Actual Play – The Bloodletters (3/17/2015)

GM: John Harper
Players: Stras Acimovic, Adam Koebel, and Sean Nittner
System: Blades in the Dark, Quickset Rules v.6

Enjoying the fruits of labors, we recapped our last session, had some downtime, and then pulled our next score, getting in bed with Bazso Baz. All the while becoming contaminated with demon blood…

New Clients

3rd and 4th sons and daughters of the nobles with nothing better to do than get our tattoos and take our drugs.

Summary Entanglements

Since the days of the party there has been rumors going around about a dangerous gang murdered a bunch of Red Sashes and made a guy carry them all back in a wheelbarrow and forced him to write their demands in blood on the door. Didn’t happen but its a good story. As a result the Spirit Wardens have brought “the rookery” into Crow’s Foot at Heartbreak Square. An armored carriage with deathseeker crows that could fly and out of it. It will be easier for them to track us now. It’s guarded by two Bluecoats and and a masked Spirit Warden. This is in response to the massacre, but also of missing people that were last scene in Crow’s Foot.

Harrington has been released, arranged by Strangford (sometimes called Strathmill). We got a note that he was going to sea and we’d hear from him when he got back, and that he’s lying low for a while. We’ve got a week of supplies left. Hopefully he’ll be back before we run out!

Downtime Actions

Arcy

Patched back up by Quellen. The moss removed from her wound, flushed out with mineral waters, sewed the wound back up and redresses it. The wound is stiff and achy, but so much better than it was.
Prowess Training with the crew to fight the Red Sashes (Skirmish raised)
Gains access to Keel Manor, by way of our nicer clothes, and using Anya Bowman to help us connect. She charmed the carriage driver (a dashing young man) and now we have access anytime we want it! In doing so though, Anja realized Arcy’s interest was personal, not just about the money. Social Access to Lord Keel (6/6). They know I’m Am (1/4).

Canter

Date 1: Nothing boring for them. The go to the devil dog fights! Where they hollow out dogs, possess them with spirits, and then let them fight to the death. Linea dresses down, incognito even. Linea shows her bloodthirsty side. They have gladiators fights to the death in Iruvia (and she’s into it). She’s something of a paradox. She’s very high ranking but her calling is this life.
Date 2: The Golden Plum. A gourmand restaurant in Six Towers know for it’s other pleasures in the back. Canter throws money around; making it rain! Linea really goes incognito here. Canter talks about the future in BIG ways “I’m gonna be a king. And a king’s gotta have a queen, right?”
Date 3: They get tattoos together. Linea has tattoos from all over the world! They get demon blood tattoos (devil’s bargain). (Corrupted by Demon Blood 1/4). Linea falls for Canter! They are now together!

Oskarr

Blasted Hand recovery with Quellen. (Burns that burn in the ghost field). At some point his hand is burning when he’s near where it happened by the brothel. The disturbance in the ghost field is what is drawing out the crows. When she looks at the wound it doesn’t look good. It bleeds void water and has become blackened.
Resolve Training by dressing in a new costume (shredded red garb, a single leviathan eye covering his left eye) mapping out places in the area that are attuned to the ghost field. He senses there is some spider webbing of ghost tendrils going everywhere, but they are coming from the basement of the tattoo parlor.
Continues developing his demonic pact with Setarra! He enters a room in Scurlock Manor that only opens with his ghost key… Edlund’s ritual chamber with a summoning pool. He unravels his hand and let’s it bleed into the water. We all notice that the craftsmanship of the pool is the same as the construction done below the basement. Here is the first place we see the ghost field, where it shows the violence we’ve done! We see Setarra in her true form and offers her hand to Oskarr.

Uptime

We talked some on demonic corruption and who has the coolest tattoos and our plans for Lord Keel. Fun times.

Meeting with Baszo Baz

Our contact with Baszo was performed as a Social Plan, with Arcy as the point of contact with Baszo, and Oskkar in his new persona the Red Hand. He invited us to meet in his tavern, the Leaky Bucket. It’s been fixed up from it’s days of dereliction, but they left one leak in the roof to keep its character, and the outside still appears weathered and worn. The area has a lot of Skovlanders, many of them who look to be doing better than other refuges in Duskwall thanks to a hand up from the Lampblacks.

All along the streets Lampblacks, identified by their waxed coats and stovepipe hats, stood openly on corners, watching out for attacks, making no effort to conceal their truncheons and larger weapons.

We attended with Cyclops, Hix, and Bricks at our side. The bar was emptied out and prepared for us to meet; Baszo working behind the bar and many of his soldiers making plans around a map on a table. He invited us to the bar where he poured out four drinks of fine whiskey, and as Oskarr noticed, one empty pour for the Empty Vessel (the mirror behind the bar reflects several huge taxidermied heads and the arrangement is the sacred symbol of the Empty Vessel).

We toasted to the death of the Red Sashes. May it be swift and their suffering in the next life be long.

Sizing each other up

As soon as the drinks were poured, Baszo attempted to read us all and find out everything he could about us. Canter, being Canter though, made so much noise that he brought all the attention to himself, so Arcy could catch Baszo off guard. He started talking about how we’re the Bloodletters now, embracing the stories as truth!

With Canter’s cover Arcy waited for the opportunity to jump in and put pressure on Bazso to join with us…and take over the Crow’s Foot! Not the plan, but she got carried away. Oskarr backed her up with a supernatural fog that frosted over the mirror and in it was written the letters written by the Bloodletters. Even with all that, though, there were complications. [Five dice but I only got a 4! On a Desperate roll, that means a serious complication and reduced effect]…

First, he didn’t want to really buy in. Baszo was going to let us do all the leg work and then see how it goes for him before really committing his forces. Arcy countered that by cutting her hand and bleeding into her whiskey glass and then passing it to him to drink and do the same. Baszo was going to fold and agree to commit fully, but Oskarr pushed the drink toward him and made it non-negotiable. We drank each other’s blood, and because Oskarr was in the mix, it was tainted with demon blood! (Both Arcy and Baszo got are Corrupted by Demon Blood 1/4).

Second, one of his guys was secretly a spirit warden, and tried to head out to tell them about us, and all our dirty deeds. Canter, however was having none of that. He smelled a snitch early on, and when Arcy gave him a nod, he headed out to wait for the snitch to come out the back. Cyclops was waiting out back to cut him off, and when turned to face Canter, he shot him down… and the friend he burst out to warn him!

Canter found a Spirit Warden journal on him, walked back into the Leaky Bucket and dropped it on the counter! Boom!

Awesome!

Credits roll over violence

As the credits rolled for this episode, we saw montages of the the Lampblacks and the Bloodletters doing violence to the Red Sashes. There was a great shot of a red sash wrapping around one of the Bloodletters throats and a Lampblack sword cutting through it, followed by the Red Sashes force being overwhelmed.

Blades on Air

Quotes:

Kissed Fairly Passionately
“I’m gonna be a king. And a king’s gotta have a queen, right?”
She’s asking you to remove the boundary between the two of them so they are both hers.” … “Uh….. yes”
What does date number two with Setarra look like?
He will literally be summoning demons right in front of you and you’ll both be like “what do you even do here?”
No one’s going to read Oskarr, he’s a book full of gibberish.
There is a consequence of being friends with a snitches.
Canter “let the bodies hit floor” Haig.

What rocked

A discussion about what’s really going on with Canter, where we looked at his character and got a sense of how he fits in the world of Doksvol. A tough criminal. An unstable and violent individual.

Canter and Bazso amping each other other up. Lot’s of “yeah, yeah, yeah!”

The blood dropping into the whiskey glass has been part of the opening credits the whole time.

Canter timing his gunshot with the peal of thunder! Meanwhile, he was filled with doubt. What if I can’t prove this guy is a snitch? I know he is, but how hard will I have to ramp it all up to get this to fly.

Oskarr forcing the issue of drinking blood, and it being tainted with Setarra’s blood…

The snowballing of our [4-5] rolls made the fiction so much better. Just as it should. Drinking over each other’s blood. A Spirit Warden in the Lampblack’s midst. Killing an innocent man. So much good stuff.

Making up the “how sloppy” trait on the fly, and deciding among ourselves how it was going to work by using the game’s internal logic!

The Red Hand!

What could be improved

My mic was popping all session long. Sorry to our listeners!