Blades in the Dark: Just a Heist. Promise

In continuation of our Locke Lamorra infused Blades in the Dark game detailed here, we’ve found ourselves at something of a turning point. We’ve ended a war and become Tier 1. We’ve pissed off a lot of people – both Right People and citizens.

I’ll get to all that. Promise. In this particular job, we sought to greatly improve our Rep with the Right People.

Roll call:
Tony, the MC
George, playing Mist the Spider (mastermind!)
Clio, playing Pinch the Lurk (extraction expert)
Shayna, playing Ruby the Slide (grifter)
Rachael, playing Sickle the Cutter and eldest Heir of the Caruso noble family (Muscle)
William (me!), playing Hammer the Cutter, twin to Sickle and youngest Heir of the Caruso noble family (Muscle)

So.

We’re altogether, sitting in the sunken bank vault that we call home. Sickle realizes: Hey, didn’t our friend Grace get snatched by the yellow jackets due to her involvement with us?

We realize Sickle is correct, and that our friend is wasting away in prison. We should really do something about that.

So: Jail Break!

We could just go snatch Grace, but that’d bring more heat onto her. Instead, we pretend to be Priests of the Lady of Ubiquitous Maladies, taking away prisoners for “psychological” reasons. There’s an immediate veil put on what sort of psychological treatments that would mean. Perfect: We’re going to fake it anyway; this is an excuse for the prison to give us anyone they don’t want and, in particular, the people we do want to snatch.

We get to the engagement roll. We get two dice, and we’re at Risky. Perfectly normal.

Some of us are dressed as Priests, some as Guards of priests. Sickle and Hammer go medium load, so we look like thugs. Pinch and Mist do light load, so they look like priests. Ruby has a brilliant idea – instead of being a Priest, she has gotten herself arrested, so she’s in the prison population.

We meet with the Warden, a squirrelly little fellow dressed fancy where everyone else who works in the prison is dressed like guards. We dislike him immediately.

We tell him that we’re here to remove some prisoners. He’s going to push back, but Mist uses his Foresight move to have sent a letter in advance explaining what we’re going to do. So, there’s paperwork and it all looks reasonable.

We roll to convince, and get a consequence or two: The warden wants to split us up, and he wants to send guards to ensure we’re really going to where we say we are. We get rid of the splitting us up, and tell him it is a 3 month journey. His guards are welcome to join. He decides they will just show us to the docks.

Flash to Ruby in the prison population. One of the guys we’re busting out is going to take a beating, possibly to the death, by another prisoner. They’ve been rivals.

Ruby uses her Rigging to have pen and paper, and writes letters between the two of them so they will like each other. Risky/Standard; she gets a crit. The two of them become good prison buddies instead of bitter rivals.

Meanwhile, we’re left alone for a few minutes while the Warden rounds up the prisoners. We do the following:

  1. Mist destroys all evidence we were hear using a Embezzler’s Bag that Sickle brought for exactly this situation. It erases paper, so now the prison will have no record we were here or that they gave away prisoners.
  2. Sickle and Hammer loot the evidence locker, then distribute the tools and equipment to the prisoners. This is a free sample: Like what you found here? Buy more at The Nightmarket.

We gather up the prisoners, and head out. Three guards come with us. Along the way, our canal boat is “attacked” by actors we hired to pretend to attack the ship. It serves well enough to distract the guards, who we knock unconscious and rob.

This was a big job in that we got Right People out of the slammer; it wasn’t a big job in that it didn’t play into a lot of our ongoing plots.

But, in the end we need to Tithe to a gang leader. This was originally the Full Crowns, but we have somewhat outgrown them. Instead, Tony decides it should be one of the 12 Capas. So, now we have corporate sponsorship – we tithe to a Capa, and he is mollified.

For downtime, we do a few things:

  1. Hammer is finally healed. He’d had a couple lingering level 1 harm’s, which are now wiped.
  2. Mist and Sickle go to a play, and get rid of all stress.
  3. There’s some training. Montage!
  4. We start two long term projects: For The Capa to give us The Distance, and for The Capa to think of us as specialists he can goto for particular sorts of Crime.

At the same time, Sickle decides it a reasonable thing that The Capa wants her to marry his son. Neither of them is into it, so it’s a long-term fight against getting married. But, this does get us closer to the Capa.

We do XP; our crew levels up, and we get a boat and make Training more efficient for playbook advances.

Not a huge episode, but a good one. And we totally robbed some cops!

2 Likes