Where Imagination Takes You
In the next session my players have suggested their characters are following up a lead they got from a crumpled programme in the pocket of a dead man, and they’re going to the theatre that the programme was advertising.
What could possibly go wrong?
Just a short update this week – our valiant agents made it to London and made a brief and paranoid contact with a Scotland Yard detective named Templeton. Templeton stumbled onto the shadowy world of vampires a few months ago with the (brief) discovery of the body of a young runaway… which body then vanished along with a quarter of an hour of memory.
In that brief interview with Rowan, Templeton provided a number of leads… as summarised below:
So far Rowan and Hans have just scratched the surface as shown above… I’m looking forward to seeing which direction they go in and how deep they can get.
But in the draft message in his gmail account there was a reference to a Scotland Yard detective named Templeton who appeared to know something of Masson’s obsessions. Routing a call through several cut-outs, Rowan called through to Templeton who was shocked to hear of Masson’s death. He wanted to arrange a meeting there and then opposite the Salvation Army headquarters in Oxford Street but Rowan had to tell him they weren’t in the country yet…
Last night started nice and easy with a quiet interview in Star Logistics with the secretary, a bored woman named Jeanne who was happy to chat with the potential client – Rowan with a fake identity – and let slip about the infrequent all-night shifts that the boss and his drivers pulled. Rowan also got a chance to sneak a closer look at the transit van parked up with its rear doors against the building wall… and noticed just how cold the air was as she passed close to it, and found herself flashing back to the hallucinatory shower of blood she experienced in Casablanca.
After that they tracked the gangster Danglars to an abandoned construction site and exercised some bad ass infiltration skills to move through that place like ghosts. In the climactic scene of the evening Rowan located some of the trafficking victims and began escorting them out while Hans confronted their captors. The captors, as it turned out, were not what they seemed to be.
The first, Janos, when covered by Hans’ pistol just smiled, leaped to the wall and then to the ceiling and raced on all fours across the ceiling to drop down on Hans. Hans pulled off some incredible rolls here, first for Stability and then for Shooting and Janos ended up face up on the floor, seemingly dead, with half a dozen bullets in him. Shortly afterward though he was found on his belly, several feet away, as though he’d been crawling from the place where he fell.
The second guard, Istvan, proved a tougher opponent and he and Hans tussled to say the least. A couple of bare handed blows from the Hungarian left Hans reeling and battered, while a few bullets and then Hans’ hold out knife into Istvan’s neck finally dropped Istvan to his knees. In game terms Istvan was way negative on Health but not by any significant source… at least until Danglars and his mooks burst into the building to help out their allies, and flooded the corridor with sunlight.
Istvan’s last word “Fu..” came a second before his body burst into flames heralding the first Vampire destruction of the campaign.
The last twist came later as the pair returned to their patron, Professor Masson, in his home. It became clear that the aged academic knew more about what he was sending them into than he’d let on. This wasn’t just some concerned citizen with money to burn and a dislike of crime… But before they could probe much further their world turned upside down. The next moment they opened their eyes and found Masson dead, the room on fire, Hans pressing his gun into his own head and empty shell cases on the floor. Masson had been shot and slashed with some cutting weapon. Sirens were blaring, and a glance at the clock showed that an hour had passed.
The pair fled, not wanting to have to deal with official entanglement and as they made it to safety Rowan found a handwritten note on her, giving an email address and a password.
That’s where the session officially ended, but my players knowing the way I work actually decided to log on in real life to the gmail address they’d just been given. Nothing in the inbox… nothing in the sent items… but in the Drafts section they found this:
I will never send this email. I fear that any mail sent can be intercepted, can be monitored, can be changed or eliminated. But I hope that I have had time to pass the details for this account to you, whoever you are.
(I’m copying a couple of posts I made at Google+ for the sake of completeness and to avoid the Empty Blog syndrome that conjures the demons Blokk and Lackspiration)
First session of Red Shift my new Night’s Black Agents campaign has just finished and I have to hand it to +Pelgrane Press Ltd and +Kenneth Hite – the system worked so well we had a blast. Highlights included an inventive use of Reassurance (after first providing an imaginary threat that the subject needed Reassurance against… “Fucking Liam Neeson bullshit” as he commented afterward), a Thriler car chase through the crowded Medina streets of Marrakech, and a brief encounter with a mysterious Arabic gentleman who for some reason didn’t show up on the hidden cameras our surveillance expert had planted around the Saadian Tombs.
The Roll20 Incident board idea I implemented worked well… and is now looking a whole lot busier.
The second episode of Red Shift took place yesterday evening and I have to say that Night’s Black Agents is proving to be one of the most enjoyable role-playing systems I’ve used in many years of trying lots of different ones. The mechanics of the game just get out of the way and let the players make appropriate genre-appropriate decisions and actions and everything conveys the right thriller atmosphere.
In last night’s episode our intrepid freelancers fled from the mysterious Arab gentleman in the Saadian tombs who luckily seemed strangely reluctant to follow them into the sunlit streets of Marrakech. Still in the possession of the mysterious package they’d recovered from a low-life English art-thief they retreated to their safe house and discovered the package contained a sheaf of several centuries-old documents in Latin. Realising there were at least two other parties interested in this package, both of whom had shown a willingness to take extreme measures to get hold of them, they decided to drive out overnight toward Casablanca to go to ground.
Alas for tracking devices and rival teams that also have Electronic Surveillance… a car chase on the A7 highway ensued which ended with our heroes out distancing their pursuers and branching off into the railway station at Skhour Rehamna and picking up a couple of tickets for the first train northward.
Did I mention the tracking device? The pursuing team turned up minutes later and the first real gunfight of the campaign ensued on the northbound platform that left the two pursuers dead, the team’s Heat rating climbing through the roof, and our heroes deciding not to wait around the station for the cops to show up but to steal their pursuer’s car and complete the journey to Casablanca without delay.
Availing themselves of a decent hotel room (using money stolen from the rival team) Intrusion Expert Rowan hacked the hotel’s security camera system and set her laptop to cycle through the cameras for advance warning. After a gory hallucination in the shower (she put it down to stress) she let Hans take the first watch while she got some sleep.
But not much… the lobby camera kept fritzing out… dissolving into static just like the camera she’s set up in the Saadian tombs. When the image cleared the receptionist appeared to be talking to someone, but there was nobody else in view.
Suspecting trouble the pair exited quickly via the balcony and a quick clamber down a drainpipe to ground level, or at least Rowan did. Hans was still on the balcony when someone they recognised from the tomb kicked the hotel door entirely off its frame, burst into the room and slammed Hans so hard he made it to the ground the hard way, badly injured and barely able to stand. He was able to use his Driving cherry to boost a nearby Volkswagen Beetle though (expressing a certain distaste at the lack of choice) and the pair fled. The Arab gentleman who just stepped off the balcony and instantly broke into a run to purse the car managed to leap atop it and smashed the windshield, trying to throttle Hans with those perfectly manicured hands… Rowan put her gun to the side of the man’s head and fired, blowing a large chunk of it away and sending the assailant rolling off the car and into the gutter… where he was visible in the rear view mirror struggling to his feet and clutching at the bloodless wound in his head.
Stability losses ensued and we had the first Network spend of the campaign as Hans remembered an old acquaintance of his, a French doctor, working in Casablanca who didn’t mind doing off the books work for a friend.
TL/DR: Lots of fun was had, the rules support the action perfectly, and the plot thickens.
Otherworlds 