Meet the PCs:
Hofner the Savvyhead for hire in High City, who’s got big ideas and sees barter as a means to that end, and her crew, Summertime, Ballpein, and Latte (her identical twin sister);
Kali the Hardholder of High City, who wants to get everything neatly under her jackboot for order and power’s sake;
Paypal the
Swapper who deals mainly in medical supplies, raw materials, and low-tech gadgets and doesn’t always swap fair, and his crew, Diamond the face, Dirt and Stark the muscle, and Cellphone his long-time friend and assistant.
High City:
Welcome to Denver, or what’s left of it. High City’s the main action in the area—it’s where everyone comes to market. There’s other holds and camps scattered through the area. Kali’s thugs keep a tight perimeter around the city, and boy are they ever serious about it. They’re a large gang of savage fucking jackals—but they’re very well disciplined. Outside High City, it’s mountains, cliffs, and swamp; to the east, it’s always raining. People don’t really go east.
The First Session:
Everybody knocks their start of session rolls out of the park. Kali wakes up to her general, Shiva, dragging in some dumb kid who tried to cross the perimeter into High City. He’s yelling about his family out in Grey’s End being sick, but Kali doesn’t really give a shit, tells him he can stay in High City and work until he earns enough to hire a doctor.
Paypal is setting up shop in the morning when Forty, another of Kali’s gang, approaches him for a hookup. She’d done some spying on Kali for him (strictly business don’tcha know) and now she wants some long-range radios, so Paypal goes to hit up Hofner. They haggled for a minute; Hofner gets the upper hand and it comes out that Paypal once robbed Ballpein, one of Hofner’s crew, of some valuable electronic shit, and Ballpein is pissed at him. Then Paypal snake-eyes a manipulation roll, and Ballpein storms out, and he has to settle for some really shitty radios.
Meanwhile, Kali is checking up on her people, and we meet Matilda and the Doc. Matilda’s a creepy tall woman who smiles a lot and has brainpowers (Kali keeps her around as another weapon in her arsenal against dissent); the Doc is a doctor. Kali hunts the market for needed medicines as Matilda trails along, and then heads down to Hofner’s to see about getting the Doc’s iron lung machine fixed, as Paypal heads back to the market.
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Next scene, Kali shows up at Hofner’s with Matilda trailing after her and gives Hof some scratch to come take a look at the iron lung. Matilda is very very very interested in Hofner’s special radio (Hofner has the move where a component of her workspace can do augury). Then Kali and Matilda head back up to the market, and on the way, Matilda tries to convince Kali that Shiva is a danger to her rule, but Kali deflects this onto Fearless and asks Matilda to get the dirt on both him and the kid who came into town. They end up in Doc’s office again, where they learn that the kid is sick with something, maybe serious, maybe contagious.
When Kali leaves, Hofner slaps together the radios real quick with the help of Ballpein, who’s just come back smelling a little like oil and says it’s because of a boy who works on machines at Edgee’s factory in the mountains who came down on a caravan today but only for a little while. Then she heads up to Doc’s to fix the iron lung and gets there for the tail end of the conversation about the sick kid.
Meanwhile, Paypal gets back to his booth to find that it is on fire. This makes Paypal very upset. There’s no serious damage, but nobody saw who did it—just that somebody threw a firebomb. Paypal gets up in arms and drags Stark over to the Station, which is the gang barracks. There, we meet Fearless, who is dumb as a post and really wants to sleep with Forty. Paypal gets Fearless to let him into the Station to talk to Forty by promising to hook him up with some flowers to give to Forty, but Stark has to wait outside. So Paypal goes and bitches to Forty that somebody threw a firebomb at his stall, and Forty is less than impressed that Paypal has caused enough trouble to get somebody to throw a bomb at him. She tries to intimidate him a little but he mouths off, so she whacks him in the face and tells Fearless to fuck him up proper. Paypal just barely keeps his teeth in his mouth by promising to hook Fearless up with a really impressive gift that will
totally get him into Forty’s pants. So now he’s got to get those radios for Forty and something real special for Fearless, and neither will hesitate to fuck him up if he doesn’t! Delicious.
Thoughts:
I totally did not push anybody to roll except once at the very end, and the result was we had maybe four rolls all session. The players seemed to be fine with that as a world-building exercise, but I’m definitely going to try to get some dynamics going next session!