rangda
First Post
9/8 Session
This session starts with Lacy & Carlie impersonating brigands from the Cloudwood (even though they don't know that) in Waryeye's shop with the rest of the party (Ford, Savanna, Cyrus) bursting in as “the law” with a search warrant to search for contraband. Dansica plays along (there is only 3 of them plus a robot) figuring if they find the safe she can always dreamdust the lot of them, and if a fight breaks out the “cloudwood bandits” might help out. The party puts the customers in the shop, the guards, and the undercover party in a corner and proceeds to search them, then has a go of searching the building. They are out of Evidence Collection points to spend to find the safe, so I make them describe exactly how they search the entire building to see if they will declare they move the painting to find the safe. I even put a red herring in the office, some false floorboards with a box of mementos of their marriage (this comes back to haunt me).
The party does a pretty thorough job of tossing the building. While doing this they notice the dreaming dust trap although knowing about it doesn't end up helping much (see below). They didn't check everything in the storeroom or the lab, so hiding the safe contents in plain sight would probably have worked better than the safe (as hiding in plain sight usually does). But sure enough when I mention the paintings on the walls they check behind them and find the safe, they also check under the office rug and find my floorboards. Rather than having Dansica open the safe and potentially set off some sort of trap to destroy the contents, Cyris decides to open it himself (with with a 21 thievery check he does). Cyrus has Arcana, but has no more points to spend so he doesn't see through the illusion but it's enough to let him know that something is a bit off. This presents the party with a quandry; Carlie is the only person left with an unspent Arcana point but she's undercover. Do they blow her cover so she can search the office or do they keep her cover and not discover whatever is there? What tips them over the edge is my cubbyhole; they are convinced something is up because of that (I should have put that in the bedroom). At any rate they come up with a cunning plan.
Cyrus keeps Dansica in the bedroom and grills her over the contents of the box. They don't know it, but this is just a memories box so Dansica is happy to waste time with this and keep them away from the wall safe and it gives her a false sense of security. Ford heads downstairs and makes a pretense of questioning the customers & guards individually. Sadly he has a bluff of 1 (untrained 10 CHA L2) and then rolls a 3. This clues in the guards that something fishy is going on and they become suspicious of Carlie and Lacy. However being separated from Dansica they have no way to tell her that. Carlie gets to search the office and after spending an Arcana IP point notices the illusion in the safe and what is in there. This gives the party hard evidence to arrest Dansica with. However before doing that they finish “searching” the customers so Dansica still doesn't know about Carlie and Lacy.
Upon being informed of her arrest, Dansica lets Blander know something is wrong and declares to the party she has to shut down the lab before leaving. This sounds reasonable, so the party lets her do it even though they know she might set the trap off. They fixate on looking for a physical switch to turn it on never thinking she might use magic (despite the fact that Ford has prestidigitation and magic hand!). So the fight starts with Ford and Savanna having both been dazed by the dreaming dust. The combat, however, ends up being fairly easy for the party. The guards attack Carlie and Lacy to let Dansica know they aren't allies, but Dansica is far more concerned with getting away than fighting. The problem is she took ~45 points of damage before getting her non surprise round action, and she just couldn't generate enough actions to get away (even though she gave a good go of it). At the end she and Blander surrender both being bloodied.
At this point I reason that dreaming dust is pretty horrific stuff in a fantasy world. The ability to reprogram someone's memories is incredibly valuable, scheming nobles would love to use it. But scheming nobles would also be terrified of it being used on them. So I rule that this is really hard core stuff that is beyond illegal and the Waryeye's are in really deep. Dansica offers to tell the party whatever they want to know if they'll just make all that dreaming dust go away. She & Blander will take the rap for everything else (and count on expensive lawyers to get them off lightly). The party decides that going out on a limb for Dansica is not a wise course to take, so they decline the offer and instead turn her over with the dreaming dust and a full disclosure of its use. Not good for the Waryeye's, but we'll get back to them later.
At this point they are out of leads for the smugglers so they are left with hoping the Waryeye's crack under “interrogation”. So they decide to head over to the North Shore where they can check out the House of the Blue Bird. It's now the night of 3rd summer, so it's been 2 days since the doctor went into hiding. They talk to the woman running the house, and she gives them the partial story about the Dr. having come and left, leaving out Officer Porter. But Lacy has bull**** detector so she realizes the woman is nervous, she's lieing or hiding something. It doesn't take much to get her to crack, one good intimidation roll and she comes clean about Officer Porter and the bribe. A few hundred gold is an insane amount of money for a bobby to toss around, so this tells them that they most likely won't find much here and that someone impersonating an officer is also searching for the good doctor. They do get the letter of recommendation from Dr. Barnaby Camp which leads them to him. He's quite confused not sure why they are here when he's already told “Officer Porter” what he knows. But he tells them what little he does know which then in turn leads the party to Professor Kindleton (it's the night of 3rd Summer so he's already gotten the note from Wolfgang).
They decide it's too late to visit the professor tonight and instead head to the consolate to see if Lebrix is more willing to talk. He of course isn't, but Carly's bull**** detector skill lets her know that she doesn't think he'll open up until something changes (for example either they find something hard to confront him with or his employers suddenly decide he's expendable). It's late but they are still in the district so head over to the police station to see if there is an “Officer Porter”. There of course isn't, so they then try to get a sketch of Officer Porter but other than “totally average with unusual mustache” they don't get much from their two witnesses. This leaves Porter being the proverbial needle in the haystack. They call it a night and try to get some sleep; sleeping at the RHC offices in case the Waryeye's crack.
4th Summer starts with a review with Delf. They decide that they'll visit the university as it's in Central so it will be easy for Delf to get ahold of them if the Waryeye's finally crack. They find Kindleton in her office (too early for classes yet) and talk to her about Wolfgang. Being such an awful lier everybody knows she's hiding something; since she's unwilling to talk they take her to RHC to let her sweat it out in an interrogation room. They don't know it but this is exactly the reassuance she needs so with a bit of empathy from Laci Kindleton tells what she knows (which isn't much really). It's 4th Summer so they know the doctor is in hiding as he knows someone is trying to find him, and that he's using criminals to hide him. But Wolfgang hasn't gotten to the point of being afraid of his “guards” so that's all they get. But they do know that they have to head into the Nettles to find out more. Carlie's background had her running with Nettles gangs as a teen, so she rattles off several names of people that could hide the Doctor, including Lorcan Kell. I decide it would be a great way to tie things together and have Carlie's former gang be Lorcan's (not good for her since she got out by becoming an informant but it's what she gets for not specifying a specific gang but leaving it vague).
At this point the party knows the smuggling is tonight but they have no leads, so they hang around RHC waiting for the Waryeye's to crack. I finally have them do so late in the afternoon, time enough to call in a favor for a bit of backup and head right over. They fail the diplomacy check to get a squad of 12 in an hour and end up with 4 bobby's and a boat. They decide on a pincer attack, they will approach the dock on land and split the bobby's between their boat and the bobby's boat. Both are steam powered so 2 can run each boat. They are counting on 2 steam boats to be impressive enough that whoever is at the docks will try to go through them instead of fleeing via the water. The party makeup heavily factors into this decision, with a Bladesinger, Sentinel, Warlord, Knight, and Elementalist they don't have a lot of ranged attacks, so the idea of getting into a gunfight on the water is less than appealing. Their ranged attacks are Carlie, Ford's Magic Missle, and Cyrus' Fire Hawk; only 1 of which has range > 10. Their lack of guns in a firearm heavy world is starting to come back to bite them. I decide that two boats is indeed impressive enough that the smugglers will make a fight of it and try to plow through the party. This fight is actually fairly rough on them. My house rule of needing 2 hits to kill a minion actually makes the minions with guns (I continue to give NPC's that have crossbows or bows guns instead for flavor) pretty scary. Deorn with his ginormous handgun was great to put the fear of god into the party (made for a great scene) but that does him in as once he becomes scary everyone unloads on him. Carlie action points and hits him twice for ~40 hp and then Ford magic missiles him to finish him off. After a bit of questioning Lacy senses someone might squeal to save his own skin and they decide letting a little fish go is OK, so they offer to let someone go if they tell what is going on. Sure enough a sailor squeals and true to their word they let him go (he's going to be dead within a week but they don't know that). When asking who is being all this the response from the Family Bravuras is “don't worry you'll meet him soon.” (Foreshadowing the meeting with Cippiano the next day.)
Now the party has to decide how to deal with the Griffoni. They decide that they will try to take the place of the smugglers to actually meet up and once the ships are lashed together “decloak” and arrest everyone. (Again the fact that the party is so melee heavy factors into this, they just cannot sit on the boats and swap ranged attacks or get into a chase.) Carlie has a very good bluff so I roll for her to make Cyrus (the only person in the party with the right build) look like Deorn. A bluff check of 27 (I rolled a 17 for her!) gives a passable job; it won't stand up to close scrutiny and the instant Cyrus opens his mouth it won't work, but it will last long enough to get a gangplank between the two ships. They take 2 bobby's with them in the smuggler's boat and send the other two in their steamship to pincer the griffoni in case it tries to run. Laci (her full plate really stands out) and Cyrus' robot bury themselves under all the gear on the boat's deck in an effort to hide until the (inevitable) fight starts. A couple of decent bluff checks from the party manages to have them provide the right signals and get the boats lashed together. As soon as the gangplank is lowered, Savanna comes out and declares “you're all under arrest”.
This fight by itself seems too easy so I beef it up by adding 8 more sailors (those guns have been working well). I also end up doubling the captain's hit points as he ends up being far too squishy. Carlie catches 4 sailors + the captain in an area using her damage pump red, criticals the captain, and then rolls max damage on her 1d6 critical die for 10 + 10 + 11 + 6 = 37. Having the captain drop in the surprise round is not very cinematic (unless you're going for a comedy) so I bloody him and let it go from there. The captain uses his whip great effect using the flight mobility to move all over the ship but doesn't really do much other than look cool. The real stars of the show are the minions shooting everybody. 25 of them (even in waves) is hard to deal with and it's a very tough fight for the PC's. It made them worry they were in a bit over their heads which is the effect I wanted. But still they whittle the crew down and eventually they surrender. Note I didn't have them use the wands at all, I'll get to why in a separate post.
The party arrests everybody, heads back to headquarters and starts in on the paperwork. They end up crashing at RHC for the second night in a row. I hit them with endurance checks for sleep depravation for 2 nights in a row at the office but with a very low DC of 5; nobody fails so they are good for now but know they are burning the candle at both ends.
They wake to find out the office mail girl, Peggy, has a letter for Savanna. It's from Monsignor Cippiano, inviting them to breakfast. They do a bit of digging in the office archives and find a recent newspaper clipping (from all the clipping downloads Morrus made) which clues them in that Cippiano is most likely the family Don in Flint. They decide that pissing him off is a good way to make it to the bottom of the bay with cement galoshes, don dress uniforms and head to breakfast. Before leaving they do inform Delf; he doesn't stop them but points out how bad this could look. This was one of the best scenes in the module so far, absolutely fantastic. Cippiano has a nice chat, says he noticed their work regarding the want smuggling, did some digging and (in the past few hours!) got pretty much everything they've done and likes what he sees. He's impressed and would like to explore a potential business relationship. As a show of good faith he tells them that Wolfgang is under the “protection” (using that term very loosely, Cippiano's disdain for Kell is obvious) of Lorcam Kell. (This revalation is quite distressing to Carlie.) He's willing to help with their investigation in any way they like and all they have to do is alter their paperwork to say that that the bravuras didn't resist arrest and upon questioning them the bravuras are just hired guards. Of course, with that slight alteration to the story his lawyers will do the rest and get them off with minimal to nonexistent sentences. Such a tiny thing to do, and in the grand scheme of things the bravuras mean nothing and are such tiny fish. And so much to gain from this tiny thing. The session ends with the party angsting over whether they should do this tiny, tiny favor and start selling their souls one piece at a time. (HUGE amounts of angst from them over whether to say yes or no although they are leaning towards yes.) Great stuff.
This leaves them with the following threads to chase:
This session starts with Lacy & Carlie impersonating brigands from the Cloudwood (even though they don't know that) in Waryeye's shop with the rest of the party (Ford, Savanna, Cyrus) bursting in as “the law” with a search warrant to search for contraband. Dansica plays along (there is only 3 of them plus a robot) figuring if they find the safe she can always dreamdust the lot of them, and if a fight breaks out the “cloudwood bandits” might help out. The party puts the customers in the shop, the guards, and the undercover party in a corner and proceeds to search them, then has a go of searching the building. They are out of Evidence Collection points to spend to find the safe, so I make them describe exactly how they search the entire building to see if they will declare they move the painting to find the safe. I even put a red herring in the office, some false floorboards with a box of mementos of their marriage (this comes back to haunt me).
The party does a pretty thorough job of tossing the building. While doing this they notice the dreaming dust trap although knowing about it doesn't end up helping much (see below). They didn't check everything in the storeroom or the lab, so hiding the safe contents in plain sight would probably have worked better than the safe (as hiding in plain sight usually does). But sure enough when I mention the paintings on the walls they check behind them and find the safe, they also check under the office rug and find my floorboards. Rather than having Dansica open the safe and potentially set off some sort of trap to destroy the contents, Cyris decides to open it himself (with with a 21 thievery check he does). Cyrus has Arcana, but has no more points to spend so he doesn't see through the illusion but it's enough to let him know that something is a bit off. This presents the party with a quandry; Carlie is the only person left with an unspent Arcana point but she's undercover. Do they blow her cover so she can search the office or do they keep her cover and not discover whatever is there? What tips them over the edge is my cubbyhole; they are convinced something is up because of that (I should have put that in the bedroom). At any rate they come up with a cunning plan.
Cyrus keeps Dansica in the bedroom and grills her over the contents of the box. They don't know it, but this is just a memories box so Dansica is happy to waste time with this and keep them away from the wall safe and it gives her a false sense of security. Ford heads downstairs and makes a pretense of questioning the customers & guards individually. Sadly he has a bluff of 1 (untrained 10 CHA L2) and then rolls a 3. This clues in the guards that something fishy is going on and they become suspicious of Carlie and Lacy. However being separated from Dansica they have no way to tell her that. Carlie gets to search the office and after spending an Arcana IP point notices the illusion in the safe and what is in there. This gives the party hard evidence to arrest Dansica with. However before doing that they finish “searching” the customers so Dansica still doesn't know about Carlie and Lacy.
Upon being informed of her arrest, Dansica lets Blander know something is wrong and declares to the party she has to shut down the lab before leaving. This sounds reasonable, so the party lets her do it even though they know she might set the trap off. They fixate on looking for a physical switch to turn it on never thinking she might use magic (despite the fact that Ford has prestidigitation and magic hand!). So the fight starts with Ford and Savanna having both been dazed by the dreaming dust. The combat, however, ends up being fairly easy for the party. The guards attack Carlie and Lacy to let Dansica know they aren't allies, but Dansica is far more concerned with getting away than fighting. The problem is she took ~45 points of damage before getting her non surprise round action, and she just couldn't generate enough actions to get away (even though she gave a good go of it). At the end she and Blander surrender both being bloodied.
At this point I reason that dreaming dust is pretty horrific stuff in a fantasy world. The ability to reprogram someone's memories is incredibly valuable, scheming nobles would love to use it. But scheming nobles would also be terrified of it being used on them. So I rule that this is really hard core stuff that is beyond illegal and the Waryeye's are in really deep. Dansica offers to tell the party whatever they want to know if they'll just make all that dreaming dust go away. She & Blander will take the rap for everything else (and count on expensive lawyers to get them off lightly). The party decides that going out on a limb for Dansica is not a wise course to take, so they decline the offer and instead turn her over with the dreaming dust and a full disclosure of its use. Not good for the Waryeye's, but we'll get back to them later.
At this point they are out of leads for the smugglers so they are left with hoping the Waryeye's crack under “interrogation”. So they decide to head over to the North Shore where they can check out the House of the Blue Bird. It's now the night of 3rd summer, so it's been 2 days since the doctor went into hiding. They talk to the woman running the house, and she gives them the partial story about the Dr. having come and left, leaving out Officer Porter. But Lacy has bull**** detector so she realizes the woman is nervous, she's lieing or hiding something. It doesn't take much to get her to crack, one good intimidation roll and she comes clean about Officer Porter and the bribe. A few hundred gold is an insane amount of money for a bobby to toss around, so this tells them that they most likely won't find much here and that someone impersonating an officer is also searching for the good doctor. They do get the letter of recommendation from Dr. Barnaby Camp which leads them to him. He's quite confused not sure why they are here when he's already told “Officer Porter” what he knows. But he tells them what little he does know which then in turn leads the party to Professor Kindleton (it's the night of 3rd Summer so he's already gotten the note from Wolfgang).
They decide it's too late to visit the professor tonight and instead head to the consolate to see if Lebrix is more willing to talk. He of course isn't, but Carly's bull**** detector skill lets her know that she doesn't think he'll open up until something changes (for example either they find something hard to confront him with or his employers suddenly decide he's expendable). It's late but they are still in the district so head over to the police station to see if there is an “Officer Porter”. There of course isn't, so they then try to get a sketch of Officer Porter but other than “totally average with unusual mustache” they don't get much from their two witnesses. This leaves Porter being the proverbial needle in the haystack. They call it a night and try to get some sleep; sleeping at the RHC offices in case the Waryeye's crack.
4th Summer starts with a review with Delf. They decide that they'll visit the university as it's in Central so it will be easy for Delf to get ahold of them if the Waryeye's finally crack. They find Kindleton in her office (too early for classes yet) and talk to her about Wolfgang. Being such an awful lier everybody knows she's hiding something; since she's unwilling to talk they take her to RHC to let her sweat it out in an interrogation room. They don't know it but this is exactly the reassuance she needs so with a bit of empathy from Laci Kindleton tells what she knows (which isn't much really). It's 4th Summer so they know the doctor is in hiding as he knows someone is trying to find him, and that he's using criminals to hide him. But Wolfgang hasn't gotten to the point of being afraid of his “guards” so that's all they get. But they do know that they have to head into the Nettles to find out more. Carlie's background had her running with Nettles gangs as a teen, so she rattles off several names of people that could hide the Doctor, including Lorcan Kell. I decide it would be a great way to tie things together and have Carlie's former gang be Lorcan's (not good for her since she got out by becoming an informant but it's what she gets for not specifying a specific gang but leaving it vague).
At this point the party knows the smuggling is tonight but they have no leads, so they hang around RHC waiting for the Waryeye's to crack. I finally have them do so late in the afternoon, time enough to call in a favor for a bit of backup and head right over. They fail the diplomacy check to get a squad of 12 in an hour and end up with 4 bobby's and a boat. They decide on a pincer attack, they will approach the dock on land and split the bobby's between their boat and the bobby's boat. Both are steam powered so 2 can run each boat. They are counting on 2 steam boats to be impressive enough that whoever is at the docks will try to go through them instead of fleeing via the water. The party makeup heavily factors into this decision, with a Bladesinger, Sentinel, Warlord, Knight, and Elementalist they don't have a lot of ranged attacks, so the idea of getting into a gunfight on the water is less than appealing. Their ranged attacks are Carlie, Ford's Magic Missle, and Cyrus' Fire Hawk; only 1 of which has range > 10. Their lack of guns in a firearm heavy world is starting to come back to bite them. I decide that two boats is indeed impressive enough that the smugglers will make a fight of it and try to plow through the party. This fight is actually fairly rough on them. My house rule of needing 2 hits to kill a minion actually makes the minions with guns (I continue to give NPC's that have crossbows or bows guns instead for flavor) pretty scary. Deorn with his ginormous handgun was great to put the fear of god into the party (made for a great scene) but that does him in as once he becomes scary everyone unloads on him. Carlie action points and hits him twice for ~40 hp and then Ford magic missiles him to finish him off. After a bit of questioning Lacy senses someone might squeal to save his own skin and they decide letting a little fish go is OK, so they offer to let someone go if they tell what is going on. Sure enough a sailor squeals and true to their word they let him go (he's going to be dead within a week but they don't know that). When asking who is being all this the response from the Family Bravuras is “don't worry you'll meet him soon.” (Foreshadowing the meeting with Cippiano the next day.)
Now the party has to decide how to deal with the Griffoni. They decide that they will try to take the place of the smugglers to actually meet up and once the ships are lashed together “decloak” and arrest everyone. (Again the fact that the party is so melee heavy factors into this, they just cannot sit on the boats and swap ranged attacks or get into a chase.) Carlie has a very good bluff so I roll for her to make Cyrus (the only person in the party with the right build) look like Deorn. A bluff check of 27 (I rolled a 17 for her!) gives a passable job; it won't stand up to close scrutiny and the instant Cyrus opens his mouth it won't work, but it will last long enough to get a gangplank between the two ships. They take 2 bobby's with them in the smuggler's boat and send the other two in their steamship to pincer the griffoni in case it tries to run. Laci (her full plate really stands out) and Cyrus' robot bury themselves under all the gear on the boat's deck in an effort to hide until the (inevitable) fight starts. A couple of decent bluff checks from the party manages to have them provide the right signals and get the boats lashed together. As soon as the gangplank is lowered, Savanna comes out and declares “you're all under arrest”.
This fight by itself seems too easy so I beef it up by adding 8 more sailors (those guns have been working well). I also end up doubling the captain's hit points as he ends up being far too squishy. Carlie catches 4 sailors + the captain in an area using her damage pump red, criticals the captain, and then rolls max damage on her 1d6 critical die for 10 + 10 + 11 + 6 = 37. Having the captain drop in the surprise round is not very cinematic (unless you're going for a comedy) so I bloody him and let it go from there. The captain uses his whip great effect using the flight mobility to move all over the ship but doesn't really do much other than look cool. The real stars of the show are the minions shooting everybody. 25 of them (even in waves) is hard to deal with and it's a very tough fight for the PC's. It made them worry they were in a bit over their heads which is the effect I wanted. But still they whittle the crew down and eventually they surrender. Note I didn't have them use the wands at all, I'll get to why in a separate post.
The party arrests everybody, heads back to headquarters and starts in on the paperwork. They end up crashing at RHC for the second night in a row. I hit them with endurance checks for sleep depravation for 2 nights in a row at the office but with a very low DC of 5; nobody fails so they are good for now but know they are burning the candle at both ends.
They wake to find out the office mail girl, Peggy, has a letter for Savanna. It's from Monsignor Cippiano, inviting them to breakfast. They do a bit of digging in the office archives and find a recent newspaper clipping (from all the clipping downloads Morrus made) which clues them in that Cippiano is most likely the family Don in Flint. They decide that pissing him off is a good way to make it to the bottom of the bay with cement galoshes, don dress uniforms and head to breakfast. Before leaving they do inform Delf; he doesn't stop them but points out how bad this could look. This was one of the best scenes in the module so far, absolutely fantastic. Cippiano has a nice chat, says he noticed their work regarding the want smuggling, did some digging and (in the past few hours!) got pretty much everything they've done and likes what he sees. He's impressed and would like to explore a potential business relationship. As a show of good faith he tells them that Wolfgang is under the “protection” (using that term very loosely, Cippiano's disdain for Kell is obvious) of Lorcam Kell. (This revalation is quite distressing to Carlie.) He's willing to help with their investigation in any way they like and all they have to do is alter their paperwork to say that that the bravuras didn't resist arrest and upon questioning them the bravuras are just hired guards. Of course, with that slight alteration to the story his lawyers will do the rest and get them off with minimal to nonexistent sentences. Such a tiny thing to do, and in the grand scheme of things the bravuras mean nothing and are such tiny fish. And so much to gain from this tiny thing. The session ends with the party angsting over whether they should do this tiny, tiny favor and start selling their souls one piece at a time. (HUGE amounts of angst from them over whether to say yes or no although they are leaning towards yes.) Great stuff.
This leaves them with the following threads to chase:
- Find “Officer Porter”
- Find the “strange smelling man” wanting to buy alkahest illegally. (Their logic here is they can contact other factory owners and see this man tried to make purchases from anyone else; they've linked the fires in the factories with this man's threats to Heward.)
- Head into the Nettles and try to find Lorcan Kell to try to find Wolfgang. I think at this point they are starting to question their original assertion that Wolfgang was one of the “bad guys”. Or perhaps they've just forgotten after the 2 week layoff. I will have to remind him of the “nefarious” Dr. Wolfgang.
- Visit Navard in the Cloudwood
- Who was the “shadowy figure” at the embassy when Nilasa was killed (Creed in the window).
- How are the Cloudwood Brigands involved
