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BitD Unbroken Sun: Session 1 (The Dolores Job)
Our first Blades in the Dark session was... sometime at the end of May. Two weeks ago. I write this on the eve of our second, which is set for Monday June 8 - has this lit a fire under me to finish setting up this journal and do these writeups? You bet your ass it's lit a fire under me to finish setting up this journal and do these writeups. There are two modes in which I complete anything, singular obsessive zeal about a vision only I care about (niche fanfiction, bitchy reviews) or fires under me (anything else); I'm still working on synthesizing those.
I have to cut in here to say that as much as I really want to give GM DVD commentary on the following, I cannot do that, because this is not the end of this campaign and my players are going to be reading this. It would be "spoilers" or "whatever" and I have to show "restraint."
So our first session covers the first part of the Turtle crew's first score: free play, engagement, and ended at a pivotal point within the score itself.
Session one finds our three sort-of mariners at the end of a week of heavy rain, and the promise of clearer weather and steadier waters - upon which many things in Doskvol depend. We open on the summons they receive to meet with a contact in a teahouse in Charterhall: a house of dilapidated grandeur, old perfume, and more importantly, private rooms for paying customers. There to meet them is a contact they've met before: Roslyn, a lady's maid who serves as a messenger and woman-of-business for the reclusive Dimmer Sisters.
(Not much is known about the Dimmer Sisters, who they are really, or if they're even a family: there are rumors of women shut up in a manor agoraphobically rotting in their lace like William Faulkner-ish gothic belles, and also rumors of complete nonexistence, that this is a fictional front for something else entirely. They pay well, however, for various magical goods - so they've paid the crew for some uneventful jobs in the past.)
Roslyn dresses well and conservatively, like Mary Poppins on a day off. With an air to discretion - mostly addressing Nico, who is most forthcoming to her - she informs them that she has a well-paying job for them, but bluntly: "Lady Lorelei wants you to steal from Malcolm Strangford."
This is not in the usual class of work the Turtle does. Lord Malcolm Strangford is a powerful man, master of the biggest leviathan whaler fleet in Doskvol, which has just come back into harbor with its newest haul and is undergoing customs, unpacking, and processing for a week. As Roslyn explains, however, the details of the job are simple: there is a whaler in harbor, the ship Dolores, not the flagship. Their contact aboard the Dolores - a Dr. Alexis Talbert, apparently - has marked three boxes with red chains. They are to retrieve the marked boxes, take them away without being discovered, lay low until the inevitable heat dies down, and then transport them to an arranged rendezvous with Roslyn. The prize: handsome compensation -- and a historical document, "of verified provenance," from pre-Cataclysmic times.
(A good time to interject that one of the modifications that we, a group, made to the setting was to re-set the Cataclysm as taking place closer to 230 years ago: out of living memory now, but recent enough for the historical record to be interestingly vivid but a bit confusing, as opposed to ancient history. Roslyn is offering a dilapidated document, not a stone tablet.)
The unspoken keywords to this job hanging in the air are leviathan blood, and perhaps leviathan flesh. Leviathan blood is an invaluable commodity to Doskvol, as the city's main source of power and also the fuel for the lightning barrier that separates Doskvol from the unlivable Deadlands. For this reason the hunts of whaling fleets are more than just lucrative, but also held in something of a heroic light, and their return a great relief every time--that they don't return empty-handed, and that they return at all. The blood is therefore a closely guarded commodity itself. The Turtle already runs on a contraband vial of the stuff, which is powerful enough to operate the small submersible for months; trading in it in any significant quantities is dangerous, even by Doskvol standards, as the city powers-that-be keep a close eye on it. It's likely that Roslyn wants the crew to be party to a very dangerous theft.
Calida is immediately thrilled at mention of the document. Aphra is already thrilled at mention of dealing in leviathan flesh and blood--a major interest of experimentation for her in questions of immortality, as leviathans are rumored to be in some way unaging. Only Nico is skeptical of the dangerousness of the job: and money has a way of changing anyone's mind. So they accept Roslyn's offer, and they agree to her communications terms (dead drops, in-the-know cafes - the Dimmer Sisters are not reckless), and they start setting up their job.
Before leaping into engagement (especially with understandably cautious first-time players), they conduct some recon. They speak to their crew's main Unbroken Sun contact, a dockworker named Elyn (once a sailor, now mysteriously landbound, full of tales about the stars underneath the Void Sea): and Elyn of course lights up in guarded and enthralled interest at the prospect of the document as well.
She lends her knowledge and her assistance, and with her help they manage a rowboat reconnaissance trip around the anchored whalers: Nico spies on Dr. Talbert with her spyglass and notices that both Dr. Talbert and indeed all the sailors aboard the Dolores seem uneasy. Their boat has not yet been fully disembarked; they seem to be waiting, fully, further into the harbor.
Calida, meanwhile, attunes to the magical world with her spirit mask, and discovers some other curious things: the harbor and the ships glow with the deep red, low, long-wavelength lifeforce of an extinguished leviathan, but not as proportionately as she might have expected. The Dolores glows unsettlingly bright for a smaller ship: and, adding to the puzzle, the great flagship of the fleet, Lord Strangford's Wild Hunt, is cooler and duller than its size would indicate.
They concoct a plan: to take the Turtle up to the bilge pump of the Dolores and swim up through that in order to get aboard. (An excellent flashback is employed mechanically by Aphra's player to figure out what to do with the Turtle in the meantime - via a memory of convincing her friend Brother Thorn to drive it, by reminding him of his glory days in the Deathlands and his audacious robbery of a convoy from the very church he used to belong to. It was all very scandalous. Nico got this info from a much more disapproving churchly source, but that's neither here nor there.)
The boat is, unfortunately, notoriously Finicky without Aphra at the helm, but Brother Thorn manages. With the help of an uncharacteristically lucky engagement roll, they get aboard soggy but none worse for the wear, and without detection.
It remains for them to skulk through the approximate layout of a ship, as they understand it. Nico, fortunately, has gotten hold of the work rotation - and it seems like that is uneasily calm, which allows them to skulk relatively well. They reach the cargo hold, in darkness, and go down - Nico stays on the ladder on watch, listening to the hatch above, while Aphra and Calida search the hold for their cargo.
The hold is tremendous and dark and stacked with boxes, and thick with the smell of leviathan blood, and the glow of it through Calida's mask. Nevertheless, they find what they are looking for: and once they do, they call Nico immediately over.
There are three items in hastily painted red chains. Two of them are boxes, considerately set aside. The third one is a living man. (Also considerately set aside.)
He is chained to the pile behind him. He looks, in the words of an improvising GM trying to put words to a mental image, "close to your ages, 24-25, like an irritating chad - like Joe Alwyn in The Favourite, or Lucas Till in X-Men First Class - but like an irritating chad who's had the absolute worst week of his life." He is red-rimmed and scruffy and bruised. He's wearing what looks like a captain's coat--and indeed when asked (for he is a taciturn fellow, or at least a fellow in a taciturn mood)--he says his crew did this. He does not especially seem to be possessed or otherwise undead, though it's increasingly difficult to put a normal theory to his bizarre situation.
And he's still definitely cargo for the Dimmer Sisters. Stunned and uneasy, the crew stall and deliberate--taken aback and panicked that this job got a lot more high-stakes and messed-up than they imagined, wondering how to alter their plan to account for walking a whole human - prisoner? passenger? - with them, and already having the seeds of doubt of what exactly they are doing with him--but are still stuck in a cargo hold in a whaler they're definitely not supposed to be on. One way or another, they need to leave.
Aphra applies a serum of weightlessness to the larger of the two boxes, allowing Calida to - with amazing and comical success - walk nonchalantly up to the upper deck and fling herself off the edge with the box as a flotation device. Nico and Aphra are left with box 2 and the chained man, and with some hesitation unchain him and take him with them to try to make it out of a porthole, partly on his advisement.
They almost succeed without a hitch. They're nearly into the cabin when they cross paths with a sailor: who may not recognize or be able to react to Nico and Aphra, but he certainly recognizes their prisoner. Before he can raise an alarm, Aphra shoots him with a paralytic dart - which, unfortunately, is a bit too powerful. They find themselves with a sailor on the floor in the throes of respiratory failure. This seems to move something, however doubtful or diffident, in their prisoner, and he kneels to assist Aphra with stabilizing the man--and Aphra does.
They make it off the Dolores just as alarm is raised, and light and shouting and signals come from the ship. Brother Thorn retrieves them and their prisoner--to his slight surprise--and they sink below the waves as the Dolores signals its nearby sister-ships and the alarm makes its way in the direction of the Wild Hunt.
I have to cut in here to say that as much as I really want to give GM DVD commentary on the following, I cannot do that, because this is not the end of this campaign and my players are going to be reading this. It would be "spoilers" or "whatever" and I have to show "restraint."
So our first session covers the first part of the Turtle crew's first score: free play, engagement, and ended at a pivotal point within the score itself.
Session one finds our three sort-of mariners at the end of a week of heavy rain, and the promise of clearer weather and steadier waters - upon which many things in Doskvol depend. We open on the summons they receive to meet with a contact in a teahouse in Charterhall: a house of dilapidated grandeur, old perfume, and more importantly, private rooms for paying customers. There to meet them is a contact they've met before: Roslyn, a lady's maid who serves as a messenger and woman-of-business for the reclusive Dimmer Sisters.
(Not much is known about the Dimmer Sisters, who they are really, or if they're even a family: there are rumors of women shut up in a manor agoraphobically rotting in their lace like William Faulkner-ish gothic belles, and also rumors of complete nonexistence, that this is a fictional front for something else entirely. They pay well, however, for various magical goods - so they've paid the crew for some uneventful jobs in the past.)
Roslyn dresses well and conservatively, like Mary Poppins on a day off. With an air to discretion - mostly addressing Nico, who is most forthcoming to her - she informs them that she has a well-paying job for them, but bluntly: "Lady Lorelei wants you to steal from Malcolm Strangford."
This is not in the usual class of work the Turtle does. Lord Malcolm Strangford is a powerful man, master of the biggest leviathan whaler fleet in Doskvol, which has just come back into harbor with its newest haul and is undergoing customs, unpacking, and processing for a week. As Roslyn explains, however, the details of the job are simple: there is a whaler in harbor, the ship Dolores, not the flagship. Their contact aboard the Dolores - a Dr. Alexis Talbert, apparently - has marked three boxes with red chains. They are to retrieve the marked boxes, take them away without being discovered, lay low until the inevitable heat dies down, and then transport them to an arranged rendezvous with Roslyn. The prize: handsome compensation -- and a historical document, "of verified provenance," from pre-Cataclysmic times.
(A good time to interject that one of the modifications that we, a group, made to the setting was to re-set the Cataclysm as taking place closer to 230 years ago: out of living memory now, but recent enough for the historical record to be interestingly vivid but a bit confusing, as opposed to ancient history. Roslyn is offering a dilapidated document, not a stone tablet.)
The unspoken keywords to this job hanging in the air are leviathan blood, and perhaps leviathan flesh. Leviathan blood is an invaluable commodity to Doskvol, as the city's main source of power and also the fuel for the lightning barrier that separates Doskvol from the unlivable Deadlands. For this reason the hunts of whaling fleets are more than just lucrative, but also held in something of a heroic light, and their return a great relief every time--that they don't return empty-handed, and that they return at all. The blood is therefore a closely guarded commodity itself. The Turtle already runs on a contraband vial of the stuff, which is powerful enough to operate the small submersible for months; trading in it in any significant quantities is dangerous, even by Doskvol standards, as the city powers-that-be keep a close eye on it. It's likely that Roslyn wants the crew to be party to a very dangerous theft.
Calida is immediately thrilled at mention of the document. Aphra is already thrilled at mention of dealing in leviathan flesh and blood--a major interest of experimentation for her in questions of immortality, as leviathans are rumored to be in some way unaging. Only Nico is skeptical of the dangerousness of the job: and money has a way of changing anyone's mind. So they accept Roslyn's offer, and they agree to her communications terms (dead drops, in-the-know cafes - the Dimmer Sisters are not reckless), and they start setting up their job.
Before leaping into engagement (especially with understandably cautious first-time players), they conduct some recon. They speak to their crew's main Unbroken Sun contact, a dockworker named Elyn (once a sailor, now mysteriously landbound, full of tales about the stars underneath the Void Sea): and Elyn of course lights up in guarded and enthralled interest at the prospect of the document as well.
She lends her knowledge and her assistance, and with her help they manage a rowboat reconnaissance trip around the anchored whalers: Nico spies on Dr. Talbert with her spyglass and notices that both Dr. Talbert and indeed all the sailors aboard the Dolores seem uneasy. Their boat has not yet been fully disembarked; they seem to be waiting, fully, further into the harbor.
Calida, meanwhile, attunes to the magical world with her spirit mask, and discovers some other curious things: the harbor and the ships glow with the deep red, low, long-wavelength lifeforce of an extinguished leviathan, but not as proportionately as she might have expected. The Dolores glows unsettlingly bright for a smaller ship: and, adding to the puzzle, the great flagship of the fleet, Lord Strangford's Wild Hunt, is cooler and duller than its size would indicate.
They concoct a plan: to take the Turtle up to the bilge pump of the Dolores and swim up through that in order to get aboard. (An excellent flashback is employed mechanically by Aphra's player to figure out what to do with the Turtle in the meantime - via a memory of convincing her friend Brother Thorn to drive it, by reminding him of his glory days in the Deathlands and his audacious robbery of a convoy from the very church he used to belong to. It was all very scandalous. Nico got this info from a much more disapproving churchly source, but that's neither here nor there.)
The boat is, unfortunately, notoriously Finicky without Aphra at the helm, but Brother Thorn manages. With the help of an uncharacteristically lucky engagement roll, they get aboard soggy but none worse for the wear, and without detection.
It remains for them to skulk through the approximate layout of a ship, as they understand it. Nico, fortunately, has gotten hold of the work rotation - and it seems like that is uneasily calm, which allows them to skulk relatively well. They reach the cargo hold, in darkness, and go down - Nico stays on the ladder on watch, listening to the hatch above, while Aphra and Calida search the hold for their cargo.
The hold is tremendous and dark and stacked with boxes, and thick with the smell of leviathan blood, and the glow of it through Calida's mask. Nevertheless, they find what they are looking for: and once they do, they call Nico immediately over.
There are three items in hastily painted red chains. Two of them are boxes, considerately set aside. The third one is a living man. (Also considerately set aside.)
He is chained to the pile behind him. He looks, in the words of an improvising GM trying to put words to a mental image, "close to your ages, 24-25, like an irritating chad - like Joe Alwyn in The Favourite, or Lucas Till in X-Men First Class - but like an irritating chad who's had the absolute worst week of his life." He is red-rimmed and scruffy and bruised. He's wearing what looks like a captain's coat--and indeed when asked (for he is a taciturn fellow, or at least a fellow in a taciturn mood)--he says his crew did this. He does not especially seem to be possessed or otherwise undead, though it's increasingly difficult to put a normal theory to his bizarre situation.
And he's still definitely cargo for the Dimmer Sisters. Stunned and uneasy, the crew stall and deliberate--taken aback and panicked that this job got a lot more high-stakes and messed-up than they imagined, wondering how to alter their plan to account for walking a whole human - prisoner? passenger? - with them, and already having the seeds of doubt of what exactly they are doing with him--but are still stuck in a cargo hold in a whaler they're definitely not supposed to be on. One way or another, they need to leave.
Aphra applies a serum of weightlessness to the larger of the two boxes, allowing Calida to - with amazing and comical success - walk nonchalantly up to the upper deck and fling herself off the edge with the box as a flotation device. Nico and Aphra are left with box 2 and the chained man, and with some hesitation unchain him and take him with them to try to make it out of a porthole, partly on his advisement.
They almost succeed without a hitch. They're nearly into the cabin when they cross paths with a sailor: who may not recognize or be able to react to Nico and Aphra, but he certainly recognizes their prisoner. Before he can raise an alarm, Aphra shoots him with a paralytic dart - which, unfortunately, is a bit too powerful. They find themselves with a sailor on the floor in the throes of respiratory failure. This seems to move something, however doubtful or diffident, in their prisoner, and he kneels to assist Aphra with stabilizing the man--and Aphra does.
They make it off the Dolores just as alarm is raised, and light and shouting and signals come from the ship. Brother Thorn retrieves them and their prisoner--to his slight surprise--and they sink below the waves as the Dolores signals its nearby sister-ships and the alarm makes its way in the direction of the Wild Hunt.