Tag Archives: story hour

Seventeenth Session – We go to thwart Lord Strangford’s horse stealing ways and are attacked by elite frogmen!  Like, they are actually some kind of Deep One-esque aquatic humanoids, as well as someone we posit is popular with the ladies; we know him only as Tentacle Mouth. Then we go get the Heart of Kotor – this Kotor guy has every body part strewn somewhere.

Strangford needs demon horses for his ritual and he’s been getting them from Baron Kinclaith’s stables. He won’t sell him any more because he found out about his naughtiness, but we figure theft is close behind. Sure enough, a whole bunch of fish-men appear, unfortunately while Bluecoats are hassling our characters due to a terrible initiation roll.

Marto just starts shooting from a window; luckily Reis keeps his head and is like “Oh no someone’s shooting at us!” to the coppers. Everyone pretty much leaves him to hold off the po-po while we go to take care of business. They just fire into the building indiscriminately, you know, how cops do.

Kraid finds himself facing a black scale armor-clad glaive-wearing beefcake with a big ol tentacle coming out of his mouth. Reis heads in to warn Lord Kinclaith and try to get him to accept our help. Of course, we did kidnap and ransom his son to him, and that son makes it pretty clear he wants to kill us during this coming melee, so there’s that.

Hasten Doom and Kraid kill all the bad guys, but the equivalent of a space herpy comes out of tentacle guy and scoots around. Kraid chases it through the city while Hasten takes a prisoner – these guys are all tattooed Leviathan hunter sailors. Strangford vouches for us being his “private security” to the cops and they slink away. ACAB!

Then there’s another bear blood orgy (Reis declines to participate) and Dylasia tells us the Heart of Kotor is being held in the Iruvian Embassy to give to their Emperor. Marto, of course, is super into being Iruvian. An embassy safe is a hard target, but as the actual consul is giving us intel we know pretty much where to go.

So we cook up an embassy infiltration plan where most of the team goes in the front and reenacts the scene only lightly modified from Lethal Weapon 2 (“But… but… You’re not bleck!”) while Reis ghostwalks through the back wall. Marto and Kraid get the guards to take them into a private roomn for a “party”, and once they are out, turn off the electrified floor in the vault (!) so Reis and Hasten can get in. We get the Heart, steal other stuff (ghost key!), and bail. Marto and Kraid come under some suspicion but acquit themselves well under questioning.

The heart is in a bag with a tracer enchantment which we give to our captive from Part 1, possess him with a ghost, and have him scamper off through the city and do a “Banzai” self destruction with a grenade to throw the Iruvians off our trail.

This was a fun session and the two elements doing back and forth Ocean’s 11 type stuff for the embassy job was nice, as was pulling a job where we didn’t resort to murdering everyone in sight. Duskvol has like magic bells that go off when there’s a murder to bring the Spirit Wardens because of the ghost threat, but the GM takes it easy on that so usually someone (where someone is usually Kraid but sometimes Marto) just decides to mass murder.

Sixteenth Session – Our gang moves up to Tier 3 as a result of knocking out the Dimmer Sisters. So we go to begin our direct operations against our long term target Lord Strangford, by… Making a scene at his party!

We tier up which makes all our stuff better. Reis starts trying to rebuild the Dimmer Sisters’ place because he’s always wanted a haunted mansion of his own, and also lets his pal ghost Salia possess him and goes on a date with Delasia Finchester, not for the first time, it’s becoming his own Whisper kink. Hasten Doom goes to party with Marlene and inject more bear blood because he’s a crazed junkie now. And Marto makes more ghost biting dogs.

For those of you not reading carefully, this is also the culmination of a long running feud in the company. Private Pyle had said inappropriate things to our patron Delasia Finchester, so Reis had made Pyle go wash all the homeless people in the gang’s holdings. Some time after, someone mysteriously peed in Reis’ bed. So Reis set up an electroshock trap. Now this session, Pyle reports to Kraid with bad electrical burns to his junk.

We find out from Kraid’s special friend Captain Luckett that Lord Strangford is having a party, and now that we’re Tier 3 we imagine we can start to mess with him without getting wiped out immediately. So some folks go in as +1s for the more socially placed women, some sneak in and pretend to be footmen.

In a surprise move Strangford says he’s retiring and leaving all his Leviathan hunting fleet to Captain Luckett, which is a huge surprise to everyone. Hasten Doom and Marto search around for intel and find some weird shrine to a pelagic deity, probably a Leviathan. Marto has to kill a fellow Iruvian servant to prevent being detected and it unhinges him a bit and we have to extract the corpse as well to placate him. Reis and Kraid cause social strife in the party itself. We get out with a minimum of other conflict.

Looking over the liberated paperwork indicates that Strangford is getting some specific breed of demon-blooded horses to take out on his ships and sacrifice to bring a Leviathan to come and eat all of Duskvol because he’s super crazy and to get out of unfavorable long term commercial leases.

Fifteenth Session – The orphanage is besieged by a mob of ghosts!  Sent by the Dimmer Sisters. How shall we get away from them and put paid to the Dimmer Sisters?  Especially if their mansion has a load bearing ghost in it? 

Well, first we sneak out via the sewers and get some Centralia Club occultists to help us, then we lead the ghosts on a cab chase through the city and right into the Ghost Warden HQ (anti ghost cops), the Bellwether Crematorium. This generates a truly huge ghost on cop melee.

As usual it’s a very complicated and dangerous procedure to try to convince police of the truth, but we manage to extricate ourselves and convince the Spirit Wardens that these ghosts are from the Dimmer Sisters and they go protect the orphanage.

Over the next couple weeks the Spirit Wardens raid the Dimmer Sisters but apparently just take away their loot, so we decide to finally move on them. We head over and then it’s a scene from Monster House because the house itself is possessed. Reis exorcises it and it ends up partly collapsing.

We make our way into the basement and there’s a mess of Dimmer Sisters, some more lizardy than others, and some weird aquatic mutated llama demon, the Sodden One. We fight Sisters and people nearly get swallowed by the Sodden One – Kraid does get swallowed, once. Finally we trap it in a pit and seal it into an alternate dimension, kill most but take the one remaining Dimmer Sister as a hostage (the green eyed one, Reis hates killing hot women) and take ownership of the mansion by right of conquest.

A lot of fight! I like it when Reis gets lots of ghost-supernatural things to do because that’s his core competency.

Fourteenth Session – We go to attack the notorious Dimmer Sisters’ mansion to steal the Eye of Kotor (like the Eye of Vecna) and it’s just as crazy and magically demented as you might expect.

But first, we do downtime, and Hasten Doom sets up a drug business, Reis inscribes a magical tattoo on his body, and Marto, and I quote, “wants to find a source for vicious spiked collars with his friend Corasso.” Heh heh I bet he does the cheeky monkey.

We go make sure the Crows gang won’t be upset with us taking on the Dimmer Sisters in their turf and they are fine with it. We have our allies the Gondoliers take us to their mansion through the canals but the ghost attacks start before we even get through the gate. Luckily Marto has made his dog able to bite ghosts. Reis uses his new ritual that lets him move through the ghost realm to pass through the wall to get them in.

We hack through ghosts and find some of the Dimmer Sisters doing some weird ritual with the Eye of Kotor. We mess them up with a Leviathan-song emitting phonograph and grab the Eye. More Sisters attack, one with cool Medusa style hair. It’s not clear how many of these Sisters there are. It’s quite a fight and it becomes clear we need to perform a fighting retreat. We bludgeon our way free of Sisters and ghosts alike and we’re good! We give the Eye to Delasia Finchester as Reis hits on her mercilessly.

Thirteenth Session – Reis and Toad run across some Greycloaks, ex-cops drummed out for being honest and help them despite their best efforts (ah, NPCs).  Then we do a social job to talk to them at our fighting pits. Somehow this leads to us running a kidnap plan on a noble bravo, Routh Kinclaith, and his girlfriend Lady Ashleigh Tier-Connell.

We go find them whooping it up at a bar. Both are privileged and violent and “whooping it up” involves intimidating and/or molesting locals.  Hasten Doom steals his sword and he chases us, and the rest of us pretend to be sycophants helping Routh chase him till we turn on him, snag the guy, hold him in a warehouse, duck his extremely scary girlfriend,  and use him to blackmail info out of his father, who’s selling special bloodline horses to Lord Strangford that have been taken out on Leviathan hunts and not coming back, so he is refusing to sell him any more.

We also start gathering intel on our main foe, Lord Strangford, the city council, who likes each other, all of that.

Twelfth Session – Some crazies that run a crematorium are abducting children so we go take care of that mainly by breaking in and killing everyone except the kids (though that’s a close thing because some of them get a bit stroppy).

The local gang, the Lost, doesn’t like us moving into the local crematorium, and rather than also kill them all because they seem like a nice “power to the people” kind of organization we strike a deal to go murder some crooked industrialist in exchange for squatting rights.  And we all know 1%ers don’t have souls, so we hop to with no scruples.

But first, downtime – everyone but Reis it seems has decided to get addicted to “bear blood”, some kind of drug.

We intrude into the rich nobleman’s mansion to thwart his gentrification. Hasten Doom goes in with an invisibility cloak and gets bitten by giant spiders and goes unconscious – sadly we don’t know that and can’t see or find his body, so we go threaten the guy after wasting his retainers and steal his stuff and leave and Hasten stays to get cocooned.

Eleventh Session – Someone called Gee Iniru Gah stole something called the Noladiches Cartography and framed Dylasia Finchester for it. Hasten Doom is in favor of addressing this for the reward; Reis is in favor of it for the end goal of getting in Dylasia’s pants – he’s becoming a social climber! This does lead us afoul of “Shelley the Killer”, however…

We make a complicated Ocean’s 11 type plan with a forged copy of the Cartography and getting a ghost to give us a map to get to the ghost map and arranging for the cops to show up at just the right time.  But then we run across a giant underground murder tree like from Harry Potter. It murders avidly. Gee Iniru Gah is a crazed sorcerer and Shelly the Killer is a mad stabber so it’s quite a time. But in the end, we stage Gee and the Cartography burning up in front of the Inspector so not only is Delasia cleared of the theft but we have the actual Cartography and we can give it to her. Woot!  I like the complicated multi-phase plans that get us everything we want.

Tenth Session – Sadly, the actual summary is missing.

If I recall correctly, we broke into a prison or police station or something to get the Hand of Kotor (like the Hand of Vecna) and give it to the Centralia Club to get Dylasia Finchester as a patron.  We succeed, I think we were pretty smooth about it.  She helps subsidize our rise to Tier 2!  And Reis wants to hook up with her, but she’s high class and that’s gonna take some doing.

Ninth Session – We go to do some light home invasion that involves possessing a man with the spirit of a parrot, and we get counter-ambushed by Hulls (steampunk zombies) and the ghost of Smelly Pete! Then we go make an alliance with the smuggling gang the Foghounds.

We’ve been looking around for some other not-too-powerful faction to victimize to gain turf, and the Dimmer Sisters, some kind of witchy women, draw the short straw. Reis knows his enemy Flint works with them so we go to bust in and mess with him, which goes fine.  But then a whole mess of very butch bad guys beset us – Hulls, ghosts, et cetera.  For the first time but certainly not the last we use the Random Ghost Generator to determine what kind of rando ghost is near an area Reis can talk to.

Then we go to make new allies and most of the group ends up partying a little (a lot) too hard. That is a bit of a pun since Kraid is introduced to some new drug you spread on your weiner. “Of course!” he says.

Eighth Session – Our longtime foes are some old ladies that run an opposing orphanage, the Weeping Ladies.  They keep causing social trouble for us, so we go to get some leverage from uncovering whatever their member Father Yorin is doing to squeeze orphans for their juices.

This starts with us finding out some nine year old kid in our orphanage was a plant sent to spy on us.  Being nine, he happily tells us all about it. The Weeping Ladies are really getting on our nerves but they’re just like some ladies that run an orphanage, we don’t feel right about using our usual kick murder squad kind of techniques on them.

We do some research and find out their #2 guy, Father Yorin, may be doing questionable alchemical research on the kids by extracting substances from them. We try to go talk to the other Weeping Ladies but he is there and we don’t have any proof.  Luckily we also have an element snooping through his stuff to find proof. They determine he’s extracting happiness from the kids and selling it, as in a fit of bad timing the other group ends up coming into the office they’re burgling. A lot of arguing is cut short by Father Yorick flipping out and trying to spray acid on the head lady Mother Naria. We beat him up as a third element appears with cops in tow.  Finally it’s all over but the downtime and XP as we make a good relationship with the Weeping Ladies (except for Father Yorick, who goes to the pen).

Seventh Session – We figure out a member of another local crew, the Wraiths, has been dumping ritually carved Hollow bodies around the city.  We decide to mess with them.  We find out too late that they are a group of PCs themselves. A standoff on a neon-lit boardwalk ensues!

So we go hunting for whoever’s been dumping ritually defiled soulless bodies around the city for probable demon worship related reasons, like you do, and gathered intel points at Carriless Firm, from some gang called the Wraiths.  Other members include the Whisper named Rune, who we hear is a lotus-head and can summon a demonic dog, “The Lesson,” an enforcer, and their leader is some mysterious Spider woman.

We decide the best chink in the armor is the lotus-head, so we find a local lotus den she frequents and set up an ambush. We’re down two PCs due to absence but figure the three of us can take one NPC, though in this world anything demonic is super tough. We and 10 goons bust in and catch her smoking it up.  Her demon-dog is no joke and comes pretty close to eviscerating us but Reis manages to get a gun to her head and capture her; the dog teleports out through the shadows.  The plan had been to just kill her but Reis called an audible when he realized she was hot (that’s how he makes a lot of his decisions), and I convince the others based on “we can get intel” and “she’s a bargaining chip” and other retroactive justifications.

But her demon dog can teleport through shadows and got away so we anticipate rapid payback.  We take her out to some abandoned entertainment pier that had a lot of electroplasmic lights so we can keep her in total light, tied to a chair. Reis spends a lot of time trying to turn her, arguing that her group doesn’t care about her and they’re doing crazy demon worship and she doesn’t need that.  But she doesn’t break.

And then the Wraiths attack!  Carriless Firm, a little guy, and The Lesson, a huge guy, show up and carve their way quickly through our gang members out front – Carriless is deflecting bullets with his cane and The Lesson sends people flying when he hits them. They are both ultra bad ass to a concerning degree. Hasten Doom tries to go after Firm and they both end up going over the edge of the pier into the dark waters below, and here in demon-haunted Duskvol that’s a lot worse than just falling into water normally.  Doom drags Firm under the water with him and drowns.

Marto tries to shoot The Lesson but their leader, Cattaby, is uber stealthy and gets the drop on him – he escapes being run through by also going down into the drink.  In no time something hideous with black scales brushes by him.

Reis is all that’s left from the Gambler’s Orphans and it’s not looking good.  The demon hound shows up but he sets off a massive flash with the electroplasmic lights rigged to an anti-demon charm and the demon dog is gone!  Then The Lesson comes ripping through the door and… falls through the boards Reis had weakened into the water.  I was working double overtime coming up with schemes upon schemes trying to stay alive.

Finally it’s one on one – Reis with a gun to Rune’s head versus Cattaby, the Wraith leader, with the others possibly returning at any moment.  I just *knew* she was going to betray Rune and shoot her so we couldn’t use her as a bargaining chip, so I had a plan to let that happen but protect Rune, and then certainly Rune would join us… I had the whole reverse-double-cross planned out. But Cattaby actually was trying to ransom her back, and it seemed like they actually were tight with each other. I was mildly flummoxed by this. So Reis ended up negotiating her release for some ransom and a promise to get Carriless to quit the demon shit. The Lesson showed up and carried Rune off and no one killed me.  Reis recovers Hasten Doom, half drowned, from the beach along with our banged up gang members and scrams; Marto came straggling in later.  We spend the rest of the session licking our wounds.

This was a real nail-biter, just the three of us and it turns out this other gang was actually some legit PC group from an actual play Paul follows. That made us even more concerned in retrospect, we didn’t know we were screwing with legit PCs, no wonder they were hardcore.

This is where this game system really shines – we had a really long complicated fight with another group, with combat and negotiation and all sorts of stuff going on, and in the end there weren’t actually any losses on either side but we were 100% sure there were going to be and better than even money was on it being us.  This was the best session of the campaign for sure.

Sixth Session – An unusual amount of this session is spent partying at the Demon Corn Inn. Then we do a favor for a pimp because… I guess Kraid told him we would?  Next thing you know we’re fighting “Professor Slice.”  He slices.

The downtime rules for Blades In The Dark require you to go indulge in vices to recover Stress.  Of course sometimes this goes bad and causes even more Stress.  Kraid is trying to date Captain Luckett and Hasten Doom is trying to date the pugilist Marlene. This leads to a bar fight and substance abuse. Fun times.

Then – Kraid somehow ends up owing a pimp named Theodore Lysander a favor, which involves stealing a magical blade. We help him really for no good reason. We deliver a barrel of wine to a warehouse to get the guards sloshed and go in the back.  I try to arrange for an entirely silent burgling, but when Marto and Kraid see some crazy cyborg doctor called “Professor Slice” they decide they just can’t let things go without combat. So Reis and Toad steal things and sneak out while those two fight.  But then it turns out all the guards are amputees with various weird substitute limbs put on by Slice.  The one who ends up being the most of a problem is a guy with mechanical spring legs. We escape in a running battle down the canal. Then it’s all over but the loot inventory.