So, elaboration time. This was the culmination of a 20-session scenario, by far the longest single scenario I've had in any of my games, chiefly because the White Court are slippery, sneaky, deceitful bastards so unraveling the web of who was backstabbing whom took a long-ass time.
The final fight involved two fronts--a Warden and Valkyrie stopping a bunch of Black Court villains from disrupting Inari Raith's wedding on one front; on the other, a cop, two wizards and a pixie stopping a pair of traitors to the White Court and their Black Court backer from sneaking into the reception area and stealing one of the wedding gifts (a powerful book of Norse spells that had been stolen from an NPC earlier).
The Black Court Knight (they go with a chess theme) had been riling up the Cop earlier in the scenario--dropping by to watch the cop's daughter's softball game, asking which one she was, etc. And then shows up to the reception wearing a ballcap from the girl's team, which sets the cop off, and a bizarre and eccentric melee ensues (the Knight is...odd. Among his arsenal of weapons is bouncy balls) that tears up the reception hall. As this happens, the pixie's player declares that on the menu is garlic chicken, and the pixie veils, grabs a drumstick, then tags the veil to ambush the Knight and cause a three-shift hit (well, two-shift, but rolled up from previous stress), much to the Knight's surprise.
Eventually, that end of the fight concludes with the cop, having had enough, tagging one of the Knight's consequences, a blindness aspect, and invoking his own aspect to boost his roll by +6, and ends up rolling all +'s on the dice for a roll of 15. The steel shot (he'd been expecting Faeries) blows off the entire right side of the Knight's ribcage, and one of the wizards declares the steel's in him, and slaps him with a magnetics block to keep him pinned. The party allows the Knight to concede, with the terms of not showing up for at least two scenarios, and taking an Extreme consequence (losing his arm, being terrified of the cop now). One of the White Courters grabs the book and flees, only to be arrested by some of the cop's buddies, while the other (who had tried to frame Lara) is left for Lara herself to deal with.
On the other side of it, the Valkyrie is busy lopping off vampire heads, while the vampires' wizard tries to get through the wards the Warden had set up around the wedding. To get around a block on attacks, the Warden gets creative and starts flinging vampires into the sunlight--starting with the one named vampire, a thinly veiled pastiche of my own PC from a different game, for which the Warden's player is the GM. ("You've been waiting to do that for a long time, I take it." "
") The vampires' pet wizard (who has been nicknamed Doc Brown and who speaks like Mordin) veils and gets the hell out, and the other vampires flee...just as the White Court wannabe King of a rage-eating house (whose son the Warden torched several scenarios ago) shows up.
He reveals two things: First, that he had been waiting for the Warden to wear herself out fighting the Black Court, implicitly admitting he'd set up most of the scenario's strife in the first place. Second, that he knew the Valkyrie's weakness and had informed one of her own enemies of it earlier--and this he reveals by beating her senseless in a single turn, having been quietly hitting her with Rage maneuvers during the previous fight.
Of course, he had miscalculated, and was unaware the Warden still had some juice left--as well as three fate points, which the player spent all at once (and declaring that the mistletoe oil he'd used on the Valkyrie has soaked his arms) to blast him with an absurd amount of fire while declaring she was, "sick of your
White. Court. Bullshit!" The total shifts of stress he took meant he would need an Extreme consequence to survive, and, well, he didn't.
The scenario ends with a quick q/a session with Lara on a few things (final fates of the White Court traitors, for one), and one of the characters getting a startling--and entirely on the ball--realization: Not only did Lara end up benefiting from the whole scenario, but she set it up in the first place by hiring the Warden, knowing it would goad the Rage King into rash action.
And then we all vowed to leave the White Court the hell alone for a good while because damn they're a confusing bunch of bastards.
