[Riddle of Steel, Chorus] Scythe's Edge, session 1

[Ben Lehman]

Aka: Sometimes you have to make *sacrifices* to get what you want.

That was a pun.

*sigh*

My players can stop reading this now, if they feel like it.  It has secret things.

So I ran a Riddle of Steel game earlier tonight with my at-home playgroup.  This group is a social group first, gaming group second, and there were problems, because the place I was running it was social central, half of the people there weren't playing the game, half of the people playing the game were also hanging out with the people who weren't, and at least one person had a character that I forgot about until he wandered off to do something else and I said to myself "Shit, I forgot his character!"  All in all, the location was a big oops, and I'm running it at my place next time.

The player group is all male, although there was a girl watching.

Because of the rather fluid nature of the group, I had the idea of most people playing marginally disconnected characters who could do their own things regarding a plotline (or two) and so it wouldn't matter who was present and who wasn't.  This was a fine idea in theory, although it seems in practice that everyone will want to be there for every session.  Nonetheless, it gave me an excuse for heavy scene-framing action, which was a great deal of fun, because it let me run with 1-3 person groups.

The setting is one I've used before, and the game makes up a sequel to a previous game (The Thief and the Knife) that I ran with D&D 3.0 in the same group.  It was generally a smashing success, although one player notably wasn't so happy with it.

The system is slightly rejiggered Riddle of Steel.  I have rejiggered the priorities a bit -- allowing slightly more powerful starting characters, adjusting the race/magic column to fit the world, adjusting the skills column to my pleasure, and changing the social class column to account for high status individuals with no money.

Participants:

GM:  Me.  My GMing style tends to involve things which are vastly more powerful than the PCs struggling with each other, and the PCs caught up in the middle, trying to get something out of it and / or survive.  This has given me a bit of a "killer GM" reputation, but I actually kill players rather infrequently.  Also, I harp on that I never force players into combat, although some people object to that -- noting that I have had people jump out of the shadows and attack them.  This is true.  Perhaps a better choice of words is that I never set up a situation that requires players to get into combat significantly -- but they can easily get themselves into situations where it is ineveitable.

C:  Is probably my best friend.  He is reprising a very old character -- a sort of avenging druid who is rather bloody in his methods and techniques.  Has played multiple characters in the setting before.  He has come to the city for reasons unknown -- drawn here by whatever inner power he obeys:
His SAs are:
Destiny: Avatar of Wrath
Passion: Bleed the Despoilers
Drive: Reclamation in Blood and Fire
Faith: Will of the Mother, Rule of the Father
Conscience
The conscience clearly being the odd one out.  We were joking about titling it: "Maybe lighting people on fire isn't always the right thing to do."

E: This is the player who played the last game and wasn't too fond of it.  He is mad into D&D and a little bit of Storyteller (not so much these days.)  He grumbles constantly about the Riddle of Steel system, but seems to have a lot of fun when he plays, anyway.  I think he is probably the one amongst us with the strongest Gamist impulse, and also that he doesn't really like the "clunkiness" of RoS as compared to, say, D&D 3.  He is playing Max,  the leader of a small band of street urchins that work as guides, beggars, pickpockets, robbers, and messengers in the Grand Bazaar of Chorus -- the very heart of the city and the center of trade for the known world and even the mysterious Parts East (see last chorus post).  He took a wonderful set of SAs:
Passion: Protect the Gang
Drive: Get off the Streets
Destiny: Go it Alone
Passion: We own this Street
Luck

A: A *very* old friend of mine -- I've known him since preschool, I think.  He is playing Gent, a member of Max's gang.  He also stuck A into race/magic, and chose the Archetypal magic option (think the Avatars in Unknwn armies, sort of), giving him some mad skill bonuses (stealth of 2!  2! {I did not realize this until we started play, or I might have toned it down}) and assorted other sundry cool things, like "bonus SAs" which serve to both speed advancement and pump up the character.  He is an Archetypal thief, and very much the Loki type.  I'm hoping to hit him up with some other people in the same Archetype, but he seemed to have plenty to do already.  His SAs, with bonuses, are:
Passion: The Gang
Passion: Hatred of Authority (archetypal) changed to Curiousity (also archetypal)
Desinty: Escape all entrapments (archetypal)
Luck (x2) (archetype allows this)
Drive: Robin Hood Complex

J: J often GMs, and likes to play *really cool* characters, at least as a stereotype.  He is a fiendish minimaxer, and someone who I would classify as a Narrativist player, but a Gamist GM.  For this game, he decided to play a monster hunter, and wanted to go the Archetype route.  I told him that, for the context of the game, the archetype of fighting monsters and being a monster was the same thing -- two sides of the coin.  He dug this further than I expected, and wound up with a cool aristocratic paranormal investigator with some nasty destinies.  Nasty, Nasty destinies.  I don't have his sheet handy, but I believe he had something like this for SAs:
Passion: They're real!  They're out there.
Passion: The Thrill of the Hunt
Drive: Hunt down monsters (archetypal)
Luck (?)
Destiny: Awaken the Jabberwocky (in my world, a foul god of murder that sleeps beneath the earth, archetypal)
Destiny: I am the Knife

The last one bears special note: the Knife (named Murder) is a massively powerful Jabberwocky artifact that was the focus of the last game I ran for this group (the Thief and the Knife).  It wants only killing and murder, especially of those that its owner loves or hates, and is remarkably effective at doing so (D&D terms: triple bane vs. humans; RoS terms, grants Drive Murder and Passion Revenge at 5 each.)
 After the last game, I had imagined that Murder had escaped its keepers (a certain Jabberwocky priestess) and fled the city, never the return.  However, he wanted the knife.  So the knife he got.

T: T sometimes is a very active player, and sometimes just hangs around and doesn't do much.  This is one of his "hanging around" characters, but I'm expecting to hit him with some pretty hard decisions, especially when his master's destiny comes around.  Long story short, he is playing J' bodyguard and, using Riddle of Steel's system, built the perfect fucking bodyguard.  Further, he dumped a mad priority (A) into being an Archetypal servant, which got him expanded SA caps (they go to 7, not 5) and the ability to speak to rats and bees.  SAs:
Faith: The Master Lives
Passion: The Master is to be protected
Drive: The Master is to be repaid
Conscience: The Master is mistake... sometimes
Luck

M: This is a cool fellow who is very busy with two jobs and a marriage, so I don't see often enough.  :-(  He has, however, committed to playing out this game, which I think is awesome.  He is playing a fortune teller who also took magic (we have a grand total of 1 non-magic user in the active group.)  Being a fortune teller, he had mad hooks, even though his SAs were bland.  So bland, in fact, that I've forgotten them.

S: This is the guy that I forgot was playing.  I feel like such a cad.  He is a good friend of many of the other people, but I don't know him very well, which may account for the forgetfulness.  He made a cool mad doctor that I had no idea how to work into the plot, which may account for it as well.  For what its worth, he had this crazy doctor working out of an abandoned building in the old city, doing creepy operations but also saving people's lives:
Conscience
Faith: Scientific Method
Passion: healing the sick
passion: helping mothers and children
Drive: conquer death

Plot synopsis next post, probably after I go to bed, because... ugh... I need to get to bed.

Comments welcome.

yrs--
--Ben

[Ben Lehman]

okay, sorry about that.  Could someone clean up the *ugh* quadruple post?

[rafial]

A magic item that grants SA is a really cool idea.  It leaves the player fully in control, but facing wicked tempation.   So much more fun than "this knife makes you evil".

Kudos.

[Malechi]

so far I've really enjoyed reading the descriptions of the characters and also the hints at the changes you've made regarding race/archetypes etc.  I don't suppose you'd like to elaborate on these changes at all, either here or at the trosforums.com site?

cheers

Jason King

[Ben Lehman]

so far I've really enjoyed reading the descriptions of the characters and also the hints at the changes you've made regarding race/archetypes etc.  I don't suppose you'd like to elaborate on these changes at all, either here or at the trosforums.com site?

BL>  It's my intention to do so, although it is possible that they will be appearing in Sorcery and the Fey, instead or in addition to a forum post (I'm talking... very slowly... with Brian about this.)

Now, on with the recapping.

yrs--
--Ben

[Jasper the Mimbo]

I'm adding to this post because ben obviously hasn't had the time. (we all just returned from GenCon, which kicked butt.) He did finish the game, which was amazing and really fun to be a part of, but probably hasn't recovered for our trip enough to post about it. I was the guy playing the monster hunter. By the end of the game a couple of us had every SA firing at once on a crash course with destiny, which culminated in a 30 dice pool each, PC vs. PC fight to the death. I died, which is probably for the better. I'll let ben tell the tale in depth and ride him about finishing this post so everyone else can appriciate his genius

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Jasper, at any time did you spend SAs down to zero and then revise any of them to something else? Or did you make up the five and keep them throughout play?

I'm also curious about "the Knife" part of your Destinies - how'd that get into play? When did it provide dice, and when didn't it?

Best,
Ron

[Ben Lehman]

Sorry about the delays in the report -- I'm having some difficulty recalling the order of scenes.  It should be up tonight or tomorrow, with a lot of caveats and "I think this happened next..."

To answer your questions Ron, at least from my perspective:  Murder made an appearance late in the first session, and it played a rather heavy part in the entire game, especially the climax.  I would not have introduced it but for Jasper's destiny stat but, in the end, it was great for the game as a whole.

The "I am the Knife" destiny was kicking in, essentially, whenever Jasper was wielding the knife, trying to keep someone else from taking the knife, trying to get it from someone, or doing a few other things which were in line with the archetype of being a murdering beast.

yrs--
--Ben

P.S. Jasper -- I'd be interested on your opinion as to when "I am the knife" was firing.

edit: typo and added P.S.

[Ben Lehman]

Okay, so the actual play report.

I want to note that, in character creation, a lot of fuss was made about what a monster C's character was, how no one wanted to have anything to do with him, etc.  C, for the most part, laughs it off / sucks it up, but the undercurrent is there.  I note this because it comes back to haunt us later -- it's probably responsible for the biggest problem of the game that isn't directly attributable to my lack of GMing skills.

In the first session, we had a little trouble getting going.  I had this brainstorm of everyone in the group having a street urchin in Max's gang, so as to give them something to do in the opening scene and further scenes with the gang (which sadly didn't come up so much), so we sort of divided up the street urchins but it took a lot longer and there was a lot of hemming and hawing and "oh, I don't need one."  We finally got that all sorted out, and began.

Game opens with Max and his gang spotting (from the rooftops) a heavily guarded caravan making its way through the Bazaar, which is a very crowded and dangerous place.  It is three wagons, ten guards and twelve bearers who are also armed.  The guards are marked with the colors of the Tass house, who are big-shots in the city (it used to be their Imperial seat, back 1000 years ago or so, and they haven't forgotten it for a moment.)

Max thinks for a while about whether or not they can take it out, and finally goes for it when a bearer falls into a pothole and sprains his ankle, letting an oddly colored vase drop out of the carriage and bounce on the ground.  They nick it, and find that inside there is something that glow softly and is "clean smelling" and cold.  Max dispatches off one of his kids to go hide it in a "really, really, really safe place" (the three "reallys" were important here) and the rest go to raiding the caravan.

At this point we finally have the attention of the group and things are sort of lurching along, despite magic cards and other distractions in the background.

The gang executes a cunning plan and ends up stealing some of the vases and boxes whilst Gent, the little sneak-thief (and other PC) sneaks into the central cart, which seems to have something of more value.  He does so super-easily, and finds that the inside is suffused in air with the same scent and temperature of whatever was inside the vase.  He also finds that there is a beatiful, pale, and thin woman asleep or dead within a glass coffin.  Whoa.

 Oh, yeah, the watch.  Gent has a watch, which is totally non-salable (they are rare enough that they can't be fenced) but he loves it dearly and keeps it with him.  As soon as he goes inside, the watch starts humming, running very fast, and even glowing slightly.  It seems to be reacting to the presence of the woman.  Panicked that the sound will give him away, Gent ducks out, but follows the caravan back to the Tass house, at a safe enough distance that his watch isn't totally berserk.

Now, the way that A reacted to the situation was a total curveball for me, because I was thinking of his character as one of my pre-defined archetypes, but he had twisted it into something else.  Particularly, I had totally expected him to fall for the girl in the glass case and try to rescue her.  He, meanwhile, was mostly interested in her as a thing he could steal.  This was the first major curveball of the game.

Okay so we cut.

I go through some of the basic "how do you move around the city, what are you doing here anyway" stuff with C about his druid.  We work it out, and open a scene with him crawling through the sewers during the day, trying to map them out so that he can use them as a safe place and escape route.  He runs smack into (almost literally) a little boy carrying a vase (yup, the urchin that Max dispatched.)  The boy has a smell about him, which I describe to C as "the smell of the moon at night."  The child, seeing this menacing figure in robes, starts to dash away, but C blows an enormous amount of spell pool and drops him with the equivalent of an "entangle."

(note: pay attention to the spell pool problem.  It will haunt us.)

He seizes the vase from the kid and opens it.  The soft glow and clean smell of moonlight suffuses the tunnel for a few moments, and I give C one spell pool back for one of his abilities which gives him bonuses for lunar eclipses and the like.  C advises the kid to leave to city as soon as possible, and lets him run.

Cut again.

We have M's fortuneteller in his little tent on the Bazaar.  A tall man in a fine suit, tall hat, and white gloves enters, and introduces himself as Thaddeus Birch.  This immediately gets groans from the players who have played the previous game, because of course they have met him before -- he was a primary ally-turned-antagonist.  Thaddeus wants to hire M to consult with his mistress, a local noble, and asks him a couple of probing questions, which M answers to the best of his ability.  M also rolls for a hunch, rolls well, and receives a prophetic flash of two images -- human hands holding bars, and then a different pair of hands that seem human but the middle three fingers are very long, with extra digits, and soaked in blood.  He manages to keep it under his hat.  Thaddeus pays him an advance in gold coins, which are marked with a strange symbol of a clawed human hand.

An aside: M's "hunches."  So the player had put an A priority (or B... something big) into Race/Magic/Archetype and had wanted a fortunetellerish archetype.  Rather than bonus skills / SAs / attributes that everyone else got, I gave him these little "hunches."  Essentially, I'd roll three dice (more for SAs, etc) and tell him something depending on the number of successes against a 9.  He could also "push it" to roll extra dice, but that would cause strange things to happen (mostly it fated what he saw to pass.)  At the beginning of the game, he pushed it not much.  At the end, every roll was pushed.

So right.  As Mr. Birch leaves, another noble client of M's, namely J's character, enters.  As they pass each other in the threshold, I note to J's character that he feels a sense of attraction to and kinship with this man he had never met before.  He notes it, and rolls well on a heraldry (or somesuch) check to know him.  I let him know that he is a servant of the Marque family, and that their daughter was looking for a husband a while back, but since she was sickly none would have her, and he didn't know what had become of them.  (Oh yeah, T is there too.)

   J and M talk a bit about J's latest investigations, which are some mysterious disappearances amongst the children of the city.  J attributes them to a semi-mythical figure known as the "Dark Man" who eats children.  At this point, I'm forcibly trying to pry A and E's attention away from video games, because I want them to listen to the children's mythos.  I have some success.

   M concentrates a bit on J's queries, rolls well, and gets the exact same image he got before of the bloody hands.  Interesting.  He files it away for future reference, but he doesn't exactly want to tell that to his client, as its a bit kooky.  So he makes a skill test of some kind and recalls from history something about the cult of the black hand who 100 years ago did a lot of kidnapping, which rings a bell with J, and thus makes him happy, and thus he gives M a gold coin (wow!) and leaves.  He makes a check on some history, and remembers that the black hand cult was arrested by House Tass many years ago, so he goes to pay a visit to a cousin in the house.

Brief organizational scene -- E and his gang are in their little hidey-hole.  They examine the vases, which have that strange clean smell in them, and the boxes, which have a very delicate silk.  Lance (the kid he sent to hide to first vase) comes back and is all panicky and frightened from his encounter with C, which he recounts in great, horrible, gaspy detail.  E gets a very stern look on his face and this is a point, I think, where he decided out of game that he needed to protect his gang from C at all costs (this is not unreasonable, as he has SA: Protect the Gang, but it unfortunately counts him out of a lot of stuff to do, and eliminates one of his main sources of interest.)  Further, the youngest member of the gang, a girl called Lucy, has vanished, and Gent hasn't come back yet.  He tells the whole gang to lay low, and goes out to look for them.  He finds Lucy begging in the streets, just as she takes a dark coin from a tall, dark man.  He looks at it, sees it has an odd sign of a clawed hand, and pockets it himself.  Scolding her for some reason, he sends her back home.

(I think I may have the ordering of scenes wrong here.  It is possible he saw her first, then went back to the hideout, or something.)

Anyway, he takes a vase of clean and a box of silk out to "the frogmaker," his nickname for M's fortune teller.  Which we will get to in a moment.

Meanwhile, we have A's sneak-thief looking for a way into the Tass estate, when who should come calling but a great nobleman and his bodyguard (J and T, of course).  So he hides -- inside the cloak -- and sneaks in but, just as they pass the threshold, J notices him in a rather miraculous roll.  (Yes, this guy is so sneaky that hiding inside people's cloaks is still cake.)  J plays it totally cool, though, and ducks into the cloak room to jury-rig him an outfit.

Aside: In this scene, there is the *only* SA change of the game -- A swaps "hatred of authority" for "curiosity."

Okay, so J jury-rigs up an outfit, and introduces A as "his boy, Corwin."  A promptly proceeds to rob the place blind while J and his cousin make small-talk.  His cousin is very busy, and clearly somewhat flustered at the unannounced visitor.  He claims to have just received an important shipment, and insists that J send a card before visiting next time.

We cut away.

So back in the sewers, C is roaming around, and bumps into a dog-man-hybrid thing that addresses him as "Uncle" and offers to bring him to meet "the Fathers."  Curious and appalled, C follows him back to an old walled estate out-of-place in the Industrial district.

Cut.

E shows up at M's place.  He shows him the vase, but doesn't open it, and shows him the silks.  As he touches both, M gets a sudden vision of beautiful music and the Andromeda galaxy.  This puzzles both of them.  E tries to show him the coin, but finds that it is missing.  He describes it, and M notes that he was paid earlier today in the same coin by Mr. Birch.  This troubles him.  He describes the vision of the bloody hands to E, and says that he is going somewhere tonight for a consultation, and asks E to go after him if he does not return.  E agrees, and returns to the streets.

Cut to J and company.  He asks his cousin about family history and the Black Hand Cult, which the cousin knows nothing about, but directs him to an old man-servant, now retired, who might remember.  His cousin gives him a variety of gifts from the Southern Continent, as a ship from their has just arrived bearing tobacco, coffee, gold and other fine stuffs.  J returns the gifts, and they leave.  Meanwhile, A's watch is going crazy still -- not running proper time at all.  J asks to look at it and, when he does, notices that it is probably some sort of code, possibly a distress code.  He wants to open it, but A makes him give it back.  As they are leaving, he idly reaches into a tobacco tin for something to chew on, and cuts himself.  Looking down, he finds an ordinary sort of knife lying just below the surface of the tobacco.

C enters the estate, where he enters into a garden and meets three cloaked figures that address him in the ancient language of the druids.  Now, C was operating under the assumption that the Druidic order had been totally wiped out, so this is fascinating.  They try to treat him respectfully, but end up in a petty little spat -- he has a mission here, but doesn't know what it is (he works off of intuition), and they don't want him to mess up any of their careful plans.  They consistently use the metaphors of gardening, and try to convince him that the city is their forest.  In the end, he departs with a huffy promise not to do anything too terrible.  As he leaves he smells the "scent of the moon" briefly on the air.

That was the end of session one.

On the whole, I think that session one went pretty well, although there were a lot of distractions which made the separate little groups difficult.  My scene framing skills could have used work, too and, in general, improved over the course of the game.  I think that, also, there are some players who still have the "ethic" that you aren't supposed to pay attention to scenes you aren't in, which I am slowly trying to break them of.  Slowly.

yrs--
--Ben

[Jasper the Mimbo]

More, ben, more! I was in the damn game, and even I want you to finish the post. Everyone needs to hear about the End!