#glowinthedarkrpg The Third Rails (out of Prism City) recovered a cache of anti-rads from the Boneyard, beating the…
#glowinthedarkrpg The Third Rails (out of Prism City) recovered a cache of anti-rads from the Boneyard, beating the Boneyard Bulldogs, Sheltered, and the Monarchs to the punch.
The previous session (https://plus.google.com/u/0/109333990936576277189/posts/JsrFwMb9D3A) ended with Ol’ Zeke the Junker collapsing a building. Since Johnny Tabernacle’s player couldn’t make the game, we ruled he appeared crushed in the rubble and was left for dead (until next game where he can return none the worse for wear). Dan Halen (the Reaper) and Zeke head into the mutant-dingo-infested subway tunnels, trying to come at the cache’s location from behind and catch any of the other factions looking for the treasure off-guard. This all works out pretty well, and although it gets dicey when Zeke accidentally drops some security doors in their path during a chase/firefight with the Bulldogs, they escape and return to Prism City with their loot.
This was just a good Blades session, hacked or not. I felt I had Devil’s Bargains tuned pretty well. I had plenty of consequences lined up that weren’t just “and then you take harm”. The duo of PCs had a tricky challenge in the form of a guard robot (Elysium/Chappie style), but they managed to defeat it with a Raid setup action by Dan which let Zeke get around behind it and use some jumper cables to stun it and then Hack it to help them carry the heavy crate of supplies. Both characters were running pretty high on stress by the end – I believe Dan Halen had 1 stress left and although Zeke was doing better, I think he had a level 1 harm he’ll need to clear. The high stress came less from resistance rolls and more from the fact that with 2 people, there’s only so many options for getting bonus dice and they’re Tier 0 starting characters. You need those dice but you’ve only got so much stress. The game’s tuned pretty well for this level, however. It forces you to get in and get out. My vanilla Blades game is for 5 people and someone always has a stress to spare for a bonus die, plus they’ve accumulated enough XP to where their starting dice pools are pretty beefy. This was a welcome change, and even I could feel that “scarcity” was actually being enforced as a theme by the mechanics.
The Third Rails’ supply situation looks like this:
2 Starting supplies
-1 paid to Westchester Woodhouse (their mutant contact) for exceptional gather info
-1 paid for medium loadout
+1 from looting Monarchs scouting party
+5 for anti-rad cache
-1 for crew upkeep
They stored 4 in their lair and plan on burning 1 immediately on either fallout (my entanglements hack) or on an extra downtime action.
Speaking of scarcity, load (and what to spend it on) was definitely somewhere between a meaty tactical decision and a pain point. I like my hack to add light ammo tracking into the game, but it does make a medium load feel like light, since if you’re going to roll Raid at any point it’s going to cost 2 load in ammunition. I either need to reconsider how to “weight” ammo, or I need to maybe up the load limits by, say, 1 point per level. It makes light load pretty useless as it is, and if you wanted to take light load and use a pistol, well, you’re looking at 3 load for that. 1 for the pistol and 2 load in ammo if you’re going to actually use the thing more than once. But then I’m flipflopping back to thinking, well, it should be a hard choice. Does reinforcing the theme here get too much in the way of player choice and freedom to act? Medium load costs 1 supply, light load doesn’t. Is the benefit of not dinging your crew’s resources worth taking light load?
On to XP: I didn’t have improved XP triggers yet but we did use the “if you did X, you get 1 XP. If you did it a lot, it’s 2 XP” rules. That helps, plus we had more desperate rolls this time too.
My 3 players are the Third Rails, a crew of Dealers (like hawker/smugglers) out of Prism City, a shitty underground mall like Crystal City in Arlington or Toronto’s PATH. There’s Johnny Tabernacle, a Leftover (think Charlton Heston from Planet of the Apes or any of the Fallout player characters); Lt. Dan Halen, a Reaper (Wez, Ironbar, Rambo – the “fighter” playbook); and Ol’ Zeke, the Junker (think Gyro-Captain, Chumbucket, MacGyver).
The Rails’ primary contact, a mutant named Westchester Woodhouse (http://teamventure.org/w/images/e/e5/Ned_smile.png in a top hat), comes staggering down into Prism City. He’s been worked over by the Boneyard Bulldogs, a sports-themed raider gang. He used all his ammo escaping a handful of killbots guarding a cache of anti-rads deep in the Boneyard and barely made it back to Prism City intact. The anti-rads are in Monarchs territory (a plant mutant gang of slavers), and now the Bulldogs and the Sheltered (secretive bunker-dwelling recluses) are on their way to claim the prize.
This was my version of the Lampblacks/Red Sashes rivalry, a good Cannonball Run race for a treasure. I took one positive faction (the Monarchs), one negative (the Boneyard Bulldogs), and one neutral (the Sheltered), and I’m hoping that we’ll get some good faction shifts out of the resulting shitshow. The players said this sounded like a Transport plan – just get there first, get the goods, and get out – although we had some good discussion about how different plans could work, which told me I’d chosen a fairly good opening scenario for once. They were +1 with the Monarchs and considered a Social tack (but they opted for stealth and speed over diplomacy) as well as waiting for one of the other factions to get the anti-rads and Assaulting them as they left the Boneyard (but their only vehicle was Zeke’s jalopy, an underpowered Subaru Brat – a chase wouldn’t go in their favor). The Third Rails paid Westchester Woodhouse 1 of their 2 supplies (Glow in the Dark’s coin replacement) and we counted that as spending resources on a Gather Information check. They got exceptional information, including GPS coordinates they could plug into their fine GPS (one of their crew upgrades). Armed with the most accurate route, the Third Rails loaded up Zeke’s jalopy and headed out.
Brief rules digression! I’m handling load slightly differently in Glow in the Dark. I charge a crew supplies based on the heaviest load taken – medium costs 1, heavy costs 2. This led to some fruitful discussion and in my mind made choosing a load level much more tactical than in vanilla Blades. These guys also aren’t Shadows, with their insane load bonus upgrade. They’ve been spoiled, and now they have to deal with the basic rules like everyone else, plus the supply ding on top of it. They went with medium load, even though it’d cost their last supply. I also charge upkeep during downtime, because scarcity is a theme here, so the Third Rails must return with at least one supply or things will go very badly indeed.
A six on engagement means that the crew makes excellent time and makes it safely into the Boneyard as far as their jalopy can get before the streets are choked by toppled buildings, thick, ropey brambles, and rusted car corpses. Dan’s player is new to Blades and PbtA-style games in general, but with 2 experienced Blades players beside him he adapted quickly enough. Dan Prowled his way over and through the collapsed building, but caused a lot of noise in doing so. I started a clock “Draws Attention”. Johnny T looked for a safer way through the rubble, and spotted an easy but long climb up to monorail track. Meanwhile, Zeke tried a subway access but encountered two-headed mutant dingos! He flashed back to the drive from Prism City to the Boneyard, where he Hacked together a dog whistle contraption because with their exceptional information, he’d have known about the creatures that lurk in the Boneyard. Zeke scares the dingos back into the tunnels but it’s clear that path is fraught with danger. It also nearly fills the Attention clock.
In an attempt to reduce the attention clock and draw any Monarchs off their trail, Johnny T uses his hand terminal to Hack into any pre-war systems that might still be operational – and rolls a 3. He finds something all right. The nearby monorail starts blaring anti-terrorism warnings (“If you see something, say something!”) and draws a Monarch patrol to the site! Three plant/bug mutants peer down at the Third Rails from atop an eight-story tenement.
What happened next just goes to show the inherent speciesism people have for weird plant/bug things. The Third Rails had +1 status with the Monarchs. I figured this might be a social-type challenge, something that’s been surprisingly absent in our vanilla Blades capers. I was wrong. It’s not me – it’s my players. 🙂 Johnny Tabernacle checks “fine energy weapon” off his items list and snap-fires a maser into a bat-winged probiscus/hibiscus. The poor dude’s water content flash-boils and he explodes like he was an extra in District 9. The Venus Butterflytrap next to him shouts “You killed Baptista!” and grazes Johnny with a Mosin-Nagant rifle (level 1 harm after resistance). Lt. Dan doesn’t take kindly to plants shooting his friends and after a brief exchange (the Raid action as opposed to Johnny’s Hunt roll), plugs the Butterflytrap in the “face”. The rifle falls eight stories (a complication – no looting this guy).
At this point, Zeke’s player mentions that they were on good terms with the Monarchs and now they have to murder all of these guys so they can stay friends with the rest of them. It’s sound logic, if a bit like the opening of Heat. Problem is, Zeke doesn’t have the skillset for a gunfight. He does have a frag grenade and 2 dots in Wreck, however. The Junker arcs the grenade into the building, aiming to collapse it and bury the woodsy Groot-like Monarch in the rubble.
Rolling a 2 on that kind of roll is bad news. The building collapses, all right – sideways into the street! Johnny T ends up with 2 harm (“Bad Sprain”) as he’s swept off his monorail track, Lt. Dan avoids harm but is pinned under rubble, and Zeke takes 1 harm from flying rubble (“stunned”). Dan Finesses his way free but draws the Monarch’s attention. “YOU KILLED MY FRIENDS!” it bellows, grabbing a length of rebar with a concrete lollipop on the end. In his first Desperate knife-fight (a recurring theme across literally any game I run), Dan buries his combat knife deep in the Monarch’s mouth. The roll’s a six, and the blade comes out sticky with sap, felling the tree-man.
We had to wrap it up there, but we did do character XP, whereupon I noted that I desperately need to revamp my XP triggers to be more like BitD 7+. We’ve been playing with those triggers for a few weeks now and they are just so much better. The players love that certain triggers don’t limit your XP to your playbook track, and that there’s explicit callouts to earn multiple XP per trigger. I still had the old style, where there was a playbook trigger and an “anytime” trigger. Furthermore, we’re only playing this fortnightly as opposed to weekly and I want my guys to advance through the abilities.
The new XP triggers in Blades are just so much better. It bears reiterating – it’s a major improvement but it looks so small on paper.
Anyways, the Third Rails looted what they could (Zeke winning the day with a Scrounge action), coming up with 1 supply in chems, rations, and plant/mutant food off the dead tree-man. It’ll cover their upkeep at least.
Battered but alive, the trio of survivors makes their way towards the cache, hoping the Boneyard Bulldogs and the Sheltered don’t reach the prize first…
#glowinthedarkrpg Our first real play session! Okay, this is a recap of our last 2 hangouts, but combined it’s character/crew creation and part of a first run (my substitute for score).
I run vanilla Blades every tuesday, and have 2 players from that game in my Glow in the Dark playtest. Joining them is a longtime friend from Texas who hasn’t played any Blades or PbtA or really much of anything in a while. I’ve known all of them for more than half my life, so their tolerance for my gaming shenanigans is high.
They opted for a Dealers crew, citing the Raiders as “too bad guy-feeling” and the Shepherds as too weird to start off with. Relics was a strong choice, though, and there was some dithering that was finally solved when they decided the Dealers were actually the most likely to be involved with building up some sort of civilization. Cool.
Survivor-wise, we ended up with:
Johnny Tabernacle, the Leftover: Born on a moon base, Johnny T evacuated to the ruined Earth once the base’s supplies ran out and the colonists turned to cannibalism. This means I can have moon cannibals follow him down to the wasteland. Perfect. Played by Matt Damon somewhere between the Martian and Interstellar.
Lt. Dan Halen, the Reaper: Originally part of the Last Cavalry, Dan was betrayed by his unit and left for dead. He joined the Third Rails while he bides his time for vengeance. Interesting point: the crew didn’t take faction status with the Last Cavalry, so that indicates this rivalry is narrowed down to just Dan and his old unit, Kill Bill style.
Ol’ Zeke, the Junker: Zeke ran afoul of the Iron Maidens, a power-armor gang running out of a derelict women’s prison. Between Johnny T and Zeke, the Third Rails got the old metro line running that serves as their hidden convoy base.
That’s right, their crew lair is both Hidden and a Convoy. An old metro line made a lot of sense, and because they’re Dealers we said the line meets up with an underground mall called Prism City.
I’ll recap the first play session later, but so far things have been promising. I haven’t gotten a lot of specific feedback yet, but then again we’ve only just started.
