Sebastian had returned from whatever secret rendezvous he'd been engaged in and was therefore available to assist in the companies operations...which is an in character way of saying that his player was able to turn up for this weeks session and we therefore had a full house for the first time...
This weeks attendees would be Captain Sebastian LaCroix (Toms character), His Lieutenant Rafaldo Scorgiani (Steve's character), the Mechanik Bragg Halvard (Arold's character) Martin's Priestess and 'Spiritual Advisor' character Danika Jansen and my Ogrun 'Bosh' Skullsplitter who had evidently been given the task of bodyguard to whoever Sebastian felt needed it currently...
The stats of the player characters can be found here should you be interested and the rest of the 'Brotherhood of the Rail' mercenary companies NPC's backgrounds can be found here though the new NPC's from this session may not have been added yet depending on when you look, lol.
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Mission Three - 'A Less Than Official Side-Job'
The group is currently in the town of Merin awaiting their transport to be prepared for the next leg of their journey...
Introduction.
Sebastian LaCroix and his officers were summoned by yet another new face of the Transcontinental Rail Company name of Philip Darling...
Editors Note - Never give the players the opportunity to name NPC characters for you...
He had been tasked with creating a compromise between Sebastians substantial list of demands and the companies requirements for the train service and fortunately they seemed strangely in synch with one another in a significant number of areas. The train had been given a significant upgrade in armour and the guard carriages were now far better equipped with emplacements on the roofs for deck guns and the personnel to man them. The company was initially issued three deck guns for their use with one being mounted on an engine carriage with the others being available for any two of the four guard carriages.
The number of the aforementioned guard carriages had been increased to four from three and somewhat begrudgingly an officers carriage for Sebastian and his Lieutenant had also been added. Several other new guards had been recruited which caused the Captain to raise the point that defending the train as well as looking after other of the companies interests would be much easier if in the first place he had some say in the interviewing and recruiting of staff rather than having to integrate whichever random group of individuals the company threw in his general direction at each new stop. However his objections were somewhat mitigated when he noted that amongst these new staff were a human female diplomat named Amelie who had an somewhat arrogant aristocratic bearing and originated from Sebastian's homeland of Llael...Editors Note - Every-one except Sebastian's player were hoping she weighed three hundred pounds and was covered in warts but evidently she needed to be all athletic and attractive for some reason...
This increase in resources made a lot more sense when the grand plans for the next stage of the journey were laid out. A whole host of new passenger and cargo carriages were to be added to the trains current complement which made the increase in security more than necessary...If anything even more personnel were required...at least according to Sebastian...though an element of empire building may have been part of that reasoning on his part rather than actual necessity.
Sebastian decided to get to know the new company members and seemed to be getting on particularly well with Amelie presumably due to their shared homeland.
"I thought we had the week off?"
After some searching of bars, messages to churches and schools of magic and a somewhat intimidating journey into the Ogrun ghetto of Merin the Lieutenants and Sergeants of the Brotherhood were located and summoned back to the train station for a meeting with their Captain Sebastian.
It turned out that they were desperately needed for an 'unofficial' job that Transcontinental Rail needed doing 'on the quiet'...or at the very least 'relatively quiet'. A group of Kayazy 'merchants' were supposedly transporting an undisclosed cargo that the company wanted re-locating into one of their own trains cargo carriages. The transport was going to be via a large armoured horse drawn carriage with what might be up to ten guards and needed to be intercepted between it's point of loading and the drop-off point though for some reason they were instructed not to kill any of the guards...which seemed like an unnecessary complication...but orders were orders. An added wrinkle was that a substantial part of the journey was via a busy market and so their window of opportunity was somewhat limited to the early part of the transportation. They also only had a day to prepare...
After some discussion of their options the following scheme was agreed upon.
Bragg with the assistance of several of the sneaky gobber company members would sneakily sabotage the carriage in such a manner that it would break down early on during their journey. Bragg assured them that he could sabotage something simple and be fairly sure of how long into the journey it would fail. He also claimed that such sabotage would be easy to repair meaning they could escape in the same carriage that they were robbing which as they were going to need to clear of hostile's anyway shouldn't be an issue. The rest were dubious that he could pull off both things but he was quite certain that he could...Editors Note - As Bragg is an engineer he has high stats in the appropriate mechanical (or Mechanikal as they are in Iron Kingdoms parlance) Skills so it wasn't out of the question that he could do what he said. He then rolled a double six on top which pretty much meant that he could specify to the inch where it broke down and repair it again while blindfolded and/or asleep...
The rest would be following in another carriage which for some reason they had to secretly 'borrow' from Transcontinental Rail Companies offices along with one of their more morally flexible drivers and would then ambush the guards while they were attempting repairs. Bragg would then drive away the seized carriage while the requisitioned driver would take their own back to the train. What could go wrong?
Well as far as Sebastian was concerned the plan involved a Mechanik he didn't know doing something he wasn't convinced he could actually do so he came up with a contingency plan. 'Geoff' a Gobber who was part of the company as well as being an extremely sneaky and streetwise individual was tasked with recruiting some local urchins and making a convincing distraction just before the market in case they needed a secondary location for an ambush and he was given ten gold crowns in bribe money to accomplish this.Editors Note - Item costs are a bit arbitrary in the Iron Kingdoms book as they're primarily to govern starting equipment and make certain items hard to get early on. The system itself encourages the player characters to gain Occupational Skills in manufacturing abilities by making the process of building something yourself significantly cheaper than buying it and if your fortunate enough to have a Field Mechanik, Arcane Mechanik and an Alchemist in your party then your going to pay a lot less than a group that buys everything retail, lol. There are rules about how currency from different areas is treated, conversion rates and the like if you really want to know but given that the whole area is at war a GM can create shortages wherever he damn well pleases. But in real terms ten gold crowns is enough money to keep a person housed and fed at city prices for a week or enough to hire an army of street urchins if you so desired...
With the plan (and back-up plan) in place the heist team readied themselves for action. Danika changed from her somewhat distinctive armour into some street clothes and the rest of the group made some attempts to disguise their appearances with varying degrees of success. 'Bosh' didn't bother but made a mental note to buy a large cloak at some point in the future. Bragg completed his act of sabotage and then met up with the rest who followed the target carriage in order to relieve them of their cargo. As promised the carriage ground to a standstill at very much the required location and they waited fairly patiently while the cargo's protectors occupied themselves trying to work out the problem. They seemed oblivious to the approaching danger and this was confirmed when were therefore taken completely by surprise by the attack..."I'm Guessing We Do This The Usual Way?"
Keeping to their tried and tested formula the others held back while Bosh and Danika charged into the enemies though this time Danika let Bosh go in first as she wasn't heavily armoured as normal and had switched to a slightly less brutal hammer rather than her usual mace so as to minimise the chance of killing any-one as per their initial brief. Bosh was already surprisingly effective at incapacitating opponents without killing them from his experience as a bounty hunter and had taken out four of the Kayazy guards in one brutal charge and the priestess jumped the last two. Meanwhile Rafaldo summoned a fierce magical wind and blasted the driver from his seat to land in an unconscious heap on the floor. Having no opponents left to concern himself Bragg positioned himself to repair the carriage as quickly as possible once the interior was cleared...
Editors Note - Obviously it was a somewhat situational solution as it required a lot of very specific skills and high rolls to make work...but it worked so who am I to criticise, lol.
Bosh and Danika were about to begin their usual after battle procedure of looting anything of value but were told that they didn't have time and that the carriages cargo was their first priority. Sebastian then signalled to Geoff using the underworld language of 'Five Cant' that the secondary distraction plan wasn't needed and to grab what he could from the bodies while they made their escape...and after having it explained to him a second time he agreed...
Sebastian was uncharacteristically evasive on the point but just as the point was going to be pressed somewhat his Gobber Geoff turned up dragging a sack of looted weapons and Bosh was allocated the task of selling them. By the time he returned with the acquired coin Sebastian had come up with forty gold crowns each in payment evidently from their employer with instructions to discuss the matter with no-one. The cargo manifest was altered to include the new goods complete with an intended recipient and those involved dispersed to enjoy what was left of their time off before their journey resumed...
Captain LaCroix then had a debate with his Lieutenant about the current living arrangements. He put forward the argument that given the new diplomats aristocratic background she should probably have her own quarters rather than being put with the rank and file and currently the only spare quarters were the Lieutenants ones next to his that were about to be occupied by Rafaldo. Rafaldo eventually agreed to give up his quarters on the condition that he got a berth in one of the luxury passenger compartments instead rather than being stuck in a guard carriage. Despite basically having no real authority to allocate passenger quarters he agreed and decided to worry about any arguments from Transcontinental Rail at a later date.
Back to Reality...
I promised when I started this project that I'd go through the sessions 'warts and all' and this one had a few warts, lol.
Primarily the issue was that our GM had his ideas worked out for the session but had skimped a little on his hand-outs which resulted in a quite long out of character conversation to decipher them and there was a bit of confusion generated on both sides. Towards the end of the chat it became apparent that our GM had only handed over half the notes, lol.
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We then got a bit sidetracked with a debate over the practicalities of the train which probably could have waited till another time rather than delaying the session with it, Once that was out of the way though things went a lot more smoothly but we had wasted a lot of time so the actual role-playing part of the session (as you can probably tell from the narrative) was a lot shorter than the last couple of times. Onto the positive...
Some of the new NPC's are interesting additions to the mix and as these got names and back-story from the outset I'm presuming they will play some greater part in the campaign at a later point or judging on the way the robbery was given to us it's possible that they're already sticking their noses in...I'm just guessing though.
Harry's Mechanik character got much more involved this session and it was nice to have a plan where we all played a part...not least because teamwork scores us an extra XP each, lol. The overall scheme was a combined effort of planning so every-one felt like they had contributed in some way which is always an enjoyable role-playing experience. Everyone got their single XP for turning up and a second for the teamwork aspects so every character got to 'level-up', As we are at different levels this meant different things to different players. They've got till the start of the next session to make up their minds as apparently I'm the only person in our group who plans ahead...
We meet again in two weeks time.....
Thoughts and comments are (as usual) most welcome.