Author: John Perich

Eighth and final session of our playtest / beta (see prior sessions here https://plus.google.com/109896206941346348750/posts/4RDXc2ug28g). The Blackstone Outfit pulled off the biggest heist of their careers, then promptly vanished from the city.

Gameplay notes:

* I was happiest with how this heist came off as a game element: almost zero planning, going straight in. I described the target (an armored carriage going between the Duskwall Mint and the Bluecoats HQ) and checked with the players for when they wanted to act. Generous use of flashbacks created a neat little “plan” ex post facto.

* Question on the setting: are the rifles in the setting muzzle loaders? Lever action? Bolt action?

* Question on gang actions: if a gang takes action and provokes a consequence, who resists with stress and how?

* We decided this would be the last session, since we don’t want to make any more updates to character sheets until the final version comes out. We also hit a good stopping point in the fiction.

As for the events themselves:

The Blackstone Outfit took advantage of the ongoing Iruvian Crisis to rob the overworked Bluecoats. They targeted the Bluecoats’ payroll, robbing an armored carriage as it headed to the Bluecoat HQ and taking only a few bullet wounds in the process.

Back home, the Outfit’s Lurk was assaulted by an Iruvian fire demon encased in enchanted armor (an Inevitant) – the Lurk had been the last person to handle the green mask that they’d planted to frame a copper. Meanwhile, the Whisper and the Cutter were surprised at their clubhouse by Baszo Baz, who had kidnapped Lyssa’s second-in-command and meant to strike at the Crows that evening. (The progress clocks With Friends Like These and Success Breeds Enemies had filled at the start of this session)

Unwilling to take a swing at the Crows, the Outfit murdered Baz to prove their bona fides to Lyssa’s second. They then waited until the Inevitant arrived so it could set their clubhouse on fire, leaving Baz to “die” in a fire rather than by knives. Unable to kill the Inevitant, they fled to a leviathan hunter staffed by the Cutter’s family. The hunter sailed into the ink-black sea, return date unknown …

Session 7 of our ongoing playtest / beta was this past Saturday (prior sessions here https://plus.google.com/109896206941346348750/posts/5G3chRgAKRe and onward). In this session, the Blackstone Outfit (Cutter, Lurk, Whisper) made good on a promise to Baszo Baz and a long simmering crisis boiled over.

Play notes:

* Contrary to last session, I felt very comfortable with my handling of the rules this time. Maybe I was better fed and rested; maybe I’m improving my hold.

* Question on trading coin for downtime: coin can be spent in downtime to either improve results by one notch (4-5 becoming 6, 6 becoming critical, etc) or to buy another action. This past session, we froze up a bit as our Whisper, recovering from two Harm clocks, did the math on whether it’d be more effective to spend coins bumping up his Recovery roll or buying additional Downtime actions (used in further Recoveries). In other words, was it more cost-effective to buy two actions or to invest more heavily in the one?

It’s the sort of min-maxing that I don’t think the game is meant to encourage, and it felt like a weird little exploit. Are we missing something? Will this be ironed out?

* For those newer to or struggling with Fiction First gameplay, a principle that helped me this past session was that no player action is wasted. I didn’t prep anything beyond knowing what the PCs’ target was. Almost everything that unfolded from that unfolded in response to a player’s question or choice. The Whisper wants to investigate the basement? Then there’s something ominous in the basement! The Lurk wants to tail one of the escaping guards? Then that guard’s headed somewhere important and the Lurk had better stop him! And so on. 

This is old hat for PbtA veterans, where structured GM Moves enforce this sort of thing, but I’m still growing into it.

* New setting elements determined this session: rage essence is somehow distilled from the blood of a great warrior in their death throes, and sometimes communicates visions; spirit bottles are lined with the same sort of wards that people put on doors to keep ghosts out, so releasing a ghost from a bottle into a warded area will frenzy it like a cornered rat.

As for the story:

The Outfit had promised to help Baszo Baz finish off the Red Sashes once and for all (an Entanglement last session). Baz’s plan was to disguise the Outfit and his own thugs as Iruvians, raid the Sashes’ new headquarters, and massacre everyone within. The Cutter kicked in the front door with a raiding party and laid waste with his leviathan hammer. The Lurk snuck in through the roof and found that the Lampblacks had reinforcements: armored mercenaries with silver gauntlets (a complication on the Engagement roll). The Whisper snuck in the back door and explored the basement, where he found one of these gauntleted mercenaries imbuing a fresh corpse with the spirit of the Red Sashes’ former swordmaster, Carvalho!

Their massacre successful, the Outfit took some downtime. When they returned to Crows Foot, they found riots breaking out. Apparently, the Iruvians were threatening to blockade the harbor (long-term clock The Iruvian Crisis had filled), and angry mobs were using it as an excuse to wreck and burn local shops. The Outfit checked in on the businesses they “protected.” They then decided to take advantage of reduced Bluecoat presence (they’re temporarily operating at a lower Tier thanks to the Lurk’s long-term project) and the citywide chaos by planning a grand heist: robbing the Bluecoats’ payroll.

Yesterday was session 6 of our ongoing playtest / beta (prior sessions here https://plus.google.com/109896206941346348750/posts/ByfLkp84uDB and onward). In this session, the Blackstone Outfit (a Cutter, a Lurk, and a Whisper) tried to appease the abbess of the Weeping Lady who’s been letting them hide out in the church belfry.

Play notes:

* Going easy on the players can stretch out a heist or a session longer than might be interesting. The players failed or earned consequences on several desperate rolls this session, and I realized afterward that I gave them normal harm (level 2) more often than severe harm (level 3). After staging this down with resistance or armor, this most often left them at level 1 or nothing. They weren’t able to make any progress against the core mission clock, but they weren’t really compelled to withdraw, either. Really it’s my own damn fault for not being cruel enough.

* Said this before, but again I found myself at a loss for consequences as a mission stretched into later rounds. Since almost every roll requires a consequence (1-5), please provide extensive lists of examples in the final product! (I probably don’t need to overthink this as much as I do, but I get tired of saying “the goon bashes you” as a consequence)

* We had our first trauma this session! Scooped up for interrogation (Entanglement), our Lurk botched his resistance roll and took enough stress to push him over the edge. He emerged from the jail obsessed with taking the Bluecoats down for the indignities they visited on him.

* Our players really like the new stress and Vice rules. Now they have dueling incentives to take some stress but not too much, keeping it in a sensitive range.

* Question: do harm penalties apply to rolls to recover from harm? Or to any downtime rolls? I ruled “no” to the former and punted on the latter, but could use an official ruling.

* Also a question: the new recovery rules suggest a roll to recover from harm is optional (if justified in the fiction) but not necessary. I adjudicated this by giving the PCs a 4-wedge clock to recover from their normal harms. After they narrated how they were treating their harms – the Cutter visiting a barber to get a bullet removed; the Whisper treating his head wound with leviathan blood – I offered them either a standard 2 wedges on the recovery clock, or the chance to roll for an “experimental treatment.” The Whisper rolled and got the same 2 wedges anyway; the Cutter opted to play it safe.

* I find myself getting confused on gang Quality. In the initial QS, Quality was the number of dice your gang rolled. However, for every other asset, Quality impacts effect, not available dice, and for every other Crew trait, Tier is the number of dice you roll. It would help me keep it straight if this were standardized, or explained in a way I could remember.

* Maybe it was hunger or fatigue, but at the end of the session, I found myself a little confused with all the rules to keep in mind. It’s likely a function of the PCs having enough XP to unlock more Thief and Crew special abilities. This led to a lot of questions – “how do engagement rolls work again? Is getting a bonus on engagement rolls worth more than Fine Building Plans?” – that I was stumped on.

I know that, for a fiction-first game, I should only be using the mechanics that make sense. However, when a player takes a special ability that uses a mechanic I employ rarely or never (engagement rolls, hunting grounds, gather information), I have to either (A) warn them off, (B) start incorporating that mechanic just to give them the bonus, or (C) let them waste the slot. Those are descending order of preference, by the way.

I’m sure this will be addressed in the final release, where the rules are organized and full of useful examples. But last night was the closest I came to saying, “Okay, we’re doing the same setting, but using Fate Accelerated. New character sheets next time!”

* Still a fan!

As for the session itself:

The Blackstone Outfit was perilously close (3/4) to being kicked out of their secret hideout, the belfry of the Church of the Weeping Lady in Crow’s Foot. They persuaded the Abbess to throw a fete, while secretly planning to summon a ghost that would emerge from the Weeping Lady statue outside the church at the height of the festivities. This “miracle,” they hoped, would get asses in the pews.

However, the Outfit’s cohort of touts and barkers (the Crow’s Foot Penny Show) had zero luck in flyering the neighborhood. The players decided that the date of the festival conflicted with the Feast of the Mortification, a big celebration for the Cult of the Ecstasy of the Flesh. Unwilling to abandon their sunk costs, the Outfit decided to wreck the Cult’s feast instead.

Highlights:

* The Lurk tried to plant a bomb in the hand-cranked tumbler that Cult loyalists drew from to get their rite for the day (sometimes you’re the dom; sometimes you’re the sub). He lost the bomb, unfortunately, and drew the lot for psychedelic herbal fumigation. A smoking pot was thrust under his gaping jaw and he passed out for a bit.

* The Whisper compelled their summoned ghost to manifest when the Lord and Lady of the Ecstatic Rites were about to be announced, so that everyone was watching the stage. This worked, but drew the attention of the Cult’s own plasmic sensitives: the Exultants, shirtless flagellants who wore iron halo vests screwed into their skulls and collarbones. The Whisper fled, but not before he was pasted with a viscous gel that numbed his attuned senses.

* The Abbess had insisted that the Cutter take a novitiate along with them, so the two of them were haranguing orgy participants from a street corner. The Cutter fought off some Cult enforcers.

* The Outfit finally kicked the Feast from a riot to a full-blown rout when they arranged for every Cult icon hanging in the square to ignite simultaneously (Flashback to their cohort rigging some fuses).

This past Saturday was the fifth session of our continuing playtest / beta (fourth and prior sessions here: https://plus.google.com/109896206941346348750/posts/CwT8My6gbV1). The Blackstone Outfit added a Lurk to their ranks, in addition to the Cutter and Whisper. We used the v4 QS rules for the first time.

Notes:

* I made the most conscious effort to play fiction first this session, out of any of the prior sessions, and really enjoyed the experience! Rather than immediately plonking down progress wheels as soon as the heist was set out, I let the gameplay proceed like a conversation. When an obstacle emerged, I asked what the PCs wanted to do, then set a roll and position as appropriate. Only when I wanted to linger on the scene for more than a beat did I impose a progress clock.

(I know the above is Narrative Roleplaying 101, but it’s still a rhythm that I struggle with! Please include lots of examples of play in the final product to help GMs like me)

* Fiction first is definitely helpful when deciding which of the game’s many mechanics to apply. As an example: the Outfit was trying to disable a hullspider. After the Cutter cracked its metallic exterior, the Lurk said he would pour ball bearings into its insides to jam up the works. The Cutter wanted to help by grabbing the hullspider’s scything legs and pinning it down. We initially thought that might be a group action, but balked since the Cutter and the Lurk were doing two different things. The Whisper, who’s been very diligent about reading the rules, suggested this was better as an assist, and we all agreed.

* This is a high-class problem to have, but I often find myself getting stumped for complications in the climactic final third of a scene. All the PCs are harmed, position is already desperate, and the reinforcements that we set as a countdown clock (in an earlier complication) have already shown up!

* With that said, I found a lot of uses for the Lost an Opportunity complication in this past session. The Whisper’s failed attempt to cut an armed guard (Skirmish) meant the guard pinned his arms against the wall (lost the opportunity to further Skirmish). And I was able to slow down the Cutter’s murderous rampage when the Whisper threw a bottled ghost at him.

* Another vote for the beauty of progress clocks as an all-purpose mechanic. The crew’s job was to raid the Bluecoats’ evidence locker. They snuck past the guards up front with no bloodshed or suspicion – a first for them – so I put them in the evidence room with a progress clock called Loot. Every wedge they filled would be 2 Coin worth of goods hauled off. The obstacle was the chaotic disorganization of the room: no clear system to the shelves, no obvious labels for what was valuable. Potential complications included added load (if they looted something valuable but heavy) and wasted time (someone has to come down to enter some evidence eventually).

* I made explicit the house rule that effect lives between Limited and Great – in other words, a successful roll will never fill less than 1 wedge or more than 3. This is mostly to save me the math and discourage PCs from spending too much time hunting for bonuses (which can slow down play).

* UPDATE: forgot to add: this was the first session I felt engagement rolls or fortune rolls were interesting enough to merit use! So that’s a big improvement for v4!

As for the session itself: the Blackstone Outfit snuck into the Bluecoats’ station via an abandoned dock ramp. Disguised as coppers themselves, they bluffed their way down to the evidence room – a large cell in the abandoned dungeon beneath the station, guarded by a hullspider. They smashed the hullspider and cracked the cell lock, only to be baffled by the disorganized shelves. They took a decent haul, but had to fight their way past several Bluecoats and a police Whisper. With further reinforcements bearing down, the Outfit opened a ghost door to an unknown location …

This past Saturday was the fourth session of the playtest / beta that I’ve been running (third session and prior linked here: https://plus.google.com/109896206941346348750/posts/djWkRsypGvp) with a Cutter and a Whisper.

Feedback:

* We upgraded everyone to the v3 final character sheets. The Cutter missed Handle being gone, but we figured it was now smeared between Tinker and Finesse. The Whisper was happy to see Invoke go.

* One thing I tried this session was ignoring unities of time to make a challenge more interesting. The crew improved their turf by clearing some drug dealers off an abandoned boardwalk. Every challenge had been dealt with but the addicts who loitered in the area (progress clock “Our Loyal Customers” at 2/4). Since the last big triumph had been a rousing victory over some goons, it felt weird to dial the energy down and say “okay, now go roust these junkies.”

So, instead, we narrated that the crew retreated to their hideout, considering the mission “successful,” and planning to return the next day to set up shop. When they arrived the next morning, though, they found a crowd of addicts pawing through the drug dealers’ burnt-out shop, desperate for adulterated leviathan blood. Resolving the last 2/4 of the progress clock was the tragicomic denouement.

This was revelatory for me. Rather than insisting a “mission” is a discrete unit of time and space – you can’t leave the “mission zone” until all the challenges are three-starred! – I let the narrative unfold, inspired by the remaining challenges.

* Sidenote: in our Duskwall, the tell for leviathan blood addiction is bony protrusions (like the narwhal horn leviathans are known for). Junkies get sharply pronounced cheekbones and ridged knuckles, with actual bone spurs jutting from their hands in the terminal stages.

* I’m getting better at adjudicating effect size for combat challenges, but still need a better gauge for everything else. Is the Whisper’s attempt at parlay low potency or medium potency? This will come with time, I’m sure.

* And, per my comments last time, I finally found a way to challenge the Cutter in combat: have the victim run away. He had fun regardless, declaring that his “unusual weapon” was a bola (“got it from some bleedin’ savage on ‘un of me last hauls, and I just been ACHIN’ to try it!”).

As for the events themselves:

The Blackstone Outfit improved their hold by clearing some drug dealers off an abandoned boardwalk. The Cutter smashed goons with his leviathan hammer, while the Whisper called up an unintentionally potent ghost to spook the addicts. Though the dealer’s suppliers – a gang of Leviathan Hunters – showed up as reinforcements, the crew sent them packing, earning another enemy in the process.

Realizing that the Crows were going to demand answers or tribute from them soon, the Outfit asked the Lampblacks to arrange a sitdown. They met Lyssa in a private dining room above the Leaky Bucket, with Mylera Klev of the Red Sashes also in attendance. Though Lyssa was intimidating, the Outfit managed to bluster the Red Sashes into embarrassed silence and argued their value to the Crows. Lyssa agreed to take them under her countenance on two conditions. First, the Outfit was to rob the Bluecoats’ evidence locker. Second, the Outfit was to bring in, alive, the mastermind of the “Green Masks”, the nativists who had attacked the Iruvians at a recent council gala, so that Lyssa could appease the Inspectors.

The Outfit knew that they themselves were the “Green Masks,” having staged the attack to occupy the Inspectors. But they agreed to provide a living head honcho to interrogate nevertheless.

This past Saturday, I hosted and ran the third session of the game I’ve recapped previously (1st session: https://plus.google.com/109896206941346348750/posts/11JSxdSVw26; 2nd session: https://plus.google.com/u/0/109896206941346348750/posts/d2CCb1YQVh9). Our notes and reactions on this session below:

– We really need more numerous and more varied Entanglement results. Twice this past session, they rolled “Demonic Notice” for an Entanglement. The first time, I re-skinned it as a vampire, as they had a vampire contact who had reason to pester them. The third time, I substituted my own Entanglement. Considering they’d already rolled Demonic Notice last session, this feels too frequent. (Unless Demons are supposed to be this ubiquitous in the setting?)

– Having progress clocks as a universal metric opens up a lot of possibilities. Example: there was an NPC project clock for the Red Sashes to find the crew’s secret hideout that was 6/8 full. The crew staged a ghost-laden terror raid to break the Sashes’ morale. I created clocks for the Sashes’ security and other complications, but just borrowed the existing 6/8 NPC project clock as the “centerpiece” of the job. I explained that the crew’s efforts would erase wedges in this clock, rather than creating a new “Red Sashes’ Morale Broken” clock. If they got the NPC project clock to 0, the Red Sashes would give up.

– I need to get better at encouraging PCs to resist consequences. It’s easy for a player to understand rolling against stress to resist harm (“the ghost leers in your face; roll Resolve or take standard harm”). It’s harder to narrate how a player can roll against stress to resist other consequences, like a countdown clock being filled (“the rival crew gets a step closer to the MacGuffin, unless you roll … um …”). I found a few ways to work it in last session, but I’m still flexing it.

– A properly built Cutter just can’t be threatened in combat, can they? Brutal grants potency on all attacks; Not To Be Trifled With lets them ignore scale; and if they’re toting a fine heavy weapon armor’s not an issue.

– Will the final rules have more articulation on what a devil’s bargain constitutes? This session, I realized that my prior devil’s bargains had been a little soft: hinting at future trouble, rather than establishing immediate, concrete trouble.

– We all like the blend of distinct moves and creative narration. The PCs frequently get in trouble and rarely have lasting success, but since every danger or devil’s bargain enmeshes them further in the world, they don’t mind. I described the rules structure as rigidly defined channels leading to wide-open rooms, and they seemed to agree on that take.

As for the session itself:

As alluded to above, the Blackstone Outfit dissuaded the Red Sashes from hunting them by summoning the ghost of their murdered fencing master and siccing him on the school. The resulting terror, aided by the Cutter laying into the fleeing students, broke the gang’s morale.

To get the Inspectors off their tail, the Blackstone Outfit invented a larger, fictitious threat that would occupy their time: a nativist gang called the “Green Masks” who would terrorize a Duskwall Council gala hosting the Iruvian delegation. The plan was to smash the guards, graffito the gala ballroom, and steal the ceremonial neckpieces that every highborn Iruvian wears. Unfortunately, a mysterious rival crew showed up to steal the neckpieces as well! The “Green Masks” caused sufficient chaos to merit every Inspector being reassigned to track them down, taking the pressure off the Blackstone Outfit for the moment.

During downtime, the Whisper’s patron, Lord Skurlock the vampire, asked him to supply a source of fresh corpses. The Whisper conned his way into a hospital and spirited off some bodies before the Crematorium could get their hands on them. Meanwhile, the Cutter learned that the Red Sashes, unwilling to confront the Blackstone Outfit directly, had tattled to their mutual masters, the Crows …