Category: Blades in the Dark: Actual Play Reports

Session 5 of the Glitter Ponies

Cast:

Operant – Cutter – Terrence

Ghost – Lurk – Charlie (Away this week)

Grandma – Cutter – Patrick (Away this week)

Drake – Spider – Antonio

Crow – Whisper – Nicko

Professor – Leech – Nick

Opening theme song, shots of downtime actions, the various crew members healing and taking their various vices, cut with Drake helping Grandma’s orphanage project, cut with the professor researching some mythical leviathan who can devour whole islands, cut with Drake building a luxury vice den under the orphanage.

We open to the Professor, Operant, Crow, and Drake around the table discussing the next score. “Im telling you Stranford has taken over the city its marshall law out there, and with the blood shortage we don’t even get revenue from smuggling blood as it’s all dried up.”.

In fact quite a lot had happened since the last episode, and in no small part due to decisions the crew had made. Quite a few clocks had been filled with quite a few impacting results. Thanks to the crew’s efforts Lord Stranford had eliminated his enemies in the city council effectively allowing him to seize control. Also at the same time the leviathan hunters reserve of leviathan blood ran out at the same time that the hunters found new hunting grounds. The leviathan hunters would have in fact failed to find new hunting grounds in time, if the crew had not retrieved the nautical map for Lord Stranford. As a result my call was that the hunters had found new hunting grounds, but Strangford was the only one who knew how to find them and was forcing the other leviathan hunters to go through him to find them.

All of this has allowed Strangford to seize control of doskvol, he is trying to use the as leverage to become the governor of Dosk Vol seizing control for himself. For the crew this is a problem because Strangford is under pressure to refill the reserves and make sure the lightening barriers are never short. This means in a time of rationing where having access to leviathan blood would be most profitable for our crew, their supply has dried up.

The crew however seem to always find a silver lining to every cloud. Drake and Operant have been wanting to get turf for the longest time. They haven’t been able to because, at tier 0 and with no gang they wouldn’t be able to keep it, also because Ghost and Grandma(Who are not here today) are more interested in other scores. So with the crew tiered up, the recruited a cohort (they also had an unclaimed crew upgrade). The cohort was actually pretty cool, it is a gang made up of Grandma’s elder grandchildren. They decided they would be loyal because “they do love their grandma so”, and savage because “they just dont know their own strength”. The crew decided that if Strangford couldn’t provide more blood to smuggle they’d use a combination of that and the fact that Strangford currently controls the city to their advantage. They met with Strangford’s quarter master to convince him that he owed them (he kind of did) and to make it up Strangford should use his influence to ‘clean up’ the wraiths currently controlling the turf right next to them. They made their desperate roll, resisting the consequence that he’d help them but then consider himself their gang boss.

The operant then scouted out the turf, looking for bolt holes or any place the Wraiths would hide during the raids to make sure the blue coats would be there waiting for them.

Finally the Professor ‘hacked’, well tinkered the power transformers in the general area to make sure the power around each of those area’s would go out during the raids.

Their plan was to just move in and take over following the raids. The setup actions included a couple of desperate rolls (hacking the power grid is not a very good idea), which the party rolled very well on.

Then after all that they got a 6 on their engagement roll. The walked in and said it’s now boys, played nice. I consider it my general failure as a GM that I couldn’t think of anyway to screw them over, so I declared the score a success and that was that.

During the downtime actions the normal downtime activities took place. However the complication I rolled was retribution. Now this seemed perfect for me, the Ponies had taken the turf without a drop of blood, surely the wraiths would want payback.

Then when the Operant said he wanted to reduce heat by tracking down things stolen from the local citizenry and returning them it seemed to perfect. I asked if anyone wanted to help him, admittedly with a huge GM is going to screw you over grin on my face. Only Drake the slide said he would help, the rest doing their own things.

I set the scene they were entering an abandoned fence warehouse to get an old ladies wedding ring back. When a group of 6 thugs appear, apparently it was a setup.

THey were Wraiths and said something to the effect that they were going to make them pay for what they did.

Right then I was thinking they have scale, the Operant has fine pistols which mean they only have magnitude on Drake. Generally I was thinking this looks like a rock’s fall everyone dies situation.

Then Drake said he would attune to summon Tyraxis, now Drake does not have Occultist or anything like. However Drake had for one reason or the other always been the person who ended up dealing with the demon, so I said, that was fine, but it was a desperate limited action. He rolls, and gets a 6. I then tell them that the demon appears, booming “Mortal’s you dare to presume to summon me? You work for me I do not work for You!”. Drake then replied “Tyraxis, I humbly apologize, I only wished to make a gift to you of these 6 mortals to join your hollow horde”. He then said he wanted to roll sway. I said it was desparate great, because he did have the setup action, and what he said was pretty likely to fit Trayxis’s wishes, but he was still pretty angry about being summoned. Then Drake rolled and got two sixes. Now my possible TPK had turned into more hollow’s for the horde and the players feeling pretty good about themselves.

For the next score the players wanted to make peace with the Gondoliers, see thinking the union was weak they had chosen to generally upset the faction in their setup choices meaning they were at -2 faction with them.

Now my call was any score that involved the canals would be treated us hostile turf and have rivals or enemies messing with it. For smugglers this is poison, so they desperately wanted to no longer have to worry about the gondoliers.

So I let them gather information, they chose to study what the gondoliers traditionally did. They rolled really well (6 or crit on of those two). So I gave the whole history, they were an ancient group, their dependence on the canals which were used to dispose of bodies resulting in wild eels who fed on the bodies and ghosts from said bodies required them to development the skills needed to deal with both the supernatural and the preternatural. Long before the spirit wardens the gondoliers used to defend the citizenry from ghosts, dark sorcerers and demons. Infact even today many prefer to trust the gondoliers as until the spirit wardens they are not influenced by politics and wealth and unlikely the spirit wardens they do not make use of hulls or ghosts themselves. I also mentioned more recent events where spirit wardens had been looking into defiled hollows and destroying ghost wells.

Crow suggested they earn favour by piloting the boat up the canal, looking for ghost wells and try and close them. I said that while that was a good idea, considering that the crew was at -2 faction if the gondoliers were to come across the crew tauning to a ghost well, they might make the wrong assumption and think the crew were creating spirit wells.

The professor then made a fantastic suggestion that maybe they try and contact the gondoliers, apologise and ask what the crew can do to make things right. This prompted the funniest moment of the night for me, as Crow then said “I agree completely we should pilot our boat up the canal, close the wells then tell them what we did”, to which the rest of the crew responded “What?!? No we said we’d do the opposite of that..”.

A couple of social interaction rolls later, the gondoliers grudgingly tell the crew that their is a mad ghost haunting an abandoned manner in six towers, the ghost was a member of the reconciled who kept the ghosts of his servants as pets, however these ‘pet’ ghosts had eroded his own sanity and he was going on a rampage followed by junkies possessed by his servants.

The crew prepared to do some old fashioned ghost busting with the Professor spending downtime actions to craft a ghost scourge. The crew entered the ancient broken down manner. I described it as a bit like the house from fight club, with water running down the walls, open wiring sparking menacingly, despite this the lights themselves failed to work, the floorboards were rotten and untrustworthy.

Crow decided the wiring must be sparking because the ghost is it, he said he wanted to study the wiring, I said fine controlled standard, he rolled a 5, I said, no it’s just faulty wiring the ghost must be elsewhere.

He decided the ghost must be really good at hiding, he said he would atune to the wiring to confirm if there is a ghost in there. I said fine desperate, standard. He then crit, so I told him what he wanted to know, “nope no ghosts in the wiring” and asked him what extra effect he wanted. After much arguing everyone agreed that we wanted it to attract the ghosts attention. Once it appeared the ghost scourge made capturing the ghost almost depressingly easy. Followed by Crow deciding to use tempst to electrocute the possessed junkies (remember they are all standing in water, sparking wires everywhere, enclosed space. The rest of the crew tried to warn him off but he insisted. So we rolled desparate great, with a 5. So I told them that the junkies were dead, as were the crew, as was he. Basically the lightning arced all over the place killing everyone.

The TPK part of the roll was resisted (he had 6 stress when he decided to cast tempst), only for me to point out that although the junkies were dead the ghosts possessing them were still a threat. The rest of the score involved the crew dealing with and/or bottling the remaining ghosts.

Celebrating a successful score the crew had a standard down time, except now he understands the effectiveness on his play book the Professor started working on plans for the ghost scourge to make it multi use per score.

Lessons learnt:

Ok this session was an example of pretty terrible gming from me. It felt flat and broken. Not sure why maybe it’s my allergies which are going crazy thanks to spring, maybe it is because work is hella insane right now and emotionally draining, maybe I’m just a crap gm. Regardless this session wasn’t my best. The good thing about that is I did learn a lot.

I should have made the turf grab a social score. The team wanted it to be social setup with an assault score, but with the setup going so well they had already got Strangford to use his influence to clear out the majority of the Wraiths, they had also ensured there were no bolt holes for the Wraiths to hide in, and cut the power to the last remaining locations, when the crew rolled a 6 engagement I was almost completely out of idea’s of what could feasibly happen. My only hope was as the first action the crew would ruin it .

With this crew that was more than likely. When they were nice to the citizens I just gave up, I mean there was nothing left to make it interesting.

In the future I’ll push for the setup actions (which in this session cost a rep each) to be part of a social interaction score, any fighting that does occur will be a consequence of that.

Another lesson learned; making turf and claim grabs interesting as a dedicated score is both hard and boring, in the future I’ll be allowing the crew to most of the claim grabs as actually building the claims as 12 – 16 clock long term projects and find a way to provide the crew options in standard scores to get turf if I know they want it.

Another lesson learnt bitd is not zero prep, I didn’t have time to prep this week and it did have a negative impact on play.

Final lesson learnt; when members of the crew are completely dead to rights and Im convinced Im going to tpk them, when I’m considering going some on them that is when the game really shines and they pull off legendary actions.

Chimera, a gang of bravos Session 2

Crew:

Alaka’i Kahananui aka The Kid; a hunter played by Chris

Ask Blindrson aka Ash, aka wanderer; a cutter played by Oskar

Emeline Comber, no known alias’s; a Slide played by Thomas

Faustulus Naqoahouna aka The Elder aka Faus; a Leech(better fit) played by Matt

The theme song for The Chimera kicks in, a cello cover of Michelle Jackson’s smooth criminal (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3qxgFE46xw)

We get shots of each character, Ash launching his spear, Emeline getting shot it the head, Faust’s spirit getting blasted out of his body, the Kid diving into a river filled with hungry eels.The rest of the intro is a sequence of gray cloaks getting shot, elderly women wild glowing eyes floating up, punctuated at the end by The Kid firing towards the camera.

The scene opens to Nick Cave’s “Loverman” (https://open.spotify.com/track/5ZMSRwLhj1nxEqVf7e4A5y) playing in the background.

The Kid and Ash are helping Emeline and Faus into the lair. Faust’s eyes are dead and haunted, Emeline is bleeding from a head shot.

Ash gets a physicker he knows, a Tycherosi called Sawtooth, to look at the two, tending to Emeline and Faust. Faust’s eyes snap open to see the tycherosi and pushes the medic away from him staggering out of their lair.

The scene cuts to him staggering through the nightmarket to his friend Quellyn’s house.

The camera shows him entering, and flashes to later that night an Faus exiting the house.

Two blue coats corner Faus and tell him that they would like a ‘talk’ with him.

He lets them put manacles on him. As they walk we snap to him slipping a lockpick into his palm and him picking the manacles. Followed by him hurtling himself through the crowd, the blue coats opening fire as he runs off the shot transitions to a minimalist view of his face as he runs. https://theboardgameshow.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/giuliaghigini-artwork2-eftaios.jpg

The shot opens to The Kid having an awkward conversation with Emeline. “With the the mercs see there were women to help the soldiers with, err… his erm… needs..”. Emeline looks up with crystal clear innocent blue eyes. Despite her worldly act she is clearly uncertain as to what The Kid is asking; “Oh? Im not sure what women could do for soldiers they couldn’t do for themselves? You mean like washing a such?”.

The kid persist in his efforts to find a hooker and get laid, “err no.. I mean women who having sex for money”. Emeline looks shocked “I wouldn’t know anyone like that…. maybe in silkshore..”.

As a disappointed look of frustration floods the kid’s face; Emeline brightens up like she has remembered something “I just realized that one of my friends, Nyryx said she was a prostitute, you know how it is; it’s so hard to remember that your friends have jobs too”.

Smash cut to the tavern the “Naughty Sign” where Emeline introducing the Kid to Nyryx a wide eyed, girlish figure, with a grin like the cat who got the cream as she runs her fingertips along the tattoos on Alaka’i’s muscular arms.

The camera shifts to a painting of a blasted tree in Mistshore park on the wall, zooming in until we we transition to Ash kneeling in front of it praying to his god. (https://astrofella.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/c2a9-iwm-art-2705-wire-by-paul-nash.jpg?w=600&h=463)

The camera starts pulling back as the opening chords of the White stripes “when I hear my name” (https://open.spotify.com/track/6wfLEvrXx2hsoW1LR4rkrJ) starts to play. As the voice starts the opening lines “Wanna disappear..” We see that Ash is surrounded by a horde of hollows, standing completely motionless, their bodies unnaturally still.

As one the hollows open their mouths to speak “Come join us, in our collective we will never been alone.” Ash his eyes wide responds “I am here for my god”. The collective responds “The old gods are dead, we will give birth to the new”. The scene shatters into frank miller style panels for the following action, Ash attunes to the ghost field, detecting whatever is controlling them to all around him. There is an unmistakeable pull to deeper in the park. Then Ash blasting them back with his mind drives them back as he runs from the park, in a shot mirroring Faust’s earlier exit.

We open on the crew sitting down as Ash finishes telling the crew of the park. His skin pale, “What I need is a job to help me shake this off”.

Faus grins “Funny you say that, I was performing some religious rituals for the silver nails” (The camera flashes to Faus sitting in a smoke tent getting stoned). “The nails are willing to pay us to clear up a ghost house in the lost district, apparently there was a lot of unpleasantness and now it is filled with angry ghosts, I believe it is the O’Care house.”

The blood drains from Emeline’s face, the O’Care house is the setting to many urban legends and grimm folk tales. They always end with the hero’s dismembered, insane or just gone, and that was when they still lived.

Emeline raises her hand “could I suggest a different job?”

The scene fades in on the naughty sign tavern with the spirit essence trader Flint talking to the crew. “As you may know someone hit the greycloaks hard. Taking their war chest. Rumor is they are looking for more coin for their battle to take six towers. They are looking to sell spirit essences and some mysterious player is looking to buy them all up.”

The crew tried to read Flint but the old trader was as tight lipped as he was canny.

The crew nods at each other and the scene opens to a deserted street with a group of gray cloaks meeting with hooded figures. As the trade goes down the Kid jumps out firing at the hooded figures, the air shimmering around them. Faus frowning, as time freezes he looks at them in the ghost field. Reality shatters and Faus sees that the eight hooded figures are the same figure, only from different realities. Each figure has weird ghost echoes of their movements slightly divorced from the movements he could see with his physical eyes. One of the figure’s ‘echoes’ looked up at him, pointing a finger at Faus blasting with spirit back almost tearing it out of his body (Dimmer sisters are hardcore). Faus uses his resolve to force his spirit to remain bound to his body, the effort causing his nose and eyes to bleed.

Before he collapses he stammers, “they are not real, use electroplasm”.

Ash then jumps at the robed women throwing a vial of electroplasm at the figures, who screamed as the liquid bubbled and popped.

Emeline then stood in a pose of classical acting leading the gang against the greycloaks. The fight was confusing to the gray cloaks as Emeline’s fighting style was unique, more stage fight than real, aiming at her opponents swords, not them, leaving her guard open to make grandiose movements.

The kid popped in electroplasm bullets to his pistols, the figures of the sisters rising up their eyes glowing, the kid unleashed a series of shots, the empty robes of the sisters falling to the ground, the sisters forms fading list mist in the electroplasm trail of the kid’s bullets.

At this the remaining graycloaks started to run.

The shot ends on Emeline, Ash and the gang shooting down the last of them.

Credits start to roll, to the theme of the Arctic Monkeys “If you were there beware” (https://open.spotify.com/album/6rsQnwaoJHxXJRCDBPkBRw)

Lessons learnt from this session;

As GM it can be hard to watch the prep your players do, they might ask the wrong questions, look in the wrong places and roll 3 on every preparation roll. I was temped to softsoap the score, and Im glad I didn’t as the crew then rolled a 6 on their single engagement dice and proceeded to wreck a combined dimmer sisters, gray cloak force. The win was so much more satisfying to watch because I didn’t lower the difficulty of the score.

Just remember on the path to TPK it just takes a couple of good rolls to turn everything around, play hard and play fair and everyone will have a legendary time.

Session 4 of the Glitter Ponies

Devils in the detail

Cast:

Operant – Cutter – Terrence

Ghost – Lurk – Charlie

Grandma – Cutter – Patrick

Drake – Spider – Antonio

Crow – Whisper – Nicko (Away this week)

Professor – Leech – Nick

Before I start, holy crap this week. With this crew it doesn’t matter how dark I make it they drive it even darker.

I had intended to introduce the demon Tyraxis to slowly seduce the crew but, well you’ll see.

So we ended the episode on the demon Tyraxis approaching Drake with an offer for work.

We cut to Drake describing the job. Tyraxis wants the Glitter Ponnies to smuggle a load of Hollows from the basement of the Devil’s Tooth in night market to Mistshore Park. It is critical that no one know what they are transporting or for whom, especially the authorities. The why Tyraxis was not willing to say, however he was willing to provide six coin for the task. Again where a demon get six coin is yet another mystery.

Paranoid that it sounds too easy the crew attempted to gather information about the route and the risks (rolls that they did terribly at). Still not certain it would be a cake walk the crew organised a massive parade/flotilla heading in the opposite direction to them to give them some cover.

With no intel on who would try to stop them nor why the Crew made the simple plan of have the parade as a distraction and then go straight from Devil’s Tooth to Mistshore Park.

Unfortunately halfway there they were ambushed by followers of the Night Mother a cult who is opposed to whatever Tyraxis’s true intention is.

The cult had set up a net with boat rendering hooks on it which caught on the boat, locking them in battle with the cultists.

The crew first tried to burn the net nearly burning their own ship, a brief firefight broke out and the crew made their escape to Mistshore Park.

A quick downtime occurred, and we had plenty of time left for another score.

As an important background note my clocks for City Council (Strangford being a close ally of the Glitter Ponies it felt like a useful clock to fortune roll) were on 5 for Strangford is removed from council and 7 for Strangford eliminates threats. In other words each clock was one away from completion.

So when the crew wanted to check in with Strangford it was too good to be true.

Strangford’s quarter master (the intermediary Strangford uses when dealing with the Glitter Ponies) told them Strangford didn’t have any smuggling work for the crew. However if they were interested he did have another task in mind for them.

Basically Strangford only had one person left outside of his control in the city council, Lady Penderyn. To make matters worse at the end of the week Lady Penderyn is leading a vote to ratify removing Lord Strangford from the council.

Now with her things were tricky, she needs to ‘disappear’ and permanently. Now killing her is a problem, as the Penderyn family will link it to Lord Strangford and vote in a replacement to seek vengeance on Lord Strangford (by kicking him out). So the crew need to kill her in such a way that it would be impossible to to figure out she had actually died.

The crew then started burning through rep to do extra downtime actions in preparation.

The crew contacted Tyraxis and asked if he would be interested in hollowing Lady Penderyn and adding him to his collection. Tyraxis was very happy with this arrangement. The crew then contacted the Architect who works in chatterhall (nailed the gather information consort roll) and they found out that Lady Penderyn would often go to Vreen’s Hound Races in nightmarket.

They then monitored number of bodyguards using survey while another prowled behind her.

All these gather information rolls had a risky consequence that she would netice, but the crew kept on getting sixes.

The Leech the profession crafted a ‘bomb’ to fire trance powder over an area wide enough to hit all of the guards. The roll wasn’t great, but it was enough to give them an items which if held and manually triggered would hit the area, but the user would also be hit (and need to resist).

Additionally one of the crew had a bluecoat contact, who he used to make an acquire asset roll of two off duty bluecoats thugs and an extra uniform to help them out.

So the crew roll their engagement, get a 5. Drake is waiting with the bluecoats to tell them about the delay. Gets a 6 in sway, delaying the carriage.

Then shadow pops his silence potion, pushes himself for Ghost veil, adding an extra stress for invisible rather than shadowy, walks but to the guards and detonates the trance powder bomb.

Because he was invisible not shadowy and not making noise and they had made this bomb which I had said would be great effect I said it was controlled with great effect, Ghost rolled 5 and chose to push it too risky extreme effect which he crit.

At this point my whole seduction to the dark side fell about as the crew decided to sell the rest of the guards to Tyraxis to be hollowed out as well. In fact the only thing that stopped them also selling the bluecoats helping them was the concern that it might get back to the bluecoats that they did this.

So the crew delivered the Lady and her 9 servants to Tyraxis to be hollowed in exchange for another 6 coin in addition to what Lord Strangford was paying them.

The scene ends on Tyraxis burning out the souls of Lady Penderyn and her servants.

Lessons learnt.

Oh my god guys. So first thing’s my players need zero encouragement to go dark.

Second I played the second score as a tier V, the only reason they were able to pull it off is because they had a tone of rep they used to scout out and prepare. I didn’t pull any punches and I’m so proud of them pulling it off. And when they were like, change of plan let’s sell these guys to Tyraxis as well my jaw droped.