I’m doing NPC downtime tonight for one the two Blades games I’m running & it’s got me thinking about the Bluecoats.
Even if Duskwall is on the sparse end of the population bell curve we’re guessing, the number of watch/patrol people they could theoretically field against any one gang is daunting.
To balance this out, the amount of intercity ward rivalry and/or corruption must be staggering.
That or the Bluecoats are a very special kind of Tier III faction…
That or the thought exercise tells us more about the kind of power a Tier III faction might be able to wield within the city within their “area of influence.” Maybe the PCs need to be pretty careful about getting on the wrong side of groups like The Unseen, The Spirit Wardens or the Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh anytime in the first dozen sessions of any given Blades campaign.
Which has me thinking about the Duskwall Council & the potential muscle behind the Skovlander Refugees.
No great insights. Just procrastinating. Back to the lonely fun of what prep Blades allows…
Good thoughts. I think of the bluecoats as the force behind the Iron Law of Distribution: “Them that has, gets.” The bluecoats are about making sure that power stays in the hands of the powerful, protecting the status quo.
If the most powerful are gangs in the area, it is in the interests of their health and safety to be paid by those powerful gangs to look the other way and keep their activities to quelching chaotic crime and smashing interlopers.
If the most powerful are aristocracy, then they are instruments to push the poor and unsightly out of the area.
When the power is up for grabs, the bluecoats are just one arena where influence is exerted and power struggles unfold.
You are assuming that the Bluecoats can muster more force than any other Tier III gang. In Augustan Rome the equivalent of the police force was 1000 men in a city of 1 million. In the Middle Ages, it’s probably better to think of a police force as a bunch of sheriffs who organise posses rather than the kind of organisation we are in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The History section on the Police WP page gives an interesting overview into the variety of police-like organisations that were used before the first police force was created in the 19th century: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police
Thanks for the link, Hamish Cameron! I am basically ignorant of pre-20th century police forces and will check it out.
My assumptions follow from the game as I understand it, with a tier 0 group able to field a group of ~5 members, a tier I able to field ~10 and a tier III only about ~40 bravos. I put Duskwall at easily a half-million. (500 Bluecoats?) I could easily be wrong on any of my assumptions. As I said, a thought exercise.
I will probably think about the Bluecoats as being both qualitatively and quantitatively different from other Tier III “gangs” in my conception of Duskwall. How much, I don’t know. Beyond their own resources, they’ve powerful friends in The Council among others at the least.
My assumption is that a starting group of PCs (Tier 0) could pretty easily muster 10-15 or so guys (5 PCs and 1-2 gangs of 5… although now that I think of it, does the text say how many people are in each gang?). So my estimates for all those numbers would be higher.
Its been a while since I saw it, but how would the Tier system work in Gangs of New York? Do the NYC police vastly outnumber those gangs? More importantly, does that feel right, too policey or not policey enough!
All that said, I think conceptualising the Bluecoats as a different kind of gang who can bring the equivalent of Tier III force onto the underworld seems like a totally legit approach to me.
The crew sheets have four people per gang, but I think gang size can be as flexible as it needs to be.
This game is very different from the Adventurer, Conqueror, King system. ACKS is more simulationist in doing research into historical precedent for how civilization adheres together, and then projecting those assumptions into a fantasy setting. While that sort of meticulous thinking can spark new ideas and inject flavor into a setting, I think Blades in the Dark is far more about projecting the mood and style you are going for.
Rather than falling back on numbers, I think picking a mood works better. Do you want the bluecoats to be like prison guards, vastly outnumbered and reliant on the threat of violence and harsher punishments to keep order? Or do you want them to be extensions of the will of the noble houses, keeping order and enforcing the laws made to secure the wealthy against the unwashed? Or do you want them to be the hard-eyed sentinels of Dostoevsky-esque justice and law that inevitably clamps down on the unrighteous with the wrath of God Himself? Or do you want them to be the city’s military protecting it from threats domestic and foreign, rotating in assignments between colonies and the capitol?
Any of those can work just fine in Duskwall (given the sparse information we have to the contrary.) Each choice stylistically suggests answers to many in-game questions like how expensive is a bluecoat bribe, what reinforcements can they call upon in times of trouble, how pervasive are they in various neighborhoods, etc.
The number of Bluecoats who could go against one gang is indeed staggering. They could crush a particular gang.
But isn’t the same true of our modern police force? Yet it doesn’t happen. The police are numerous but they’re up against numerous gangs. They have to actually FIND the gang at a particular time and place, organize the operation, and then come down on them.
So yes, if you immediately and intensely antagonize the Bluecoats it’ll probably go poorly for your fledgling gang, but you’re so small that you’re probably way down on the list of Bluecoat priorities and hard to pin down unless you really do something to demand attention.
I imagine that the Bluecoats are tier III because that’s the most any officer could manage to mobilize for something. It’s basically impossible to get the entire force organized to do a thing (also: outrageously expensive).