Actual Play - Lady Blackbird, part 2

Second half of Lady Blackbird!

This game ended with a bang.

They infiltrated the hunting club, and Naomi successfully persuaded into getting the sky-squid hunter, allowing her to free the sky-squid...but not before Snargle, Cyrus, and Lady Blackbird end up a fight with a merchant over a badly treated servant, Cyrus and Lady Blackbird get detained by security, and Snargle sets a fire to allow them to break free and rescues more sky-goblins from servitude.

When they get back to the ship, they discover that Kale has been possessed by a ghostblood, so Lady Blackbird casts a spell to free him.

We find out more about the crew in the refresh scenes. Lady Blackbird and Cyrus agree to get along and put his unfortunate crush behind them, but nonetheless continue to bicker. Snargle and Naomi shake their heads over it. We discover that Naomi has never met Uriah, but despises him... because she's secretly in love with Lady Blackbird! When Cyrus finds out, he and Naomi end up getting really drunk together and bonding over their unattainable love (who is inexplicably in love with some sketchy pirate).

Also, all the sky-goblin passengers decide that they want to become pirates, since they're sick of capitalism. Naomi teaches them how to fight, Lady Blackbird teaches them how to walk like nobility, Cyrus grooms one of them to command, and Snargle teaches them to be pilots.

Once they get to Nightport, they track down a pirate king named Treebeard -- a former noble turned pirate, so named because of his green, algae-like beard (due to a magical accident). There's a problem with former nobles turned pirates in this 'verse. Presumably because all the nobles are jerks anyway. Treebeard welcomes them and Lady Blackbird convinces him to set up a meeting with Uriah Flint in three days.

Treebeard also drops some hints that Uriah is working on a "project" in the Remnants, and the crew decided to investigate. At this point, I threw my hands up and was like, "OKAY, WHAT IS URIAH UP TO. EACH OF YOU TELL ME ONE THING."

The group decides that Uriah had a portal to another dimension, which was giving him access to aether and summoning monsters from other dimensions. There are also hints that he wants to create his own fiefdom. IC, they discover this via lots of spying and rescuing two scientists (who join the crew, because OF COURSE).

After their investigations are done, they meet Treebeard...but it's a trap! Treebeard has made a deal with the Empire, which will restore his title in exchange for Lady Blackbird. They fight a group of pirates and a Voidblood noble -- Naomi takes Treebeard hostage, neutralizing the pirates. The Voidblood is trickier because of the counterspell and phasing abilities, but Lady Blackbird eventually manages to turn the noble's disintegrate spell back on her and partially disintegrates her.

When they reach Uriah's ship, the Flint, (which is disguised as an asteroid), he's busy with the project but seems reasonably delighted (if wary) to see Lady Blackbird here. Lady Blackbird and Naomi wait for him in his chambers, while Cyrus and Snargle chat up the crew with varying degrees of success.

Then, everyone hears a scream. It comes from behind a locked door, which Naomi breaks open. Inside is Uriah, a scalpel in his hands as he vivisects a crocodilian biped. Behind him are cages and beds with more victims, and the magic of the portal hums -- and because Cyrus is a Warpblood, he begins to phase in and out.

Uriah tries to justify himself to Lady Blackbird -- the portal is to a dimension of magic. He's been driven mad by the portal and is harvesting magic from that dimension's inhabitants to distribute magic among the masses, bringing about true equality. Lady Blackbird does not buy that bullshit and accuses him of doing this for his own power and abandoning their ideals of equality. In addition, she thinks it's completely unnecessary -- the noble houses are producing so many illegitimate children that the aristocrats no longer have a monopoly on magic.

Uriah pleads with Lady Blackbird but unable to persuade her, at last pulls a gun on her. She and Naomi team up to knock him unconscious.

Meanwhile, Snargle frees the prisoners, and Cyrus gains enough control over the dimensional portal to realize that he can close it with a sacrifice. He resolves to sacrifice himself to close it and says goodbye to Snargle, but Lady Blackbird intervenes and substitutes Uriah instead. As part of the spell, she links herself with the other three members of the crew, reading their minds - and thus learns of Naomi's hidden affection for her.

Uriah dissolves, and the portal disappears.

In the end, Lady Blackbird and Naomi take over the ship, which terrorizes the Imperial Navy. They also start dating, but decide to take things slowly!

Cyrus gives The Owl to Snargle and moves on, eventually settling down, going through a lot of character growth, and finding love and belonging.

Snargle becomes the leader of a group of sky-goblins and frees more, helping them establish their own home. Eventually, he grows tired of the responsibility and sneaks off onto the Owl, along with a loyal crew of adventurous sky-goblins.

Lady Blackbird's prophecy turns out to be true -- in the years that come, the increase in magic among commoners (along with the attacks on the navy and the sky-goblin rebellion...) produce a more just society within their lifetime.

And in the meantime, the Owl and its crew sail on, always working to make a better world...

Notes:

- I think the game started out with some pacing issues as I tried to figure out how to resolve the sky-squid plot thread and keep the party from splitting up too much, but that ending was great.

- This session ended up being really low on narrative control on my part, and I think it ended up better for it. I felt very much part of the system instead of the primary narrator...which was good, because I was very low on creativity. There's also an interesting sneaky component in asking for player feedback: it was preeetty obvious the party wanted Uriah as an antagonist once they started taking turns narrating the details of his vivisection chamber. (Vivisection is definitely on the top 10 list of things a relationship cannot recover from).

- Naomi/Lady Blackbird took me (and I think everyone else) by surprise because Naomi's feelings were VERY well hidden the first session, and I came with the advantage of knowing that Naomi/Lady Blackbird is a common ending romance. Interestingly enough, while the game teases Lady Blackbird/Cyrus (and Lady Blackbird/Uriah), the game feels biased away from both of them -- Lady Blackbird discovering that what she wants is not what she needs (to paraphrase John Yorke) and the game actually having a final arc villain is much more satisfying story-wise, and Lady Blackbird/Cyrus feels very infatuationy. On the other hand, Lady Blackbird/Naomi and Kale/Cyrus aren't explicitly part of the setup, but they come with a lot more history for the characters that can be used to feed a romantic longing.

- This was definitely a great ensemble cast.

Actual Play - Lady Blackbird

This was my second time running Lady Blackbird today with a group entirely new to the game. We had no Kale, unfortunately. The twist I didn't expect in this game was that Naomi was pretending to be a noble lady and Lady Blackbird was pretending to be her servant.

Naomi busted them out of the cell (they were planning to do something with a ventilation shaft, but unfortunately got caught by the guards). The crew set off the alarm, but managed to disguise themselves as soldiers and make it to the hangar by claiming that Captain Hollas had sent them to destroy the Owl. Snargle's trick piloting got them out, but the ship ended up leaking fuel with no way to reach Haven.

They hid from the Hand of Sorrow in the Lower Depths for a bit, where their ship was attacked by a sky-squid. Cyrus (taking Secret of the Sky-song) realized that the sky-squid was a baby whose mother had been captured near Haven. He convinced it to tow the Owl to Haven in exchange for finding its mother.

This was somewhat hilarious, because Naomi and Lady Blackbird did not trust the sky-squid Cyrus claimed to have talked into hauling the ship. There was a big argument. It didn't help that the sky squid kept jerking the ship around. Favorite line from Naomi about the squid: "Don't worry, if I see one hole in the hull, I'll go out in a suit and eat it."

Naomi and Lady Blackbird were not very happy when Cyrus insisted that he needed to go rescue the squid's mother instead of finding the route to Uriah.

The gang got their ship repaired at Haven, won a lot of money by having Naomi fight in an illegal pit fight while pretending to be a delicate lady, promised to rescue a group of sky-goblins from the illegal slave trade on Haven, and learned that a group of young merchants had formed a club for hunting dangerous monsters.

The gang decided to disguise themselves as wealthy folks with a goblin servant (Snargle). This required buying clothes, during which Lady Blackbird met her second cousin's wife, Lady Bluejay, who recognizes her. Naomi followed Lady Bluejay to a mansion, where Bluejay informed Count Carlowe of Lady Blackbird's presence on Haven.

At this point, they're all prepared to infiltrate the club, which is where we will begin next session!

Naomi, Lady Blackbird, and Cyrus were almost always at odds. Everyone (except Snargle) was very bloodthirsty. Snargle and Naomi saved each others' lives early and became blood family. Cyrus completely failed at flirting with Lady Blackbird, who was very nasty to him in response, and gave up his Key of Hidden Longing (in favor of Key of the Vow -- to help make the world a better place by helping people!). Lady Blackbird revealed her secret identity to the crew and bought off her Key.

So this session (mostly!) worked.

General comments:

- The group was really great about helping with the worldbuilding and what happened next and took a lot of the heavy lifting off my shoulders. There were a lot of scenes where I just sat there while folks argued, and they had some wonderfully creative solutions.

- I had trouble figuring out what to do with Snargle - but hopefully there will be more opportunities for piloting/sneaking/trading in the future.

- I decided to let players award up to 3 XP for cool things in a scene. I think this was used three times in the group? My hope was that it would encourage good feelings and good roleplaying (this was a Meetup, with folks who mostly hadn't played together. Not sure if it worked.

- In hindsight, the squid thing might have been a mistake, since Naomi and Lady Blackbird didn't really care. The only reason they're doing this is because Cyrus declared that this was his ship and they were going to SAVE THE SQUID first. I'm going to try to wrap that up quickly next session.

- Desperate Housewives of Ilysium is apparently the soldiers' show of choice.

Actual Play - Annalise, the Mystery of the Auspicious: Part 2

It's been about a month so I honestly don't recall all the details of the end of the game. The Captain and the Doctor decide to explore the Queen Anne, meeting the Beast, a giant white wolf-like creature.

The Doctor's possessed hand tries to kill the Captain. The Captain lost control of his fire powers and saw the Beast, which recognized him as a brother.

At this point, undead creatures (including Sailor Godfrey) begin crawling up the sides of the ship and filling the water.
The two of them manage to escape the ship in a rowboat, where the Doctor turns out to have one sentimental feeling on seeing a vision of his fiancee Annalise.

As the two escape, the Captain resists the tempting call of the Beast and uses all of his power to set the Queen Anne on fire, ending (almost) the menace of the Beast.

The Doctor isn't so lucky, however. He wakes up the next night to feel his possessed hand across his throat. He amputates himself with a scalpel, but when the Beast calls to him to give in and to serve it, he succumbs. His secret, revealed, is that he once poisoned a hospital on the command of a foreign power. (A: "Your secret is that you're a MASS MURDERER, not that you're a traitor.")

The Captain continues sailing, now a better man who has come to peace with himself and taken command.

The Doctor disappears, until a decade later, a handsome young man - a widower, who seems surprisingly young for the job - signs on as the doctor of a new merchant vessel...

And so the curse persists.

This was a good game, but the ending was less fun that Laying the Foundations. I think we dragged on the Confrontation a bit too long and didn't put high enough stakes -- there were a few too many rolls. I think this would have been served by faster confrontations.

Still, I love the way the story came together, even if I didn't get to play with the Doctor's secret that much.