The Shucked Oyster Score

After stealing the Edge of Forever from the party of Nadya Vostik during last session, the crew are invited to see Alfred Urdelath to get help with their little vampire problem.

Before we started, we had along chat about what games to play next. I’d really like to take a break from running Blades, since I’d starting to get annoyed with planning for it. I feel that the system railroads me (the GM) down certain tracks, and makes it hard to come up with deep plots and meaningful scenarios because everything is forced into the score mechanic. The investigate and explore side of the game that I enjoy running as a GM just doesn’t work so well.

Though we spoke some weeks about about others maybe running some scores in Blades at some point, people don’t have much time for that. The most likely contender for our next game is some more Delta Green, which would be cool.

Anyway, before the crew head off to see the vampire hunter, Tamasis tried attuning to the sword, to get an idea of what it is. She got a 6 on her attune, so managed to find out some details about it without waking it up. She got images of a strong looking warrior in strange armour and wielding the sword. There were images of him and the sword fighting monstrous creatures, and then at some point the sword and the man merged into one.

She had the feeling of the sword being used by others over time, and that those people have left imprints of themselves within the sword. After some questions about the nature of the man, I did concede that he was an albino, but he wasn’t sickly looking, and neither did the sword have 999 brothers.

For purposes of going to see the vampire hunter, I didn’t run this as a score, but just as a free form session. They went over to the Urdelath household and met with the now retired vampire hunter. He was very interested in the sword, though said it is likely to attract trouble and though he would like to spend some time investigating it it would be safer to hand over to the crew for long term keeping.

On discussing its abilities, they discover that basically if someone merges with it, it will cause a level of Trauma, but provides a lot of bonuses when fighting creatures such as vampires, as well as providing protection.

He tells them that he has located the vampire, who is based at the Shucked Oyster brothel in Crow’s Foot (yes, I’ve re-used the brothel name from my Magnimar campaign). He has rented out half of the second floor, where he has hired about a dozen bodyguards as well as a couple of the prostitutes.

Dominus checks out the brothel himself, and sees that it is a four story building, with the main ‘public’ reception area on the ground floor, standard private rooms on the first floor, upper class private rooms on the second (half of which have been rented out by a noble), and bedrooms for the staff up in the attic.

The ground floor has a shrine to the Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh, where the staff hold public ceremonies each evening very much focused on physical pleasure and pain. He finds out that the noble will sometimes go out with a small contingent of guards and the two girls whom he has hired.

They decide though that the best way to approach him is by attacking him in his lair. So after some downtime, the group prepare for a deception based approach, trying to rent a room up on the second floor, and perform their operation from there. Since weapons have to be checked at the door, the plan is for most of them to go inside, then for Spid to get up onto the roof and lower weapons down into the window.

As I often have been, I’m generous in the engagement dice (I really don’t like the idea of things starting with the roll of some dice which the players or characters have little control over), so they start with 3D, and Dominus grants an extra 1D from his special ability.

He rolls 4D, and gets 3, 2, 1, 1… so the score begins with a failure.

I decide that the first part of their plan was relatively straightforward – going to the brothel, hiring a room and drugging the prostitute that goes up with them. So this all comes out without a hitch. Spid then gets up onto the roof of the brothel, and begins to lower their equipment down to the window they have opened.

I give Spid a choice – things go wrong either because he is noticed by someone, or because something goes wrong in his attempts to safely lower things down. He selects the former, so a window next to him opens and a young barely dressed lady walks out onto the small balcony to get some air before she begins her ‘day’ and spots him…

Given most of the time for the session was spent discussing other matters, as well as the chat with Alfred and examining the sword, it is quite late by this point so we decide now is a good time to bring things to a halt. Next week we’ll find out how he gets out of his Desperate situation.