Category: Blades in the Dark: Actual Play Reports

The Porcelain Dolls: Session 3 (February 17th 2016)

Downtime actions for the Playing Both Sides Job:

Constance goes up to the roof of the Leaky Bucket for some alone time. Yanth Agog speaks to her and gives her the task of following Boots for the night. She catches up with him at Spogg’s, where he’s firmly ensconced in a card game. Some Bluecoats show up, a prickly sergeant and the three officers from the night of the previous heist. The sergeant makes a show of goading Boots, but Constance steps in. There’s a tense moment, but the sergeant decides to go bother someone else. When the sergeant is out of earshot for a moment, his subordinates greet Constance respectfully.

Shade emerges from a week-long binge of debauchery to discover that the situation between the Lampblacks and the Red Sashes has not yet escalated, but things are very tenuous.

Thorn goes off to deal with family business until further notice.

Turf Claim #1 – The Drop:

The group decides that they need to expand, and that they should control the entirety of their little island. Boots has an idea to start cleaning up The Drop (and later on, all of Crow’s Foot), in order to attract a wealthier class of residents, which they could then rob. To that end, they begin investigating the Lampblacks’ operation in their immediate area. The Lampblacks deal in, among other things, a low-end drug known locally as Tar, which is taken by smearing on one’s tongue. Shade conducts a ritual of his own devising to become invisible (he’s actually warping the Ghost Field, wrapping it around him like a cloak), in order to Survey the dealers. It mostly goes well, but stepping into the Ghost Field is dangerous, and colder than he expected. He risks frostbite to get an accurate picture of the dealers’ comings and goings. Meanwhile, Boots attempts to Consort with the dealers as just a local face in the crowd. This doesn’t go as well, and they figure out he’s up to something in the process. Constance goes after the users, shaking them down for information using Command. This goes as expected.

Armed with their information, they make their plans to Assault the dealers. They will approach them first and deliver an ultimatum: They have three days to cease operations on the island. Then, whoever’s left will be killed. Constance goes to see Lyssa, and informs her of the group’s intentions. Lyssa mentions that this will indirectly result in a loss of income for the Crows, so the group should have some plans to make themselves profitable. Constance agrees to do a job for the Crows.

The next day, they approach the dealers, in full costume (the white masks they wear make them look like porcelain dolls), and tell them they have three days to get out. This gets mixed reactions, mostly amusement. Three days later, they make good on their threat. They start close to home, with a group of thugs hanging out on the northeast corner. The dealers are ready for them, but the fight very quickly goes in favor of the Dolls. Constance in particular is a sight to behold, causing massive amounts of carnage with her primary weapon, a converted anchor, while Boots provides covering fire. Shade uses his vials of electroplasm to quickly dispose of the bodies after the fight. Constance takes a hit defending Boots.

They move on to the second group, who deal Tar out of the park on the west side of the island. Again, they make short work of them, but Constance takes another hit.

It’s about this time that reinforcements arrive over the bridge from the southern end of the Marble Street Bridge. The group goes to meet them, at which point Constance calls for a halt, and Commands them to side with the Dolls instead. Some of the group stand down, but the leader attacks. Constance again rises to the occasion, and Shade attempts to Sway the remaining two thugs to join them. Another one stands down, but the last attempts to flee and warn Baszo. Boots barely manages to pull of a snapshot to bring him down.

The payoff is another 2 Rep, but no coin. However, they gain their first point of Turf, and can confidently claim that they control their island (for now). However, the operation brought a lot of Heat (narrowly managing to avoid gaining a Wanted level), and as a result the crew caught the attention of the Inspectors, and Constance has to hand over 3 Coin to Lyssa to make the investigation go away.

Downtime actions for Turf Claim #1:

The crew spend the next downtime cycle attempting to reduce Heat and Stress. I rule that the crew has access to the three thugs they managed to win over from the Lampblacks, but until they can pay for the Cohort upgrade, they’re just background color, carrying out low-level tasks for Constance until she feels she trusts them enough with real work. If she wants to use them on a trial basis, she can Acquire them as an Asset temporarily.

Notes:

As jobs go, this one was very simple, a straight-up combat. It was represented mechanically by a series of clocks, one for each group of enemies. Constance’s scale bonus went a long way to leveling the playing field, but they took a few hits in the process. It also served to illustrate why straight-up combat doesn’t happen more often, because they got up to 8 Heat and had a difficult time dealing with it elegantly afterward.

Thorn’s player unfortunately had to drop out of the game due to a conflicting work schedule. He’ll be missed, but Thorn himself is still around somewhere, and may show up as an NPC in the future. Fortunately, the score/downtime structure makes it fairly easy to drop people in and out as necessary. We end up exploring this further in later sessions, as each of my other three players eventually bring in an alternate PC, and I come up with what I think are some fairly decent house rules for dealing with that.

I’m using Evernote to organize my stuff, and so far it’s working quite well. I have two notebooks: One is public, and contains my session writeups (which is what these posts are based on), as well as notes for various NPCs and locations that the PCs have encountered. I also have a private notebook which has all my behind the scenes stuff. There’s a note for the current job (whatever it happens to be), and one for ongoing long term-clocks and NPC plans. The most important one is called Lingering Questions, where I jot down all the loose ends I inevitably find myself with when running a game (“There’s an ongoing investigation into the death of Sgt. Galloway. The Inspectors aren’t convinced it was an accident.”). My prep consists mainly of going through this for interesting things to throw at the players. It’s been exceedingly helpful for providing a sense of continuity and consequence for the players.

We have a whiteboard hung up on the wall that I’ve been using for the clocks, and that worked just fine, but later on I worked out an even better solution. More about that later.

#dontmesswiththedolls

The Porcelain Dolls: Session 2 (January 20th 2016)

The crew has agreed that they will attempt both jobs: stealing the painting for Mylera Klev, and the case of whiskey for Baszo, and keep everything as quiet as possible in order to keep on the good side of both factions.

Shade talks to a possessor ghost friend of his named Nyryx, and persuades them to jump from body to body in order to do a little recon at the coal warehouse (in return, Shade agrees to help Nyryx get rid of a rival named Tocker sometime in the future). As a result of this, they are able to confirm the presence of the painting in a large vault in the basement, protected by a strong lock, but no guards actively patrolling that level. Meanwhile, Boots leads a group action with the others to scout out the entrances and exits, as well as the surrounding buildings, finding the best rooftop vantage point as well as identifying their point of entry: a coal chute that leads into the basement.

Next, Shade performs a ritual (killing an anonymous street urchin in the process) to summon a small air demon, who looks like Tinkerbell, but made out of smoke, with a mouth that would make a sailor blush. While petulant and verbally abusive, it agrees to do recon on the Red Sashes’ HQ (a former manor house known locally as The Temple). It reports that the case of whiskey is kept in the larder off the kitchen, and while it would be a simple matter to get to it, the roving guards would make it difficult to do so unseen. Again, the rest of the group scouts around (again with Boots in the lead), identifying all entrances and exits to the house.

The Playing Both Sides Job:

That night, they hit the coal warehouse first. They get a 6 on the Engagement roll, so no complications. While Boots and Shade keep watch from nearby rooftops, Thorn and Constance slip into the parking lot and down the coal chute without incident. I put out two clocks: theirs is Open the Vault, and mine is Guards Alerted (each with 8 segments). Thorn decides to use Tinker to pick the lock, reasoning that while Constance could use her demolitions tools to break the door open, that would definitely cause more noise. There are a couple of tense rolls, and every time Thorn gets a 1-3, I tick off a segment of the Alert clock, and they can hear the guards arguing upstairs about whether they heard a noise or not. Thorn gets the vault open, grabs the painting, considers taking some of the Lampblacks’ coin as well, but then thinks better of it. Meanwhile, Constance rigs up a bag of grain with a hole in the bottom, situated on the edge of a shelf, for a time-delayed distraction. This is when I hit them with their second clock: Escape (only 4 segments this time). Things get really tense as there are a lot of 4s and 5s, while Thorn gets up to about 7 Stress. In the end, they creep up to the ground floor, and find an unguarded side door to make their escape. Upon examining the painting, Thorn and Constance discover that it moves (like in Harry Potter). Shade later speculates that the artist somehow utilized electroplasm in the paint.

Next comes the second job. This time their plan is to cause enough outside distractions to draw all of the inhabitants of the house away from the side with the kitchen, which will allow Thorn to slip in, grab the case from the larder, and exit without having to risk any more Stress. Boots is on a rooftop across the street from the Temple, carrying lots of guns. Thorn is hanging out near the side entrance. Constance has called on her friend Marlane from the docks to help provide a distraction. Marlane is mute, which suits Constance fine; she’s gotten quite adept at interpreting body language. Shade is down the street, ready to act as backup if necessary.

Again, there are two clocks: they have Distractions!, and I have We’ve Been Spotted (again, both 8 segments). This time they only get a 4 on the Engagement roll, so I go with the complication in the example: As they’re getting into position, some Bluecoats come barreling up the street and start yelling at the gate guards, demanding to speak to Mylera. Constance and Marlane choose that moment to start a bare-knuckled boxing match out in the street. She rolls a critical, so it definitely gets the Bluecoats’ attention. As they crowd around, she asks them Tyler Durden style, “Who’s next?”, and the sergeant steps up and takes his jacket and shirt off. While this is happening, Shade finds someone on the street who’s drunk, but not yet passed out, and offers him a purse full of coins to go toe to toe for 30 seconds with the sergeant. The drunk takes him up on it, lurches over to loudly declare that he’s next, and predictably, gets knocked out with a single punch. Meanwhile, Boots starts shooting out windows from a nearby rooftop. I give him the option of using the rifle (which would make the roll easier, but the ammo was distinctive, so there was a greater chance of discovery when the scene was investigated later), or use his pistols (which would not convey as much of a bonus on the rolls, but would not arouse suspicion after the fact). He goes with the pistols. The first shot misses a window, but the second one finds its mark, drawing the interior guards (visible by the lamps they carry as they move past the windows). By this time the fight club has died down, and the sergeant remembers that he and his men were there for a reason, so they go back to interrogating the gate guards. However, they’re now in a position that Boots is able to shoot one of the statues on the roof of the Temple and cause it to come crashing down on the front walk. What he didn’t intentionally plan was that it in fact lands on the sergeant’s head, splitting his skull and spilling a lot of blood on the walkway. However, in the end this has the desired effect, and Thorn is able to retrieve the whiskey without making a single roll.

The next day the group splits up again, with Shade and Boots going to see Mylera, to present the painting immediately upon accepting the job. Mylera is duly impressed, though a little distracted by the fact that there is an investigation going on regarding the sergeant getting killed on their front doorstep the night before (which of course Shade and Boots know nothing about). Meanwhile, Thorn goes to pick up a case of the cheapest, lowest quality whiskey he could find, and swaps out the bottles. When he goes to talk to Baszo, he accepts the job and offers the case of cheap whiskey as a placeholder. When Baszo opens it and sees what’s really inside, he is duly impressed.

The crew earns a total of 4 Rep and 4 Coin, 1 of which Constance brings to Lyssa, to inform her that the crew did both jobs and also offer her The Crows’ cut. Lyssa is duly impressed, and the crew’s reputation as Daring is reinforced. After that, they take their well-earned downtime actions. Everyone has at least 6 Stress, so they all indulge their Vices. Additionally, Boots and Constance work to reduce their Heat, which was more than they were expecting due to the unforeseen deaths that occurred. An Entanglement roll results in The Unquiet Dead, so I rule that the body of the bum that Shade killed for the ritual was not found in time, so they’ll have to contend with his ghost later on.

Notes:

This was our first real interaction with the Mechanics, and I’m loving every minute of it so far. The clocks just work. Since they were attempting two jobs at once, I wanted to make sure they were very distinct in nature, with very different kinds of obstacles. Nearly all the details were improvised on the fly.

#dontmesswiththedolls

The Porcelain Dolls: Session 1 (January 13th 2016)

[Foreward:

I started running this back in January, and we’re now 12 sessions in as of this writing. I meant to start getting this up here a bit earlier, but I’ll catch up as quickly as I can.]

The Crew:

The group of ragtag scoundrels and Thieves known locally as The Porcelain Dolls (called such due to their habit of wearing bone-white masks while on the job) hangs out at the Leaky Bucket. Their actual hideout is an abandoned doll factory in The Drop (which we decided was the small island on the north side of Crows Foot, so named for the large difference in height between one side of the canal and the other), which is only accessible via the rooftops. The crew consists of:

Constance: Cutter (and Not to Be Trifled With). Daughter of a Seaside Dockers foreman (whom she killed when she was 15). Hears the voice of Yanth Agog, a forgotten god, in her head, who tells her to do the most random things sometimes (Vice: Faith). She assumes it’s all part of some larger plan. Carries a ship’s anchor as her main weapon.

Boots: Hound. Formerly known as Sergeant Dygen of the City Watch, he was drummed out of the Bluecoats for attempting to sidestep a superior officer and cut him out of a side business he had going on. He has a penchant for card games (Vice: Gambling), carries more guns than you’re ever seen in your life, and is always accompanied by a large wolfhound named Valter.

Shade: Whisper (and Ritualist). Disgraced nobility from Skovlan, he turned his back on his family and heritage and fled to Doskvol. He is well known for his unnatural appetites, the fact that he frequents a brothel run by Setarra (Vice: Pleasure), and being an all around creepy motherfucker.

Thorn: Lurk. Hailing from a large Severosi gypsy family, Thorn has been everywhere and seen it all. Railjack, crematorium attendant, leviathan hunter, deathlands scavenger, he’s done a little bit of everything. Every once in a while one of his cousins shows up looking for his help with something (Vice: Obligation).

Session 1:

Roric is dead. The peace he brokered between the Lampblacks and the Red Sashes is about to dissolve. Meanwhile, Lyssa offers a hefty reward for the head of Roric’s killer, screaming in the streets for his killer’s head, as if everyone wasn’t convinced that she did the deed herself.

Mylera Klev sends the crew an engraved invitation c/o The Leaky Bucket to meet at their earliest convenience (provided their earliest convenience was at 1pm that day), so Shade and Boots go to talk to her. The conversation is filled with flattery and no small amount of flirting between Mylera and Shade, and ends with her offering them a job: Baszo Baz is in possession of a particular painting that she (as an art lover) very much wants. She graciously gives them 24 hours to give an answer, and if they agree, an additional 48 hours to deliver the painting.

Meanwhile, one of the Lampblack’s thugs comes around to inform Constance and Thorn that Baszo wants to talk to them. They head off to the coal warehouse, where Baszo reminds them that they’ve stepped on each others’ toes a bit in the past, but that he’s looking for strong allies in the weeks to come. He offers them a job as well: Mylera is hoarding a case of the finest 80 year old whiskey, and he wants it.

The crew agrees amongst themselves to do both jobs in the same night, delivering the goods at the same time as their acceptance of the jobs. Additionally, they resolve to outwardly maintain a friendly demeanor to both factions, and avoid (for as long as they can) openly choosing a side in the war that was to come.

Constance, being the self-appointed leader of the crew, meets with the Crows on her own to inform her of the crew’s intentions. Finding Lyssa at the watch tower, she offers her congratulations. Lyssa, a bit preoccupied at the time, maintains her innocence in Roric’s death, so Constance offers her condolences instead.

Notes:

Not a lot in terms of mechanics this time around, mainly just establishing setting and situation.

#dontmesswiththedolls