Pallbearers End
My 9-month Blades in the Dark campaign ended last week. It was a hell of a ride and I wanted to share it with y’all.
The Pallbearers:
Ashen Crow: Leech, devotee to a dead sun god and master of the mystical and mechanical.
Finni Gyles: Bruiser, ghost-fighter and partially ghost himself, lover of sandwiches and seeker of eternal life.
Herrik Vanir: Smooth operator and team rakehell trading in whispers and favors to further his own ends.
Veretta Jingshen: Deposed Svoklan noble turned sorceress and burgeoning playwright.
The team had spent months fighting back against enemies like the Gray Cloaks, Inspectors, Spirit Wardens and Lord Scurlock while in the background a clock counted down to the arrival of a demon they had accidentally unleashed on their second score. The demon, named Murmur, finally emerged from the sea and began a campaign of terror against the people of Doskvol, killing and abducting as it pleased. It then approached the Pallbearers (minus Ashen Crow and Herrik who were imprisoned at the time) and marked them as its agents on a mission of pure destruction: they were tasked with infiltrating the Ministry of Preservation and destroying the city’s leviathan blood stockpiles, bringing down the lightning walls and letting Murmur rule over the survivors.
Without much choice, the B-team of Pallbearers, now including Dog the Skovlander tracker and Ioane the Dagger Island archer, broke into the fortress of the Ministry of Preservation and went about their task of sneaking past the hazard-suited workers to find the leviathan blood reserves. What they discovered was that the leviathan hunters have been failing to return for months and that the reserves were depleted, a secret not even known to Murmur. Veretta convinced the Director to use the reserves to protect the fortress with its own lighting walls, a last-ditch redoubt for the team.
Meanwhile, Finni Gyles led another B-team consisting of Lily the ghostly avenger and Jolly the Iruvian sniper into Ironhook Prison to break out Ashen Crow and Herrik. In the process, Ashen Crow assembled his arcane materials and unleashed his greatest ritual: summoning a demon that embodied the power of the shattered sun and bringing light to Dunslough in the form of a blazing creature that hung in the sky. Doing this earned him the devotion of the imprisoned sorcerers, who began to follow him. The team then released all of the prisoners in Ironhook and escaped while the prisoners overcame the guards.
The two teams came together in the fortress of the Ministry of Preservation, fighting their way past demons and defenses to reunite. The core team remained behind and the others were sent to organize the defense of their home Six Towers, using the sorcerers to ignite old wards left by the Emperor in the hopes of holding off the denizens of the Deathlands. The Pallbearers then waited for Murmur to arrive, and in the final showdown they managed to kill the demon, hooking its body to an experimental generator and transferring its essence into the sun demon summoned by Ashen Crow.
As the lightning barriers fell, the team tested their preparations with some Fortune rolls. They managed to save Six Towers along with Charterhall, Brightstone, Nightmarket, Coalridge, Dunslough and the Docks. With their new miniature sun and the ancient spells of power reawoken they were able to hold back the mass of Deathlands inhabitants. The sun demon’s power is great but not infinite, and it has to rest for half of the day, and during that time the lightning barriers are reignited to protect the reduced Doskvol. And the light draws the attention of powerful horrors from across the continent as well as the eye of the Emperor, who contemplates what to do next.
We had a discussion on how each character’s epilogue would go, and this is what we came up with:
Ashen Crow became the leader of the cult devoted to the sun demon, keeping it supplied with power. His cult becomes a very powerful force in Doskvol and is contacted by the Emperor about the city’s continued status as a part of the Empire.
Finni Gyles: His hands were turned to demonflesh during the fight with Murmur, and after the battle he left the criminal life to become a leviathan hunter, captaining a small fleet of ships that work out of Doskvol while still pursuing immortality.
Herrik Vanir: Falling back on his core talents, Herrik expanded his spy networks across the new city and became an information broker playing for all sides. He is entertaining offers to work for both the Emperor and his distant homeland of Tycheros, who are very interested in this new sun.
Veretta Jingshen: A master of the arcane in her own right, Veretta gathered up the sorcerers and witches who abhorred the light of the new sun and took them to the Deathlands, where she has built her own fortress to continue her studies and write her plays far from the light over Doskvol.
Since we kinda broke the setting, we decided this was the end of the campaign for the time being. We all had a ton of fun and I look forward to running more Blades of FitD games in the future. Right now I’m really eyeing Blades Against Darkness and Copperhead County. And we might not be done with our version of Doskvol! I’ve considered writing up the changed city a hundred years in the future and picking up from there with new factions and characters, and we’ve also thought about using a different system to play around in the aftermath of this campaign. Either way it was a blast to run and Blades is my new favorite system for how easy and fast it is.
