Faith, Faces, and Fingerprints again this weekend (finally; it's been a month and a half -- and a bit hard to maintain mental and creative momentum in the face of that, but that's a topic for another time).

In this episode, rob_donoghue's PC, Anders, is put to the task of impersonating The Face for a crucial vote. But there might be one or more assassins out for the person he's impersonating -- so his friends may need to watch his back.

We know the Council of Seven (the Face tends to abstain or cast deciding votes) has two seats of the Clergy, two of the Nobles, and two of the Merchants, and we know that the strong astrological theme of the setting means that each seat corresponds to a constellation. Middle of last month I asked the players if they wanted to decide what those constellations were and I suspect everyone was too busy to respond to that. With the game tomorrow, it's time to invent a few details of my own.



That gives us The Crown and the Blood (Noble seats); The Chalice and The Coin (Merchant seats); and The Left and Right Hands (of Nod -- that goes unsaid; the Clergy seats).

In another post I'll review the lingering questions from the session BEFORE last, and what got answered in the last, and what new questions there are.

So this past weekend I got the chance to run more of my Faith, Faces, & Fingerprints game (I also got to hang out and shoot the breeze with ratmmjess, chadu, and rdonoghue, but that's beside the current point).

We had a fun sort of caper thing going on, with a kidnapped guy and a judicious application of the Wilderness of Mirrors method -- my players contributed five obstacles (I gave each player a fate point per obstacle), and took three "fuck with 'em" points for myself at the end to complicate their path. It worked out really well once we got past the play-habits obstacle of "wait! what? i'm coming up with my own obstacles? okay, i'm going to make them really easy!" thing. Admittedly, that particular hump was surmounted by a bit of me playing "willfully misinterpretive djinn" with the ideas they came up with (e.g., "green, inexperienced recruit" became "green, inexperienced, VERY EAGER TO PROVE HIMSELF recruit", etc).

But what I really liked seeing was the fights. This is not a fighty set of characters, but they found themselves in a few circumstances where things had to come to blows. I'm running with the -2/-4/-6 consequences thing, and really short stress tracks -- the base is 2 instead of 5 -- so the characters were in big jeopardy of getting hurt pretty bad. As a result, the fights that took place were (deliberately on the players' part) unbalanced whenever possible: two of the opponents dropped were knocked down while drunkenly half-asleep; another was incapacitated by a stink bomb. The one time the group's fighter was outnumbered by two guys who were *almost* as good as her, she used a flash-pot to blind them both (go go gadget!) as a two-target maneuver and then put her all into making sure she dropped them both the first time she hit them, tearing through Fate Points and the like to do it.

I dug this a lot. I wanted a fantasy setting where folks got *scared* when the knives came out, and this build for Fate -- similar in several ways to the Dresden Files -- really delivered on that promise.

Next session -- deep into March -- will involve the impersonation (by a PC!) of a politician amidst an atmosphere of intrigue and assassination. Can't wait.