Actual Play – Six Towers Gang (3/2/2015)

GM: John Harper
Players: Stras Acimovic, Adam Koebel, and Sean Nittner
System: Blades in the Dark, playtest draft Beta 07

John Harper, in preparation for for the Blades in the Dark Kickstarter, has recruited a few scoundrels to play in demo games for some actual play footage for the game. Would I play in it? Fuck yeah I would!

The Six Towers gang

Here’s our motley crew of scoundrels! John has written them up beautifully here.

Oskar “Witch Boy” Scurlock (Stras), the inheritor of the Scurlock manor in Six Towers, as well as the Scurlock family haunts. Raised by ghosts, spirits, and Setarra, a demon. Oskar is weird, but no doubt he’s got more experience with the occult than anyone twice his age. Our lair is in his family manor. Spooky as fuck, but people leave it alone. Oskar supplies our lair and magical protections. [Playbook: Whisper]

Acry Keel (Sean) was XO of the steamship Nightbreaker. When she realized her captain was consorting with Leviathans she led a mutiny against him that failed. She was cut down and thrown off the ship at sea. Arcy is tough. She survived and now makes her way in the underworld by siphoning Leviathan Blood from her old contacts on the Nightbreaker that are still loyal to her. Arcy supplies the product and muscle. [Playbook: Cutter]

Canter Haig (Adam), the corner boy. Canter knows the business. He doesn’t give a shit about ghosts or steamships, he cares about sales. Bringing in the coin. Canter knows how to find a corner, set up shop, and start slinging goods. He moves with a confident swagger than some realize is bullshit, but respect just the same. Canter supplies our know how and connections. [Playbook: Lurk]

The Six Tower Gang is our presumptuous name for ourselves; a crew of peddlers moving product. In our case the product is unrefined Leviathan Blood, smuggled up to our lair in Scurlock manor and then pawned to whoever is interested. So far the Dimmer Sisters, but we know our client base has to be expanded if we want to stay in business. [Playbook: Hawkers]

Blades on Air

Here’s the Google Hangout of us playing (in two parts). Watch us make goofy voices and do violence!

 Fight for what you…want to take

None of this “beliefs” shit. Blades do jobs. We knew off the bat there were holes in our operation. Giant gaping ones. From the onset we knew we wanted to:

• Equip a factory to refine the Leviathan Blood so it could be used in Electroplasmic Disintegration and other savory prospects.
• Find new clients in need of our product
• Set up a turf to hawk our wares.

The last was by far the most immediate concern, and we knew just the Lurk to find us a place to set up shop.

Gather Information

We kicked this off with Canter on point. His primary contact is Petra, a childhood friend who grep up on the streets like him but managed to get a clerk position in the city. She processes criminals so is often in the know.

Canter headed down to the city hall to catch her during lunch. It’s a place of odd juxtapositions. Plenty of Bluecoats working, civil servants doing their jobs, but also a constant influx of criminals being processed, visiting each other, coming for legal advice, or in their best case, being released. In this crowd Canter fit right in. Though most of the Bluecoats recognized him only one made a point of giving him a stiff shoulder in the chest as they passed each other going through a doorway.

Yeah, he could have started beef, but it wasn’t worth it.

Lunch with Petra was fruitful, but not without complications. We’re looking for new territory to move into so Canter pressed her to find out about people just brought in, thinking we could swoop in to claim their turf before anyone else did. Canter had a regular line with Petra; he’d make some vague allusions that if she just helped him out of some unspecified bind with certain information, it would be enough to help him get out of the life and set himself straight. It was never a promise, just a hope he let live in her.

Talking this close to a bunch of Bluecoats isn’t without risk however. Even though most of them couldn’t give a shit what he was saying there was always that odd chance that someone was paying attention, and by the end of the conversation someone in some office was tacking a red piece of yarn from one picture to another.

[Mechanically, Adam rolled Canter’s sway to manipulate Petra. Since she was his favored contact, giving information that wasn’t any particular risk to her, to a friend she trusted, we considered this a Controlled situation. Adam rolled three dice, 1D for his Sway, 1D for his shared background with Petra, and 1D for the Devil’s Bargain that a Bluecoat would overhear the conversation and we’d get +1 Heat. His result was 6: You do it to full effect.

So we’d get what we want, but how good would the information be? Canter rolled for Effect. In this case we chose influence as he was pushing her for information. He rolled 1D for his influence and another 1D for their shared background. His result was 3. Weak: A single nugget of information, leaving much more to learn.]

She had info, but it wasn’t good. The Red Sashes and the Lampblacks are always fighting, but a day ago it got ugly and Bazso Baz, the leader of the Lampblacks had two of the Sashes killed in one of their safehouses at the bottom of a tattoo parlor by the docks. Petra warned Canter away from it though, it was going to be contested territory, he should just wait a week or so to find something easier to hit…

Cut to us breaking in

We’re all standing there at the street side end of a dead end ally. The ally so narrow you’ve got to walk sideways to get down it. At the opposite end was a dingy tattoo parlor which looked vacant. No lights on. Door closed.

We alluded to a conversation that Arcy and Canter would have had before the approach about how you take a place by just calling it yours and doing business there, or so said Canter. Arcy knew she was a bit out of her depth, but just didn’t get the concept of claiming a space (rightfully or not) without letting everyone effected know you took it. I mean, lines of control have gotta be clear.

[Mechanically speaking when the crew is planning for something, all you need to do is decide your method and then supply a detail. We selected “Deception” with the detail that we were carrying inventory in like we belonged there. ]

Who’s on point?

Arcy is! She hefted a barrel of Leviathan Blood on her shoulder and squeezed down the ally. At the end of it a one eyed sailor was guarding the door. She shoved the barrel into his chest and started barking orders like she owned the place. “Open that door. Carry this barrel. Get moving sailor or I’m going to put you in the sweatbox.” Not quite the kind of swagger Canter had in mind.

Meanwhile Oskar was trying to stay out of sight. Every time he’d go by a lamp it would start fizzling and sputtering. He did his best to stay in the shadows, and there he found someone, or something waiting for him. Setarra, his demon mentor manifested and told him there was something inside the parlor that she needed. Something that belonged to the Scurlock family. Would he get it for her? Of course he would.

[John had Stras start a clock with eight segments called Setarra’s favor. This represented a project starting that Oskar could work on]

Bluster and Bravado paid off, but there was a catch. Cyclops opened the door for Arcy and let her into the parlor, but then set down the barrel and tried to toss her down the steps to the dark basement below!

[Arcy tried to push her weigh in using Command. She rolled 2D for her command, 1D for her shared background (Labor), and 1D for a Devil’s Bargain that by using a specific seaman language, this guy would recognize her, or at least her previous station, and she’d stand out to him in the future. My result is a 6, which is great, but this was a Desperate gamble (there were threats below that we didn’t know about).  Result of a 6: You do it but suffer the effect of the danger. Hence getting in, but not without trouble. I marked one advancement blade on the Desperate Rolls section on my sheet]

Cyclops didn’t know who he was messing with. He grabbed Arcy by the collar but instantly Canter was up in his face for fucking with his friend. The distraction was enough for Arcy to grab his hand, squeeze it into the sharp talismans she wore around her next and then when he flinched, pull it off her, twist his arm and send him crashing into the parlor, knocking over a tray of needles and bottles of ink.

[Suffering it’s effect meant Arcy had to resist him, in this case his effect was Force. I rolled 2D for her force, 1D for help from Canter (which cost him 1 stress to offer) and 1D for the shared background. Result was a 6, the effect was resisted, but she took 1 stress to overcome it. This didn’t go as smoothly as Arcy had hoped it would.]

Whispers down below

Three of them. Four when Oskar got in the mix. What we didn’t know, and why getting in was a Desperate move, was that three Lamprey Whispers were in the basement, interrogating the ghosts of the two dead Red Sashes.

Flashback

To be better prepared for this Oskar (who was now on point) flashed back to the day before when he had show up knowing the Sashes would have left ghosts behind. He had a chance to commune with the ghosts in advance and insulated that if they helped him out, he’d do the same for them.

[This was text book impractical and obscure preparation. Stras marked 2 stress on Oskar’s sheet]

Flash forward

Like a shadow himself Oskar slipped down the stairs to the basement, past the Lamprey Whisper Cross who was guarding the stairs, but also translating the moans of the ghosts being interrogated ghosts.

Oskar donned his spirit mask so he could attune to the ghosts and learn from them what was going on here. Silver was asking them questions, but Emeline, who was just holding them in place sensed something was amis. She looked around but was distracted by shouts from above. Arcy yelling that she was coming down with a gun, and people didn’t want to get shot the should just come up peacefully.

[Stras rolled attune to communicate with the ghosts. We decided in play that this was a Risky move because Whispers could detect other Whispers performing magic in their vicinity. That was something new, but once decided, became president. He rolled 2D from attune plus 1D from Arcy offering help with her creating a distraction above. The result was a 4/5: You do it but suffer the effect of the danger. John started a countdown with four segments and filled the first two in. Once all four were complete they would detect Oskar, but for now they were just suspicious.

Arcy took 1 stress for helping Oskar out, she was putting herself on the line after all]

In a private ghost tongue that only Oskar could understand (it just sounded line moans to the other Whispers) they ghosts told Oskar that these Lamprey were asking them questions about who killed them and when it happened. Most importantly though, and the one thing the ghosts had been holding out on, was where the Red Sashes had been getting their supply of spirit essence from.

As Canter and Arcy came down the stairs, Oskar’s spirit mask conveyed that information to us as well, but discovery and investigation was over. It was time for…

Murder One

Canter didn’t bother with trying to scare the Lampreys he just gunned the fuckers down. Acry should have been there at his side but a combination of the icy chill from entering a basement with ghosts present and the surprise that he just opened up immediately meant she was to slow to be of much help. Oskar didn’t have a gun, but he did summon a small gust of wind that broke the line of salt which caged the spirits and having two angry ghosts harry them, distracted our enemies. “Should have used ghost dust” – Oskar, besmirching the Lamprey Whispers for going cheep and using salt to bind the ghosts and making call back to our earlier teasing him for his expensive tastes in occult paraphernalia.

Cross, prepared for intruders dashed across the room, skipping from one shadow to the next and almost had his blade to Canter’s throat, but the Lurk was faster on the draw and filled him with lead.

[Adam Led a group action, in this case a firefight, ah no, an execution! To do that he rolled 1D for Murder, 1D for having a shared background with the target, and 1D for help from Oskar (Which cost Oskar 1 stress). His result was a 6: You do it and avoid the danger. or you may choose to overreach and increase your level of effect but suffer an effect from the danger. Adam opted to overreach (why Cross got a chance to cut Canter) to improve his effect roll.

Since Canter was leading an action that meant that Oskar and Arcy both had to participate. Since neither one of them had murder, their rolls were crap, both getting 1-3 results, and so Canter took 2 stress (one from each of them) to make up for their slow reactions.

For effect, Adam rolled 2D from Force, 1D from having a shared background and 1D from help from Arcy (after an initial hesitation, she did start firing). His result was a 6, but because he had over exerted, that was bumped up to a Critical: Your effect is extreme—beyond what you would expect given the situation. Everyone was fucking dead.

However, since he overexerted, Canter also had to roll to resist the effect of our enemy (Cross, doing force by way of dagger in the face). He rolled and got another Critical. Effect resisted. No stress.]

Electrical Afterlife

When the guns stopped firing is when the fireworks really began. One of the ghosts dove into Cross’s dead body, destroyed the spirit within, and possessed him.

Another dove into Silver’s body, but her spirit fought back and destroyed the ghost.

Both of these actions caused any remaining lights in the basement to shatter, electrical arcs to spark, hoarfrost to form on our skin, and terrible noises to channel up through the stairwell into the street.

All dead but us, Oskar went about electroplasmicly disintegrating the bodies of Silver and Emeline. Cross had a ghost in him, he was now a vampire. Free to go I guess. Arcy poured some of the Leviathan Blood on the bodies, which Canter chastised her for as wasting their “product” and Oskar channeled the blood, refined it using himself as a conduit and destroyed the bodies.

Business as usual

Above Cyclops had fled. In his place however, was a small line forming. They had witnessed all of the horrific sights and sounds from the basement above. At the front of them was a thin woman with a sallow face. Her arm shook some as she hunched over and scratched the back of her neck “Are you open?”

“Yes, yes we are.”

Fuck yeah, we’ve got corner!

End of Game

Operation complete and session at an end (successful one at that) we then turned to the end of game mechanics. Heat, Development, Entanglements, Vices, and Downtime.

Heat

We had one heat from a Devil’s Bargain Adam took earlier when getting information from Petra. Then we maid our Heat roll. We figured the mission was 2D (Under Control. Medium Exposure) because we had scouted a good opportunity and though there was violence it was quick and in basement where nobody would care if they did hear. We added +1D because killing was involved, but did not subtract -2D for being on our turf, since as of the time of the session it was our turf. Not yet at least. Our result was a 4/5: The crew takes 1 Heat.

Total Heat is 2.

When Heat goes to five, Entanglement rolls get more serious. When it goes to eight, it resets and both Wanted and Renown levels go up. It’s not worth nothing that intentionally taking jobs that grant you more heat is a good way for boosting your Renown!

Development

Sweet, time for the money to roll in! How much did this little operation of ours profit us. We took 1D for our crew’s resources, and 1D four our level three faction status with the Dimmer Sisters (they’d be sending business our way for sure). Our result was 4/5: Your crew gains 1 Hold and 2 Coin and roll an entanglement, below.

A crew starts with 3 Coin and the Lair can only store 4 until you have taken the vault advancement, which we haven’t, so we’re one coin over what we can hold onto. Oh well, I guess we’ve gotta spend some of that!

Entanglements

Doing jobs tends to ruffle someones feathers. I rolled on the Entanglements charge (for Heat 1 to 4) and got 1: Unquiet Dead. The rogue spirit of a past victim finds its way to you. Pay 1 Coin to a Whisper or Rail Jack to exorcise it, or deal with it yourself.

A few days later, in Scurlock manor, Canter woke from his sleep to see his breath frosting in front of him. The ghost of Silver, thought destroyed, was coming for vengeance. Just as she was about to put her ethereal hands around Canter’s throat Oskar appeared and threw a spirit anchor threw her. The bauble passed through her but as it did, it latched onto her essence and dragged her with it to the wall.

Someone has a means of surviving disintegration? Hell yeah Oskar was going to find out what that was all about!

Vices

Sweet, sweet vice.

Oskar knew this ordeal with the tattooing equipment wasn’t at an end. When he followed Seratta’s instructions to place the supplies in a room he found strange things there. A dentist chair covered in a tarp, an old razor blade. If this was the site of some ritual, it simply would not due! He started placing the orders for the appropriate accouterments to meet his standards. Gold dust, candles, a tattoo artist, rare paintings. All necessary, and all expensive.

Stras rolled a 4/5: You clear 2 Stress. (chart below) but that wasn’t nearly enough (he had 7). He spent the two coin we made to bump that up to a Critical: You clear 6 Stress. Some expensive artwork later and Oskar felt at ease, well, more at ease.

Canter went to get himself some bling. The boots off of Cross were nice, but he needed something with a bit more flash. A velvet cape would be just right.

Adam rolled a 4/5: You clear 2 Stress. Canter only had 3 stress to start with so he was content with that.

Acry went out drinking, whoring, and fighting. Possibly in that order. She had been sleeping in the tattoo parlor to keep it safe, and being by the docks is just no good for her. Slumming it was Marlane was going to happen, and it happened big. Big enough for the Lampblacks to take notice and wonder if our crew was as professional and capable as they had previously thought.

I rolled a 4/5: You clear 2 Stress as well. I pushed that up to a 6: You clear 4 Stress by overindulging and getting a Bad Rep. You let word get around about your vice problem. Lose one status level with your least understanding faction connection until you assure them that you’re reliable. Mark the status box with a slash to show the temporary reduction.

Downtime

All that time brawling down at the docs wasn’t for nothing either. Arcy used it to round up a crew of muscle to watch over the parlor. We know the Red Sashes are coming for it and we’ll need some heavies to help us hold it. Here first pick of the lot was Cyclops. She had already beaten him down once and those things then to stick around.  John offered up the Devils Bargain that she could find a capable crew, but they’d be likely to look out for themselves in the long run, and after a time wonder why they weren’t running the corner themselves. I gladly took that one, with both Sean and Arcy in full knowledge of the type of crew she was assembling.  Arcy has no dots in Supply, but I took 1D for our shared background, and 1D for the Devil’s Bargain. Result was 6: You acquire a Fine Asset. Not just a group of thugs. A fine group of thugs. And enterprising to boot!

Oskar was fascinated by Silver’s power to survive, and was going to make it his! He rolled his Attune and spirit-melded with Silver, half letting her possess him in order to understand her secrets. It had something to do with shells and layers of protection. He got part of the way there, but more work will need to be done with her. Hopefully before she goes batshit crazy.

Johh said this was a pretty involved secret and had Stras create an 8 segment clock. Stras rolled 2D for Attune plus 1D for having a shared background with silver. His result was a 6: Advance the clock by 4 Segments. Nice, Oskar was half way there!

Canter, like Arcy didn’t want to do all the work himself. He looked for some other corner boys to act as scouts, lookouts, runners, and to be on the count. Not dice though, looks like Canter will be peddling our wares himself for a bit longer.

Canter has no dots in supply so Adam just rolled 1D for a shared background. His result was a 1-3: The asset isn’t available right now. Had he succeeded he would have acquired a gang of Shadows.

Since gangs acquired this way are temporary “one use” the implication is that they will stick around for a single job. In the case of Arcy’s thugs, probably long enough to fend off (or try to fend off) the Red Sashes once. Getting these gangs permanently requires taking them as a Crew advancement (more on that below).

NPC Downtime

Behind the scenes, the GM also advances the NPCs. Duskwall is a living breathing place, and more is going on than the crew necessarily knows about.

Advancement

Normally advancement doesn’t happen until the stat of the next session, it’s a way to help everyone recap the game before. Since we were running a demo game however, we wanted to include that as well.

Both crew and characters advance!

Oskar: No doubt, we all thought he spent hims time taking actions from the Book category. Stras selected to have him study in the Book category as well. Two ticks for that.

Arcy: Definately Blades for her, though for her study I chose Mask, as she’s trying to learn to act more like Canter.

Canter: Blades all the way for him. Murder One (the joke there being that Canter had one dot in Murder and will never raise it).

We all took one advancement tick for Effects.

Playbook questions

Here were our playbook questions for Cutter, Lurk, and Whisper. The answers were mostly HELL YES!

Crew Advancement

Thought our Rooks, supplier, and contacts didn’t see much screen time this game, the organization as a whole advanced. We did after all have new turf and new clientele.

The answers for us were yes (we now have a channel for our product), yes (we took new turf), yes (this was a special case where John asked Stras if Setarra was a client and by getting the tattoo equipment for her, Oskar was doing a side job that might hurt the crew later… so yeah to that as well), and yes (we managed to piss off the Red Sashes, a Tier 1 Crew compared to our measly Tier 0).

Additional each of our character got 1 Coin as our share of profits which we could either keep on hand or put away in our stash for retirement. Retire-what? Yeah, fuck that shit. We’ve got bigger fish to fry.

And that was it for the game. Good times!

What Rocked

I love, love, love that indulging vice is the healing mechanic in the game. John is well known for having awesome healing mechanics. In Agon you recover by having a competition among each other, challenging one another to wrestling matches, poetry recitals, and foot races. Perfect for the Greek-heroes-of-yore in the setting. In Lady Blackbird you reflect with your crew members, tell them about yourself and learn something of them. You know that scene at the end of Serenity where Mal tells River about how you need to love your ship and if you do she’ll love you back.  That is how space cowboys recover. In Blades, you recover by doing vice. Indulging your whims for drugs or fancy things or whatever weakness you have. And it’s a constant in the game, even if your character is the leader of a tier four gang and ruling the criminal underworld in Duskwall, they still need their fix.

What’s particularly ingenious is that indulging your vice is essentially a cost-less reward. You can do it for free at no detriment to your character’s health, social standing, or wealth. But to make it really worthwhile (i.e. to recover more stress) you’re encouraged to either overspend (using up Coin from the crew’s hold or your own) or overindulge (let your vice get the better of you). I love it.

Devil’s Bargain is probably the best single mechanic in the game. I say this because it’s so universal both in it’s application in Blades, but also in it’s potential utility in any other game. What’s so brilliant about the DB is that it’s a deal you make, and it happens regardless of the roll results. So, if you accept an extra die in order to put yourself in a little more pressure, that pressure is real and there, regardless of how well you do.

Compare this to the “raises” mechanic of Roll and Keep games like 7th Sea and L5R. In those games you can increase your difficulty in something by trying to get something extra. In principle is the same idea as DB but in reverse. Where raises fail me however is that they are dependent on the die roll, and it’s all or nothing. So your inclined to throw every resource you’ve got at the die roll (Void points/Action dice, special abilities, help, etc) as you don’t want to miss out on not only the advanced benefit of the raise, but also the base level success of the roll.

By severing the connection between outcome and results, it means we’ve got all sorts of tasty fall out from the roll. You can succeed and get what you wanted with a hitch, or you can fail and have additional complications, or you can reject the Devil’s Bargain all together and try it on your own merit without the bonus die. It’s pretty fucking brilliant.

Fuck Planning. Fuck it so hard! I absolutely loathe planning sessions, and yet, I find myself just as susceptible to doing them and any one else. You’re trying to figure out all the variables so that your plan succeeds and more importantly (I think) you don’t question your own character’s authenticity. If you’re supposed to be this bad ass rogue, and then you get caught by a dumb trap and have no backup plan, well you’re not a bad ass rogue then are you?

The planning and flashback mechanics let you preserve the veneer of a plan without having to spend often fruitless minutes or hours actually planning. You pick a general method and supply a specific detail. Then you go!

In our session it involved about 30 seconds of discussion “We’re going in like we own the place. That’s infiltration, wait, no, that’s Deception.” I don’t think we even expressly stated our method (in this case it was means of deception), but it was clear. We were acting like we owned the place and everyone there worked for us.

Flashbacks are also integral because regardless of how cool we are, there is that possibility of being caught off guard, and our characters are intended to be better scoundrels that we are. There is a cost so the mechanic isn’t abused, but that’s all part of the game!

Playing without a net

A little exert (incomplete) of the GM best practices.

There was so much we just made up as the game progressed.  Can Whispers detect other Whispers plying their trade in the area? Yes. Now that’s fact. Is Oskar working for Seratta as a client? It mean Stras got to mark another Playbook Advancement so fuck yeah! Can crafty or powerful ghosts survive electroplasmic disintegration? I guess they can. Which means our whisper can learn to do the same? Does Leviathan Blood double as a drug? Hell yes it does!

These weren’t things we new going into the game, but all of us, John included, were open to possibilities. We went with choices that made sense in the moment, and that we understood would shape play in the future. We were literally world building in play. Hell yeah!

Clocks, Clocks, Clocks. Progress clocks are a fantastic way of tracking progress in a concrete. way. Any time a goal or outcome doesn’t seem like it should be resolved with a single action, put a clock on it. Let folks work towards it!

In the case of our game we had:

• An 8 segment clock called Seratta’s Favor that Oskar made one tick on for recovering the Scurlock tattoo gun and inks from the parlor.
• A 4 segment clock to discover Oskar in the shadows, which the Lamprey Whispers got 2 ticks on when they senses Oskar’s presence.
• An 8 segment clock to discover Silvers secret of eluding disintegration, that Oskar got 4 ticks on during his Downtime action.
• An 8 segment clock to research mystic tatoo inks discovered in the parlor. No ticks on this one yet, but we’ll start on that soon enough I’m sure.

A clock I didn’t start this game, but really want to is:

• Commandeer the Nightbreaker!

What could have improved

There were several conversations between Canter and Acry that we alluded to but never ended up happening. Specifically Canter critiquing Arcy on her lack of subtlety and jumping to violence too quickly. I also would have liked to have that conversation about “wasting the product”. Given that Silver came back as an unquiet dead, maybe Arcy didn’t use enough!

I think it is implicit that these are good downtime conversations because there is a character Playbook Advancement “Express your relationship to the crew. Why are you here?”. Arcy didn’t get that one this session and I think it was because she didn’t have a chance to have that talk afterward. This isn’t an issue with the game, more that I think we were just running short on time and wanted to get in all the of the mechanical effects in a single session for the demo video.

The assumption that all of the Lamprey (Cross, Silver, and Emeline) were from and Underground background because they were Blades seems like an over simplification to me. Since Blade PCs can be of any background it makes sense that NPCs should be as well. Also, when picking a background it should say something about the character. Like Petra (Canter’s friend), it made total sense that they were old friends who grew up on the street, so they’d both have a Underworld background. In the case of the Lampreys though, Silver had some pretty sophisticated magical knowledge, I could see her as an Academic. Was Cross a Bluecoat doing jobs on the side? I think varying up those background would make for more diverse NPCs and is any easy way to give them a sense of belonging in the setting, rather than being just another criminal.