With the help of two playtest groups and the continuing evolution of the BitD rules through v8, I’ve made some progress on my post-apocalypse Blades hack, Glow in the Dark.
-Some abilities revamped in light of how v8 does it
-Fallout (entanglements) redesigned to be more players vs. factions rather than having internal strife, bad luck, and weather playing such a large role
The Dead Setters get back to basics, helping Ulf Ironborn run the Billhooks off some turf at the docks.
As an entanglement from their low-heat last session (low heat only because it happened on the Void Sea and nobody knew about it), Ulf Ironborn (known in our circles as “Good Ol’ Barf Ironface”) came to the Dead Setters for a favor. They were +3 with him, and when he asked for their help taking over the Billhooks’ extortion racket at the docks, the crew agreed even though they were also +1 with the Billhooks.
Amusingly they chose a social plan, convincing Coran that his sister Erin was planning on using supernatural chicanery to finally gain control of the Billhooks. This led to a confrontation at the ‘hooks’ slaughterhouse, which was easily fanned into the flames of fratricide. I set up a clock for Coran’s group and a clock for Erin’s group, and then set up a smaller clock for the death-dogs Erin loosed upon her former comrades.
The dogs won, and then the Dead Setters Ol’ Yellered the dogs.
Coran survived, albeit with one hand looking more like a Pez dispenser and strips of meat ripped from his other arm. Rook ushered him out the back, as the crew didn’t want Ulf to storm in and just kill him. They might have use for the wounded Billhook scion.
It was a pretty simple score. We had to break before payoff and downtime, so we’ll get that next time.
This session we also broke from Hangouts and tried using Roll20. We had tried it at the beginning of our campaign but couldn’t get everyone to hear each other back then. They’ve made improvements or something, because I felt like the audio in Roll20 was even better than over Hangouts.
Of note: In our refactoring character and crew sheets for v8, we ended up needing to choose 2 crew abilities. They chose Ghost Market (as their long-term plans involve dealing with the Reconciled and applying their secret of longevity to still-living people somehow) and Patron (because that’s how you get from Tier 3 to Tier 4). Ghost Market wasn’t taken lightly, as it filled their second Veteran dot and blocks off other winners like War Dogs, which they had been eyeing for some time too.
I’m looking for some good examples of resistance rolls involving Insight, and to a lesser extent, Resolve (although without supernatural “will save” effects, I’ve already got those down).
The Dead Setters fight a demon on a boat in The ‘Game Over, Man!’ Caper.
The Dead Setters fight a demon on a boat in The ‘Game Over, Man!’ Caper.
The crew and Ulf Ironborn headed out to sea, hiring the smuggling ship Insider Raiding to rendezvous with the Colossus (their stolen state-of-the-art leviathan-hunting prototype vessel) and retrieve Ulf’s family (his wife Arika, his sister Yan, and his son Alf) where they had been stashed while the Setters dealt with Lord Strangford. Captain Minos and the cohort of exhausted, terrified rovers clamored for help as soon as the PCs came aboard. Something was taking the crew and stalking the ship for victims. Minos estimated about a quarter of his men were missing or dead (2/8 on a clock), although Ulf’s family were still alive, kept under guard in his own quarters.
This situation came about due to a Demonic Notice entanglement on their way back from Skovland a few sessions ago. I rolled on the random demon table and got keywords like amorphous, gears, and savagery. I was also one of the few sad people who saw the Jamie Lee Curtis movie Virus in the theater.
An Assault plan went awry with double 1s on the engagement roll. A sudden storm enveloped the sky, capsizing the Insider Raiding! They couldn’t evacuate Ulf, his family, or their beleaguered cohort of rovers! They’d have to stick together to hunt this creature, but a poor Hunt roll meant the demon found them first! It tried to crush several crew by tearing a pressure door off its hinges and using it like a trash compactor in a narrow hallway, but Rook the Cutter took the hit and burned his armor. The demon opted to hit and run, tearing through to an upper deck and collapsing a stateroom down into the gap. The glimpses the PCs got were of a vaguely simian shape, all massive hydraulics connected with human meat and sinew, pumping oil, electroplasm, and blood through pipes and arteries.
Ulf saw the thing and immediately headed for his family. Rook tried to cajole the Skovlander into working together and destroying the entity first, but Ulf would have none of it. I asked Rook’s player if he’d be willing to go to a fight over it, because that’s what it would take to stop Ulf, but Raven compromised and went with Ulf. Party: split!
Each team found evidence of other creatures and remnants of hapless crew as they went. Spider-bobcats, fashioned from clockwork and meat, or headcrab-like vent-crawlers, all human hands with shaving razor fingers, clamped down over ruined skulls and corpses stripped of useful parts.
Rook and Deemo the Leech took the rovers on the hunt for the demon and critted! I decided that they would get the drop on the demon in the most advantageous location – the reactor room. With limited effect, Deemo surveyed the situation and couldn’t find any specific “silver bullet” weakness, but Rook, a Tier III monster with Brutal, a fine heavy weapon, and Not to Be Trifled With, waded in and started whooping ass with his railjack hammer. If you have the right stuff, sometimes you can knock over the stone tower with a hammer.
Meanwhile, Ulf and Raven made it to the captain’s quarters and found… corpses and the signs of a struggle, but nothing had been able to get through the sturdy door. Clearly the demon hadn’t constructed its behemoth body yet. The only snag was that Ulf’s family weren’t sure it was him! They said the creature was taking people and maybe it was trying to trick them. Raven managed to sway them, however, and Ulf was finally reunited with his family. The storm would destroy any lifeboats, though, so they weren’t out of the fire yet. No escape. They headed below decks to reunite with their comrades, deciding safety in numbers was better than going it alone.
The demon had a clock going for corrupting the Colossus’ reactor, plus a small group of its “helping hands”. I didn’t get cute with consequences or positioning, just doled out harm (which was absorbed by armor and then by masterful resistance rolls) and desperation. The Dead Setters had dealt with monstrous enemies before and they dealt with this one now, wrecking the construct with railjack hammer, alchemicals, and electroplasmic bullets. But – but! – it managed to deal actual harm to Rook before its corporeal form was trashed. I know Rook had taken harm before, but probably not in the last 9 months or so. Small victories. 🙂
Deemo used Alcahest to make stripping the body horror out of the ship’s engine easier, then got to work actually fixing the reactor. The rest of the group scoured the vessel for any leftovers, but soon found that the entity’s presence, while divested of its corporeal assets, was still haunting the ship.
We had to break there, but overall this was a success in terms of tone. I feel that while the actual combat felt a little light, I was able to provide some good complications in the storm, Ulf breaking ranks, his family’s initial mistrust, and the lingering danger still to come.
The Dead Setters brought their war with Lord Strangford’s leviathan hunters to a close by returning to Duskwall from…
The Dead Setters brought their war with Lord Strangford’s leviathan hunters to a close by returning to Duskwall from Skovland, blowing up a sloop outside Strangford’s manor, and murdering him inside his panic room. Then they bottled his spirit for eventual trade to the mirror-demon Ahazu, all in accordance with their ghost contract.
The philosophy of “talk shit, roll crits” was on full display in their two-session assault plan. While the vast array of corrupt Bluecoats, house guards, and supernatural countermeasures was not enough to stop the PCs in the fiction, it cost everyone nearly all their stress (including Richter the spider, who almost never takes a lot of stress) to pull it off.
With Strangford’s bullet-ridden corpse hiding inside his locked, secret panic room, the authorities had to proceed as if he was missing, not dead. This bogged down their usual asset seizure process so the PCs could make off with a bunch of valuables. When the Dead Setters returned to their hidden lair, however, they discovered that while they were in Skovland, Strangford completed a long-term clock called “find out where the Dead Setters live”. He traded the PCs’ lair location to the Bluecoats (the crew has a 2 Wanted level) in exchange for a few off-duty death squads at Strangford’s beck and call. So the cops seized the lair, but an epic resistance roll saw their cohort of pit fighters escape with their vault contents.
Of the Dead Setters’ other two primary locations, they took Ahazu’s offer of “help” in protecting the canal-side lair they had previously taken from the Eels. The spirit well in Coalridge was almost lost to the Spirit Wardens, but Raven the hound spent a load of stress for a complex flashback and protected it by essentially rigging it to “go off”, releasing spirits to possess a cache of stored hollows and fight off the authorities…
…essentially creating a sudden vampire plague in Coalridge. What can I say, you can’t roll sixes all the time. We’re not all Adam Koebel.
What else? They still have to do the handoff with Ahazu. They have to get Ulf Ironborn’s family, rescued from a Skovland prison, back to him (they are currently secreted on the Colossus, their stolen prototype leviathan hunting vessel which has run afoul of demonic notice). The bluecoats were able to place Raven and Teatime the whisper at the crime scene, and we haven’t rolled Heat yet.
All my games eventually turn into the end of Commando. #justbodies #talkshitrollcrits
The Dead Setters evade the wrath of Lord Strangleford and the Imperial Navy by running to Skovland in the Non Extradition Country Caper.
In the I’m on a Boat Caper, the gang hijacked Strangford’s newest, largest, most advanced leviathan hunting vessel ever built, the Colossus. Although the score was over, the crew couldn’t just putter over to the Eels’ old waterway access and park the ship. They had just broached 3 Wanted stars, and the Navy was after them.
Could they fight and board the warship? Maybe, if the navy was there to board them (they weren’t). But they did owe Ulf Ironborn a favor from several sessions ago (smuggling his family out of Skovland), and Skovland was somewhere that was not Duskwall.
And so, with several references to Red Seas Under Red Skies, the Dead Setters steamed for Skovland and the cold, white north.
We had a strange downtime – being on a ship meant some downtime actions wouldn’t necessarily be available, but everyone found ways to indulge their vice, whether it was nicking the lion’s share of luxuries from the officers’ quarters or gambling with their cohort of Rovers in the hold.
We also weren’t on a score, but we had some opportunities for action rolls as Raven the Hound used her hunting raven to Survey for a cove or similar to stash the Colossus while the Setters headed overland to Lockport. Everyone fought off posession attempts, because we assumed the non-city areas of Skovland were deathlands just like Akoros.
They arrived mostly none the worse for wear, and we started making up Skovland as we went. Rook the Cutter was from Skovland, and aggravated everyone with how majestic and historic the motherland was. It wasn’t, really – I used the phrase “in the shadow of former greatness”, and we generally agreed it was about 80/20 Russian to Viking. Great orthodox-style ornate architecture, but long-looted and stripped by the occupying imperial military. Bases of toppled statues. Street urchins. Ramshackle wagons. Elevated train lines. Very industrial but in a black-lung, run-down kind of way. We also fleshed out the Skovland Refugees faction a bit, and added some mafiya-type characterization to them so they’d deserve their Tier IV rating.
Richter the Spider tried to gather information on Ulf Ironborn’s family by visiting a sauna and chatting up the people there. With a 1, the people turned out to be imperial officers, and the basic gist was that Ulf’s family were prisoners of the state, being used to lure him back for a quick death.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough to plan a score for next time.
Bird Rentals -> Burt Reynolds -> Raven’s player wouldn’t let me retcon her raven into a firebird. 🙁
We find out what Johnny Tabernacle, the Third Rails’ Leftover, was doing as a prisoner of the Boneyard Bulldogs before his friends came to rescue him. Zeke the Junker gains no XP and Johnny Traumas out during a flashback.
Last time, Lt. Dan Halen (a Reaper) and Zeke rolled up on the Bulldogs’ fortress in a ruined high school but got a 1 on the engagement roll. Before addressing that, I spent some time bringing Johnny Tabernacle’s player up to speed and playing through his downtime as a prisoner of the Bulldogs, which limited his options but he found a way to indulge his vice (denial, satiated through his hand terminal’s offline Netflix library). He managed to Barter his life in exchange for granting the Bulldogs access to the few stored sports movies in his hand terminal’s library (like Scheherazade). By making himself a useful prisoner, Johnny secured himself access to the sports doc and was able to Recover his wounds from his first session as well.
Sadly, as a complication from his Barter roll, Johnny’s library ran out and he was next in line for the Bulldogs’ next sadistic bloodsport. Meanwhile, Dan and Zeke were making their approach. We talked about what kind of terrible situation Johnny could be thrown into and settled on “fighting mutant beasts”. I had mentioned that the Bulldogs had two stripped-down bodytank frames that they used for certain sports, like “swing prisoners in bags at each other like a bloody pillow fight until one power armor frame gets knocked off a platform”. As a Leftover, Johnny had a bodytank available as one of his personal items.
Letting a prisoner have access to powered armor just because it was on his sheet? It’d make sense for it to be a hard “no” this time, but I figured maybe this is how Johnny gets a bodytank. Plus, it was license to make the creatures he was up against pretty nasty, so Dan and Zeke saw their friend in the middle of the astroturf facing three radscorpions. Johnny’s power armor didn’t have much in the way of actual
armor (the obvious weak spot flaw) and its powerplant was draining fast (limited power), but since Johnny was a former moon colonist and not some wasteland savage, he was able to jailbreak the armor’s admin settings and unlock potential the Bulldogs weren’t aware of (the Fast and Strong edges).
There was still the problem of the 20+ Bulldogs in the bleachers and on the field spectating, plus the four watchtowers surrounding the area. Dan took one watchtower guard while Zeke used a flashback to trade favor for favor with the Monarchs, a gang of plant and insect mutants who are trade partners with the Third Rails (the Monarchs originally asked for more than just a favor, but Zeke’s Barter roll was superb). A squad of a dozen locust-people arced down out of the night sky into the Bulldogs, causing instant chaos!
I like running big, complex fights in Blades. Using clocks and Tier/fortune rolls lets you engage the mechanics (so you’re not just using fiat) but still prevents a battle from feeling onerous. Within the larger chaos, a few interesting choices and mechanics were tested:
1. Lt. Dan knifes a watchtower guard and sets up to just shoot a second guard. He has more dice in Raid, but chooses to roll Hunt instead because Hunt won’t cost him an ammo dot and Raid will. My hack: working as expected!
2. Unlike my vanilla Blades game, I wanted to set a precedent for resistance rolls reducing harm by default instead of avoiding harm (I was a softie before and it’s bit us in the ass now that the characters are all experienced). Dan’s choice of Hunt got him a “Grazed Thigh” wound, downgrading from “Shredded Thigh” instead of avoiding it entirely. It makes spending armor – and remembering to keep back some load items for it – more important, because I generally do let Armor just stop an attack cold unless I can’t reconcile it in the fiction.
3. Zeke throws molotovs and hand grenades from the relative safety of outside the fence. It helps some (the molotov separating Johnny from the scorpions flanking him, allowing him to pitch one into the Bulldogs in the bleachers) and hurts some (a 1 on the grenade peppers Johnny with shrapnel instead of the scorpions). While effective in the moment, we’d see later that when Zeke doesn’t act like a Junker, his XP triggers don’t fire. If he had whipped up a homemade bomb, he’d have gotten XP for it. I asked afterwards if it was weird or discouraging, but Zeke’s player agreed that he wasn’t taking desperate risks and he wasn’t doing Junker-type things.
As the Bulldogs beat down the remaining Monarchs, Johnny crits the two remaining radscorpions, killing each of them with the other’s stingers. He makes a run for it, using his suit’s fast edge to outpace pursuit. Dan slides down the watchtower, landing on his hurt leg, and is about to be overtaken on his way back to Zeke’s jalopy when Zeke charges the pursuing Bulldogs in the Subaru Bratmobile. He ticks Armor as one shotguns the windshield (pig-iron welding mask), Dan clambers in, and the Third Rails take off into the night.
Payoff, aka “No Reward is Worth This”
Other than stripping the bodytank for parts, which they didn’t want to do yet, the Third Rails really only recovered Johnny on this run. That would leave them with only 2 supplies after upkeep, so Johnny asked for a flashback where he was palming valuables during his captivity. He had no dots in Finesse or Prowl, so he’d rolling 2d take lowest. He was getting high on stress and didn’t want to push himself and although I don’t remember the devil’s bargain I made, I remember he didn’t want to take it.
The dice came up 6… and 1.
The Bulldogs discover his trickery and lock him in a room where they play the Monday Night Football theme on a loop (shades of Daryl from the Walking Dead). Level 2 Harm, “Catatonic”. Johnny resists with Resolve, avoiding the harm, but only gets a 2. The extra 4 stress is too much and he Traumas out.
During a flashback.
Johnny’s player figured out the answer. His rival is “Nine Cat Nine”, a radio voice. The Bulldogs called in a favor and Nine Cat Nine starts broadcasting the MNF theme over open air. Johnny’s bodytank radio picks it up and, unable to escape the music, collapses in a catatonic heap.
When the crew returns, they find the denizens of Prism City hungry and anxious. When it becomes known that they returned practically empty-handed, the settlement turns its eye on stripping down anything they can to trade for food. This was the Fallout roll, which resulted in Drastic Measures: Desperate for raw materials, your crew razes one of its own claims for resources. Choose a claim to destroy, gaining your tier in supplies, or stop the madness some other way. If you do not have additional claims, then you must take the second option.
We stopped there and will do downtime and upkeep next session. How will the Third Rails stop their own settlement from literally tearing itself apart? How will the Boneyard Bulldogs retaliate? What kind of favor will the Monarchs call in, and when?
The I’m on a Boat Caper ended with the Dead Setters in control of the Colossus, Lord Strangford’s largest and newest…
The I’m on a Boat Caper ended with the Dead Setters in control of the Colossus, Lord Strangford’s largest and newest leviathan-hunting vessel, and with Richter (Spider) as the newly “elected” magistrate of Crow’s Foot.
Strangford’s control over his leviathan hunting business dropped to Weak as his peers distanced themselves from the scandal he’d invited upon himself. Because the Dead Setters’ lair has remained so well hidden, Strangford resorted to appointing Richter to public office to make him visible. It all completely backfired, of course, when the duelist (Roethe Kinclaith) Strangford arranged to kill the new magistrate at the Colossus’ launch party turned out to be a sometimes-ally of the Setters. Then, after the party, undercover Bluecoats attempted to drive Richter’s carriage into the canal and drown him. That didn’t take either, as apparently as a result of too much contact with leviathan blood combined with a Ghost Contract with Ahazu the demon, Richter picked up the Tempest power and Harry Pottered his way out of the deathtrap.
On the boat, the rest of the crew and their new cohort of Rovers, led by Captain Minos (a former leviathan hunter himself), struggled to take control of the Colossus on its maiden voyage. The PCs smuggled themselves onto the boat in barrels and crates, dwarf-style. Setarra the water demon, who was in concert with Lord Scurlock and “on loan” of sorts to Lord Strangford in order to keep the vessel’s prototype Sparkwright electroplasm reactor running, tried to drown them then and there but was rebuffed with a crit from Teatime (Whisper).
After that, it was fire and blood. Rook (Cutter) led the rovers to the upper decks where he singlehandedly fought and destroyed a hull-powered waldo, a giant hydraulic crane arm for harvesting leviathan flesh and blood. A second such drone arm gave him more trouble, almost tossing the cutter into the Void Sea along with a section of the deck. Meanwhile, Deemo (Leech) had her hands full repairing the reactor after a hapless engineer got thrown into it. Strangford’s whisper, Miss Sprunk, went up against Raven (Hound) and lost her boots. Also her life, but the image of Raven looting Sprunk’s quality footwear as the whisper bled out below decks was a high water mark (ahem) for this nautical adventure.
The Colossus’ captain Rackson surrendered after doing her best to sabotage the vessel’s bridge. The Dead Setters’ rovers took quite a few losses, leaving them Impaired. No PCs took any harm, although there was a lot of stress spent. Lots of sixes in our first session saw the crew wedge themselves firmly into the score before the second session’s luck turned against them somewhat. Still not enough to cause serious problems in the moment. The high-profile nature of the job did leave the Dead Setters with 3/9 Heat and Wanted 3.
Good Stuff:
I think this score was big and complex enough that everyone got spotlight time. We had steampunk gadgetry, straight-up fighting, magic, stealth, and all juxtaposed with a high society party.
I think everyone got into how weird I was making the Colossus. It’s the Red-October-crossed-with-Titanic of leviathan hunting ships. I think calling the engine a reactor was appropriate. The bowels of the ship blurred somewhat between pipes and steam and actual bowels and pulsating, breathing tissue. Hull bodies built right into the deck like drone arms. A Big Daddy-inspired first mate (critted immediately by Rook).
Mechanical Stuff:
This session also saw my first attempts at multiple consequences. Miss Sprunk had warded a ship corridor and when Raven tripped the ward, she had to resist the damaging ward as well as Sprunk trying to shut the door and trap her inside the corridor. Likewise, Rook had to resist damage from the drone arm at one point as well as being pinned by it.
These are experienced characters and they have the dice to handle this stuff, but throwing these extra dangers into the mix made our second part of the score feel more dramatic and dangerous.
Funny Stuff:
The Bluecoats’ deathtrap for Richter. It was pretty great. Under the (completely true) pretense of Strangford possibly trying to kill Richter, some undercover Bluecoats got him into a carriage and then simply drove it into the canal, then waited around with shotguns in case he got out.
They had no idea he had JUST taken Tempest as a Veteran advance. A little magic to blow the door lock and some fog to conceal his exit from the canal, and Richter easily took down the cops because he also took Not to be Trifled With as a previous Veteran ability.
Questions:
You don’t roll anything for Tempest, do you? You pay the stress and the stuff happens, right? Can you resist the stress that you’re paying? I would think no, especially if there’s no other roll involved. It seems like a straightforward pay for effect mechanic but I’m curious if I’m interpreting it correctly.
What does Wanted 3 look like? How are you guys generally using Wanted in your games?
Hey Stras Acimovic! Along with everyone else heaping praise upon Scum & Villainy (deservedly so), I wanted to point out a specific ability under the Stitch: Moral Compass: When you do the right thing at cost to yourself, mark XP.
I’ve been struggling with my Glow in the Dark post-apoc hack’s Leftover playbook (the Fallout 4 survivor, Planet of Apes, person-out-of-time idea), and I’ve been trying to put the idea of drawing strength from convictions into a special ability. My closest attempt was complex and fiddly, but man, you guys nailed it with Moral Compass. So simple and concise.
