The Marble District, Session 1: A Shit Plan
Play Report
To the rich, Sigil is the city of doors, crown jewel of a multiplanar empire. They drink and feast and fritter away their time and money carelessly. Townhouses line pristine streets in The Lady’s Ward, center of high society. But Sigil is a cage. The Cage. At the bottom of society, in the colonies and the slums, the hard-up fight over scraps. Our campaign begins in a tenement, 17 Shatterbone Street, in the city’s most notorious slum.
It is in this tenement that three new immigrants to Sigil make their kip: Ratspit, Homunculus Thief; Silvius Ambros, Tiefling Druid; and Thuddeus “Thud” Strongsteel, Dwarf Alloy Wizard.
The session began as I distributed pamphlets and helped the players create their characters. They each had to be new to Sigil and 15gp in debt. The players decided they came from Bytopia, a bucolic and pastoral plane. They all owed the same person: the Alloy Wizard Maru Beefbroth. Ratspit owes the cost of their creation, Thud the price of his training, and Silvius the cost of items broken when he trespassed on Beefbroth’s land.
Once characters had been made, play began. The session’s events started strong with Thud descending into the basement of the tenement, a dive bar, to get the ale he needs to live from barkeep and upstairs neighbor Abd al-Rashid Ismail.1 This immediately turned into Thud threatening to rat on Ismail for not having a liquor license unless he was given better booze than the watery beer-dregs he was served. Abd ar-Rashid calmly reached under the bartop and, seeing a flash of metal barrel, Thud withdrew.
After that bit of failed extortion, the party convened to discuss ways to get out of debt. While Thud promised that as soon as he learned to create gold their troubles would be over, Ratspit had a more practical idea. “So I read about ‘stealing’...”
Silvius was in immediately, but Thud had concerns, sitting on the dirty floor of the single room they all shared. For one thing, it was unclear what they’d steal. Ratspit suggested targeting the garbage men — “they take stuff from us, so we could take stuff from them and that’d be fair” — but just then their upstairs neighbor Kinetoscope Thaum descended the creaky central stairs.
Yawning and wiping glitter from her prismatic eyes, the homunculus printmaker asked what the group was talking about. “If you’re discussing—”
Thud cut her off. “Steel! Like, the metal.”
“I see,” Kinetoscope said, sticking her hands in the pockets of her thirdhand jacket. “If you had been discussing stealing, I had a target in mind.”
The party, all thoughts of concealment gone, confessed. Kinetoscope told them that the Harmonium2 would be transporting a load of revolutionary texts to the Old Prison for incineration in four days. She would pay 5sp for every book liberated and brought to her instead. After some deliberation, the party agreed. As Kinetoscope left for work, they immediately began to scheme. The plan they made was this:
- Thud would use Heat Metal to break the axle of the cart carrying the books.
- Posing as a concerned civilian, Thud would appear to help fix the axle and distract the charioteers.
- Ratspit would sneak inside the cart.
- Silvius and Ratspit would trade the books for an equal weight of feces.
- The crew would bring the books to Thaum and extort her for more money.
With a plan decided on, the party split up. Silvius said he would spend the next few days collecting poo. Since I figured that wouldn’t be particularly difficult, especially given that he was spending three days doing it, I didn’t ask for a roll or spend much play time on choices involved.
Thud, meanwhile, had multiple things he wanted to do. First he pried up a plank from the tenement’s rotting stairs. He resonated he’d need a weapon. Then he went to scout out the Harmonium’s route. Immediately, the plan had problems. The main thing was that there was no wagon. Instead the books would be carried, like most cargos in Sigil, on a palanquin by a pair of ogres. With no axles to break, a new distraction was needed.
Ratspit suggested that no one likes to step in shit, and that if the ogres stepped in a bag of the stuff they’d probably stop for a bit. Thud found a small alley off a quieter part of the route along Dossy Street. With only doctors’ offices and a perfume shop it didn’t attract many visitors. It would be the perfect spot for an ambush. He also put nails enchanted with Metal Chime in the poo. This would stab and deafen the ogres. Thud could then appear disguised as a doctor and distract the ogres while Ratspit and Silvius grabbed the books.
And so, with the plan in place, we ended the session.
Reflection
This was an excellent first session. The players have great chemistry and got the spirit of the game immediately. There were a handful of times when I had to make a roll or come up with a detail and the group RPed right through it. I may have to learn to shut up more, but I’m excited to have such participatory players.
In terms of gameplay, not a single check was made all session. I rolled a few times on tables and such but PC actions were easy to resolve by fiat. I predict next session will have more rolls, but I doubt there’ll be many.
My play aids definitely helped out. The random buildings table from Magical Industrial Revolution and a map of Sigil I’d printed supplemented the prep I’d done nicely, allowing me to create a skeleton key of the ambush location on-the-fly.
I’ve made sure to be very clear with the players that I don’t pull punches in my rulings. They’ve all expressed excitement about this, which is heartening. The chaos which is certain to come next session will be more fun knowing everyone’s on board with the consequences.