GM: Stras Acimovic
Players: Jory Bowers, Andi Carrison, and Sean Nittner
System: Scum & Villainy
Our first session of Scum and Villainy, and how cool it was! We created our characters offline so we started this session filling out the ship details for the Stardancer and then jumped into our first job!
Stardancer
She’s a good ship, stolen from the Janus Syndicate and installed with an illegal cloaking device by Conclave 01. A very good ship. Also, super illegal but thanks to some false ship papers, we can even dock her in port!
Here’s the upgrades we picked:
- Hull +1 (but no crew quarters yet)
- Engines +1
- Cloaking device added (thanks Conclave 01): Doesn’t necessarily render the ship invisible to the eye, but masks the heat and electrical signature of the ship, making it very hard to detect or identify once detected. Super illegal.
- False Ship Papers (thanks to Laren!): A few well forged or transferred documents giving the crew and ship papers that are less wanted in any given system. Often simplify gate travel if the transponder and ship look match. You have a couple sets even if you have to practice responding to a new name.
- Home Cooking: Your whole crew gains Home Cooking as a vice. Right after a job in space, you may spend 1 cred and a downtime action to cook for everyone, allowing the whole crew present to make a vice roll. If anyone overindulges, a fight erupts, and everyone gains 1 stress after the vice roll).
- Our close contact is Alor, a keen-eared barkeep: A memish (aquatic xeno from planet Mem) barkeep who has taken all of us in and helped us on many occassions. Yay, Alor!
Dropped into the thick of it
We started en media res trying to deliver a package to someone in a bar. Citani, our info broker contact had gotten us the job and all we knew was that we had to deliver a box that had something inside it…but when we pulled back the sheer curtain and we found or contact dead in the booth. This is where we were supposed to hand off the package (and get paid!) but instead we had a dead guy, no money, and over our shoulders a growing collection of gathering security officers. Bam!
How did we evade the local officers, House Malklaith security (including the deadly mystic Kor), the Ashen Knives assassins, and one more group of unidentified yet poorly disguised agents? Only one way to find out…
Scum and Villainy on Air
What Rocked
It was so great how quickly we jumped into the action and into our characters. I can’t say I know exactly who Faye or Bhaz or Laren are yet, but I’ve got a gosh darn good idea. And there are place where’re we’re surprised as well. Bhaz an Aya, Laren rolling up her sleeps, Faye getting testy about someone grabbing her jacket (okay, that last one wasn’t a surprise at all).
Scum and Villainy is a great example of how to dig into the bones of Blades in the Dark, take what you want and dump the rest. There are a lot of the core systems there but every place that needs to be about a space faring crew Stras and John have created the systems needed to support that. A ship with upgrades and custom moves. Multiple sectors and heat tracked in each of them. A ton of very cool (and freaking very dangerous) factions. Scum and Villainy is such good work.
I love my fellow peeps. This is my first timing gaming with Jory and I’ve only played once before with Andi. They are both so rad, and Stras is such a rad GM. YAY!
What could have improved
Producing a show (i.e. starting up the stream, watching chat, changing scenes in OBS, watching the clock, setting up the timers, pulling up the right stuff in roll20, etc) while playing in a game is still really new to me. I’m sure that with time the overhead will go down, but if you watch the episode and you see my eyes fluttering all over the place, that’s just me checking on stuff in the background. I’ll get better at it!
