So, the next game is tonight, so I really need to get the last summary posted!

Apologies to any comments I’ve missed recently – something managed to get past the spam filters, so I’ve been cleaning the stables by hand, and that meant a lot of stuff got stuck in limbo until that got sorted out.

Anyway: the session

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Summary of Session

It had been a while since the last session, so I admit I had to check my old posts. Ok, so we came back from a long hiatus with our heroes headed south to Vendel. The roads and posts were fine until they reached the barricade, but things got sketchy after that.
One night, Basillio noticed something odd about one of the posts they were going to stop at, and they stopped to send Zeta to investigate. It looked like it had been taken by bandits (Eisen mercenaries, by the look of them). Easily circumvented, but Zeta also heard the sound of prisoners, which demanded action.

Action followed. They rode in through the gate and ambushed the ambushers – roughly a dozen brutes – and made short work of them with the help of their coachman’s grenades. The Doctor chose to enter the building herself and deal with the brutes inside, and the results were messy and deadly, mostly for them. Prisoners were rescued, including an Eisen nun (and member of the shawl) who hit The Captain in the face with a chair before realizing this was a rescue.

A slow trip to Vendel followed, with the remaining Eisen following as prisoners. One of them, the leader, told his captors that Commander Heinrich of the Steel Hawks was his uncle and would willingly pay any ransom. These men were not Steel Hawks though, and Basillio surmised that they were some of the Eisen mercenaries who had come to Vendel expecting opportunity who were now making opportunity for themselves while politics remained at an impasse. No authorities along the way were willing to take them off the Heroes’ hands, but at the Vendel gates, the guard was more than happy to do so.

The next step was to deliver the silver and their report to Red, who was surprised by a series of things, including the money making it, the presence of slaves in the mines, and the possibility that the Thane was not a radical atavist. She arranged for the Captain’s help to have the actual chests delivered rather dramatically to the floor of the guild (with the difference made up out of her pocket, in a quiet sort of gamble). When we say “To the floor of the guild” it’s quite literal – upending two chests down onto the floor.

Chaos followed. The floor was shut down and a day of closed door meetings followed, once of which was watched very closely by The Swordsman. When the head of the Miner’s guild emerged, he was challenged to a duel (for his secret slaving), which was to follow the next morning.

At dawn, a crowd had gathered – not so much to see The Swordsman as to see The Hammer, the highest priced duelist in Vendel who was fighting on behalf of the guildmaster. The Hammer was a serious looking woman who wielded two hammers (think sledgehammers) and who played the crowd masterfully while remaining very professional with her opponent.

The duel that followed was fairly intense and closely matched. I talk more about it below in the mechanical part of things, but both parties were hurting when the Hammer knocked Basillio’s sword out of his hand and Basillio yielded. However, this was only the second most exciting thing to happen as a scream came from within the guildmaster’s pavilion – someone had taken advantage of the distraction of the fight to assassinate him.

Oh, and yes, The Acrobat was in the pavilion when this happened.

So chaos has increased, and our heroes manage to slip away in the chaos, partly because guard response was surprisingly non-present. A lucky break, until word reaches them that the Steel Hawks have surrounded the Guard HQ (and jail) and matters are about to get violent.

 EDIT: Crap, I totally forgot the endgame

Ok, so the city is totally going to hell. Fighting in the streets, whole nine yards.  Nearest force of men able to deal with this is the new High King, but the way there is problematic.  But if a ship can get out of harbor before it’s locked down, then head inland form one of the coastal cities, he might be reached in time.  But who could do such a thing?

Oh, you know who.

Getting out of the harbor was tight, but ended up being a dramatic use of the Doctor’s Time rune – she borrowed some future time (so the bad guys had a round to close in), but the shop then got double action for its escape.  Super fun. Probably an utter misuse of the power, but I am 100% ok with that!

GM-ish notes

I tried something new with the coachman in the fight, something I’m calling NPC triggers. The idea is that if you have NPCs in the fight, you can spend a raise to have them act, and that action will generally reap some manner of reward. In this case, when the coachman threw a grenade, the player got to roll some dice (6, which was too many in retrospect) and every hit on that roll took out a brute. Effectively it increased the effectiveness of the single raise in return for constraining what it could be used for. It was a good start, and it’s lead to me writing up a small system for handling named brutes which I’ll probably release to the Explorer’s Society when I have a minute.

The duel was interesting – this was the first time we’d really had a chance to throw two 5 dot duelists at each other, and I was very curious how it was going to go. The end result was mixed.

First off, the players had fun as audience. I was really worried about that, because this was really a focus on one character, but I suspect the novelty kept it engaging. Also, Sorte and Glamour sorcery ended up handing The Swordsman a giant bonus in the fight, which had an interesting effect., and also helped with investment.

The actual die rolling was a pair of huge piles. I spent a stack of Villain Points to bring The Hammer’s 10 die pool up to a 16 to be able to challenge Basillio. It revealed that counting 15s is definitely a bit more cumbersome than 10s. I like the mechanical effect, but it slows things down in play, so I need to bear that in mind.

Basillio started with a small advantage (something like 11 vs the Hammer’s 10) and things proceeded pretty well from there. The actual back-and-forth, move-countermove was great. Very fun, very dynamic, kept things going.

HOWEVER

I screwed the pooch in terms of player expectations.

When the Hammer disarmed Basillio, my thinking was that it would cost him a little tempo (since he could just spend a raise to recover the blade) but the player felt strongly that he was skating on thin ice, and that losing tempo would turn things against him very strongly, so he conceded. I was surprised, because thought the impact wouldn’t be that pronounced, but I also knew that The Hammer’s die pool was depending on my villain point spend to stay competitive, a fact the player did not have.

Running the numbers later, I think we were both right. In subsequent rounds, Basillio’ die advantage would have made a substantial difference BUT the way NPC wounds are handled would have meant that it would take so long to drop her that he could have gotten nickel and dimed to death in the interim.

So, all in all, I’m kind of filing this away as one more reason I need to retune the way NPCs are handled. The villain rules are well tuned for one villain vs a group of heroes, but that is not always going to be the arrangement.