Blades in the Dark: Actual Play Reports – Page 86

Here is a write-up of session two of the Low Hangers from last Wednesday!

Our game began with resolving previous session downtime activities. Bartholomew used his connections with some urchins from a Weeping Lady orphanage to spy around the Gaddoc Rail Station where a terminal is under Bluecoat quarantine after an Electrorail pulled in with a car full of passengers sick with a Slumber Plague outbreak. One child finds a service tunnel and sees that the Bluecoats are not delivering the aid brought by the Weeping Lady to the affected train passengers, instead they are waiting for them to die. There is also a Spirit Warden present who has set up wards and an anchor to cordon the souls on the rail car. The boy leaves the station but not before he notices a trio of Whispers slipping into the same service shaft he used. He listens as much as he can without being caught and determines that this is a new crew of spirit traders that are going to attempt to nab these souls for themselves before the Spirit Warden can dispose of them all.

The crew meets up with their broker Amancio and gets word of a new job that came down from some powerful folks, a job with absolutely no room for mistakes. In the cellar of the Mansion of the Duke de Mondallet in Six Towers Ward there is a safe that contains heirloom jewels and a large book. The book is very important to the client, but the crew can have the jewels. The job comes with info; the house is very heavily guarded and warded but there is a ball to be held and it is the perfect opportunity to strike.

The plan chosen is deception and they will walk right in the front door. Edlun dresses in his finest formal-wear with Bart and Skovi disguised as his servants. The first flashback is to their newly promoted “friend’s” office, Inspector Orlan. The Crew asks if he might know of anything that could defeat wards. Orlan, still thinking they might be involved with the Spirit Wardens somehow, provides a spiritbane charm that looks like a silver ingot with baby teeth imbedded in it at strange angles and a small vial of electroplasm. Bart will carry them. Back at the front door, the butler asks for an invitation. A Flashback to Edlun’s mysterious (to the other players) background easily obtains an invitation, “Earl Birch Rowan, the butler announces as he gestures Edlun into the ball. At this point we queued up Oceans 11 montage music and cut to a flashback of the crew looking at stolen blueprints of the house to determine the cellar location. Edlun begins schmoozing near the buffet and Bart and Skovi go down into the cellar to locate the safe. Unfortunately they don’t see a safe, just a lot of wine casks. Their poking around draws the attention of the maitre dis who asks what they are doing. Skovi rolled to resist consequences and the maitre dis turns from them with a scowl as a more pressing matter is announced to him back up stairs. The boys finally find a hidden door behind a wine rack that leads to descending stairs. Down below, in a large damp labyrinth of vaults and crates, they stumble onto a watchman’s body with the back of his skull freshly crushed in. Someone else is clearly down here with them. They locate the safe rather easily and Bart goes to work with his wrecking tools. Skovi covers him and hears a strange series of noises down the hall. Upon peeking around the corner he sees a faint glow and moves cautiously to investigate. Suddenly he is violently tackled by a snarling black eyed half rotten man that moves almost too fast to see. Luckily the thing broke Skovi’s lantern when it landed on top of him. It burned his arm, but caused the beast to fall back in fear just long enough for Skovi to draw and fire both his fine pistols, killing it immediately. As he returns, Bart is finishing up with the safe, “Skovi why are you making so much noise? This is a robbery!” Bart opens the safe door and gasps as his spiritbane charm becomes impossibly cold to the touch, he also notices the vial of electroplasm is now empty. Shrug, “I guess that’s that.” Inside the safe are the jewels as promised, and a large, old, finely bound tome entitled “On the Study and Practice of Spirit Manipulation”. At this point the duo decides to investigate and they discover the glow from earlier is coming from a sewer tunnel beyond a smashed in wall, probably where the thing came from. Suddenly they hear footsteps so they duck into the sewer tunnel and prepare to fight. “Skoooooooovi?” They hear Edlun drunkenly calling out for them. Bart manhandles him into the tunnel and they make their way down the tunnel until it lets out in a canal very near where they just so happened to have left their boat. Another successful job by the Low Hangers!

During downtime Skovi overindulges in his lust for isolation and wanders off into the Deadlands. His bounty-hunter friend Casta gets worried and goes looking for him but gets picked up by the Bluecoats on her way out of the city. Luckily she doesn’t spill anything of value to the boys in blue before they release her but Skovi definitely owes her one. Bartholomew heads back to Gaddoc Station to see if there has been any more moves by the new gang of spirit freaks. Meanwhile, Edlan overindulges in some of his finest wines. He goes off the deep end into a morose fit and wanders into the streets. No one has seen him since, but he gets that way when he’s in his moods.

Definitely still getting the hang of the rules but it is beginning to be much more intuitive. I feel the rules are very good at contributing to immersion, unlike a great deal of rpg’s where they get in the way. Can’t wait until this weeks session!

Here is an actual play from our first session last week.

We started off with character creation and ended up with Edlun the Slide, Bartholomew the Cutter, and Sven Lundvik Gunderson vund Serndivik AKA Skovi who was a Hunter. We then moved on to crew creation using the Thieves crew book to establish the Low Hangers. Creation time for crew and players took about an hour with some setting discussion thrown in as well. Pretty darn good for starting a new system.

We jumped straight into the action with a meeting with Amancio, their broker contact. Amancio runs an art gallery but acts a middle man between the underworld crews and the rich clients with too much class to deal directly with criminals. Amancio fed them a new job from Brynna Skyrkallan, the Duskwall diplomat of Skovlan. Apparently an inspector with a hatred for all Skovlanders, but especially the refugees in Duskwall, was setting up innocent Skovland immigrants and having them falsely convicted in order to get them off the streets. Brynna needed some kind of hard evidence to take to the Duskwall Council in order to protect her countrymen. Skovi, being a true blue blooded Skovlander was the first to agree to the job.

The crew’s first action was to discover how the Inspector was convicting these innocents. This was easily done by Skovi dropping some questions in the immigrant community. Apparently the Inspector was planting a terrible new drug on them in order to force arrests. The drug itself was known as Ash and was a derivative of the raw remains of a corpse after being cremated with Electroplasm. When consumed, Ash delivers an intense and addictive hallucination consisting of the strongest memories of the deceased. (Needless to say the Spirit Wardens will not tolerate anyone in possession of the substance.) Armed with this knowledge the crew was immediately ready to act; they wouldn’t just be providing the good Madam Skyrkallan with dirt on the Inspector, they would be eliminating the problem altogether. Edlun used his lady love, the woman of the night, Nyryx to lead them in the direction of an ambitious Bluecoat client of hers, Orlan, that may want to knock a fellow law enforcer out of the way to make room for his promotion. With the constable identified they set up a meet and Edlun let his Sway run wild while Bartholomew loomed hulking behind him to put a little intimidation into the deal. Edlun laid out the whole story of the Inspector and the drugs and let slip some details to make Orlan think that MAYBE he had something to do with a Spirit Warden investigation into the Ash trade. Now Orlan was under the impression he was dealing with something bigger than his current pay grade and was sure if he helped out he would be justly rewarded. He decided to leave immediately to take the Inspector into custody, with the Ash in his flat as evidence of his corruption.

Here we ran a short flashback scene in order to ensure there WAS Ash in the Inspector’s flat. Skovi and Bartholomew would break in through a window while Edlun tried to draw attention away by arguing with a food vendor across the street. The operation was successful and they were able to plant the drugs, but a passing Dock worker caught sight of them and demanded 1 coin to keep his mouth shut. Flashing forward to the present, Orlan and his squad kick in the door of the flat and arrest the outraged Inspector after finding a large stash of illicit drugs in his pillow. The Duskwall Daily Crier headlines the next day were a tell-all about the heroic Orlan who was promoted for his honorable duties arresting a corrupted official and ensuring justice reigns in Duskwall again. Needless to say Brynna was more than happy and the crew gained a little extra rep for going above and beyond. We did a quick run through Payoff, Entanglements and downtime actions but saved most of it for later discussion.

All in all we played a little fast and loose with the rules since it was our first foray but tried to get a good baseline familiarity with the mechanics and it was a really good introduction to Blades in the Dark. One thing I am doing to help make the city seem a little more alive is sending out a “Word on the Street” and a “Duskwall Daily Crier” message between each session.

The word on the street is to keep the crew in the know on underworld events, such as the war in Crow’s Foot. This works well to communicate Faction Clock events that might become public. The Duskwall Daily Crier message serves as a means to communicate city-wide public events that the crew might be interested in. In this weeks case it was an electrorail car quarantine at the station after reports of plague on board.

Last night we had our second session, so if there is any interest in the future capers of the Low Hangers I’ll write another synopsis to share.

This Saturday I ran / played Blades for the first time.

This Saturday I ran / played Blades for the first time. We had a great time and I look forward to playing it again. Here is a quick play report and some suggestions for improvements.

# Play Report

I was the GM and there were four players. No one had played Blades before and only I had read the rules. I played the trailer for Dishonored to give people a sense of the world of Duskwall.

We followed the quick-start instructions and it took us about an hour to create characters and crew. I mentioned some of the relevant mechanics as they players filled out their sheets but it was still a lot of work to do at once, without full knowledge of the rules.

I opened actual play with the scene in Baz’s office. The players had chosen to start with a negative relationship with the Lampblacks so they politely declined his offer and said they’d stay out of the Lampblacks way. They were soon approached by a representative of the Red Sashes and were told that their boss wanted to talk; a meet was arranged in a neutral pub. The crew also turned down the Sashes’ request for assistance and approached the bar tender, a friend of the crew.

The bar tender told the crew of a possible heist – the Dockers had helped themselves to some Spirt Essence off a recent shipment and it was sitting in a warehouse while they looked for a buyer. Our crew accepted the job and decided to go the Infiltration route. They used their gang of assassins to distract the dockworkers on guard and then picked the locks to enter the warehouse. They were leaving the building with the loot when a dockworker came down the side alley; one of the players zapped him with channeled lightening.

I did an okay job of enforcing the game mechanics – I wasn’t consistent in telling people which type of action (e.g. Daring) or the effect level but that didn’t seem to be a problem.

The score was a success but was witnessed by a nearby gang – the Eels – who asked for some coin or rep in exchange for their silence (they threatened to tell the Dockers). Our crew agreed to give them some rep – partial credit for the score – and offered future opportunities to collaborate.

During one of the player’s downtime, he kidnapped a Lampblack to interrogate him about the Lampblack’s plans. The crew persuaded the thug to switch allegiances and so they learned of the Lampblack’s scheme. The gang was going to raid an old city oil depot and then use the fuel to burn down the Red Sashes’s temple complex / base. The players decided that their next score was to sabotage the raid on the depot and then attack the Lampblack HQ in the chaos. Prior to executing this plan, they went to Lyssa and got her blessing to take action to ‘end the street war and restore peace’ – they didn’t explain how, though.

They infiltrated the depot a few hours prior to the Lampblack raid and planted explosives. They also had the Eels tip off the Bluecoats that something big was about to go down at that location. The crew then staked out the depot until a good number of Lampblack’s entered the building. They then blew the explosives, killing many thugs, maiming others, and leaving most of the survivors to be picked up by the cops.

The crew immediately followed up this success by storming the Lampblack HQ – there were limited members present and the crew outnumbered Baz and his lieutenants. They made Baz and his goons an offer: join the Imperial Guard and cede your territory or die here and now. Baz was intimidated into taking the offer.

The session ended with the players’ crew moving up a tier and taking over the Lampblack HQ. They probably didn’t have the Hold to do so but it made sense within the story.

# System Feedback

Let me start by saying that I really like where Blades is going – the theme is excellent and the core game loop around Scores is very fun and yields good stories.

With that said, there were a ton of new terms to learn and rules to track. I can see a lot of it being useful in a long running campaign but most of it could probably be cut for a first session. Similarly, the players found the character sheets a bit overwhelming at first.

I suggest an even faster quick-start that throws the players right into the story. This super-quick-start might have:

– Pre-gen characters, or maybe just a slimmed down character creation

– Skip the crew creation at first

– Start with a score already selected, so the players first choice is which approach to take

This would immediately get players into the action and allow the GM to only convey the relevant rules. After this opening score, players could finish character creation and then create the crew. This opening score could be the catalyst / origin story for the crew’s formation. The GM could then walk through additional rules and dump the players out into the bigger Duskwall sandbox.

I’ll point to the Fantasy Flight Star Wars Beginner Box modules as masterful examples of how to gradually introduce mechanics to players in a fun / exciting way.

So in my latest BitD session, we ran an infiltration score into the Red Sashes treasury.

And unfortunately, the session fell pretty flat.

Part of it was likely due to low energy. But I actually found the score much harder to run compellingly than the previous one (which was a Deception score, and was fantastic ).

Mostly, it felt like the players’ object was for things to stay quiet and boring. And I whirled up a decent variety of challenges, but the various resolutions were mostly, “OK, we do X to get past Y quietly.”

The scope felt very limited, and the outcomes were uninteresting – a complete reversal of the previous session.

A big part of the problem was that the players kept getting complete successes (and taking a lot of stress to achieve them). So I had a lot of trouble finding places for things to start going south, or get more complicated. But… I don’t think that was all of it (and I suspect a lot of the reason the players were willing to take so much stress was because of the whole sense of “this entire plan depends on nothing going wrong and us continuing to avoid detection).

So… I don’t know. I had trouble “making bad things happen” in my previous session as well, since I feel that during scores I’m mostly responding to player actions. But this time was a whole different level.

Any advice? What can I be doing better?

Many thanks 🙂

So.

So. Tonight, our Lurk got shanked by an Eel while trying to steal a few documents from a merchant. A really bad roll followed, and she ended with a stiletto in the lung, ending up narrowly avoiding death.

The Eel in turn got done in by a head-shot by the Hound.

Then the Bluecoats showed up and the Hound and the Slide decided to run interference while the Lurk was extracted by the gang. The Hound then attempted a Wreck action on the powerlines of the street lights.

In a Desperate situation, she rolled snake eyes, and the whole thing exploded. The Slide then rolled snake eyes on the Sway roll to persuade the locals to hide them from the ‘coats.

The entire evening of failure ended with an insane shoot-out on the eastern Crow’s Foot Bridge, with the Hound giving her it all as an escaped character from Sin City.

21 dead Bluecoats. That rained some serious heat on the crew.

Fortunately, a Devil’s Bargain meant that someone cleaned up the entire mess, and removed most of the wrath that would have accompanied the players.

All in all, love this game. And the new rules are awesome.

http://imaginaryhallways.blogspot.com/2015/08/evil-gang-of-eleven-blades-in-dark.html

The Evil Gang of Eleven forms and kill Baz – not for the Red Sashes, but because they figure it’s the best way to be left the hell alone.

Played with the 3f ruleset, which I freakin’ love. Wreck made for a couple of great moments, and the Leech playbook is very cool.

Session XI.

Session XI. Last to use 3e. Due to real life interfering in fun, there was just one PC this session — Tal the Dagger Islander Hound.

The crew’s unreliable gang led by Tomas Billingsworth finally returned from their absence, broken and exhausted. They had attempted to make the run out of Duskwall into the deadlands to recover riches from the lost Billingsworth Enterprises mine stash, but returned empty handed and missing half their members.

Baszo Basz requested audience with the Little Sisters but Tal stalled and asked to meet again in the future.

Mr. Higgins (a demon bent on usurping control of Duskwall) said he would offer the Little Sisters one more chance after they blew him off when he requested the last job. He asked for the Little Sisters to acquire the ring of keys kept on the 4th floor of the City Watch HQ auxiliary vault. Tal agreed and attempted the job but was thwarted by a mass of Bluecoats and a wicked lightening storm.

Realizing she couldn’t do the job alone, Tal fished for an invitation to a party being thrown by Mr. Higgins at his Garden Overlook in Brightstone. She slipped past the doorman and avoided sadistic socialites, known enemies, and strange curiosities. She negotiated more time from Mr. Higgins to complete the job and managed to improve his view of the Little Sisters.

*Comments on the System*

The system worked unexpectedly well with just one PC, though there were some slight issues. Clocks make challenges more complicated and give more than one PC a chance to contribute to success. With just one PC working on a clock, the player was tempted to repeat the same action after some time — creativity fatigue in trying to make it fit with other actions (for fewer dice) was an issue.

We also tried out a tug-of-war clock for the first time for an argument. It didn’t really have the desired effect — with only player rolls it is hard as the GM to really move the clock the opposite direction. I think in the future I will use a countdown clock together with a regular challenge clock (i.e. countdown “He’s sick of all your bullshit and tells you to leave.” with simultaneous challenge “Convince him to give you more time to complete the job.”)

Otherwise, awesome.

Ran my 16th session of BitD today for a group of complete strangers, from the group only one player plays Games…

Ran my 16th session of BitD today for a group of complete strangers, from the group only one player plays Games newer than Ten years (exept pathfinder but thats a D&D variant for me)

I was rather surprised, how fast they excepted stress/trauma systems and liked it a lot to trade in with wounds.

They fastly adapted the dice pool and resistance system (I use 7-Roll or just said 1,2 or 3 stress for minor injuries)

I skipped Controll/Risk/Desperate distinctions entirely to not confuse them. And decided the outcomes of fails on my decision.

No Duskwell but a random City named Hollowshire. No complex relation / faction tracks, just some noble and patrician houses.

I think for a quickstart play in 3-4hrs its taking to long with full rules. So i see my edit as a lot faster.

They liked that the characters are “prepacked” with a full Equipment pile. But wonder about longterm micromanagement. And they liked how the bestfriend and rival on the sheets are giving plenty of Plot and relation points.

Its getting more and more easier for me to improvise on the fly.

We had a full teamup of all 5 playbooks in the round. They decided to choose the Physician Marwyn (a mad scientice) as their patron and had their lair hidden under his workshop, as they choosed Workshop and Carriage House as Lair options as well as Everyone Steals as ability.

I always start by appointing a Leader and a treasurer of the Thiefs. Slide became “the face” of the group and its missionbroker and treasurer while the Cutter became leader.

I asked how they would like to earn some cash. DW style: What do you do?

Slide did got to Nyxx the prostitute who ran a crew of prodtitutes and streetworkers as well as a human trafficking buisness. She asked to be protected on a party, Rumbsey one of the criminal noble houses.

Cutter and Whisper both got lost trying to get their Vices, Gambling and Drugs to meet new people and failed a lot with their rolls and got lost in the slums. The Lurk tried to talk to his beggar friend, but was swarmed by the spirit warden, who created a Quarantain Zone. Strange spiderlike undeads wreck Havock in the quarters Till the other lost Whisper and Cutter arrived all at that scene and Quickly finished up 6 Click monsters with no more than 2-3 strikes per creature.

Meanwhile the hound found the Headhunters Guild and tried to spy on his rival, but failed and got some stress by a provocation on form of a broken Glas in his head.

The whisper was tackled by an undead and now seeking the cutters medical contact. Who was hired for 1 Coin and Healed with ghostpowers.

Additionaly the slide got asked by their partner to get illegal Machine parts out of an old dock-building.

To be continued

Although with a rather small attendance I ran my first wonderfull session of Blades in the Dark with Nigel…

Although with a rather small attendance I ran my first wonderfull session of Blades in the Dark with Nigel Clarke (Cutter) as Bricks and Slade Stolar Duster (Wispher).

To set up the scene we established that both worked for the Crows, Duster as an expert Ghost Whisperer and Bricks as an enforcer. Lyssa called upon them to make a stop to a devastating Ghost assualt on their headquarters. Organised by Hook and the Dimmer Sisters.

After some investigating they discovered that the ghost attacks were killing Crow members left and right, draining their spirit essence to a location under the headquarters of the Crows. They also discovered that the Dimmer Sisters and Hook were behind the attacks.

This prompted the execution of an Assault plan from our two operatives. With a point of attack to place spirit anchors to create a distraction to stop the attacks on the Crows.

While trying to break through the Wards of the Dimmers Mansion they got stopped by a pair of bluecoats. Bricks didn’t hesitate to put his blade to the test, while Duster vaulted the walls of the mansion.

Duster went on his mission to place the spirit anchors as the Dimmer Sisters became aware of an assault due to a firefight between Bricks and the Bluecoats. Duster barely managed to stave of their divinity spell with his Beyond armor.

After the Bluecoats died, Bricks got a invitation beneath the streets with Hook, who made Bricks an offer to bring his boss a gift in return for him helping with the mission. Bricks declined the offer with a shot in his gut. Hook didn’t hesitate to strike back as his right hook(a literal hook ofc.) grasped for Bricks, barely missing him as he flipped the table. An ongoing chase through a maze of pathways under the Dimmer mansion ensued.

Meanwhile Duster barely managed to stay out of sight in the Dimmer Gardens, placing a few spirit anchors across the garden. Just before getting spotted Duster made a desperate attempt to gather as many spirits as he can into the spirit anchors, causing the sprits to break into the Dimmer Mansion, alerting them to Duster position.

While Duster barely managed to drop the spirit anchors underneath the foundation of the Mansion, as one of the Sisters cast an blood binding spell on Duster dragging him unconscious into the depths of the manor.

Bricks closed in on Hook(tick, tock, tick, tock), and with a last attempt caught Hook, and sliced open his throat. He even avoided taking with him a cursed amulet.

While this happened the Crows suffered a great assault taking more losses, which eventually diminished to a halt. And Lyssa was very pissed that it took so long. But as Bricks offered Hooks’ hook as a trophy she smiled as her long rival was finally dead.

The Path of Echoes didn’t take the death of Hook lightly, and a war between the Echoes and the Crows ensued.

All in all a wonderfull session. Perhaps we’ll see another session happen again in a few weeks.

Session X.

Session X. To retaliate for having their HQ seized, the Little Sisters ask around to determine how the Bluecoats are weakening themselves by having so many people hidden for the trap they have set up at the seized HQ. The Little Sisters find that the Bluecoat station watchtower is operating on a skeleton staff and decide to sneak in, rig up explosives and flammables, and light it up.

Long story short, they send the place up in smoke. But they get pretty badly hurt in the process, kill a friendly NPC, destroy a sacred Skovlander scripture, and bump the crew’s wanted rating up to III.