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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7050082" data-attributes="member: 42582">Here's an elaboration on the characters, sblocked for length:[sblock]Jabal is a strict NPC. In the first session of the campaign Jobe tried to circle up an ally in his sorcerous cabal (Jabal of the Cabal, naturally) but failed, and so Jabal has never taken kindly to him. Jabal has been a recurring NPC who has also been built more fully into the backstory of the PCs.Joachim is also a strict NPC. When Jobe was created, he had a demon-possessed brother as part of his backstory, and a Belief about freeing him from possession. When Halika was created as a PC, she had a Belief about her horrible master against whom she was going to get revenge. At a certain point it became established that the horrible master and the possessed brother were one and the same.Alenihel, the elven ronin, is a PC. When created, he had - as a 1 RP personal effect - a token of his former master, the broken, black-headed orc arrow that had slain him. It later emerged in play (due to a failed Scavenging check in Jobe and Joachim's ruined tower, another part of Jobe's backstory) that the black arrows had been made by Joachim. So Alenihel was conflicted between loyalty to Jabal, his employer (a relationship established in an earlier session as part of an attempt on Alenihel's part to overcome a series of bad Resources checks), who wanted to protect Joachim and see him recover; and his loyalty to his slain master, for whom he should seek vengeance. In the first of the sessions I mentioned he earned a Mouldbreaker persona for this before being taken down by Halika. Alenihel's player was absent for the session yesterday, though, and so Alenihel spent most of the time out cold and then when he woke up only figured as the (successful) object of a Persuasion attempt to keep Jabal restrained long enough for the other two to escape with the bodies (and with a Brawling 5 against a locked-out Jabal with a bunch of physical 3s and 4s, I was happy to say "yes" to that - I don't want NPCs to be the focus of action, and there was nothing remotely implausible about it in relation to established fiction and character capabilities).Halika started as a PC but has drifted into NPC status (the player finds BW too gruelling). This means that her Beliefs aren't changing very much, but given that her settled Beliefs give her a clear trajectory in the game, she remains pretty significant. Her desire to find Joachim, kill and flay him, and send his soul to . . . [that bad place] has been established since session 1 and has never changed (she has a Driven call-on for Sorcery when pursuing this Belief, which is what enabled her to get a strong enough Emperor's Hand to take down Alenihel).At a certain point - when the black arrows came to light - Halika had persuaded Jobe, via Duel of Wits (and with Alenihel helping), that his goal of redeeming his brother was futile (because the sequence of events established in the backstory made it clear that the black arrows in the tower had been made before the possession, and hence showed the Joachim didn't become evil because he was possessed, but rather became possessed because he was evil). At some point, though, Jobe shifted back to the goal of redeeming his brother - I think after the first time I actually introduced Joachim into a scene, on the docks in Hardby, and Jobe saw him for the first time in over 15 years and pitied him. (In terms of the rules for working around a Duel of Wits I can't now remember what the details were that allowed this transformation to take place.)Jobe and Tru-leigh are both PCs. Jobe started the sessions with (I think) three Beliefs all related to his brother - rewritten after the unfortunate decapitation last session. One is to make sure his soul is freed from the demon's influence so that it can go to a proper afterlife, which will require Halika's abilities to summon and talk to the dead; the second is to learn all he can about the balrog's plans from his brother's dead spirit (now that he can't get it directly from his brother) - which will also require Halika's ability to summon and talk to the dead; the third (slightly macabrely, but not entirely out of character for Jobe) is to obtain some of Joachim's blood to serve as an antecedent for enchanting a sorcery-boosting item.Tru-leigh was introduced into the campaign a bit later than the others. In his second (or thereabouts?) session he confronted a dark naga deep inside a cave of chaos (I was <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?473620-Keep-on-the-Borderlands-shenanigans" target="_blank">using bits of the Keep on the Borderlands</a>), and due to an unlucky roll on his part and a lucky roll on mine ended up being subjected to the naga's Force of Will. We've handled this via him having an appropriate Belief, in this case to find Joachim and bring him back to his master so that the naga can spill Joachim's blood to bind the spirits of the land to its will. Tru-leigh had finished the last session (the decapitation one) with this Belief still not fully done, but then apparently superseded by events. So it was rewritten at the start of yesterday's session to be a Belief that he would bring Joachim's blood back for his master: hence, in the initial scene at the start of the session, while Jobe was trying to deal with Halika and then Jabal, Tru-leigh Assessed to find some vessels in the room (chamber pot and jug) and then scripted (unopposed) physical actions to use them to capture all the blood spilling from Joachim's neck.[/sblock]So after that long exposition, I think the short answer to your question is yes. The body and blood were the agreed-upon goals, with Halika and (to a lesser extent) Jabal being the initial opposition; and the guards being brought in as the result of a failed Beginner's Luck Hauling test.With the PCs in the watch-house, obvious questions become: where does Joachim's body get taken? what happens to the vessels with the blood? can Halika be persuaded to help Jobe, or will she use her lockpicking (which for various reasons around some early episodes became something of an obsessive focus for the character) to get herself out of jail while leaving the others there?Because it's the "second" game in a group which only gets together for four or five hours once every two to four weeks, it's not going to advance that quickly (mostly just an hour or a bit more of play in each of those sessions), but I'm fairly happy with the melodramatic/blood operatic trajectory of play.</blockquote>

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