Tag: Joachim Leibhammer

So, on friday we ran our third session of the ratpack. We didn’t have as much time as the first two sessions, and we had some administrative work to do as well, because we switched playbooks and crew over to v8 and discussed some of the changes.

Then, we first did some stuff outside the normal sequence of score and downtime. Our whisper, called raven, investigated a strange faceless amulet we recovered from lord phelps in our very first score. It seem to a be associated with a forbidden god that advocates loss of identity and is somehow related to spirits that have lost most or all of their personality, having gone feral, eternaly lusting for the lifeforce of the living. And, our whisper seems to have been infected by the amulet somewhat, beginning to hear whispers about occult stuff. Sometimes she can actually glean some useful information from the whispers, other times it distracts her or irritates other people when she answers aloud to whispers nobody else hears.

Next up the whisper was contacted by a bat from Lord Scurlock, who wanted to meet in a dream. There he told the whisper that there is a complication regarding Roric’s ghost, as some members of the dinmer sisters caught it. He suggested we go and rescue the spirit and even suggested some details of the plan and where the witch-cult had taken the spirit.

Apparently he also convinced our whisper of his good intentions apparently (she didn’t want to resist). Actually he is not that nice of course.

So off we went on our only score that evening. I won’t go into too much detail here, but we had a blast and confronted crazed witch-women, enslaved spirits and destroyed a strange demonic underground tree. In the end everybody was at their very limits of stress, but we had roric’s ghost, strangely bound into the heart of a pig. And we had quite a lot of occult paraphernalia we could sell to Lord Scurlock for a tidy profit. We also had killed an entire witch-coven, but since we left no living witnesses we can quite possibly avoid a war or any such serious repercussions. I actually tried for some tense negotiations but my players were like “ach, I can’t do social very well, I’ll just shoot her in the face”

It does seem the dimmer sisters tried to feed roric’s ghost to some strange otherworldly entity to have it regurgitate a “doppelganger” of roric, with whom they wanted to take over the crows.

There are two possible pitfalls now: One, when we fled through underground tunnels, we met some poor laborers delivering coal. And one of them know our leech from his old teaching days. While that allowed us to take a ride in their coal boat, it also means that this guy could possibly make a connection between us and all those dead witches.

The second one comes from entanglements. Our crew is slippery, so we get two results, but finally ended up with demonic notice. Apparently a foul water demon named setesh took an interest and basically blackmailed us into giving money to a cultist group that fights the leviathan hunters. According to the whispers our whisper keeps hearing, setesh may be the father of the leviathans, but that does not need to be true. Maybe he only wants to stir up trouble and if the supply of leviathan blood dwindles, that does indeed mean trouble in the long run.

We still have to do downtime and xp for that session, but it was good solid fun. But it does seem my players are very reluctant to take trauma for their characters. Understandable, but we are now three sessions in and still nobody has any trauma. Maybe i have to be a bit meaner as a GM, and put some massive trouble their way even if I know they don’t have much stress to spare. So far, it just happened that most of trouble was over by the time the stress bars got filled up, and even if there was some trouble, those people with little stress did their utmost to deal with it.

I am looking forward to our next session and hope that we will have some more time then.

So, second session of the ratpack ran tonight.

First of we did some organisational stuff like flesh out the crews hunting grounds and establish their standing with various other factions. I didn’t do that in the first session because I wanted to get things rolling quickly. Turns out the ratpack is basically besties with the grinders, a dockside gang of rather brutal bruisers.

And this gives us a great opportunity to profit from the situation in crows foot – the grinders want us to destabilize the area as best as we can, so they can move in and claim the place. The crew was all for it. But first we had to deal with the affair of mr. pemberton, the watchmaker we kidnapped and maimed last time – apparently he scrounged up enough silver to put a mercenary on our tails but, due to a bad fortune roll, he asked around the wrong neighbourhood and got beat up badly and nailed to a chair by some grinders. They informed the crew and we went to see him. It was a really huge guy, over 2 metres tall and with a heavy frame. Getting him to spill who he was working for was easy enough, but turns out he had a ghostly partner. With just the cutter and the spider in the room the ghost went on to throw a knife at the physically mediocre spider, wounding him quite badly, and try and possess the cutter. A huge scramble followed, where the cutter resisted and tried to bully the ghost into leaving by threatening the mercenary, but the ghost instead possessed the merc. And a huge guy that can take a bullet to the head and just go on is very scary. Also the proprietor of the bar didn’t want any deathseekers around so she also made a ruckus. In the end a lot of people got a lot of stress, but our whisper sent the ghost packing and nobody had to die. We even made an unlikely ally of the merc – he wasn’t happy that the ghost would have sacrificed his life.

We sorely needed some downtime after that, so it got handled like a score but without pay (and very very little heat).

Then we went to work. The lampblacks and the red sashes had been going at each other for a bit now, and the lampblacks currently had a slight edge. We decided to break into a lampblack weapon storage, take what we can, destroy the rest and try to blame the red sashes, so as to take their edge away and stoke the fires of the gang war.

It was successful by and large, but we had to content with a huge steam-mecha with a gatling gun, a very well armed patrol and a botched escape plan. Now we got, among other things, a military field gun on a two-wheel carriage and a glass brain of a hull with a spirit locked within.

Also, Lord Scurlock, a strange friend of our whisper, contacted her and made a deal over tea: He said he could put us into contact with rorics ghost, so as the enact his revenge and destabilize the crows even further. In exchange Scurlock wanted some kind of unspecified favour in the future.

So I guess next week we will seriously fuck up the crows and then see how things go. Having a spirit on our side should be refreshing for a change.

All in all I think we are getting used to the mechanics. We had a lot of fun today.

So, I have recently begun to play Blades with my usual friday gang. It hasn’t really taken off in the first session, especially because there are a lot of mechanics to wrap your head around. But I guess we are getting there.

In this first session we made characters and a crew, at least the basics, and did two scores. I am planning on using the quickstart situation with the crows, the lampblacks and the red sashes soon, but for now they were able to get a bit of a feel for the game without that.

The crew are shadows, mainly because of compromise. Some players where considering assassins, but some other players were concerned that this might result in an extremely dark game they were unprepared for.

In the first score they had a mission to recover a sigil ring from the estate of a Lord Phelps. It turned out there were very very few people in the mansion itself, but they had roped in via a high line and that very line had been discovered by a bluecoat patrol. And somewhere high up in the mansion the dear lord phelps was conducting some kind of occult ritual. I had clocks ticking for the bluecoat intervention and the progressing ritual, and I guess it was good fun. In the end they got the ring, clobbered the lord with a club and had to fight through a horde of dog corpses animated by spirits. Yet they didn’t really kill anybody and quite successfully ran away from the bluecoats as a group action.

In the second score I allowed for a bit more information gathering and planing, which, in hindsight, might have been a mistake.

They kidnapped a watchmaker and entrepreneur and it became quite bloody because they wanted to avoid witnesses. When they exchanged the man for a trove of silver on a bridge, they even had a sniper set up to kill the man, although, in the end, he survived badly crippled. So, basically successful, but bloody, high exposure etc.

They just very narrowly avoided a wanted level in that one.

I am looking forward to the next game tonight.

I guess there may be some bountyhunters or assassins hired by Mr. Pemberton the watchmaker looking for the scoundrels. Would it be ok to do a fortune roll on wheter they can find the crew’s hidden lair? I