aka The Best Little Whorehouse In A Wicked Age

players: Shuo, Fred, Ben

We tried In A Wicked Age sans GM. A noble (Fred) lets a house of sin flourish in the fallen manor where his own family was destroyed in a ghastly tragedy. And even though the "harlot with the heart of gold" that he cherishes and wishes to adopt as his own daughter and heir works inside, he's leery of setting foot in the accursed, ghost-infested, place. Wisely.

Beyond hookers and ghosts, there's also a strong theme of "good help is hard to find." The noble's gardener (Shuo) is really a dark thaumaturge craving blood to feed his spirit-summoning rituals. And in the bawdy house, the affable manservant (Ben) is really a masquerading devil, relishing the abundant human sin.

It was a short game but we managed to hit a pretty strong conclusion: the madame of the harlots got her vengeance and exposed the noble, who was pelted with rocks and driven out by angry peasants when they found out he intended to pass off a common prostitute as his noble heir (no one hates aristocratic hypocrisy more than the have-nots). And the hooker with a heart of gold rode off into the sunset.

Anything noteworthy mechanically?
Did NPCs have best interests? Who got to set them?
Who owned the NPCs?
Sounds like there was a conflict between the madame and the noble - who owned her - did you stat her up or use the owner's stats in the conflict?

Pretty much as expected: GM not really needed.

We never set Best Interests for the NPCs because we really didn't need them to drive action: the PC Best Interests were in direct opposition, putting contrary demands on the NPCs.

The heart-of-gold hooker and the madame both got stats in the very last scene, because they were directly in conflict for the first time. We just used the standard "someone whose PC isn't in the scene is going to play the NPCs" method. If the plot had gone a little differently we could easily have gone the whole game without statting any NPCs.