spooky_squirrel

With Neverborn and Resser lures in mind: Kang with Warding Runes and Mei Feng popping up Vent Steam once or twice will ruin their fun. The Counterspell ability on Warding Runes alone makes Kang effectively immune to Lures that aren't coming from things that can spend Soul Stones, and he has an aura that helps with Horror Duels and beating down Undead/Constructs. With Mei Feng popping up Vent Steam and you having appropriate kinds of threats within her protected bubble, you can get some serious denial in against the problem you describe. That all being said, you're in a tight ball in the middle of the table if you're benefiting from all the auras, which means you might not be getting your Strat and Scheme points in. Make sure that if you do decide to take the utter denial route that the scenario supports it. Schemes like Show of Force can be completed with Envy (Well Rehearsed) and Kang (Hard Worker, Warding Runes) in the circle and the rest of the crew postured for the Strategy, but you've still got another scheme to score. I've used Mei Feng and Kang into several Lure crews, and the one time I didn't take Warding Runes on Kang, my opponent happily spent every AP of his turn dragging Kang out of the Steam bubble and into his area to beat him down. It made for a wonderful distraction and allowed me to get more pieces into position, but it wasn't exactly planned. I had been hoping to use his Horror-immunity bubble to enable my crew's assault. Note: it also works well against other control crews, including 10T and Arcanists.

Would buy, not even a resser player or interested in Ressers in general.

On top of @Le gob's remark: the prerequisites for the advanced pursuits aren't as strenuous to meet as something like Prestige Classes in d20 Star Wars. You can actually build a starting character that's most of (if not all) the way there as a Fated player, and as long as the Fatemaster is on board get the rest of the way there within a session or two. The hardest part isn't actually meeting the character sheet prerequisites, but the in-game justification (to be a Showgirl at the Star Theatre you have to be invited and pass an audition, to be a Demolitions Expert, you've got to blow stuff up). With regards to starting with several steps on the Pursuit already completed, @EnternalVoid covered the mechanics of why other systems do that (skip the rats in the basement). I would add to it that the Fated crew loses out on the value of growing in their own direction (with the way experience is awarded and skills advanced). If you're wanting to run something more high powered: they can still start at 0-level (Pursuit), but you can grant them an additional point or two for fine tuning characters after creation. TTB not being a mob-grind or Epic dungeon crawl means that there's no reason to bother with the rats in the basement beyond Session 0: introduction to TTB combat system. You can get your Fated crew lined up to deal with a Miner Strike in the Northlands, Gremlin smuggling 'shine nuisance in the slums, corrupt Guild Guards shaking people down, or even minor Nephilim incursions threatening Contract Towns--from just their creation. That's what the prologue of a session is for (and why with the exception of the first session of a newly created character Pursuit is chosen after the prologue): to set player expectations. Someone who started their Fated career as a Drudge might become Invested if they get brutally mauled during a session and "saved" by the Steamfitters Union, but they also might become a Guard, Merc, or Tinkerer if the campaign is going in a direction that supports that. The way the rank system is set up, you can adjust difficulty on the fly by bumping the Rank and Station of the mobs that your Fated run into. A Minion (5) has some tricks up its sleeve that will make encounters harder, but the same exact stats and skills on a Peon (4) are considerably easier to deal with (not just because of changing the AV, but also by limiting what that Fatemaster character can do outside of tactical actions). This lets you introduce different potential hostiles scaled for the Fated. The corrupt Guild Guards might be out of practice on shooting and fighting because they're so used to using their patrol time to shake people down (in story justification for being easier to fight against), as well as not used to people standing up to them (in story justification for being easier to use non-combat abilities against them). Those Miners in the Northlands might be on a hunger strike or striking because of illness and injury, making them not nearly as resilient and prepared for a full-fledge fight. With these mechanics in play for TTB, you can avoid bog-standard "you all meet in the tavern and are asked to deal with { a rat problem in the basement, goblin raids on the village, etc. }" that dungeon-crawling systems seem to revolve around for starting characters.

Minor observation about @Ampers&nd's (excellent) advice: it's very similar to the process of a short story writing exercise that you might use when refining your ability to write a short story. Use an existing, working framework as a launching point, and flesh it out with the story you want to tell, then prune it. The bestiary trick is definitely helpful if you're looking for something to be the central theme--even if you land on something that is relatively weak (rats in the basement module, anyone?) or overwhelmingly powerful (I don't think this group could handle a Balor) it can be the launch point of a brainstorming session. In either extreme you might look at using them as a why focus instead of a what focus. Why is the [Bestiary threat] landing in the players' laps? For things that are weaker than the Fated crew, the investigation goes in the direction of how those rats ended up in the basement (sabotage, driven by a predator, Plague extending his influence); stronger things end up leaning in the direction Call of Cthulhu would go: you stand no chance against the main bad guy, but there's a lot of flunkies and there's a specific goal said bad guy is aiming for that you can disrupt without ever actually engaging the main bad guy directly.

Depending on what you expect to face and how you expect things to go, the Emissary can be priceless or distracting. I've had games where it died Turn 1/2 without doing more than drawing fire. I've had games where it killed 3 models a turn while buffing Sandeep's summons (Arcane Conflux) against a summoning Dreamer because its cast actions could reach out and touch freshly summoned incorporeal models, with The Negation killing a fresh summon that had not yet activated.

It's a characteristic like living/construct, by the look of things. Station characteristic is defined as peon/minion/enforcer/henchman/master (unless I missed fine print about totems).

It completely disables many synergies. For instance, abilities that require being an Academic or M&SU to use or benefit from no longer apply. Things that are not Construct will not drop scrap markers, and things that are neither Living nor Undead will not drop corpse markers. Anything that says target [characteristic] [effect] no longer applies.

The good news is is that so long as you relent and the Black Joker comes up on the attack and not the damage, you're fine--you still hit because no TN involved.

The flaw with this method that I've run into is forgetting to use Joss' second AP. Turn 1 for me usually features "Joss' job is to generate scrap, he will shoot twice if necessary"--and especially when I was first learning the spider factory (and not using Blade and Claw) I'd forget to move him up afterwards. Once you get some practice in (playing in general) this flaw is easy to avoid.

Exactly this. If someone's counting on their Hard to Wound, positives closing up differential, Impossible to Wound, or auras/effects that give out negatives to keep them safe, these guys with their drunken boxing keep everyone honest. This is why it is I don't typically use Moon Shinobi in learning games. Related to why you hire people: I hire Sparks quite often in Mei Feng's Foundry crew. In dozens of games I've had Sparks' damage track come up once. He's not being hired to hit things, he's being hired for his Hostile Work Environment bubble, his ability to make Constructs Fast, and his ability to make other models into Constructs. With how many other beaters Gremlins have, judging a model on its damage track does a couple of things: 1) sets up utility models for failure, and 2) demonstrates a lack of imagination/sideways thinking. Gremlins have a lot of models that can put out some serious damage (some at some risk when they get the Dumb Luck trigger, others by virtue of whichever master they're hired under), so if your metric for value is on damage output, many models aren't going to measure up. There are people who look at models like Fingers and think that these models are fundamentally useless, which might be the case for them and their playstyle, but is definitely not the case in general. Fingers can win games by being on the board and just going defensive. Sparks interferes with opposing crews' abilities that require targeting (including condition removal, skill borrowing, friendly pushes, prompts/obeys, etc.) while providing a way to make things interesting on your side of the board with Constructs and manipulation thereof. So with that in mind: if your hiring criteria is limited to raw damage output viewed in a near vacuum, then there will be a lot of models that look/feel useless to you. Which comes around to the Closing Time box and crew. There's no A/S tier beater in the base crew. The Moon Shinobi can go in as beaters, but you're going to want to support them with other things that this crew's box has and your control hand. Swill puts them on negatives, which they treat as positives. Cheating to a tie while swilled puts them on triple positives to damage anything that they hit. If your opponent is using I2W or H2W, you don't need the tie for the triple positive damage flip, and they'll have no way to put you on actual negatives (11+ differential gives single positive, swill cancels that positive, I2W/H2W leaves them at a single negative). This means that they have to make sure you miss to not get hurt by lucky swings. This is a different kind of problem than other attack models present, where the defender might not have the ability to cheat to win, but they can at least cheat to reduce your ability to spike damage. Alternatively, you use swill to put your target on negatives, giving you a better chance of having or cheating to the tie or narrow margin. Which ties into areas in which the Moon Shinobi might need improvement. Similar to my earlier comment about their using poison +x to improve their Df, maybe being poisoned might improve their Ml (again, limited) or have other effects (Fermented River Monks come to mind). I would lean away from mithradatism-type healing because of Brewmaster's sharable ability being a healing flip (and being a flip that the Moon Shinobi takes, gets the Drunken love as well) that hands out poison. Before we start talking how to improve on it, we also want to make sure that we're not trying to have a fish climb a tree. Utility models aren't supposed to be beaters. Scheme runners that have tanking/defensive and/or hitting ability get expensive to hire, so cheap runners should not be expected to stand up to a focused attack. The design and testing teams will be working to make sure that any improvements don't accidentally create a problem, but they won't catch every combination that is unintended.

That gets us closer to the realm of workable. What if instead of ticking poison damage, they had some other effect? I don't think we could justify the mithridatism healing effect, given the availability of poison in a Brewmaster crew, but some other non-negative effect on normal poison burn. Maybe make them a little closer to the Fermented River Monks in their reaction to poison. Drop their Df one point and make it so that the poison condition boosts it, on top of not actually ticking for damage? If that route is taken, there would need to be a cap on how much drunkenness helps their defense. I get the desire to elevate an under-utilized model, but we've got to temper it with the desire to not create a new problem where the model is autotake or notably over the curve.

@lame0, couple of things, since you decided to quote me on it: 1. Defending? Eh. Pointing out some things that will come up during design and testing of tweaks for these guys. 2. If you want your honest opinion to be received as such without push back from someone like me, make sure that your argument points aren't hyperbolic. Claiming that a 6 wound model can be removed from the game in a single shot without thinking about it is being hyperbolic. Are there things that can? Yeah. Are they that common and cheap where having them use their AP on this model is a good use of AP? Not unless the scenario calls for it. I understand that you're responding to a "don't forget about this trigger"--but something that is far more common than a single AP removing a 6 wound model is a relatively cheap model that ignores defensive triggers. If the only issue with the trigger was the lack of suit, it's something that could potentially be built into the model as a tweak to make it better fit its stone cost. One of the reasons to not gloss over the trigger is related to how the Moon Shinobi interact with other abilities and effects in the game, which means that if you set up for it they're flipping on positives and have a better chance of getting that defensive trigger. Currently the set up for it is a little odd, arguably not worth it, but that's yet another angle that could be tweaked. Again, it's something that will come up during design and testing of tweaks/changes for these guys. What's not going to come up during design discussion and expected play testing is a high frequency of 6+ damage per AP attacks. After all, there's a lot more to this game than doing damage and killing things. That's my recommendation. Dial back the sky is falling and focus on things that fall in the more likely range.

Holy smokes is Fingers' stock going up in GG18. I think 10T Brewie is going to have a lot of value in this set as well, especially if you're playing along the lines of Swill and Binge, with appropriate models for the effort. I've never had Brewmaster's aura do more than deny an area for a while, but I've had Binge win me games. Swill lets you work with your own positives more effectively, because a AV of 5 on a positive is still getting overbid against a 7 that flips/cheats a 13. Putting your victim on a negative makes things work so much more smoothly for you.

Also: the ability to change what you're targeting is priceless when you're concerned about triggers, conditions, or raw stats. I'd also like to point out that if you're one-shot removing a 6 wound model that has Df 6, you're doing it with a model that has very valuable AP and/or you're burning some valuable cards to do it. If that high quality AP and/or card is not being used to complete the scenario, that's even more of a win for me.

There are two non-master models in her starter box that cannot be used outside of her crew: Kang and her Totem. Rail Workers are really good and require minimal support. Their (0) buff lasts the full turn, so anything that triggers additional attacks from them still gets them (prompt, reactivate, Flesh and Metal), and putting them in a crew with a Bleeding Edge Technology carrier (M&SU Enforcer+) makes them last just a little bit longer, for when you need to keep something tied up. What she brings to the table is massive amounts of mobility (especially with her Wave 5 upgrade that lets her bring a passenger), which is great into scenarios that require mobility. Vent Steam effectively turns off shooting and casting at things around her, which is useful when you're not facing dedicated Ml beaters, and you can use her Rail Walk ability to extend her threat range considerably--if what you're looking to do is attack. I've also used it to get her into hard to reach places of the board to run schemes or complete/deny a strategy point. Her crew for the longest time had problems keeping up with her, but that can be mitigated by selecting quicker models for the crew, or taking advantage of out-of-activation things like Angelica's pushes and the Emissary's Flesh and Metal. With GG18 beta shaping up the way it is, you might seriously want to think about having Mei Feng in your practiced masters list for scenarios that require mobility. With everything at her disposal, she can get to those Symbols of Authority (even in Corner deployment) to tear them down. That same upgrade I hinted at also makes her Foundry hires quicker on their feet, bumping their walk by 1 if they activate within range and LOS of the effect, letting you extend their mobility without needing to hire Angelica to push them.

Aside from the suggestions available in some of the Penny Dreadfuls, there are a few discussion chains here on FMing and tying in Fate Steps is one of the things that every FM will end up needing to tackle. If you're feeling daunted by this, I would suggest two things: Taking a quick read through how other Fatemasters/mistresses have handled or suggest handling Fate Steps and character advancement, and Looking at a Penny Dreadful or two to see how they handle the ones that they suggest fulfillment of. One of the things I appreciate about the way they do it is that the Fate Step business is entirely optional for you as the FM to use (it's not crucial to advancing the story), which makes it possible for you to swap it out with an adapted modular response for a Fate Step that applies to your Fated crew. The adaptation would simply be making sure that maps and references you are using all have the updated information (people, places, and what specifically ties it to the Fate Step).

Outside of strange behaviors like the ones I just mentioned: if you're running Sparks and your opponent didn't bring construct hate (Relic Hammers, Kang, etc.), you can use it to make your non-construct elements stronger. If you've been taking your Mei Feng in the direction of 1-2 constructs with some form of scrap marker generation (e.g. Emissary, Porkchop) and fleshing out the rest of her crew with non-constructs, it lets you do things like make Envy a construct (and thus benefit from everything that could tune up constructs, including Sparks making Envy fast and the toolkit putting Envy on positives--because who doesn't want to have all those shots?). With the Wave 5 release, we've received a Foundry Enforcer who gets bonuses when fighting alongside constructs, in that he gets to attack more often because he's trying to outdo mere machines. I'll double check the wording after work, but I think Mr. Henry could potentially trigger his own bonus attacks if he happens to have been turned into a construct by Sparks.

One of the things I'll do with Sparks in Arcanists is make Coryphee Duet Fast. Outside of that, being able to make select enemies Construct and then ignore their Armor through Hard Worker is amusing--especially on Mei Feng, who has no competing (0) actions and plenty of reasons to want to be on positives.

And unless I'm mistaken, the Fistload ability still kicks in, which really helps with getting that better damage.

That's what I was thinking. But then I also thought about it some more and realized that with the professional levels available in this time period, a professional investigator was literally anyone paid to look into something. Which means all the Fated are investigators if they're being paid to check something out. Specialization (i.e. Sherlock-type investigators, career detectives) still wasn't a requirement, though it certainly would help if the "investigator" in question had a consistent record of finding the truth of matters, provided the people hiring investigators want the truth as opposed to a truth that would forward their agenda. I would not be surprised if Mason's being cagey in his inline responses because there is something along those lines either on its way to production or currently in test. All of the people who know for certain are most likely under an NDA so won't be able to comment--but if its still in development and test, then there's still time to help shape it by planting ideas.

Piggybacking on @Mason's comments: Lawyer: let's see.. good with paperwork, knows procedural stuff, lives and dies by contacts and ability to argue. high society: Wastrels typically come from there, and backgrounds are wide open. Are you thinking like the "Noble" class in Star Wars d20? Features of that class: knows diplomatic stuff, lives and dies by contacts and ability to present themselves. Bureaucrat: Good with paperwork, knows procedural stuff, basically a lawyer that doesn't argue? These have a lot of common ground and can be answered with a single Pursuit that focuses on contacts and procedural knowledge, with Talent branching that gives Lawyers non-magical arguing (or access to Procedural Magic similar to Tinkerers' access to Animate Construct), and the other branch of Talent selection allowing for things like easier access to supplies and personnel (requisitioning) and tracking of others' supply requests (useful for tracking illicit activities, but may be tricky to shape into something within the game without the FM planning for it). If you're a high society bureaucrat, you're like a noble, if not actually one. Low society bureaucrats are the ones who handle the leg work, the paperwork, and in some cases act as a sounding board for their betters. Middle society would give you assessors, customs agents, law enforcement, supply yards, etc. Basically someone that would work for (or against) Overseers in support of [Faction] operations.

On top of @Le gob's recommendation (solid place to start, as it gives you an idea of what sorts of things raise suspicions), if you're not trying to avoid notice altogether, it depends on how you are carrying yourself and where you're at. The question to answer is what is expected in the area the characters are in?

Following up: they're from Spain, and instead of tassels, their brim is covered in lit candles.

The book was made available during GenCon, but if you're patient they might show up in the Monday Previews section some time, otherwise if you're looking for look-and-feel alone think of the Mexican dia de los muertos costumes with skull face paint, wide-brimmed hat with tassels, bright colors, etc.. When I get home I'll double-check their background fluff to make sure I have their country/region of origin correct in my Iberian assertion above.

Zoraida: earth born human that impressed Lilith enough to where Lilith actually respects her. A swamp-themed Baba Yaga. The Guild's England office is probably closed indefinitely. When the whole Burning Man thing happened, the King's Empire decided to start taking matters into their own hands. Earthside Guild influence is starting to wane. The breach itself they'll have that kind of information at (Western U.S. if I recall correctly). It will be a closely and jealously guarded secret, however. Earthside history has lots of little breaches opening up around the world, some more stable than others. That's how Zoraida ended up in Malifaux, and that's how Abyssinia got ahold of Soulstones before they were cool. With the Tyrant's flight from the Grave Spirit and Titania, there's also a number of other interesting thin spots between Earth and Malifaux that could be exploited. Here's where you, as Fatemaster, get your mafia/theft hooks even if you've got a demented lore monkey in your group: Controlled portal creation device (Darlin approach to unravelling the Cult of the Burning Man members' abilities) per Mason's reference. Added bonus: it has a precedent in the Penny Dreadful adventure. A tome that contains predictions on when and where portals will open up, as well as for how long and estimated size. So far the tome has been accurate enough to aid events. A fixed location in Italy that has historically been a site of worship and prayer, regardless of faith/tradition involved. It turns out that there's a specific ritual that can activate a portal, but at considerable enough cost where it's only done in emergencies, and various traditions have some variant of that ritual built int their practices. Would the Vatican get involved? Check out Wave 5 Guild offerings. There's some undead hunters out the Iberian Peninsula in the Guild ranks (Domador de Cadaveres).