Blades in the Dark: Actual Play Reports – Page 78

I ran a one shot for a group of cultist druggies (the PCs, not the players).

I ran a one shot for a group of cultist druggies (the PCs, not the players). They turned out to be quite a handful! But more than that I wanted to relate some observations I made.

It felt..odd.. to tell players to narrate the level of success they want, without telling them what levels of success they could ever hope for. When I told the players that they describe the outcome they create, and we will assign difficulty; it came back to bite me later when one player described shooting Baszo Bas to kill him. The player is like “I kill him in his face,” and I realized by all rights, Baszo, being the leader of a Tier 2 gang, would basically turn any 4-tick description (such as killing) into a 2- or 1-tick effect (he is the the leader after all, so him having an additional tier of difference makes sense). This created this awkward moment where he rolled a 6 for a “face killing”, and then the tier difference kicked in to reduce effect by 2, and disappointment/confusion resulted. I explained it was armor, and magic wards, and it seemed okay, until..

An action later, when describing how the situation defaulted to that, since it had to be Desperate to cause any damage at all. I ended up feeling compelled to go easy on him because I felt sorry for him having no chance. I dropped the damage reduction before long (sort of like how the Escalation dice work in some games to let him do things)

Retrospect: I wonder if I shouldn’t have broken down the makeup of these rulings more clearly or not, from a game perspective. The fiction was there, but it felt like it would have bogged things down, and probably killed him. Or perhaps spent longer on mechanics at the start or throughout the game (I have been describing the rules a little at a time so far). Thoughts?

Also: Curious how long others are spending explaining the Blades rules during the first hour?

Another successful (?) heest!

The Spirit Well Twinkie Caper, or I Have a Victrola For a Mouth and I Must Scream

The Dead Setters went after Turf this time, specifically a spirit well site within Duskwall limits that was controlled by their allies the Dimmer Sisters. They gathered some info and found out that the Dimmers were using the Eels to move freshly-bottled spirits offsite. The Eels and the Dead Setters were direct competitors in the spirit trade, so the plan changed from “let’s take over the turf” to “let’s sabotage the handoff and make the Eels look incompetent by blowing containment on the spirit well!”

The dice were not with anyone, save for Rook the Cutter’s critical Skirmish success after I said “sure, you can attack all four Eels but it’s definitely a Desperate position”. Teatime the Whisper was our first Trauma victim (Unstable of course!) as his dead parents manifested and tried to eat him. A lightning oil mishap left Deemo the Tinker badly burned. Mostly, it led to utter chaos, gunfire, and explosions, which ironically kind of ended up working for the PCs. The Eels definitely were left with egg on their faces, as the Dead Setters got away with the Eels’ wagon, the spirit bottles, and the cargo of whisky that was the cover for the spirit bottles.

While we stuck with the Lampblacks and Red Sashes for our first heest, it was fun to run with the vague suggestions for the other gangs this time. Our Dimmer Sisters, for example, are going to be different from yours, and that’s pretty cool. Random setting bits we came up with that might help someone riff off for their own games:

* Nobody said there were only two Dimmer Sisters: Ava, Talia, Tibia, Sasha, Sorcha, and Henry. Or that they were all female. Or that they were on their original bodies. Or that those bodies were made of meat. They go around fully robed with weird spirit masks, so you’re never sure if you’re dealing with an actual Dimmer or a Dimmer-bot.

* The Dimmers use hulls for servants/muscle. The automatons have wax cylinders or something for voiceboxes, so they sound like olde-tyme record players, crackling and hissing. If you decapitate one, there’s a gout of blue-white sparks and flame as the electroplasmic binding goes up.

* The Eels’ signature is wearing their hair in a long braid, not too unlike Jet Li’s portrayal of Wong Fei-Hung.

*Coalridge is the Dimmer Sister’s stomping ground. It used to be a more well-off section that’s been bought up and built over with great honking refineries. Blade Runner skyline with some Jane Austen-meets-Addams Family manor houses. Dried-up fountains and crumbling, ivy-covered walls give way to belching smokestacks and gargantuan industrial blocks.

The Unrecommendables recover Aldo, but may be pulled into deeper mysteries.

https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/2016/02/23/unrecommendables-cold-chamber/

https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/2016/02/23/unrecommendables-cold-chamber

Looking Glass Crew – Part 1

Looking Glass Crew – Part 1

So we took a break from our regular Monday night game and I ran Blades. Character creation took a good portion of the session (about 1 of our 3 hours). I’d forgotten to print the page with the nations on, so heritage stuff clusters on Tycheros (which I could remember) and Duskwall itself.

After a bit of general discussion and once everyone was done, we went round the table describing the thieves and I took notes of interesting stuff to intermingle into the score.

Our thieves are:

Tick Iock – A leech artificer with a drug problem, who spent a while studying in Tycheros. Occasionally mutters about “we had to take the lizard out of his skull”.

Chinashop (as in like a Bull in a) – An ex-military Cutter, betrayed by the system after a 5 year tour (you should have seen the Tycheros campaign)

Mist – A sharpshooter street kid with a great sympathy of other urchins.

Corvid – a boney lurk who grew up at St Wotzits orphanage, you know, down the way. Lives with the roof ravens.

Thorn – an Iruvian academic of comparative religions, and whisper, who owns the shop in which our crew are based.

I noted the orphans/urchins and ex-military for future use.

We start with the default situation, which turns into an IC chat about how bad things might get in the district. Then some skinny runner arrives from Bazso and we start the game as planned. After some haggling, (60/40? Maybe a favour?) they accepted Bazso’s job, to break into the Red Sash’s secret vault under an ex-serviceman’s club.

They go for a stealth option for the plan and entry through the sewers. Having the blueprints from their building plans crew upgrade, they figure they can demolish a sewer wall to break into the strong room. No problem.

Mist surveys the place looking for something to use as a distraction, finds the pie shop opposite keeps a very flammable barrel of grease out back. Should be ideal for the Leech’s plan… but man don’t eat the pies from that shop on Strov street, they turn your innards (harm resisted, but some stress).

Cut forward to the action, gathered round the wall they need to breech. With perfect timing as the distraction timer ticks down just as the sewer wall is breeched. There’s burning grease all over the street and the pie shop is on fire. Unfortunately that barrel exploding dislodges a sewer support, collapsing the tunnel they came in by… Still, they made it to the vault, which seems to have been remodelled since their plans. It’s now a chemical production line for the red sashes, staffed by urchins who don’t seem to be paying them much heed.

Their attendant is, and gets out his baton, but fortunately Chinashop does a good line in scowls and sends him running…for his friends upstairs.

The Leech gets distracted by the production line and tests the drugs and, oh, yeah that’s the stuff. S’okay. Can handle, what was I?

Thorn tries to find the vault and accidentally activates the poison dart trap, which bounces harmlessly off the Lurk. Mist does find the door to the vault though, with the help of her rat. It’s some horribly arcane clockwork thing behind a false wall…

As Chinashop tries to bar the door to upstairs (breaking some poor ex-serviceman guys arm in the process), everybody else tries to decipher the lock. Turns out it’s all distraction, to the real lock hidden to the left. So they’ve got the loot, just have to get out with their original exit plan blocked…

So, everybody had fun and we’ll be continuing next week. Things that I noted:

Nice clear fail forward system stuff. Stress and resistance worked well. We haven’t used clocks yet, given it was the first session.

Items needed some explaining, the way the playbook and standard items are split on the sheet caused some uncertainty. Unclear if armour / heavy is three or two ticks. i.e is it armour then heavy armour or a combined thing…

I found myself skipping forwards and back in the rules quite a bit, even with the GM and Player refs, but I think this was just being the only one who’d read the rules.

Devils bargain is wonderful. I was often using it to add complications affecting other characters, and afterwards I wondered if that was intended or just what I fell into?

One thing I noticed. Phrasing on the action roll summary, is always you, i.e. you suffer harm etc, which seems to imply players choose which, but then underneath it says the GM sets consequences according to the situation. Required more hunting around to clarify.

I love the Actual Play Reports, but I could really go for some that include some of the mechanics as well…

I love the Actual Play Reports, but I could really go for some that include some of the mechanics as well (specifically the QS version 5 system). I read them, and think I understand them, but I’d really like to see some examples of how they are used.

I had a second session for my (still!) unnamed Cult crew this weekend, and in this session we learned not just a lot…

I had a second session for my (still!) unnamed Cult crew this weekend, and in this session we learned not just a lot about what this cult is really up to, but we actually learned quite a bit about Duskwall as well. I’m going to start off with a list of things this group has added to the setting.

– There is a precursor species to the leviathan, which is a horse-sized squid monster called a Devilfish. Their blood has similar qualities to leviathan blood, but is several orders of magnitude less potent.

– There are exactly 23 leviathans at any given moment. Whenever a leviathan dies, a devilfish begins metamorphosis to take its place. Leviathans never stop growing, so there are a few that are very old, enormous, notorious and practically immortal.

– Charhollow used to be a district devoted to establishments of learning, but at some point the schools were closed and turned into factories for refining leviathan blood. The name comes from the toxic black dust expelled from the refineries which coats everything in the district, giving it a burned look.

– Everyone in Charhollow works at the refineries and they’re all slowly dying from exposure to the toxic dust. Among the symptoms are purple veins in the neck and chest area. The darker the veins, the closer the person is to death. Because of the color, the disease has been nicknamed “The Royal Sickness”.

– During the refining process, the blood is super heated in autoclaves that are pumped by hand (I have no idea how refining things actually works). The phrase “pumping the clave” is slang for something that is incredibly stupid and dangerous.

– A whisper can use electroplasm to fill a hollow with enough intelligence to follow simple instructions, and are often used as slave labor if a job requires very little thinking. This practice is legal, but heavily looked down upon.

– Ghost essence is an important component when tinkering clockwork and alchemical items. Want to make a putty that can be inserted into a lock and expand in such a way that it unlocks? You’re going to need the ghost essence of a master thief.

I was really happy that my group was so interested in creating this shared world. Their goal as a cult is to find a way to refine devilfish blood to be a substitute for Leviathan blood, to prevent the slaughter of these sacred creatures (as well as make a ton of coin). Some of the cult members are fanatics and some are just in it for the cash. To that end, their first score was to hit a leviathan blood refinery in order to gather up reagents and equipment needed to start the long term project to distill a more potent devilfish blood.

The crew disguised themselves as workers at a refinery, managed to score some punch cards from a corpse thief contact and entered the building. Using flashbacks in various ways they managed to find the vault where the reagents were kept and secure a key. At some point they rolled a critical and discovered that the empty barrels would be removed from the premises for dumping, and if they could get some full barrels switched into the empty pile they could likely just rob the delivery carriage, so they wouldn’t have to try and sneak out several barrels of reagent.

While they were in the building half of the crew went into the offices looking for shipping records, purchase orders and other business-y stuff that they assumed would come in handy when either trying to emulate the business or sabotage it. While in the offices they managed to run afoul of the plant foreman who was also a vampire. Fortunately the Whisper found that the barrels were all being loaded/unloaded by programmed hollows, which she overrode with instructions to start a riot. In the ensuing chaos, most of the party managed to escape unscathed with their mission accomplished. The whisper however was cornered by the vampire and tried to use a ghost door to escape. A partial success let her escape, but she was possessed by her rival, the demon Setarra, who was waiting for her in the ghost realm. In trying to resist the possession she took a trauma and is now haunted.

I’m really impressed by this group of relative newbies and how they’re taking to the system and the setting. I still haven’t introduced all the mechanics yet (I think I’ll introduce the engagement roll, and effect in the next session), but they’re all having a great time. Even the RPG veterans really appreciate the freedom they’re allowed by the system. When I mentioned all the different settings the game is being expanded into, they were already thinking about new crews to play in space or as pirates.

Actual Play Prep : Ex-Legionnaires in Tropical Duskwall

Actual Play Prep : Ex-Legionnaires in Tropical Duskwall

I have the suspicion that we’re going to revert to not-so-tropical Duskwall, since I’m getting a sense of cold feet from my players, but here is a collated description of Ashamoil from KJBishop’s The Etched City in case it might interest anyone else to look into it :

” It’s a decadent, corrupt city-state in the heart of the jungle, with 19th century technology and a colonial twist.

Built along a straight stretch of deep, slow river running east and west through granite hills towards the sea, it fills some twenty miles of jungle almost exactly halfway between the mountains and an immense cataract.

Its architecture is a cross between gothic victorian and indian architecture climbing in tiers of walled terraces up steep hillsides, with thousands of boats crowding the waters at the bottom and riverside houses with front stairs plunging right into the river.

In the hour after sunrise and sunset, the water along the quay fills with hungry saurians and at those times, small boats keep out to the middle of the river and carts stay away from the banks.

Seven bridges and the seven days of the week are named after seven traitors to the empire, their deeds erased from history so that only their names remained after their execution.

Three hours riding east along the river brings you to the verge of the city and a new extension of it, which in the short span of its existence has earned the name of Little Hell, where slaughteryards, tanneries, knackers and glue makers ply their trade.

The climate is hot, there’s jungle just outside the walls, and crocodiles swim up the river and eat you if you aren’t careful. People bring in pythons to clean up beetles. Most of the characters are dark-skinned, and a northerner’s pallor marks him as a foreigner.

An endless war among small nation in the wild territories along the river, not far from the city, keep a steady supply of defeated and captured people coming into the city’s slave markets.

It has slums. It has lower-class characters. It has dangerous, nasty gangs. It has factories powered by child labor. It has slavery and opposition to slavery. It has crime lords fighting things out with guns, swords, and cavalry charges. It has blood and guts and sex and death. “

We’re back, with an Unrecommendables play report! First game of the second arc.

https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/unrecommendables-six-months-later/

https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/unrecommendables-six-months-later

My tuesday night Hangouts game (the Dead Setters) successfully went a-heesting, liberating the U’Duashan Moon Pool…

My tuesday night Hangouts game (the Dead Setters) successfully went a-heesting, liberating the U’Duashan Moon Pool Ruby from within an idol of a forgotten god, which was itself located inside Mylera Klev’s personal vault/gallery, which was all up inside the Red Sashes’ lair.

* The Spider posed as a new art dealer and ended up in a brief but bloody fight, tumbling off a balcony with Mylera onto the cobbles. In my head, I mixed up the mechanics I wanted to do. I wanted a resistance roll as a gateway to the Spider’s attack, because Mylera is no pushover, but I screwed up. It’s okay, though, because the Spider was so battered that he was captured and taken up to the Red Sashes’ dungeon…

*… Where the group’s Cutter was just finishing up with what was left of the Sashes’ torturer. We had a brief Pulp Fiction “Butch and Vic” moment. Party gathered, they ventured forth!

* We used our first Flashback to great effect. Our Hound player was absent last night, so the players flashed back to her avoiding guards and inscribing the bottom of Mylera’s vault floor with acid so when the guys cleaned out the ruby (their payment) and trashed Mylera’s art (what they’d been hired to do by the Lampblacks), they were already standing on their escape route. Through the floor and out the door (well, the canals).

* Downtime is brilliant. I really like throwing choices at players, and injecting some Devils’ Bargains into downtime keeps it engaging while really allowing people to get into the sandboxy nature of the game. They paid off their Bluecoat contact to free their broker, who had been taken in for questioning. They set up a long-term project to identify or create a spirit well in the city limits where they could bottle and sell spirits (devil’s bargain: hell yes, and you’ll have to take it from an ally). Finally, the best entanglement wasn’t on the chart: It’s a giant magic ruby. No normal fence can move that kind of thing without heat coming back on them. Someone will have to use their precious downtime actions to find a broker, or they can keep the ruby and figure out how to use it, or do the latter and then maybe the former?

Actual Play Intro : Ex-Legionnaires in Tropical Duskwall

Actual Play Intro : Ex-Legionnaires in Tropical Duskwall

” They don’t have a name yet, which I think makes a lot of sense, they’re new to this business, after all.

They know each other though, they fought together, they trusted each other, back when things were simple.

There was a mission, a few weeks or months or years back, a run-of-the-mill extraction job in the Dagger Isles.

Everything went pretty smoothly, but that’s when things started to turn sour, when people started turning up dead.

They saw something, or took something, or someone thought they did, something worth killing over.

Hix got drummed out of the fleet when her father fell from grace, so she slid back up into her ivory towers before the killing started.

Needles had that misunderstanding over the appropriate purveyance of narcotics, and sank into the muck with the leeches.

Mist, she turned up “dead” in the massacre of her unit, slipped some other poor blood in her uniform and lurked into the night.

But Crow… ah, some poor bastards are still hunting that old dog, and all the dark gods have mercy on their souls when they find him.

And they all found themselves back here, with pockets full of holes and broken promises, just aching to make a name for themselves…

…and me with a barge full of imperial wheel-locks and not a soul alive in this city desperate enough to try to shift them for me.

What’s an honest smuggler to do, I ask you? “

– Hoxley, Imperial Quartermaster