Author: Stefan Struck (monkeyEcho)

Where is the Case File against Lord Strangford? Some story inspiration with pictures.

My crew finished their great first season this week in which we saw 15 episodes mainly based on the Gray Cloaks, their expulsion from the City Watch and the famous case file on Lord Strangford.

I decided that the case file is still there and not burned because Strangford and his big ego has a trophy room to show off and to impress enemies and allies alike. He’s just badass enough to show contempt for the system, but where could that room be? It has to be somewhere save enough to avoid being dangerous to him and it has to be accessible to bath in it’s glory from time to time. Strangford Manor? Too dangerous/obivous. The Nightbreaker? Not posh enough for noble guests. I came up with this:

Before the cataclysm there was a system of towers to relay messages in split seconds across the globe, maybe using demon powers or some other mean of magical mojo. So, every tower had a wizard/summoner and his stuff/staff. The messaging was only available for the high and mighty and therefor those wizards had enough time to practice their own rituals and research in the towers. Therefor they were a place of high magic and an imprint of them remained in the ghostfield as the cataclysm came (a la ghost rooms but whole towers). Today they are in the Void Sea because the land on which they stood is flooded and only the top part of the towers are accessibly above the water level.

Lord Strangford doing his homework of pre-cataclysm stuff and having a Void Sea ship was able to locate a spot some days away from Doskvol. First he constructed a smaller Void Sea ship (= The Black Dagger) and then he “convinced” people to build him a modern steampunk tower at the same location. Now, for a nice twist: To access all those shadowrooms this new tower is mainly empty. It’s just a shell with a spark net to keep the Void Sea troubles out. In the basement you have infrastructure like electroplasma energy generators etc. Inside you have a moveable box like an 3D-elevator/lift to bring you to the place were the old rooms were. Plus nifty runes build inside this movable box to cross the threshold between today and the shadowroom.

Strangford took the old library and build his tropy room into it.

Needless to say that a lot of people died building that thing: The architect knew too much and had an “accident”, the spark craft engineer from Skovland did it to save his family from poverty and is still living as head of technical maintainance. A lot of Skovland helpers were killed by demons/ghost on the void see, the rest is still imprisoned at the Dark Tower. No one will miss them, right? A whisper has to be present at all times to deal with arcane challenges and oh, so a sweet playground to help Strangford with his demon experiments and conduct some rituals of its own, like creating a blend of (skovland) humans with water demons of the Void sea. Ergo: A really twisted place. I created three pictures for that score: 1. A blueprint to give some hints what may be in that Dark Tower 2. A vision of what the tower looked like in the ghost field and 3. How the platform / tower looked today with sparknet and strange magic effect.

The crew had a first score to reach the tower unnoticed on board of the Black Dagger and then we had a second score as the big climax. It was awesome, no AWESOME!!! I don’t have enough space here to describe all those astonishing moments we had. Let’s just say one Lord received a deadly headshot before the room was open, the file was recoved along with strange artefacts from the trophy room and the Dark Tower was blown up. The PCs? They may have survived or not. All three were trauma-ed out at the end during the explosion. We will see in seaon 2 with a lots a brand new plot twists.

Thanks to my players Mathias Belger Oliver Smock Jörg Mintel for the very cool time.

I think this is great example of how good Blades in the Dark + awesome players who are willing to play the game could drive a story. This all coming from maybe 3-4 lines of text in the book. Too cool to be true.