Hey Blades
Just come away from a great first session with a new group. I’ve recently turned some friends onto the metaphorical crack of rolling dice and doing silly voices, and BitD really got their creative juices flowing.
We ended up with a The Everyn Trading company, a crew of ‘professional’ smugglers. It was a whole mess of fun. I’ll try and post the play report at some point. I ended coming away with reams of questions from play that I thought I’d share/get your thoughts on:
– Smugglers seem to interact with Duskwall in an inherently different way than other gangs do; by their nature they need to cross boundaries. At first glance this has them going much further afield than your average thief/breaker (across lighting walls / into the void sea / on the rail lines).
Can smuggling work entirely effectively within Duskwall? What boundaries exist within the city? What’s taboo/illegal/frowned upon? Can you smuggle between wards/turfs? Can smugglers be the illicit equivalent of a man with a van for other gangs/spirits/other weirdness?
– The vehicle they chose was a old ex-fishing skiff, which raised some interesting questions about Duskwall’s canals.
Do the Bluecoats have patrol boats? What sort of control the Gondoliers/Canal Dockers have? Who owns the water? When you gain turf/smuggling routes could that be a controlled section of water your gang owns? Are there other watercourses around Duskwall (vast cyclopean sewers from an age before)?
– When determining starting faction status, we ended up with +1 for the Bluecoats and the Inspectors (one had done some bounty work and the other was related to an inspector). When we rolled entanglements, someone’s contact got rolled by the Bluecoats. How can the characters leverage their faction status with them to make sure the interrogation goes their way?
I ended making a quality roll for the contact. In this case, does a +1 give them the opportunity to lean on their Bluecoat relationship to interfere? Is that an action roll [sway/consort/command] or would you modify the quality (major advantage?). How would you run it?
I suppose it all comes back to the fiction. If there’s a mark on a sheet, that
means something. +1 with Bluecoats comes from a character’s relationships, so who are those people? What went down? Can they help without risking their own neck? What do they want?
Also could wanted level deteriorate these relationships?
This got me thinking about gang leadership. Conceptually could you have a situation where a gang is pretty chummy with the crew whilst their leadership actively wants them fucked with? Who’s loyalty wins out? Sounds like a potential power keg around leadership.
Stream of consciousness over. Thanks.
