Roleplaying is Awesome

The Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game I’m playing in is nuts. My character, Albrecht, started off as a lowly thug before slowly progressing into the career of an interrogator and from there into the careers of a physician.

During his life he’s made dodgy deals, been tortured and hideously scarred as a result, caught disfiguring diseases and survived, tortured people, plotted and carried out revenge and more recently got into quite an adventure indeed.

The party was sent to assassinate someone in the Chaos Dwarf empire and on the way we were confronted by a slaving band. Before they could get close enough to see us properly we decided to fake being a slave band, with me playing the role of slaver and putting the rest of the group in chains (bar two, who would be my guards). Anyway, meeting with the slavers, they had a much larger group and so afraid we’d all get captured (assuming no honour amongst slavers) I sold the chained up party members into slavery for a tidy profit and got myself a ride to the city. The plan was to steal them back or buy them back later at the city where it was arguably safer, at least when it came to being grabbed and forced into slavery.

Anyway, what happened next was that it became clear I’d been ripped off selling my friends and I had no chance of buying them back with my meagre sums of cash. So, gambling time!

Through gambling, first in a bar with dice games, and later at the gladatorial arena, I managed to amass 27 million gold pieces! With that seed fund, I started looking into hiring some assassins to do our mission for us, after all this was a city of evil people and I expected assassins and assassinations were common place. Eventually, through setting up various meetups, dead drops and other indirect communications channels, I managed to get a clan of assassins to work for me on retainer. However, as proof I was serious, they wanted me to kill someone – another party member, one of my ‘guards’ that had been sticking his nose into fights that didn’t concern him and had consequently killed some guys from the clan. They’d tried to kill him themselves but so far failed. So, I found someone that looked similar, had him killed and roughed up enough so it’d be hard to say the differences weren’t from injuries and sent his head to the assassins. Not pleasant, I know, but I assumed everyone in thus city was a bastard slaver or warmonger or evil in some way so I had no qualms about it. Anyway, we still needed to make the party member disappear, so being a trained surgeon and physician, I did some face surgery. After some botched attempts that nearly left him insane, he ended up looking different, if a little messed up.

Now, during my gambling I’d made friends with a hobgoblin that had a lot of money and seemed well connected. I’d heard some of my friends were sold to the gladatorial arena and through this hobgoblin learnt they were going face ogres and likely die. Using charm and gambling prowess, I convinced him to enter into a plan with me to deliberately leak info that the ogre were the next challengers (in order to manipulate the odds at the bookies) and to get some poisoned weapons over to the slaves. That way we could place a bet with huge odds against with a good chance at winning and making a tasty profit.

It worked and at 3000-1 and a 1 million hold bet, I came away with 3 billion gold. Cha-ching! I also bumped into another party member at the arena and so got to talking with her owner. Eventually we made a business deal for me to acquire slaves (I’d used some trepanning I’d done previously on a dwarvish party member as evidence of my Dwarf pacification techniques, dwarfs being highly prized slaves) and got myself a massive ship and crew for a 10 million gold investment. I also offered to buy the slave back from him, using the story I’d need obedient empire stock, as I could hardly show up in the empire with a bunch of dark elves on my crew and so would need a fake crew for show whilst in port. Unfortunately, he wasn’t her owner, only her master, and so I had to go to the owner to buy her back. To make it seem legitimate I bought all the empire slaves they guy had (he only had two) and as luck would have it, the other slave turned out to be a spy sent by the same people who sent us. Turned out that the people we were sent to kill were some of the most powerful people in the world and we had no chance – basically we’d been sent to die – deliberately – our boss being an agent for dark powers previously unbeknownst to us. He also let it be known that there was a hit out on all of us and that my gambling buddy was their boss so all my assassination plans were in ruins. Luckily their retainer hadn’t been paid yet for this month! Anyway, with new slaves in tow, I decided it was time to leave before we got killed.

I’d previously set up a deal to fund development of new battle mechs in exchange for the arena’s prized fighters (my friends that beat the ogres) but with my new timetable I couldn’t wait. I sent one if my guards to bribe/buy the slaves with 200 million gold and another with the same amount to buy assorted slaves and weaponry. In the meantime, I went to the bank, emptied my accounts and spent 500 million on buying warehouses full of weapons at the docks and as many orc slaves for dock hands as possible.

Everything went smoothly and so I had the guard with slaves separate out the humans and bring them plus some weapons to the ship whilst leaving the 20 thousand goblin and orc slaves left over to be free at the opposite side of the city (and in charge if some wagons that just happened to be full of weapons). We just made it to the ship as the assassin clan came after us. I told my dock hands they were free and could help themselves to the warehouses and so the assassins were trapped between two armed riots of about 30-50 thousand slaves each. Quite the distraction to escape with. So everyone was saved, I saved 5000 human slaves and also made 1.8 billion gold. Also got a very, very fine ship (though I’ll need to replace the crew, though I’m sure my party plus 5000 freed slaves with access to weaponry can manage that).

All of this achieved with planning, manipulation, lying, gambling, murder and other business dealings with evil people – and I’m one of the good guys!

It’s stuff like this which is why roleplay games are awesome.