First proper session of a new campaign.
First proper session of a new campaign. Cult, fairly physically oriented characters except for the Whisper, so I’m not sure we’re going to see a lot of social/subtle! Pretty normal game, players getting used to the mechanics I guess, some nice use of teamwork, but no flashbacks.
More details on Cult/Members
http://apokalypsisrpg.blogspot.ie/2016/01/orphans-of-bloodmoon.html
Hello Blader-teers – wondered if anyone had extracted the audio from the Harper actual play sessions?
Hello Blader-teers – wondered if anyone had extracted the audio from the Harper actual play sessions? I’d do youtube but audio ap is more versatile at the moment.
So my crew of Blades has taken reckless action during a score, resulting in a -2 status with the Unseen.
So my crew of Blades has taken reckless action during a score, resulting in a -2 status with the Unseen. They don’t even have a hideout yet! But yes, they made dubious choices, and now this tier IV faction is going out of its way to kill the crew. In the last session, the Unseen make it clear to the crew they are outmatched (they did get away, for now at least.. but it was really tense from their perspective).
So, one player decides to send a courier to ask to talk with the Unseen. The reply I narrated was a messenger saying “Where are you? Let’s meet.” and the player doesn’t say where they are, but agrees, specifying a place that is very public, and not in an area under their control.
I feel my metagame sense tingling here.. but.. am I not obligated to hit them hard with a surprise attack (as any self-respecting criminal group would probably do in this situation), or do I play it as an actual chance for diplomacy (since they aren’t actually at war)?
If I do hit them hard with a trap, how much character competence do I assume? Reason being, my thoughts so far are that perhaps I should suggest the things their characters might do to cover their butts and realize it is a possibly-deadly trap. My other idea is, simply tell them how the trap is sprung when the meeting occurs, and ask how they resist en media res. EDIT: third idea comes to mind. Tell them as players how the fiction might go to produce the result they and their characters want (improved relationship).
HEEST COMPLETE!
HEEST COMPLETE!
In the I’m Getting Too Old For This Shit Caper, the Dead Setters took over the Coalridge spirit well from the skeleton crew of Bluecoats who were guarding it while the Wardens assigned to it were investigated for artifact smuggling (see last issue – Smilin’ Stan Lee).
They did this without killing any cops for once! Instead they turned to that nugget of film perfection, the height of Norm MacDonald’s career: Dirty Work.
Three Easy Steps to Make Bluecoats Hate Their Job and Screw Off Instead of Patrolling
1. Send Rook the Cutter into the sewers to Wreck the pipes underneath the Bluecoats’ hastily-erected watch station, flooding the area and soaking the ground with filth. Watch out for giant albino eels, Rook!
2. Now that the entire neighborhood smells like a Preakness portapotty on a humid August day, Richter the Spider riles up the local taverngoers and blames the problems on the Bluecoats. With a crit, he manages to keep them right on that line between undisguised malice without crossing over into outright violence.
3. Then all you have to do is have Teatime the Whisper magically suborn flocks of ravens to make pinpoint shit-airstrikes on the Bluecoat cohort at the spirit well. All the time. In their lunches. On their heads. Whenever they’re outside.
The beleaguered Bluecoat skeleton crew essentially does as little as possible while still technically remaining at their posts. The crew easily sneaks onto the crumbling manor house grounds and they disable the lightning field. Technically, Deemo the Leech was going to temporarily disable and then reactivate it, but the field flickering out caused Rook to flashback to his time as a Railjack, when the fields failed and ghosts swarmed his crew. He ended up wrecking the field pylons in an impressive Devil’s Bargain.
Turn In Your Gun and Your Badge! You’re Off the Case!
While this chicanery was afoot, I had a clock running for two Spirit Wardens, disgraced by the recent allegations and yearning for justice despite their suspensions, to track down what was really going on. My not-Riggs and not-Murtaugh were waiting inside the manor house and pulled guns on Raven the Hound just as she walked in. Everyone pulled guns, in most cases multiples, and we had ourselves a boss fight.
I used a six-segment clock for the pair of Wardens, but with a crit the crew blasted poor not-Murtaugh to bits right off the bat, his ruined corpse bouncing down into the sinkhole-exposed basement where the spirit well waited. It was in the general shape of a drainage pool, its surface glass-smooth and frozen over, with writhing angry spirits clawing at the eldritch ice from underneath.
Not-Riggs tackled Raven off onto scaffolding that had been erected around the spirit well (a Devil’s Bargain to make it a mano-a-mano knife-fight in true Lethal Weapon fashion). Raven blew through her armor quickly, but managed to take herself and the Warden off the scaffold right onto the spirit well’s frozen surface, which started to crack. It was looking bad until Deemo spotted a huge mirror on a crane/pulley (used to extract spirits from the well), and sent it hurtling down on top of the Warden. Bad luck for him.
The Dead Setters added a piece of Turf, maxed out their Rep, and filled their crew XP tracker to boot! There wasn’t any Coin to be had, but I ruled that a downtime action could easily create or repair a way to extract and bottle spirits, thus fulfilling their contract with the Dimmer Sisters. We didn’t quite get to downtime this session, so we’ll begin with that next time.
#heestcomplete
On the off chance, any online groups looking for more players?
On the off chance, any online groups looking for more players?
Just a quick thing to say about the Spider.
Just a quick thing to say about the Spider.
He’s amazing. Playing one now, by the name of Hangman, whose stick is “The Oldest Criminal in the Dusk”. Hangman knows almost everyone in the underworld, and have retired several times, but events just keeps pulling him back into the game. This time?
His old mate Roric died, and his neighbourhood value were dropping swiftly with the Lampblacks and the Sashes doing the dance of war.
And then, his house burned down.
So, hiring some muscle, a safe-cracker and a sneak, Hangman has now reestablished his old crew, The Band of Gargoyles.
(No one talks about what happened to the six other incarnations)
Highlight of the first session was both the incredible explosive plan we marked our return with (The Gargoyles are not the most subtle of Thives.), and nearly burned a eight of crow’s foot into cinders.
And that I managed to get pulled for questioning in the first day after my return. But, that very same Interrogation, I managed to start reducing Heat while still in custody, eating five of our earned seven heat from the first mission.
The Spider is pretty much all I needed to really be a smart criminal, and a crew without one is still awesome, but more likely to be sent to Ironhook Prison early in their career.
The Walunds
The Walunds
“Let’s end all the violence in Crows Foot. Starting with killing all the bookers.” – Walund family vigilantes.
My first playtest is on air, we created characters and their crew. Waiting to see what trouble they get into next session.
HEEST COMPLETE: The And You Will Know Us By the Campaign Trail of Dead Caper
HEEST COMPLETE: The And You Will Know Us By the Campaign Trail of Dead Caper
The Dead Setters entered into a Ghost Contract with Ava Dimmer to take over security and transport for the spirit well in Coalridge (the PCs destablized the region in the previous session). The first problem to be dealt with was the small matter of the Spirit Wardens being called in to investigate and potentially exorcise the location.
Time was against them, but they discovered the identity of Warden Grine, who was leading the investigation into the Coalridge well. Rook the Cutter hired his pit fighter friend Marlane and some of her MMA buddies to steal an illegal artifact from the Fog Hounds. This Omar Little-style raid was incredibly successful, and after some reconnaissance work in Nightmarket, Raven the Hound spotted Grine (older guy, prosthetic leg) in the crowd. Richter the Spider and Rook distracted the crowd with Richter’s sudden urge to campaign for public office while Raven planted the artifact (a carved leviathan tusk) in Grine’s bag, then tailed him home and fed his address to Laroze, the Dead Setters’ Bluecoat contact, for the arrest.
With Grine under arrest for corruption, his active cases came under suspicion as well, and the heat was off the Coalridge location. While the Bluecoats and Wardens were able to erect a lightning barrier around the Coalridge spirit well, it’s manned by a skeleton crew instead of being a hotbed of law enforcement activity. It’s uncertain if the city will ever get around to actually assigning resources to wiping out the well.
The Dimmer Sisters still want to move fast – the spirit well isn’t in immediate danger but it’s not yet under anyone’s control except maybe (MAYBE) you could say the Bluecoats at this point, plus they have clients that need their product. Next time we’ll probably stay in “Heist Time” off the bat.
Richter’s player wanted a long-term project to get elected to public office somewhere, which led to our group deciding that it’s more fun if there’s some sort of democracy in Duskwall, it’s more in-theme if it’s ultimately a futile gesture, and it’s more useful to me as a GM if it’s excessively corrupt. I’m treating it as several project clocks Richter can fill in, the first of which is “Recognition as a Legitimate Candidate”.
They were in Nightmarket for Spirit Warden Grimes, for which I pulled liberally from Perdido Street Station’s opening scenes with the transactions performed via baskets and pulleys and the huge, constant press of stalls and traders creating a sea of people between tall rowhomes and apartments crisscrossed with balconies, power lines, and scaffolding. A real Assassin’s Creed parkour playground.
Raven’s nemesis Casta the bounty hunter showed up as well. Our Casta is a female Tycherosi, in black eelskin with vestigial eyes above her normal pair giving her the look of some sort of spider-person. Both she and Raven have project clocks for hunting the other down.
The dice favored the players this session and nearly every action was an unqualified success. I didn’t mind; last session it went the other way so it was nice to get something of a breather in.
The Unrecommendables are at it again.
The Unrecommendables are at it again. This time, the Inspectors used them to preemptively kill an assassin targeting an important member of the city.
https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/unrecommendables-the-lighthouse/
The whole thing took about 90 minutes.
https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/unrecommendables-the-lighthouse
Segue from Info Gathering into the Score
Segue from Info Gathering into the Score
In a recent session, players decided to deal with an entanglement: an unquiet dead, aka the ghost of Ashlyn Daava.
Ashlyn Daava was an occult collector and the last bounty of the crew’s Hound. In fact, she was the bounty that brought the crew together for the first time. The ghost of Ashlyn has been sighted searching amongst the ship graveyard where the crew has a lair. Sighters say she’s looking for something.
The crew do a little info gathering during downtime and find out that the Sextant in Shadow was stolen from the Hive around when Ashlyn’s her bounty was set. All they know about the Sextant in Shadow is it’s said both the body and the spirit can wield it.
So, the crew decide to handle this entanglement themselves. They haven’t seen her ghost themselves, so they decide to find the Sextant in Shadow first and use it to lure her in.
And this is where we ran into trouble. Almost quagmired.
The way I read it, I thought the approach to a score was to pick a plan and do some info gathering if the crew lacked the detail for the plan. Sort of like info gathering is a step between picking the planning and diving into the score.
But in this situation, in trying to find the Sextant, I think this was the wrong approach.
The book says:
Some investigations are complex and require a longer process of information gathering. In this case, the GM makes a clock (or several) to track the progress of the investigation.
Until the crew were trying to find the Sextant, the implication I hadn’t grokked from reading was that sometimes, when the crew needs a longer process of info gathering, the players may not be able pick a plan first and then info gathering for that plan. They may not have enough info.
Instead, they need to investigate and explore first, gather info from multiple sources maybe, before they pick a plan. This is a very different expectation to what we grokked from reading.
We have finished the hunt for the Sextant in Shadow, so I’ll let you know, but I think this will make the score get us out of the quagmire, make things much easier to run and play.