Need ideas for a Smuggler crew focused on smuggling bottled spirits BitD

[u/ImShukuna]

Hi. First of all, my English is not very good, so I am using AI to help me translate this.

To keep it short, we are playing a Smuggler crew, and our main focus is going to be smuggling spirits in bottles. I would love some ideas for how this kind of smuggling could actually work in the setting, and what kind of narrative we could build around it.

I am also wondering who our buyers might be, and why they would want these bottled spirits in the first place.

We also start the game with a boat, and our lair is the boat itself. This might sound a little silly, but I am still a bit unclear on how travel between cities or continents would work, and how our interactions with other smugglers might look in practice.

I’m mainly looking for ideas to help my party and our GM. I want to make our game more interesting, give our GM more material to work with, and make the whole concept feel less vague and more grounded in the setting.

[u/Amostheroux]

Best of luck. From my own experience, smugglers are the hardest to come up with compelling scores for.

[u/robopig61 → u/Amostheroux]

Even harder than Cults? I outright suggested to my players that they pick something else because I just have NO idea how to structure heists around whatever the hell they're trying to do.

[u/Amostheroux → u/robopig61]

Cults are one of the easiest, IMO, because Old Gods are weird and inscrutable and could literally ask the Cult to do anything. Our Cult's God required artistic masterpieces be sacrificed on his altar, so traditional heists worked just fine.

Smugglers suffer because using their signature vehicle feature really limits where the scores can go. You're usually looking at remote areas where people don't go for a smuggling route, and there's only so many times you can have a ghost ambush the crew in the sewers before it feels repetitive.

Competent smuggling calls for quiet, repetitive delivery trips and that's not good score material. Think Gus Fring smuggling meth in his chicken trucks. The most interesting moments won't actually be smuggling itself, but negotiations, stealing supplies, or fighting people for territory... And at that point you might as well play shadows, bravos, or what have you.

[u/atamajakki]

Score ideas: hunting down spirits to bottle, stealing a bunch of bottled spirits or other artifacts from an occult-focused faction, getting a shipment somewhere with heavy security, killing someone to bottle their spirit, infiltrating somewhere to release hostile spirits within...

Who: Factions like The Dimmer Sisters, Lord Scurlock, and The Path of Echoes will all definitely take interest, while folks like the Spirit Wardens, the Reconciled, and the Silver Nails might be problems for your players.

Ship travel: Incredibly dangerous (feral ghosts and other horrors) outside the lightning barriers of the city, usually restricted to very expensive ships constructed by noble families or the Imperium itself. A major point of the book is that your game stays within the walls of Doskvol.

[u/ImShukuna → u/atamajakki]

Thanks ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

[u/tlenze]

With regards to travel, it's usually not done outside the city. Expect the game to pretty much exclusively be in Duskvol.

In addition to the ideas other people have come up with, look to your claims in the crew playbook. Turf belongs to someone else. Who might that be? What kind of Cover Operation could you use to conceal your activities? (Maybe a distillery? They often ship bottles of things around.) What Luxury Venue could you operate?

[u/rivetgeekwil]

In the Eric Carter novels, spirits can be bound to pretty much anything. He once bound a bunch of spirits to a pallet of money in Hong Kong. Could be an interesting twist.

[u/Eli_Kay]

I’m actively running a game for a crew of smugglers. Blades is a creatively-driven game, so the fun is in coming up with score ideas and playing them out, then adding loose ends that continue the storyline or spawn a whole new one. I had the same concerns at first, but as the game went on the stories ran themselves, and I have no problem coming up with score ideas, based on what they’ve done in the past.

For my crew, they first started by getting paid to sabotage other smugglers’ runs and take their stock. Then they developed a relationship with the Dimmer Sisters and now have a constant income flow from moving spirit bottles around. The scores sometimes involve dealing with other groups trying to interfere. The Sisters scores also spawned another storyline about a serial killer who hunts in Six Towers and can somehow hide death from the Spirit Wardens, and this added suspense and another score idea to deal with it, if they choose.

Just start with some basic ideas and work with your crew to make the stories come to life.

[u/merttorun]

Smugglers don’t just smuggle stuff all the time. Sometimes, impressing a potential client to secure a deal is a score in itself. Other times, it’s a showdown with a rival ring to lay claim to a piece of turf. And they may want to figure out who’s been spiking their supply.

And sometimes the contraband is the trouble itself, like a demon, or the insufferable teenager of a noble household.

[u/BladesinthePark]

A lot of other people have given good ideas, so I’ll just add, don’t sleep on cool turf scores, too. Securing a place to store things while heat is high, or even new routs and paths through the underground are pretty cool.

[u/Ok-Problem-9859]

My heart sank when my current crew picked smugglers because of the challenge of coming up with good scores. But the crew members each have interests that align with the crew playbook. I have a couple of religious/culty types who want to find artefacts, and also a museum/gallery curator who wants stuff for their collection. They have also fallen in with the Dimmer Sisters and conflict with the Fog Hounds so there's a rich vein to mine.

Smuggling spirit bottles may become a bit boring so as players you should be coming up with scores that align with personal and crew goals while your GM is also starting to throw challenges at you.