Author: John Perich

I played session #2 with the crew referenced here: https://plus.google.com/109896206941346348750/posts/11JSxdSVw26  We were using the GenCon draft still, since I didn’t want to spend time re-allocating everyone’s Action dots.

Notes and feedback:

* It feels like a lot of the Entanglement options repeat. Twice in the last session, we rolled some variant of “someone you know got nabbed; they either spill details to the Bluecoats or you pay 2 Coin”. On one of those occasions, I substituted “The Inspectors” instead of “The Bluecoats,” since the crew was already at war with the Inspectors.

* The abstraction of Effect and the factors that weigh in on it is handy, but takes some getting used to, and a lot of trust between players and GM. Our Cutter had a habit of wading into mobs with his big leviathan maul. With a successful roll, there’d be some quick tallying, followed by an “eh,” and a number of wedges filled. “Well, you’re brutal, and it’s a fine heavy weapon, but you’re outnumbered, so the heaviness doesn’t really matter, so … three wedges? Yeah, three wedges.”

(Thankfully, the Cutter took whatever ability lets him ignore mob scale with his advancement, so that’s one less factor I need to worry about)

* Realizing the “Controlled / Risky / Desperate” spectrum was my easiest way of dialing difficulty up or down was the biggest eye-opener for me.

* I couldn’t find anywhere in my version of the QS that explicitly says “when a crew’s Heat fills up, erase it all and give them a level of Wanted.” Is that how it works? Some other way?

* I still love Devil’s Bargains. “Half of your notes are Devil’s Bargains and complications!” one player lamented.

* There’s no Stitch in the latest version of the rules, which led our players to wonder how the Whisper could help the Cutter recover from his severe harm. We settled on Tinker (stitching is stitching, right?).

As for the actual events of the session:

– To prevent the Inspectors from burning down the glazier they were extorting, the Blackstone Outfit brawled them in the streets, summoning a demon in the process. That demon later showed up (Entanglement: Demonic Pact), asking the Whisper to get it a child, since apparently demonic possession ages a body unnaturally fast. The Whisper snuck a child out of an insane asylum (“it’s no WORSE off!”) and led it back to the demon secretly, since the Cutter and the rest of the gang would have nothing to do with it.

– To ease off the coming war with the Inspectors, the crew decided to break into the house of the corrupt Inspector who was hounding them and steal something personal – her heirloom saber. A series of escalations too numerous to list led to the Whisper going catatonic through ghostly hallucination (severe harm), the Cutter murdering the Inspector he meant to merely stun (serious complication), and her house being set on fire (serious complication).

– The Blackstone Outfit tiered up (tier 0 to tier 1). While laying low from their misadventures with the corrupt Inspector, a lot of local thugs and miscreants were talking them up in the street. They emerged from hiding to find a few more young toughs at their disposal. Nothing helps you keep a low profile like thugs who want to murder more cops.

– Coming up: the Red Sashes’ “Find The Blackstone Outfit’s Secret Hideout” clock is one wedge short of completion, the Inspectors look for a subtler way to deal with this murderous new gang, and that bone carving in the shape of a cresting leviathan that the Cutter nicked has to come up somehow …

GMed my first game with the QSv3 (Gencon draft) yesterday. I may post a more narrative write-up on a blog later; for now, my system-related notes.

– The players struggled with the flow of teamwork at first, in part due to my failure to articulate it. Next time, I may say, “Think of it as ‘initiative for a game with no NPC die-rolling” and see if that helps.

– The act of answering questions to fill in the setting produced some gems! I hope that the final version doesn’t spell out too much more of the city.

(E.g., the Whisper asked, “how does anyone do medical research, if bodies have to be seized and cremated within hours of death?” Our answer: “illegally!”, and the Whisper’s Vice of “dissecting corpses to learn anatomy” was born)

– Both players were familiar with and comfortable with the idea of escalating danger as a drive to narrative. So they took a lot of devil’s bargains and suffered consequences without bothering to resist.

– I’ve seen guidelines elsewhere for how many clocks to give the players to challenge them. For now, I can say that 4 segments per player (e.g., two 4-clocks for two PCs) is a cakewalk, especially if they get one controlled roll.

– For Overindulgence costs, neither player could ever see themselves pawning off every item they own save one as a cost. They were happy to Overindulge and temporarily lose access, as they immediately set out a Long Term Project of finding a new supplier.

(The Cutter’s vice was Obligation: his wife and kids elsewhere in the city. When he got kicked out for coming home with stolen goods – again – his LTP was to get back into his wife’s good graces)

– I struggled to explain resistance under the new rules. “Okay, so you take an action, and it may or may not succeed, and even if it succeeds, you might get reduced effect or suffer a consequence, and if you suffer a consequence, you have the opportunity to resist it …” Eyes glazed shortly before that part. 

– I didn’t find the engagement roll useful. They rolled 2d and got a bad result, meaning … the score would be hard? I’d already planned to make the score hard for them; this told me nothing.

– I ran into an issue others have noted, in that the ubiquity of ghosts and electroplasm make Attune very broadly useful. Thinking on ways to bound it.

– Are NPC project clocks meant to be public? Otherwise, I don’t see much point to them.

As for the game itself: our crew took Baszo Baz up on his offer to rob the Red Sashes. The Whisper led the crew into their hideout through a ghost door. The Cutter cracked the safe and looted as much as they could carry. They escaped thanks to their gang of shadows infiltrating the Sashes’ masked membership (a 2-stress flashback) and the Cutter bowling his way through the rest.

After downtime, we had time for one quick score, so the crew smashed up a nearby glazier’s and demanded protection money (+1 hold). They both completed their long-term projects to get back in the good graces of the Vice suppliers they’d tapped out last time.

We ended with an entanglement roll: the Inspectors, who already disliked them, asked them to step off the glaziers or it’d be war. The crew decided to fight it out, having already pissed off the Red Sashes, the Rail Jacks, and the Gondoliers. So that’ll be a fun Session 2.