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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8298848" data-attributes="member: 16814">So, to better explain the backstory of this setup, here's the skinny.Our crew is a bunch of smugglers.  We specialize in moving items around the city clandestinely.  Unfortunately, due to some past interactions and that fact that one of our team is a big softy about helping out the less fortunate (what about us, Tika?), we ended up kinda helping a worker's uprising in our home neighborhood, Coalridge.  So, there's a union, the workers, and the Lost (think underclass Robin Hoods) and they're up against the managers and they're hired muscle, Ulf Ironborn's gang.  In addition, the cops (Bluecoats) are out in force and they're just gonna side with the manager class in general, so they're almost allied against the workers.  We had some run ins with Ulf's goons before, and so we were already in a sticky spot, but the situation was winding up fast and we talked about how we could do something about it (thanks, again, Tika).  Mechanically, I noted that if we pissed off Ulf's crew again, we'd very likely go to war with them, so I recommended taking an action against Ulf that would reduce that gang's Hold on their Tier from Strong to Weak.  This aids us because, if you go to war, all participant's Hold is automatically degraded by one step, which would put Ulf's crew on the same tier as us (this is mechanically important).  So we talked about it and came up with the idea of stealing Ulf's armory and giving it to the workers or their allies.  Me and another player went to talk to our usual contact for such things to set up a meet with the Lost to see if they wanted any part of it, or rather, if they would pay us to do it.  The third member of the crew went to scout the location of the armory.We met with the rep from the Lost, and she was died in the wool crazy-cakes diehard lunatic ideologue.  She wanted the weapons, specifically the explosives, to be used to blow up a meeting of the mangers and "really show them we mean business."  I hard noped this contract (the other players were on the fence, but this hit my backstory in an interesting way), so we went looking to see who else might be interested.  The third member of the crew had contact in the Ministry, and that's when it got established that the weapons in Ulf's armory had been stolen from a Sparkwrigth/Ministry collaboration effort to develop new kinds of weapons and that they had, so far, kept the loss quiet.  Gotta love Duskvol politics!  We made a deal to sell the weapons back to the Ministry for a pretty penny, but now moving them was really going to be interesting because any notice from the Bluecoats or the military would mean the Ministry would lose face and the deal was off, leaving us in the wind.  Luckily, we specialize in clandestine movement of illegal goods around the city!  This was the GM adding a complication to due to the result on a gather info check demanding one, and putting it squarely within the crews' interests.  So, now we headed off to steal the weapons (which when smashingly well, in terms of BitD, which means we barely made it out of there), and now we have to move them around the city.Normally, Blades works by framing a problem and then snowballing from there.  If that problem is solved, the scene shifts to the next one.  This works great, but I very excited to try [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]'s approach to this, where there's a maps (with blanks) and some of these threats are listed.  Since we know the city, we should be able to know what general risks exist on the route, and this give us some ability to choose which problems we'll face.  It's still Blades, though, so nothing will go to plan (until it does!), so this is more like "there's orcs on the plains, goblins in the woods with a rumor of a green dragon as well, and drow in the underground passages, which way do you want to go?"  Only, using Blades' framework, this is really all of the prep you need to do.  We'll sit down at the next session and establish were these problems are along the route, and then see how well we get past them.  If we do so successfully, we'll get paid out and Ulf will be on the warpath with us, but we'll have weakend him enough that it'll help the workers and mean we're on an even footing with him.  If we fail, well, we've stolen the weapons, so Ulf will still be weakened, but we'll have earned the anger of some powerful people and will have to figure out what to do with very hot (on multiple levels) mechandise.</blockquote>

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