A Sweet Whisper and a Hidden Blade, episode 1
I had great fun on Thursday night playing Alicia de Alejandro de Ontiveros for the first time in the Boy's new 7th Sea Game. Last (academic) year's Star Wars game was good fun but we were playing a group of Empire officers and my character was a lazy, cowardly rich boy, who mostly wanted to delegate his way into an easy life while committing as few war crimes as possible, so I missed a bit of good old fashioned swashbuckling and mad heroics.
Alicia is going to be great fun on that front though. I described her to the other players as follows:
Know to her family as El Pequeno Torbellino (The Little Whirlwind), Alicia is Trouble with a very sharp sword and tongue to match. With her flamboyant clothes and dark alluring eyes, she attracts attention and a string of often bitter, disappointed would-be paramours everywhere she goes. She has a major superiority complex and doesn't suffer fools... unless she's broke and they're paying!
The basic premise is that a bunch of us have been hired by the House of NiccoloRois et Rennes to start a branch of their bank/trading house in a city in Vodacce (the Boy and I have been reading too much Dorothy Dunnett). Alicia is a swordswoman for hire, having lost her ancestral lands in Castille to a bunch of Montagne invaders.
So far, I have taken a sailor's hand off for groping me*, made an enemy of a random Montagne noble who was making trouble at the Courtesan's House by leaving all 6 of his body guards on the floor in various states of undress in the blink of an eye (divesting them of their clothing was more amusing and made less mess on the doorstep than killing them), thoroughly ingratiated myself with said Courtesans (they are the most educated women in the realm, you know!), handily getting free wine and food and 'borrowing' a beautiful mask, killed a whole squad of brutes in a boat who were trying to kill us for an as yet unknown reason (they didn't get very far... in fact, they shot our oarsman, rammed our boat when only one of us was left in it anyway, and either died or ended up in the canal very quickly), up staged nearly everyone at the Prince's Masquerade Ball (in said borrowed mask), and danced whatever the fantasy Castillian version of flamenco is with Giovanni Villianova, reputedly the most evil man in all of Thea.
I think everyone who is anyone in the entire city should know of me by the next morning!
*Well, that's what I told the other characters anyway, I possibly exaggerated for effect, ruining his entire livelihood was possibly overly harsh depending on how much he offended me, I may have settled for a couple of fingers.
Annoyingly (but unfortunately unsurprisingly), I put 'swashbuckling women' into google image search to try and find a suitable picture to make an Alicia icon for this post, and the only one where the women weren't half naked, or at least showing off bare legs up to their armpits, was the picture of Katherine from the front of The Privilege of the Sword :( And while I dig the green velvet musketeers suit, Alicia looks rather more like Salma Hayek. This is the most appropriate one I could find but she should have a flouncy shirt and a rapier in each hand, damnit!
