Tag: heestcomplete

HEEST COMPLETE!

The To Survive War You Gotta Become War Caper ended with the Eels’ war preparations proving ineffective against the submaritime ingenuity of the Dead Setters.

We left last session after the Dead Setters laid a trap in the catacombs/mine tunnels under Coalridge. They used the strongboxes the Eels were after in the previous session (which led to their current war), filled them full of explosives, and staged a fake shipment meant to lure in the Eels. The Eels ambushed the convoy and were counter-ambushed in turn. We ended with the Dead Setters’ Whisper, Teatime, coercing one of the Eels’ recently dead to lead them to his lair in a half-flooded warehouse (useful for loading wagons, docking boats, storing cargo, and looking disused and abandoned) on the canal where some of the retaining wall had crumbled into the water. Richter, their Spider, had gotten lost along the way but he had purchased the Foresight ability so he could still assist.

Richter tried to find his way out of the catacombs and did so, clambering up a watery rockfall right into the Eels’ lair (a devil’s bargain)! The Spider turned it around perfectly, though – he produced his fine whiskey flask and claimed he was there to parley. An impressive Sway roll stopped his impending stabbing and we discovered that Richter had drugged the bottle with sleep essence. The half-dozen Eels – and their lieutenant Unagi – all passed out, along with Richter (who was still able to help through Foresight and Mastermind).

Meanwhile, the Setters’ Leech rigged up a gondola to be a submersible and the Cutter approached out of sight of the enemy lookouts. The Hound took out the Eels’ sharpshooters and the Cutter obliterated the lookouts on the water-facing side of the lair. The Eels simply weren’t prepared for a submarine.

The main battle I ran as an 8-clock, since I figured as a Tier I gang the Eels probably only HAD about eight guys left, and that was being generous. A crit on a Teamwork Skirmish felled most of the Eels, prompting one lieutenant, Remora, to attempt an escape by gondola. The Leech’s clockwork spider-bot had been waiting for this (via flashback) and started drilling holes in the boat. The Leech rocked an Attune roll and actually summoned a ghostly gondolier to punt the surrendering Remora back to the Dead Setters’ waiting thugs.

Moray, the Eels’ rotund, dangerous boss, dragged Richter’s unconscious form out onto the catwalk ringing the warehouse floor. The Hound snuck up behind Moray and all three fell into the canal. Moray let Raven (the Hound) stab him and wrapped his meaty hands around her throat, determined to drown her even as he bled out into the inky water.

I dealt harm to Richter, as he was unconscious and underwater. That’s when he used his Mastermind ability, his special armor taking the form of inflatable clothing, pulling him and Raven to the surface. Rook the Cutter and Raven drowned the shit out of Moray and Raven left him as a sacrifice to the Deathseeker crows (she’s started trying to gain their favor as a LTP).

We ended the session there, but we still need to see how the Dead Setters will treat their prisoners (Unagi the Lurk, Remora the Spider, and five thugs who were lucky enough not to fight the Cutter), handle Heat (HEAT WILL BE GAINED), and decide if they want a bigger Coin payout and liquidate all the things, or a smaller Coin payout but use the Eels’ lair as Turf or something.

Quickest. War. Ever. But then, sixes on near every roll will do that, and it was still a fun session and one where I felt I got everyone into the spotlight. Everyone’s pretty damn good at fighting or resisting harm at this point, and although it’s hard to steer clear of that in a gang war, I’m going to look for ways to maybe lure the guys towards more cerebral scores in the future. We’ll see. It might be that they’re just Thieves who secretly act like Breakers, and that’s okay. That’s what veteran advances are for.

#heestcomplete

HEEST COMPLETE!

The Not Another Sewer Level Caper:

With the Spirit Wardens closing in on the tattoo parlor the Dead Setters were currently in, the Cutter and Hound set the building on fire for them, covering their tracks, and the gang escaped into Duskwall’s catacombs.

After some navigational mishaps, they found their way to a sewer crossroads/hideout of sorts where their score was. The only problem was that they spent too long mucking about in the tunnels and the Eels got to Father Yorren’s stash first – barely. The Dead Setters took the Eels by surprise (a 6 on an engagement roll) and Rook, the Cutter, laid into a half-dozen toughs while the Hound and Leech chased down the two Eels escaping with the strongbox.

The fighting went in the PCs’ favor, though everyone had to burn armor (that’s what it’s there for!). The Leech burned the corpses and they dumped them in the deeps – I didn’t ding them the Heat for killing because they covered their tracks and it happened far away from witnesses.

Then the best entanglement happened. With 7 Heat and 1 Wanted level on the table, I rolled “Show of Force”. The Eels make a play against the Dead Setters. They could either give up their single claim (a spirit well/turf area) or go to war. Considering that they took the spirit well off the Eels in the first place, and the guys already were thinking of ways to get the Eels off their back, it was an easy choice.

During downtime, everyone spent the Coin they earned to reduce Heat and recover Stress, so they’re down to 2 Heat/1 Wanted. They’ll be glad of that reduction because in the grimdarkness of Duskwall, there is only war.

#heestcomplete

HEEST CLIFFHANGER!

The Dead Setters helped out their Leech’s vice contact, Father Yorren, who had his supplier disappear on him. He was pretty sure she’d have to be dead to miss a shipment? Either way, he needed the crew to find her corpse and get the location of her stash from her ghost before the Wardens zeroed in. If she wasn’t dead, then they were to get the stash from her and then make her dead. Yorren’s clients expect a certain timeliness to their transactions with the priest.

A group action for Gather Info resulted in a 1970s split-screen cop montage (“Can I use Skirmish to gather info?”*) and they learned the supplier, Lucia, was dropped off at the Hound’s physicker contact. She had been tortured and mortally wounded and she died at Melvir’s “clinic”. The Eels who likely did it likely dropped her off so maaaybe she wouldn’t die and haunt them? Or they already got the info they wanted? Were the Eels on their way to get Yorren’s stash?

The snag here was that someone stole Lucia’s body out from under Melvir’s nose a few hours before the PCs showed up. The Leech’s nemesis, Eckerd the corpse-thief, strikes again! The Hound tracked Eckerd to a tattoo parlor/tenement between Coalridge and Nightmarket where somebody had gotten the bright idea of mixing in leviathan blood with tattoo ink. No idea where that idea came from (thanks Bloodletters game!), but with a location and general idea of what the score was, the PCs picked an Assault plan, with the Cutter and cohort kicking in the door, the Hound on overwatch, and the Leech using spider oil to come in from the roof.

The only danger came from a few Grinders guarding the basement and one huge guy getting an arm tat. The Cutter grabbed the huge guy, carved off his tattoo, and punched him in the meat until he passed out. The Spider talked the other guys down after that.

Meanwhile, Eckerd burst out the back door with Lucia’s body slung over his shoulders – and was immediately gutshot by the Hound. He fell back inside, blood pouring from the hole in his armor. Then the Leech landed on him. A Desperate cripple-fight ensued but Deemo the Leech smashed a bottle of binding oil over Eckerd, holding him fast to the floor.

With the players’ Whisper out this week unabashedly watching his new Force Awakens blu-rey instead of gaming, interrogating the dead woman’s spirit fell to the Spider and the Leech. She used Life Essence and got a mixed success – Lucia returned to life, but her grevious wounds were too much for her to bear. Plus, the gang’s lookouts spotted the Spirit Wardens coming in.

With the Wardens on their way, Deemo had to make a Desperate Tinker roll to keep Lucia’s body together enough for her to talk (using bellows to work her lungs, that sort of thing) while the Spider made a Desperate Sway attempt to convince her to give up the location of her stash. The Eels had grabbed her, but she had lied to them. She wanted vengeance and it was all the Spider could do to coax out a partial clue (“it’s buried near my-“) before the Life Essence wore off and she died again.

For youse guys in the audience – have you used Spirit Wardens much? Anything you did with them that was cool or well-received by your players? I’ve been playing the Division so I’m mostly imagining them as steampunky Cleaners from that game, but I imagine they’re a little more ritualized than that maybe. More Warhammer?

#heestcomplete

*The answer was “Skirmish is fun but you’re not really going to get answers if you do that.”

HEEST COMPLETE!

The Opulence I Has It Caper was the first time where we really let planning get out of hand. The warning in the rules about overplanning really isn’t made idly. Between the engagement roll and flashbacks, you really do have the tools you need to make whatever happens feel like it was part of the plan all along.

This plan generally involved stealing Severosi sculptures off a train, and had an optional goal of getting the Lampblacks in trouble for it. The Spider and the Dead Setters’ cohort of Thugs used stolen Bluecoat uniforms to gather real Bluecoats around one of the Lampblacks’ coalworks where the ill-fated train had been rerouted earlier in the heist.

Not only did the Spider manage to get the Lampblack capo (Badger Baz, Baszo’s cousin or something) to bribe him to take his cops and go, he flashed back to bribing the actual cops with him to ambush the Lampblacks instead of simply accepting the bribe. The coalworks ended up burning to the ground while the rest of the crew was far away with the stolen goods.

The Cutter had a knife fight with his nemesis (Stras, the “clever blade” off the contacts list) where Stras learned the hard way that you should always secure loose clothing around moving trains.

Heat was gained. The crew also has a spy in their midst! The Whisper pulled in a spirit to animate the hull that was carrying their score after the previous occupant was devoured in a summoning mishap. Unbeknownst to the characters, this new spirit was already following the crew under the command of a Red Sash Whisper. The poor Whisper plugged a spy right into their prize and walked it into their hidden thieves’ lair. That was by far the best “a complication occurs” so far in the game, I think.

They hit all 4 XP triggers for their crew, though, got 3 Rep, and a ton of Coin (which they mostly spent on extra downtime actions). Everything’s working like I assume it’s supposed to. I’ve got a bunch of PCs who are just about to hit Trauma in a gang about to tip over into Wanted level 2, but at the same time we’re seeing our first playbook advances and 3-dot action ratings and stuff.

Somewhat unrelated, I can’t get the idea of a Mutant playbook out of my head and I kind of want to try my hand at a Blades hack for Mad Gamma Max Fallout World. “Glow in the Dark”, maybe.

#heestcomplete

HEEST COMPLETE!

In the I’m Getting Too Old For This Shit Caper, the Dead Setters took over the Coalridge spirit well from the skeleton crew of Bluecoats who were guarding it while the Wardens assigned to it were investigated for artifact smuggling (see last issue – Smilin’ Stan Lee).

They did this without killing any cops for once! Instead they turned to that nugget of film perfection, the height of Norm MacDonald’s career: Dirty Work.

Three Easy Steps to Make Bluecoats Hate Their Job and Screw Off Instead of Patrolling

1. Send Rook the Cutter into the sewers to Wreck the pipes underneath the Bluecoats’ hastily-erected watch station, flooding the area and soaking the ground with filth. Watch out for giant albino eels, Rook!

2. Now that the entire neighborhood smells like a Preakness portapotty on a humid August day, Richter the Spider riles up the local taverngoers and blames the problems on the Bluecoats. With a crit, he manages to keep them right on that line between undisguised malice without crossing over into outright violence.

3. Then all you have to do is have Teatime the Whisper magically suborn flocks of ravens to make pinpoint shit-airstrikes on the Bluecoat cohort at the spirit well. All the time. In their lunches. On their heads. Whenever they’re outside.

The beleaguered Bluecoat skeleton crew essentially does as little as possible while still technically remaining at their posts. The crew easily sneaks onto the crumbling manor house grounds and they disable the lightning field. Technically, Deemo the Leech was going to temporarily disable and then reactivate it, but the field flickering out caused Rook to flashback to his time as a Railjack, when the fields failed and ghosts swarmed his crew. He ended up wrecking the field pylons in an impressive Devil’s Bargain.

Turn In Your Gun and Your Badge! You’re Off the Case!

While this chicanery was afoot, I had a clock running for two Spirit Wardens, disgraced by the recent allegations and yearning for justice despite their suspensions, to track down what was really going on. My not-Riggs and not-Murtaugh were waiting inside the manor house and pulled guns on Raven the Hound just as she walked in. Everyone pulled guns, in most cases multiples, and we had ourselves a boss fight.

I used a six-segment clock for the pair of Wardens, but with a crit the crew blasted poor not-Murtaugh to bits right off the bat, his ruined corpse bouncing down into the sinkhole-exposed basement where the spirit well waited. It was in the general shape of a drainage pool, its surface glass-smooth and frozen over, with writhing angry spirits clawing at the eldritch ice from underneath.

Not-Riggs tackled Raven off onto scaffolding that had been erected around the spirit well (a Devil’s Bargain to make it a mano-a-mano knife-fight in true Lethal Weapon fashion). Raven blew through her armor quickly, but managed to take herself and the Warden off the scaffold right onto the spirit well’s frozen surface, which started to crack. It was looking bad until Deemo spotted a huge mirror on a crane/pulley (used to extract spirits from the well), and sent it hurtling down on top of the Warden. Bad luck for him.

The Dead Setters added a piece of Turf, maxed out their Rep, and filled their crew XP tracker to boot! There wasn’t any Coin to be had, but I ruled that a downtime action could easily create or repair a way to extract and bottle spirits, thus fulfilling their contract with the Dimmer Sisters. We didn’t quite get to downtime this session, so we’ll begin with that next time.

#heestcomplete