Spoilers for Knives at Night season 3
My crew recently captured a long term enemy we ended a score with the villain being taken alive and some other stuff exploding. The problem I have is that I don’t really want the villain to die during downtime, because mechanically if they are like “we kill her,” then fiction wise I’m not sure how to justify being like “but wait hold on!”
I remember the movie Lucky Number Slevin where a bunch of groups of assassins are all coming for the same criminal captive and I could see that being a fun score, but not sure mechanically what the “plan and detail” would be.
I’m going to let the players come up with ideas for leveraging this high value captive but one of the crew is traumatized-obsessed specifically with killing the baddie, so if the answer is “murder them”… what would do? Does moving a buncha faction rep around seem weighty enough?
Open to any ideas! I just think it’s a fun situation to wind up in.
Everyone has friends or at least someone paid enough to come looking for them. You could do this as free play or as an interruption for a score while the crew is trying to figure out how they can kill the npc without attracting the death seeker crows and or Spirit wardens. Arcane scor maybe?
Oh my, I honestly forgot about the Deathseeker Crows.
That’s brilliant.
I think especially with the faction they are friendly with… the idea that a magic crow will fly to their base and a huge bell will go off that would kick off some really cool stuff.
If the baddie dies, you can also consider the option of turning him into a ghost.
That way they get to kill him but he comes back later, as a good nemesis should.
For a major antagonist especially one a pc has history with the murder should at least take place in free play making it appropriately significant. Having it in downtime would feel anticlimactic to me.
If you want to have that kind of Lucky Number Slevin type of encounter one of the gang’s cohorts.or contacts bursts in to inform them that a faction or two are turning over the gang’s territory looking for their friend, maybe they’re heading straight there because a whisper bound one spirit of a pair of lovers into the antagonist’s cufflinks and has the other in a lantern to use their connection to track them, or someone the crew screwed over in the past leaked the info in revenge. Now the gang has to make decisions do they finish the kill or use the antagonist as a bargaining tool, it also opens up scores, an offensive or defensive assault, transporting the antagonist elsewhere, disrupting the tracking method etc.
These are fun ideas! I definitely think that the beginning of free play is going to be a lot of “this faction is coming for the baddie because xyz” x 3 or so. It’s also a great opportunity to introduce a brand new faction to our game given that baddy is an Iruvian dignitary. I think even if the gang decides that killing her at home is the play they are far from done with the trouble that Big Bad is responsible for.
Her only relative was exploded into shreds that turned into geese that instantly died of old age, so I’m not sure what kind of connections to exploit there.
Dovetailing your advice, I’m toying with the idea of doing “Plan and Detail” as a flashback almost. After the person bursts in saying “oh heck the heckin’ jerk gang is a comin’” there’s still an opportunity to tell the crew like “you planned for this, what was the plan and the detail” and jump to whatever cool part of the plan they had for the engagement roll.
This is good stuff I am a lot more excited to see what happens.
Ah I assumed the obsession with killing them was linked to a connection they had.
Though if you want to create a connection then you could have the baddy die in the exact same supernatural manner in the middle of a possible interrogation after dropping some useful information for other plot threads or already introduced factions, maybe screaming out a clue to the identity of those responsible for the murder as they die. It would then provide at least two avenues of investigation as they track down info on the clue and further investigate the baddy’s background all of which leads to related scores. It can also let you and the player shift their obsession from this baddy’s death to finding those responsible for the murder. The baddy doesn’t even need to be directly involved with them they could have come across the clue independently and been unwittingly marked, as it feels like a spiteful thing a losing enemy would do, pointing those who beat them in the direction of someone powerful enough to destroy them.
It really depends on how your group would feel about the options and whether you want this enemy’s defeat to close one branch of the crew’s story or act as a springing off point for future arcs.
This is helpful and awesome. The duck thing was not spontaneous (it’s just how I described the effects of a person being awash in the fallout of an exploded tank of unrefined leviathan blood) but I am cry-laughing at the idea.
That said, if the baddy dies of poison in custody… who was the poisoner? did she poison herself? when does the poison kill her and when would the ghost bells go off at the least convenient time…
Maybe