Play Report 15.2: Parzival Must Die

A situation that arose over multiple previous sessions is the intrusion of Parzival upon the party as a representative of an interest at complete odds with their own. As detailed in Play Report 15, Akela has conspired with Coordinator Amaya to get rid of this interloper. Amaya is now left with the task of acquiring and paying out the 3000 coins to Parzival, and of assigning someone to kill Parzival and take the money back in a way that leaves the Thicket Collaboration seemingly innocent.

First the money. The Guillermo Del Toro movie The Devil’s Backbone (my favorite GDT work, if you have never watched it you should consider doing so!) looms large in my mind here — there’s something that gets to me about the revolutionaries having successfully seized a fortune that they can never safely spend and are haunted by the way it tantalizes without ever being useful. I like the idea that Amaya has something that is necessarily a danger to sell but would have an immediate buyer. I’m cracking open the TNU magic items, the Thawing Kingdom treasure list, and &Treasure to see if anything jumps out at me as something an unscrupulous collector would be trying to wheedle out of the anarchists. I settle on a helmet from The Thawing Kingdom that lets one see fights that took place in the last three days.

In an unassuming house near the current edge of the populated parts of the Thickets, a man with a lifeless smile pours himself some tea. He represents the interests of a wealthy independent collector from Catage, someone who can thrive in the new regime but sees the Merchant-Industrialist habit of excising royalist and anarchist memorabilia alike to be an intrusion on the need to preserve historically interesting artifacts. A convenient moral excuse for trophy taking. A knock comes on this mans door, and when he answers it, Coordinator Amaya is there with a heavy box and a look of grim commitment. He invites her inside. When she leaves, the bag is heavy for different reasons.

Next, the murder. Amaya needs someone willing to sever ties with the ideal society they are trying to build in order to save it. I think this also has to be voluntary on at least a surface level, even if there are social forces that color exactly how truly voluntary it is. The Thicket Collaboration is hardly a successful utopian project yet and who is to say if it ever will be, but it does have a culture of committed anarchism, so Amaya cannot just pull rank that she does not actually have without herself being resented in the settlement. Someone willing to do this sort of thing must already exist, a person with a commitment to the cause colored by some sort of desperation or fatalism. I decide that I will use the TNU retainer generating rules and interpret the results through that lense.

I roll 1d6 on the potential retainer table, with a +1 for seeking the desperate. A 3 gets me a foreigner, someone from outside the thickets – promising for Amaya’s need for plausible deniability. I roll again for a subcategory, and get a refugee. An idea crystallizes for me here, and I start to picture a dissident from Riccamino who had to flee from Occult-Futurist arrest. Matilde (she/her), a piratical Riccaminoan who has been laying low here, is delivered a message by Amaya and unpacks the gun she hid under the floorboards of her home. She had been an informant for the anarchists for a long time, but the Occult-Futurists ended up on her case for plain old theft, and she has lived here under an assumed identity. She has been restless and feels guilty at hiding, so she relishes this opportunity to once again contribute to the effort.

Last I have to figure out how and if the murder actually works. Parzival and Miss Marlowe leave at the end of the week with the coins for the salvagers guild, and Matilde begins trailing them.

Parzival and Miss Marlowe have the advantages of there being two of them. Parzival is often underestimated due to his teenaged appearance but has near a centuries worth of fighting under his belt, and has an understanding of magic. Miss Marlowe is a capable combatant, an expert in bluffing and has a good business sense. She has the good sense to be cautious about how favorably the deal seemed to go down — she might have pulled this very trick, given the need to do so.

Matilde has the element of surprise and a gun that she knows how to use very well.

I am now going to use some of the TNU encounter mechanisms to adjudicate how the ambush goes. I take the distance rules and make an interpretive maneuver to make them appropriate for outdoor areas — I roll a 10, which is in the upper end of how far two groups might notice each other from, and I roll for surprise from Parzival and Miss Marlowe’s perspective, resulting in both parties getting a clear look at each other simultaneously. Matilde has an immediate advantage of having a ranged weapon, but she does have to deal with both of her opponents knowing where she is and the need to reload her rifle.

The situation that makes sense to me is as follows:
Matilde shoots Parzival, the one who has the money.
Miss Marlowe, recognizing that she is at a disadvantage in an open fight here, grabs the money and uses the time Matilde spends reloading to book it into the woods.
Matilde quickly steals what is obviously useful from Parzival (most notably his hammer and his magic ring Ommon that lead to his whole deal) and persues Miss Marlowe into the woods.
At some point, Miss Marlowe will find a defensible hiding place, where she will lay low while Matilde searches for her. I decide that this will be hex 0507, in which the dense forest makes it easy to both break line of sight but also be a little bit lost and cornered at all times. This situation will be updated as time goes on, but I like this as a new status quo to maintain until the time comes that it makes sense to break it.

Parzival’s body is almost certainly going to be found in the road, and if word of it being found and Miss Marlowe being absent gets to the other salvagers, the idea of foul play on her part will almost definitely come up. I don’t have a specific plan in mind for this yet, so I will just let it percolate in my other schemes and ideas for now.