Character Sheets


Character Sheet
Isabelle Morgenthau
A Fisher

Isa (right) and her boyfriend Arren (left)


Hard Keen Calm Daring Wild
+4 -2 +4 +1 -1
Moves
Creepy: When a comrade sees you perform a ritual, overhears your prayers, or sees signs of your alienness, they lose Trust in you. Once they learn one of your Moves, they are no longer affected, but they gain Creepy as well.
Deep Ones: You can call on your patrons to Help you on a roll. On a 1, you Break after this mission.
Blessing: When you dab fresh blood on a piece of working equipment, roll +Calm. On a 16+, take both. On an 11-15, choose 1.
  • Take +1 Ongoing with this item this Routine. (+1 Handling for a plane)
  • The item cannot break or be lost this Routine. (+1 Armour on 1 Section of the Plane.)
On a miss, you need a bigger sacrifice. Don't disappoint.
Ideomotor Response: Your plane effectively has a programmable autopilot. It does not have to be switched on and off; it "knows" when you are behind the controls.
Soul-Bound: When you paint a rune in blood on an aircraft, you are linked. While in flight, you can take incoming Structure damage as Stress, 1-1. You can take a hit that would strike a Component as Injury, or give incoming Injury to your Engine.
Bond: (Witch move learned from Wulf) When you hold an object of significance and make an emotional connection to it, take 1 Stress. The object becomes a magical Focus, and you learn it's Nature (Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Iron, or Blood).
Contemplation: When you draw a ritual circle and stay within it, roll +Calm. On a 16+, you come out of it about an hour later refreshed; strike 3 Stress or 2 Injury. On an 11-15, it takes the whole night, and you're unreachable in that time.

Mastery
The Bushwack
Ambush Predator: When you strike an enemy who is unaware of your presence, roll with Advantage.
Forced Evade: When you fire to scare an opponent off, spend 1 ammo and roll +Hard. On a hit, instead of dealing damage, choose one: Target dives 1, target climbs 1, target loses speed in a forced turn. On a 16+, roll attack dice on them anyway.
Momentum: When you dive onto a target, add +1 AP.
Scissors Snip: When you disengage, give an ally +3 towards dealing with your target.

Familiar Vices
- Drinking
- Prayer
- Dancing

Vice Progress
- Breaking Stuff: ☑☐☐
- Cannabis: ☑☐☐

Intimacy Move
When you are intimate with another, choose one of you to get a hold. They can spend that hold to give the other a command: if followed, then forward to their next +Stat move, they will always score at least a partial hit, regardless of what the dice say.

If you use this move in the air, there are two holds, and they can be distributed however you agree.

The Company
People
  • Isabelle (Fisher): The PC. She's out to find her way in the world. 1 thaler per Routine.
  • Arren (NPC- Confidant/Observer): Your cute fish boyfriend. Artist and recently trained observer. 1 thaler per Routine.
  • Wulf (Witch): Former bandit leader. Actually half wolf. Hot as hell. Ex-Goth. 1 thaler per Routine.
    • Hard +3, Keen +3, Calm -2, Daring +0, Wild +3 (Avenger)
  • Minna Hammerl (Soldier): Inexperienced but highly trained soldier and passionate duelist. Speaks all formal-like. The most beautiful woman in the world. 1 thaler per Routine.
    • Hard +4, Keen +1, Calm +2, Daring -2 (Professional)
  • Heinrich Engel (Student): Political science student working on his thesis-slash-manifesto.
  • Anny Meldgaard (NPC - Mechanic): A young half-Fischer, half-Himmilvolk woman from Piav, trained by the mechanics there. Looking for adventure and her origins. Blushes red?
Aircraft
  • Isa & Arren's Plane: A Teicher Möwen seaplane. Steel frame, liquid-cooled engine. Deeply possessed. 1 thaler per Routine.
  • Fang Howl: Wulf's helicopter. An experimental pre-war model. Liquid-cooled radial. Three wolf moon. 1 thaler per Routine.
  • Pup: Wulf's Kreuzer Skorpion prototype retrieved from a sealed hanger. Gets a lot out of an underpowered engine.
  • Minna's Kobra: An inline-engine powered, wood framed fighter. All around an excellent machine. 1 thaler per Routine.
  • Heinrich's Reconstruction: A canard plane with a 30mm cannon in the nose. Awkward and unstable but hits like a train. 1 thaller per Routine.
Stress XP
3 7
Cash Expenses
41 10.5
 
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Hm...

@open_sketchbook if we get to know this in advance, I'd like to know whether the Complications roll was "take highest" or "use both" (or something else I guess). Advisability of taking the job partly depends on what difficulties it will entail. Obviously Isa doesn't know yet, but since the roll was public I figured we might be supposed to OOC.
complications are both, not highest. there's competition. remember how the yard workers couldn't shut up?
 
I'm not necessarily averse to a spot of air-piracy, but I reckon we might be able to spin this into a more sustainable revenue stream. We shake them down for protection money make an unsolicited offer of armed escort, for a reasonable fee, then bounce whichever other poor fools show up expecting a turkey shoot. Might be a chance for repeat business. And if the merchants try to screw us, we're in a great position to revert to Plan A, ground them and rob them blind ^_^
 
[X] Fuck that, let's find something else.
[X] Plan FlatlineAskari. Run a protection racket on the zeppelin.
The zeppelin is just so juicy, but escalating into air piracy this early seems... risky.
 
Voter cautiousness on SV can be a bit disappointing sometimes. Like sure, maybe there are in-character moral reasons for not wanting to engage in privateering, although frankly that will be an almost impossible line to maintain in our chosen profession. (Which would actually be interesting, so props to the two and a half people genuinely voting for that reason.) But mostly it seems to be out of timidity, out of not wanting to take risks and bold action, stuff that will attract notice.

Which is like... firstly when you're leading a new mercenary air company if you don't take risks, it's unlikely you'll ever make it unless you're very good or very lucky. It is intensely based on reputation and making big scores, having an air of danger and "she'll take on anything" about one's person, to get better contracts. And on a more meta level, it makes it that much harder to tell stories with drama and high stakes, unless the GM is always the one to introduce it in some way, which can have its own issues.

A daring air heist?!! With another company trying to come and steal the score out from under us? How fukken' cool would that be? It's a heist movie combined with an aces high war drama!

But no, we'll go and find what we imagine to be a "safe" contract against "bad guys" (spoiler alert: these things do not unambiguously exist, with the possible exception of the Goths), so we can add more shinies to our pile of shinies and accrue upgrades and XP, with the highest reward/risk curve which is optimizeable, because this is what good storytelling looks like. Except hilariously, this strategy often isn't even successful or optimal at achieving the highest reward/risk curve- because it misses large payoffs for a repeated exposure to lower risks, achieving the same aggregate risk for a lower total reward. Especially in a system like Flying Circus, which is meant to be very feast-or-famine in terms of bookkeeping, as would be true for running a mercenary outfit of canvas and wood planes.

Ultimately, it's probably a question of temperaments. I can't blame people for wanting different things out of stories, or for wanting to have fun. I still enjoy playing this game with all of you. It's just frustrating occasionally.

Apologies, mild venting over.
 
How big is a crew of an airship?
If we get Minna to learn Ideomotor Response, we can field four boarders with LMG, Forbidden word and some more magic of Wulf.
Instead of a dedicated boarder we could look for a man who can steer the airship, and is going to be willing to sign up with an outfit longterm.

Then we repaint it, get it crewed, uparmor it and get into lucrative field of transporting goods. Like, 90 thalers per run...
 
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I must admit, I have very large reservations about working with Checkmate or anyone associated with them. They have an extremely poor reputation, and they were recently kicked out of Aldershoff and we don't know why. They sound like the type of people who would work with us right up until the job is done, and then through trickery or outright force, attempt to scoop the bounty out from under us. Also consider that we're basically no-names at this point, why should they bother with us when they have the apparent man-power to take our info, shoot us, and then do the job themselves.

To me, they sound more like a bandit gang than a Flying Circus, and I have no desire to get involved with them.
 
How big is a crew of an airship?
If we get Minna to learn Ideomotor Response, we can field four boarders with LMG, Forbidden word and some more magic of Wulf.
Instead of a dedicated boarder we could look for a man who can steer the airship, and is going to be willing to sign up with an outfit longterm.

Then we repaint it, get it crewed, uparmor it and get into lucrative field of transporting goods. Like, 90 thalers per run...
The profit margin on actually flying a cargo airship isn't that high because you need to buy all the things you put in it, carry it across wherever, and then sell it. While the cargo traders are obviously getting stuff cheap (trading with industrial towns, agricultural nexuses... and yeah sometimes the Goth camps..) they aren't getting it for free.

The profit in piracy is in avoiding the stage where you legitimately acquire goods.
 
The profit margin on actually flying a cargo airship isn't that high because you need to buy all the things you put in it, carry it across wherever, and then sell it. While the cargo traders are obviously getting stuff cheap (trading with industrial towns, agricultural nexuses... and yeah sometimes the Goth camps..) they aren't getting it for free.

The profit in piracy is in avoiding the stage where you legitimately acquire goods.

However, there are times when someone else needs cargo moved.
And said cargo needs to be protected.

Not 90 thalers per run, but we probably can get away with ~20.
 
Ugh. We're a flying circus not a bunch of cargo-haulers. I don't want to get bogged down and be the target for air pirates when we could be the air pirates instead.
 
Ugh. We're a flying circus not a bunch of cargo-haulers. I don't want to get bogged down and be the target for air pirates when we could be the air pirates instead.

However, if we have an airship, we would actually be able to haul our own support staff and have reserves of rare stuff on-hand (like specialty bullets) without being tethered to a land base.
Much better than paying premium for underqualified mechanics everywhere and being hamstrung by not having tools for the job.

Also, capability to salvage stuff by ourselves (Upgrade Howl and move stuff up to airship by hanging it off helicopter), as opposed to selling navdata for it to someone else.

Being able to move stuff from point A to point B is just one of the pluses.
 
Airships are not without maintenance cost, though. It's doubtfull whether having an entire heavy cargo airship for just 3 planes is a viable solution.
 
Zeppelins themselves require maintenance, and they are hueg,beyond the capacity of individual experts to fix hull problems by tinkering.. I'm sure this setting has a surprising number of airship hangars, but we may find ourselves the victim of a vicious cycle.
 
I think a small sprint trader or a packet lighter would make more sense as an airship for supporting a fledgling Flying Circus. They're intended to be run by a couple of people and could carry plenty of supplies and a few specialists, who would also fly the ship. We could probably buy a decent used small trade ship for the sale price of a fair-sized cargo zeppelin though, and have plenty left over to spare.
 
5-23: A New Thing Called Planning
"Hell, let's do it." You said. Wulf let out a little cheer, and her enthusiasm infected the table rapidly.

You finished eating, then headed back to the stand to get the rest of the information. The eventual verbal contract was thus: he gave you the place and the time (a town called Weveleind about three hours up north, in two days. He marked on the map where the zeppelin would pass through) and you owed him 5% of the job, minimum 5 thaler. That seemed eminently reasonable.

At Wulf's insistence, you then got out of the rain and headed inside. The ballroom bar was mostly empty, just a few staff picking through the place cleaning up, so you picked a nice big table out and started discussing your options.

Arren opened the meeting. "So, does anyone know how to take down a zeppelin?"

Wulf raised her hand like a little kid in a schoolroom. "I do!"

"While keeping the cargo intact?" Arren clarified.

Wulf's hand sunk slowly back into her lap.

"Actually, I know how to do this." Minna said. "It was featured in its own chapter of Air Operations in the Post-War Era, Volume III." You all turned to this sudden expert.

"Okay, what does the book say?" You asked.

"There are three ways to successfully secure a zeppelin and its cargo. Eins, you form up around the zeppelin and threaten it until the captain follows your orders. Advantages: The zeppelin is taken intact. Disadvantages: You will provide a tempting target for escorts and defensive guns. Zwei, you make an attack on the zeppelin targeting the engines, aiming to disable all of them with light weaponry that will not touch off the gasbags. Advantages: This can be done even in active combat, Disadvantages: The zeppelin will be disabled. Drei, you land a team of soldiers atop the zeppelin with a slow-moving craft, such as another airship, a helicopter, or a specialized aircraft. They either use the external hatches or cut a hole in the canvas to enter, and they secure the ship with small arms. Advantages: The zeppelin is taken intact and can be moved to the location of your choice. Disadvantages: Escorts and guns must be cleared before the attempt is made, and causalities in boarding teams are often very high."

"Also disadvantage, we have to share our loot." Wulf said. "We don't exactly have boarding craft or a bunch of soldiers lying around."

"No, but we do have money." You said.

"Explain." Wulf said suspiciously.

"Money can be exchanged for goods and services. We just hire whoever we need."

"If that's the plan we want to go with." Arren said. "It sounds a little bloody for my taste."

"Dude, this morning you cut your finger on your pencil sharper to bless it." Wulf said.

"Yeah, and my lines are much cleaner now. You know what I mean, Wulf. I like option one."

"What do you think, Minna? Which is best? You asked.

"It is situational, of course. But the warrior in my soul says we should attack boldly and seize victory, and not rely upon some other soldiers to do our fighting." Minna said, emotion behind every syllable.

Urgh, everyone was looking at you again. Stupid leader thing.

[ ] Plan Eins: Intimidation.
[ ] Plan Zwei: Target the Engines.
[ ] Plan Drei: Boarding Action.
[ ] Plan X: Write In

Remember this is just the ideal plan you will be going into the field with. You can always switch to a backup plan if things go wrong, and you don't need to write that in. Obviously if intimidation fails you can start shooting up engines or sending in the clowns. (Subject to availability of clowns.)
Adhoc vote count started by open_sketch on Dec 2, 2018 at 8:08 AM, finished with 1908 posts and 9 votes.

  • [X] Plan Eins: Intimidation.
    [x] Plan Zwei: Target the Engines.
    [X] Plan Drei: Boarding Action.
    -[X] However, book does not accomodate for magic - and we have ways to let our planes land safely without pilots as well as an expert who can both land safely herself and do the same service for others.
 
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