation. A Flashback to Edlun’s mysterious (to the other players) background easily obtains an invitation, “Earl Birch Rowan, the butler announces as he gestures Edlun into the ball. At this point we queued up Oceans 11 montage music and cut to a flashback of the crew looking at stolen blueprints of the house to determine the cellar location. Edlun begins schmoozing near the buffet and  Bart and Skovi go down into the cellar to locate the safe. Unfortunately they don’t see a safe, just a lot of wine casks. Their poking around draws the attention of the maitre dis who asks what they are doing. Skovi rolled to resist consequences and the maitre dis turns from them with a scowl as a more pressing matter is announced to him back up stairs. The boys finally find a hidden door behind a wine rack that leads to descending stairs. Down below, in a large damp labyrinth of vaults and crates, they stumble onto a watchman’s body with the back of his skull freshly crushed in. Someone else is clearly down here with them. They locate the safe rather easily and Bart goes to work with his wrecking tools. Skovi covers him and hears a strange series of noises down the hall. Upon peeking around the corner he sees a faint glow and moves cautiously to investigate. Suddenly he is violently tackled by a snarling black eyed half rotten man that moves almost too fast to see. Luckily the thing broke Skovi’s lantern when it landed on top of him. It burned his arm, but caused the beast to fall back in fear just long enough for Skovi to draw and fire both his fine pistols, killing it immediately. As he returns, Bart is finishing up with the safe, “Skovi why are you making so much noise? This is a robbery!” Bart opens the safe door and gasps as his spiritbane charm becomes impossibly cold to the touch, he also notices the vial of electroplasm is now empty. Shrug, “I guess that’s that.” Inside the safe are the jewels as promised, and a large, old, finely bound tome entitled “On the Study and Practice of Spirit Manipulation”. At this point the duo decides to investigate and they discover the glow from earlier is coming from a sewer tunnel beyond a smashed in wall, probably where the thing came from. Suddenly they hear footsteps so they duck into the sewer tunnel and prepare to fight. “Skoooooooovi?” They hear Edlun drunkenly calling out for them. Bart manhandles him into the tunnel and they make their way down the tunnel until it lets out in a canal very near where they just so happened to have left their boat. Another successful job by the Low Hangers!

During downtime Skovi overindulges in his lust for isolation and wanders off into the Deadlands. His bounty-hunter friend Casta gets worried and goes looking for him but gets picked up by the Bluecoats on her way out of the city. Luckily she doesn’t spill anything of value to the boys in blue before they release her but Skovi definitely owes her one. Bartholomew heads back to Gaddoc Station to see if there has been any more moves by the new gang of spirit freaks. Meanwhile, Edlan overindulges in some of his finest wines. He goes off the deep end into a morose fit and wanders into the streets. No one has seen him since, but he gets that way when he’s in his moods. 

Definitely still getting the hang of the rules but it is beginning to be much more intuitive. I feel the rules are very good at contributing to immersion, unlike a great deal of rpg’s where they get in the way. Can’t wait until this weeks session! 

Here is an actual play from our first session last week.

 We started off with character creation and ended up with Edlun the Slide, Bartholomew the Cutter, and Sven Lundvik Gunderson vund Serndivik AKA Skovi who was a Hunter. We then moved on to crew creation using the Thieves crew book to establish the Low Hangers. Creation time for crew and players took about an hour with some setting discussion thrown in as well. Pretty darn good for starting a new system.

We jumped straight into the action with a meeting with Amancio, their broker contact. Amancio runs an art gallery but acts a middle man between the underworld crews and the rich clients with too much class to deal directly with criminals. Amancio fed them a new job from Brynna Skyrkallan, the Duskwall diplomat of Skovlan. Apparently an inspector with a hatred for all Skovlanders, but especially the refugees in Duskwall, was setting up innocent Skovland immigrants and having them falsely convicted in order to get them off the streets. Brynna needed some kind of hard evidence to take to the Duskwall Council in order to protect her countrymen. Skovi, being a true blue blooded Skovlander was the first to agree to the job.

The crew’s first action was to discover how the Inspector was convicting these innocents. This was easily done by Skovi dropping some questions in the immigrant community. Apparently the Inspector was planting a terrible new drug on them in order to force arrests. The drug itself was known as Ash and was a derivative of the raw remains of a corpse after being cremated with Electroplasm. When consumed, Ash delivers an intense and addictive hallucination consisting of the strongest memories of the deceased. (Needless to say the Spirit Wardens will not tolerate anyone in possession of the substance.) Armed with this knowledge the crew was immediately ready to act; they wouldn’t just be providing the good Madam Skyrkallan with dirt on the Inspector, they would be eliminating the problem altogether. Edlun used his lady love, the woman of the night, Nyryx to lead them in the direction of an ambitious Bluecoat client of hers, Orlan, that may want to knock a fellow law enforcer out of the way to make room for his promotion. With the constable identified they set up a meet and Edlun let his Sway run wild while Bartholomew loomed hulking behind him to put a little intimidation into the deal. Edlun laid out the whole story of the Inspector and the drugs and let slip some details to make Orlan think that MAYBE he had something to do with a Spirit Warden investigation into the Ash trade. Now Orlan was under the impression he was dealing with something bigger than his current pay grade and  was sure if he helped out he would be justly rewarded. He decided to leave immediately to take the Inspector into custody, with the Ash in his flat as evidence of his corruption.

 Here we ran a short flashback scene in order to ensure there WAS Ash in the Inspector’s flat. Skovi and Bartholomew would break in through a window while Edlun tried to draw attention away by arguing with a food vendor across the street. The operation was successful and they were able to plant the drugs, but a passing Dock worker caught sight of them and demanded 1 coin to keep his mouth shut. Flashing forward to the present, Orlan and his squad kick in the door of the flat and arrest the outraged Inspector after finding a large stash of illicit drugs in his pillow. The Duskwall Daily Crier headlines the next day were a tell-all about the heroic Orlan who was promoted for his honorable duties arresting a corrupted official and ensuring justice reigns in Duskwall again. Needless to say Brynna was more than happy and the crew gained a little extra rep for going above and beyond. We did a quick run through Payoff, Entanglements and  downtime actions but saved most of it for later discussion.

All in all we played a little fast and loose with the rules since it was our first foray but tried to get a good baseline familiarity with the mechanics and it was a really good introduction to Blades in the Dark. One thing I am doing to help make the city seem a little more alive is sending out a “Word on the Street” and a “Duskwall Daily Crier” message between each session.

The word on the street is to keep the crew in the know on underworld events, such as the war in Crow’s Foot. This works well to communicate Faction Clock events that might become public. The Duskwall Daily Crier message serves as a means to communicate city-wide public events that the crew might be interested in. In this weeks case it was an electrorail car quarantine at the station after reports of plague on board. 

Last night we had our second session, so if there is any interest in the future capers of the Low Hangers I’ll write another synopsis to share.