dismallyoriented

Landed myself a 3 day weekend after having to call in sick, so spending the time trying to get caught up on these. We'll see how far I can get, yippee

NPCs reference list
Annalise Challenger (she/her) - stern, lean, proud - Dragonkid’s mom, still quietly mourning the loss of her child; trusts Dragonkid implicitly, even after all these years; likes Quentim and is willing to help out
Arcturus (they/them) - secretive, dangerous, impulsive - the child who fused with a dragon 20 years ago, now returned for a reason they won’t say; has a softly glowing aura in the shape of a dragon’s features
Imogen Constant (she/her) - distracted, forgetful, outgoing - 13yo forgetful messenger girl, Library apprentice; probably plural, doesn’t know what that is; one of like 4 kids and the only one in her age group
Senary (she/they) - adventurous, pushy, overconfident - Imogen’s headmate/imaginary friend; definitely not a 13 y/o Trinity Escapade factive from when Imogen was reading about her when she was younger. Loves Marl because it let her shoot a gun (Imogen is jealous)
Hema Preston^[1] (he/him) - cop, traditionalist, devoted - Leader of the Lithobreakers, somewhat arrogant and prone to quoting laws; native to Dragon’s Rest
Vanessa Deirdret (she/them) - ruthless, strict, imperious - Yara’s ‘rival’, a fellow member of Nowhere, known to be somewhat ruthless and uncaring when it comes to cataloguing and acquiring information and tech. She won’t directly hurt people, but she won’t spare a moment’s thought for their wellbeing either

Love Letters
- Yara: DIONE asks her to join a New Haven scouting mission into Pump Station β. She discovers that the decades of machinery noise and the pain it inflicted on the wildlife created an aura of pain around the area that make it dangerous to be in for longer than an hour. She also finds a large backup battery called the hydrostatic core, which can be claimed on a mission. Yara's player also outlined some character backstory, an incident from her teens where she failed to save a friend after falling into a cavern. This motivates her insistence on good field medicine but gave her medical trauma.
- Marl: Senary approaches her to ask for some advice on preparing for an excursion. She claims it's for a camping trip with Trinity and the town scouts, but is asking for A Lot of detail. Marl picks up on this but chooses to give advice anyway, treating it like mission planning for an adult client. Senary reveals that she's going on a 1-2 day cave excursion, lets slip that it might be more of a solo trip than she's making it out to be, and Marl gives her its own comms pack, removing it from her loadout for the next mission.
- Momo: DIONE asks them to help mediate a dispute between Nowhere and Dragons Rest, as both have laid claim to the observatory ruins from Mission 1, and the two lead negotiators (Hema Preston and Vanessa Deirdret) are both extremely stubborn. She acts as messenger between the two, hoping to counteract their tendencies to respond to conflict with equal oppositional force. Her efforts get her +1 rep with the Lithobreakers (the rival DR crew), and negotiations continue instead of breaking down
- Gail/Quentim: Combo love letter where the two of them try to resolve the fight they were having. After a very awkward week of avoidance after the mission they finally sit down to talk about what happened. Quentim explains his concerns over Gail getting hurt and apologizes for being cruel. Gail talks around how insecure she feels about her place on the team and how badly his words hurt her, but doesn't disclose just how deeply the insecurity goes. We have a meta level talk about how both these characters mean well, but will still have that tension around them - Gail will always be more reckless than Quentim would like, and Quentim will always be a source of danger to Gail because of his potential for judgment. She's got a longer journey to go on than just one conversation, even if it's a necessary step

Really liked how crunchy these letters were, all of them moved the plot forward in big ways and if you poked at them enough you could guess at what Mission 3 was going to be. I must also shout out the non-canonical NPC love letter that Yara's player wrote for the GM

Montezuma, you have the worst kind of headache. You didn't even get it from eating one of the fun kind of ores you sometimes find in the walls while sending your molelings down into the nooks and crannies of the cave system. No this one is just because of whatever monster is behind that scary door that guards the entrance to the big metal box.
It was twenty times worse this time too since it compounded off of the residual headache you still had from huge pulse of radiant energy that washed over everything you had ever known the month before. The benefits of it were wonderful but the hyper focus and seemingly endless energy feels like a fading dream. It was almost like the dragons were back and for a week or so you had begun to hope. But alas, now you are left with a headache, some embarrassing memories and a door that now lay open into the mysterious (and now blessedly silent) metal box.

GM's responses were
1. (What did you take?) A very nice gem that had been growing off of something deep inside that felt nice to be near and helps me get restful sleep
2. (What scared you off?) The scent of one of the humans who'd turned the noise off. I still feel awkward about how things resolved
3. (What did you leave behind?) I accidentally left some wreckage in my wake when I made my escape. I'm sure it's fine!

If there's a very mole-shaped exit hole in a Pump Station wall, well. We'll know who to blame I guess

Downtime 2

Thread: What is the spirituality of New Haven like?/How is New Haven recovering from the disasters?
Complication: Community Conflict

Annalise comes to see Dragonkid at the Crashpad after hearing rumors that her kid was here
Quentim answers the door, initially trying to lie and put her off the trail. IC and OOC I am stuck between wanting to keep Arcturus's confidence and having spent 3 years knowing Annalise in her grief
Quentim decides to be honest, telling Annalise that Arcturus isn't ready to see her yet and asking her to be patient. Gail assists, spending the last two stress to scar out like her player intended to last session
We crit the roll, and Annalise leaves. But not without leaving behind one of Arcturus's old stuffed animals, well-loved and kept in good condition all these years ^[2]

Gail takes the scar “Dysphoric” retroactively, tying it to seeing Dragonkid and intensifying her own desires to become draconic.

Session Events
Action 1: Momo - Recover

Small community, only one proper doctor. Has been around since the dragonpox epidemic (at least). Momo is reluctant to seek out their care because of bad memories of going through the epidemic - being in their care resurfaces those.
Gruff bedside manner, a smidge “Long time no see” about Momo’s lack of regular checkups. Splints, pain management, and admonishments for bedrest.
Doctor is not a very religious person, takes a very scientific view of things, understands transcendent forces as a material thing in the world and an explanation for many otherwise spiritual things.

Action 2: Gail - Recover

Gail’s feeling poorly about getting chastised by Arcturus and starts rambling about it to the first person who walks past it in the Crashpad while repairing its leg (Momo)
Momo: “Oh yeah, you’re not the asshole here. You tried to offer help and they were harsh to you in response. That doesn’t make it your fault or something you did wrong. It sounds like they had a lot going on and snapped from being on edge. This shouldn’t be something you take personally.”

Action 3: Yara - Cut Loose

Yara's researching old board game rules from Nowhere archives and figuring out a way to reconstruct them to play (Stratego, future 4-player edition)
Gail did not participate in the game, as she was already at 0 stress, but for narrative reasons we had her in the scene
Everyone chooses a skill to roll in order to play
- Yara: Bluff, [initially 1, bumped to a 4 after Gail begins texting secret information to her]
- Marl: Trace, conservative play about blocking movement [3]
- Quentim: Decipher, trying to watch and learn. He fails to learn [2]
- Momo: Decipher [4]
Momo does roll off with Yara, catches the cheating and begins concealing her pieces from Gail’s field of view.
“Wayfare is eating the pieces”

Action 4: Quentim - Training (Playbook)

Whenever we train for Playbook XP, we tend to frame it around whichever ability we're working toward next
I wanted the ability Making Time, which gives +1 Downtime action for the crew to use. We themed it around literally making time, clearing up other commitments Quentim had, and also setting up some deals with people to ensure supply deliveries and other logistics are taken care of in advance

Action 5: Marl - Unwind

Trinity asks for her help on an upcoming kid fieldtrip, because the kids are all huge fans of it and demanded that it come along
They all go on a hike together - Marl is a cool synth with a cool gun and cool wilderness survival skills, and also will no sell kids clambering all over its chassis.
Imogen is on the hike, not Senary - Marl notes the change in temperament
Overindulgence - Commitment. Kid schemes are afoot. “We found some cool ruins that Trinity doesn’t know about, can you help us turn it into a cool place that we can play Manhunt in? Trinity refuses to help because she says it’s dangerous but you’re a cool robot with big gun please? Please please please?” The last two kids (twins) propose this idea to her.
Monica and Moses McCormick, the only pair of twins in New Haven. One of them is trans, and both of them are keeping it ambiguous which one.
6 step clock to help build this fort

Action 6 (and 7): Momo/Yara - Training (Semiosis)

Momo’s phenomenal run of Stratego gave her a thirst for social deduction/bluffing games. She spends her period of bedrest playing games with Yara, and anyone else who cannot flee her bedside and overwhelming enthusiasm quickly enough

Action 8: Gail - Training (Playbook)

Gail takes up Yara’s offer from last mission to practice with her Charmhack abilities. She also examines Yara’s wings in the process of trying to figure out how to build some for herself
Yara designs tests and challenges for Gail to throw her abilities against. How far away from this device can you be in order to fuck with it? How many devices at once can you affect?
Gail also practices by assisting with town recovery - repairing damaged technology
- Freya McCormick, one of the farmers, asks for help fixing her sprinkler system
- Warding of superstition - a gesture adopted from Dave Smith. Two fist-bumps to the chest, kiss the fingertips, raise to the sky ^[3]

Action 9: Marl - Downtime project

Gotta go work on your commitment bud! Chop chop
It goes scouting the area for the fort, getting a feel for what it’s like and the layout of the space and surveying for dangers
Marl seeks help from the rest of the team, but everyone is indisposed/busy/has some excuse. The GM points this out as a potential narrative thread we could play with if we wanted
Is Marl religious? It’d be cool if she was but player needs some time to think about it

Action 10: Quentim - Recover

Unfortunately I have no notes for this section because I ran out of idea juice and just wanted to roll some dice. We can instead imagine my poor guy sitting in a bubble bath with cucumber slices over his eyes. My guy needs it.

At the end of session, we decided on a new Crew ability, having filled the bar last mission. We took Engineers, which gave +1d to gathering info about damaged tech, and +1 impact to modifying/repairing/sabotaging tech in the field. We themed it as Gail, Yara, and Momo having reverse engineered little charms that could do a smaller version of Gail's Charmhack ability. So now everyone has a funny lil talisman badge like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon.

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Takeaways

- Threads were less well integrated this time, but mostly bc it was a slippery topic for a lot of the players to interact with and we spent a lot of time focused on the team instead of the community. GM and I had spent time trying to brainstorm outside of sessions, but also found it hard to incorporate. Future Thread topics should be stuff with more buy-in and familiarity across the whole table
- We've been having a lot of fun with the group Cut Loose option - future downtimes will see us starting to use Unwind more. We do run into some friction when we want to make it a whole-Crew scene but one or more members is short on stress and would overindulge, but that's the domain of "fan of the players"
- Commitment is the funniest fucking overindulgence consequence and also it makes for such good story beats. It has almost but not quite supplanted my favorite OG Blades consequence of "swap out your character and play someone else," but that one fits differently in Songs

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[1] Previous readers may remember this man as Brother Preston. In the intervening time, the GM decided that religious leaders within Dragons Rest take titles based on various gemstones. Brother Preston's title is now Hema, after hematite (and because we also can't stop calling him Brother Preston, "Brother" is now his given name). ^[return]
[2] One of the things that we decided about New Haven is that because of the community's size and small child population, children's things like clothes and toys are communal hand-me-downs, passed from family to family when a child is born and reaches the relevant ages. After Dragonkid left initially, Annalise kept this stuffed animal and the whole town collectively agreed not to ask for it. ^[return]
[3] Good ol' iseguy, Dave Smith. Man he loved football. ^[return]