From These Beclouded Skies

So this was back when a guy I knew asked me if I wanted in on a game. He was putting together a group for 1st ed. Fleur de Lys. For the unfamiliar, Games To Die For did a full write-up of The Laughing Rogue, a good introductory module, here. For this story, what you need to know is that FDL 1 isn’t one of those Hollywood RPGs where the PCs are towering bags of hit points striding across battlefields to do grand heroics. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to play an RPG as Nameless Guard Number 15? FDL is that game. Get into a fight, and you might die. Get into a fight when you aren’t prepared, and you will die.

Needless to say, I was extremely down to join.

We get together over a weekend and roll some Musketeers. The GM was running Against The Tyrant, a classic module where your Musketeers become rogue agents resisting a cruel despot, and we were all super excited. Party comp is a Treasoner, a Blaggart and a Vavasour, so I decide to make a Blazon for frontline survivability.

Meet Sir Antoine Viche d’Armilly, honest man among schemers. I’ve always argued that you should make your character have one significant difference to the rest of the group to make them stand out; here Sir Antoine is half a hero – in his mind, at least. Sort of a Don Quixote.

Anyways, for the first leg of the module, our Musketeers are up against Count Accolon, the Adder. This guy is serious bad news. He’s got spies in the taverns. He’s got prisoners hung up in gibbets. He’s got a small army: a brutal corps the locals call the Red Guard. He got his name from poisoning his own brother. As a punishment for thievery, the Adder likes to cut off the thief’s ear – and this is FDL 1, everyone is a thief of some kind (except Sir Antoine).

The hook: the Blaggart’s landlord has a beautiful daughter. Unlucky him. Why is that? Because the Adder took a fancy to the lass and sent the Red Guard to come… collect… her and carry her away to his castle to be his mistress. The Blaggart’s landlord is at his wits’ end about this, and in the absence of any real heroes, well, at least we had swords and knew halfways how to use them. We put our heads together and the Vavasour suggests a plan. Rather than fight our way into the castle, we could creep into the siege tunnels and slip past the Red Guard without a fight. All we need is a boat.

The Treasoner has a boat.

So phase one of the plan goes pretty well. We get into the castle, and after a few close calls, we find the hostage and start trying to make good on our escape. The problem: we had snuck into the siege tunnels in the Treasoner’s scull. That thing was a boat designed for one person, and we already had a hard time convincing the GM to let it carry four of us on the way in. As we try to get the hostage out, the GM puts his foot down.

“You could only fit four people in the scull coming in. If you want to bring the hostage out, someone is going to have to stay behind.”

We all look around the table at each other. The Vavasour makes a half-hearted comment about leaving the daughter behind, but none of us wanted to get out of there without the hostage. Like it or not, someone’s going to have to play hero.

Meet Sir Antoine Viche d’Armilly.

The rest of the party slips away with the hostage, and Sir Antoine gets captured by the Red Guard and dragged before the Adder in chains. The Adder starts monologuing, and as he winds up he finishes with: ‘You have stolen something of mine, Musketeer. And do you know the punishment for thievery in this province?’

Oh yeah. The ears. Oops.

The Adder pulls out a knife, and I start idly planning out my next character. As he drags in Sir Antoine by the hair and starts to cut, I say – last ditch attempt – “I use Brace.”

Brace is a Blazon ability. It lets you resist a physical complication of magnitude 2 or less. Page 39, “a weapon being used to cause physical complications creates complications of a magnitude equal to its size category.”

A knife is size 1.

The knife bounces off. He can’t cut through the ear. The Adder hacks and saws and swears but as long as I keep using Brace, nothing keeps happening. He could have cut Sir Antoine’s head off with a halberd easily, but cutting his ear off with a knife was like taking on leather with a pair of safety scissors.

The group is losing their minds at this point, and in game the Red Guard that dragged Sir Antoine into the Adder’s audience chamber are starting to look sidelong at each other as well. After about ten rounds of this I finally make my Slip Bonds check and get my hands free. I’d been planning to leg it out of the window, but… you only get an opportunity like this once. I knock the knife out of the Adder’s hand, face down the Red Guard, and say, “Any of you gentlemen think you’ll do better?”

So that’s the story of the Titanium Ear. Always read your PCs’ abilities, GMs. Forkholster, out.

4 Comments

Lone Wulf commented:

LMAO this guy uses magnitude

Just trust your judgment dude, you can eyeball that shit

I know it sounds daunting for a new gm but its like learning to hit a fastball, you get a feel for it on the instinctive level

I’ve run hundreds of games of FDL and never needed to use mag

When a player comes up to you and says you just ran the best session they ever played and you didn’t touch the mag rules once, ditch them

Lor commented:

No but how do I stop this happening in my game??? I’ve got a really cool idea for a prison break adventure and it won’t work if the blazon can just no-sell all my complications. Do I have to ban brace at my table?

Jon C Williams commented:

Let them keep using Brace, but start slamming them with increasing amounts of Mind damage every time. Your Musketeer might survive, but good luck enjoying it when they’re eating strawberry yoghurt in a padded room. Torture’s no joke.

Rockstar commented: