Working Title: Desks in the Dark play report
So I’ve been dropping hints about the hack of Blades in the Dark that I’ve been building, but have been pretty adamant about not giving too many details until I play tested. Maybe it was paranoia, but I just wanted to be the first to try out the idea.
Well tonight I had the first session.
Unfortunately we were down a player, but we decided to continue and test the waters of The Ravencliff Academy for for troubling children.
I should back track though. Desks in the dark takes the rules from John Harper’s quick start and uses them to play a game at a creepy or secretive boarding school. What makes the school like that is up to the players. The idea is to build the school communally from scratch and then place students there who will sneak around, discovering secrets, causing trouble, and earning reputation in the school.
My players made a school for students that are just too scary to be in mainstream society. The headmaster is a man constantly surrounded by cats and is unfathomably nice, but there is a constant presence of heavily armed security personnel. The students we had tonight were Llewellen, a student who receives fan mail from the future and has memories that have not happened yet, and Joanas, a student who literally hears art talk to him (I hate my players for making me remember difficult names).
The game started with Joanas and Llewellen in the headmaster’s office being confronted with their disturbing behavior. These two troubling boys decided to explore the mysterious light coming from the channel (over the cliff) in the middle of the night. To do this, they decided to steal rope from Castle house, the very exclusive dorm house of the soccer players (not ultra soccer) and the ROTC students. The two successfully scale the side of the building (which is shaped like an actual castle) with their own house, River Brook which is the home of misfits, the ignored, and the unimportant, watching from their windows and cheering. Joanas decided to steal the flag at the top of Castle House as a prank. Llewellen made it down ok but was discovered by Amy, a girl from Castle House. He convinced her not to rat him out, but she became very interested in him. Probably too interesting.
Joanas had far more trouble getting down and ripped his uniform, a serious offense, but still couldn’t make it down. Instead he made the flag into a hooded cape (cloak?) and ran throughout the halls of Castle house yelling while carrying a random cat and shaking it so that it made a god awful sound (this is total animal cruelty by the way). Jonas was able to get out of the building but had a bunch of the residents chasing him (mostly heavily armed ROTC kids). Llewellen tried to keep the door up to River Brook to let his friend rush in, but Joanas tripped over some rose bushes. Instead, Llewellen convinced his cheering dorm mates to come out to the rescue, which wasn’t hard given the fact that Joanas was being a total badass. This included the RA, who hated Castle House enough to take the flag from Joanas and wipe his ass with it (that was an interesting devil’s bargain). The Castle kids pulled out weapons (because the kids in ROTC consider shotguns light arms). Joanas was able to rile up his dorm so much that the Castle kids had to let him get away.
From there the pair used their stolen rope to climb down the cliff and swim down into the light. What they saw was a dome with rows of 12 ft mechs being inspected. Deciding they didn’t want to mess with people who had military grade robots they could pilot, the two decided to head back.
Except Joanas still needed a replacement uniform before the school discovered that his was ruined. The school has some very odd policies when it comes to their dress code, but it is well known that you do not want to damage them. After failing to switch his out for another student’s dirty uniform, Joanas decided that it was better to just convince somebody else to trade. This resulted in him owing Rodric a favor and missing that there was something embarrassing in the pocket that he would miss.
Of course the headmaster had something to say about this embarrassing item and called the two into his office (back to where we started). The students assumed that they were there because of their excursion and tried to cover up the worst of their actions with lies, but basically admitted to breaking curfew. The headmaster did not care about the dispute between houses and instead was far more concerned with the health issues of male students wearing women’s underwear. He also suggested that the two should be more discreet about their relationship (since Llewellen’s name was on the panties). Joanas however earned enough attention points (this syste’s version of stress) to get detention.
This lead to Llewellen checking out Rodric’s dorm room while the pervert was in the Cube of Shame (An empty white room with a speaker that constantly repeats the word shame) for a uniform transgression. Llewellen found a shrine to himself (mostly consisting of pictures of him when he was older). Llewellen stole all the items in the shrine for use in one of his classes.
Meanwhile, Joanas was bullied into doing a days training with the ROTC kids as punishment for being a smart ass. He discovered that Amy is both the student lead of ROTC and is capable of firing an anti tank gun accurately without any stands or supports.
I liked a lot of how this system played. There were still players having trouble with the results of rolls, but I think that might improve with exposure and with more copies of the rules available (unfortunately due to miscommunication the result chart did not get printed so I was running the results off my tablet).
One concern I have is about how fast students accumulate attention (stress in Bitd). I decided on the fly to up the critical point from 8 to 12, but in one session the players received 10 and 12. There are things that could have helped that, both players only had one skill at 2 dots, they were a player down, and they didn’t use teamwork consistently. They also didn’t roll great, but still that’s pretty fast. I’ll keep an eye on this, but it does concern me about the system, especially since I think I did a lot of things that are nicer than Blades. Maybe the players should have accepted more negative effects? I don’t know, I just feel something is a bit off on that.
At some point I’ll probably post my rules thus far once I make a few updates.
Interesting! I think one way you could turn the strength of the system (focus on heists and downtime in a cycle) would be to focus game sessions on practical tests. Students could be dropped into something, and they could use flashbacks for study and gathering objects or cheating.
You could then use grades instead of hold, and year in school instead of tier, and individual merit/demerits instead of coin.
So, sessions could be initiations, auditions, performances, mid-terms, and finals. Perhaps all students have to cycle through those successfully to go up a year.
If you aimed to do a four year or seven year school, then that’s a campaign. You could add extra-curricular rough-housing in along with other homework and grade issues as part of the down-time cycle, adding in advantages and disadvantages depending on how it goes (like complications work now.)
Each class could give them a lasting effect of “Ignorance of [subject]” that they could try to erase during down times. But, having the clock also opens up the option to buy the related special ability with experience gained while testing.
So, you could have a curriculum, with each class culminating in a single special ability (probably organized by tier.) For tests, you could have suggestions for obstacles, maybe some maps of standard chambers, descriptions of illusory environments, and so on to jog the creativity of GMs.
Actually the game focuses on the trouble students get into rather than the stuff their supposed to do. Kinda like Harry Potter, or Gunnerkrigg Court. Tiers are the students social status, and coin is social currency. So far I’m leaving off hold since that felt clunky and less thematic
I had a very similar idea =) Glad to see someone’s runnign with it!
I find it interesting that you chose to go with coin as social currency instead of Hold… Hold in the base game IS social currency, to a large extent. Coin is more like small favours, things that get you stuff. Like maybe hall passes, or ious for chores.
Are you thinking about including non-student groups? I could see the janitorial staff as a gang, various teachers, the board of directors, PTA if there is one…
These were just my musings when I was working on my version. Looking forward to what you’ve made!
There were a couple of reasons I decided to use a social currency as coin instead of using hold for social currency.
The first is that to be honest, I don’t have a firm grasp of how your supposed to use it. The rules in the quick start just feels too incomplete for me to have an intuitive understanding. That isn’t any body’s fault, the quick start was released for one shots and hold is a long term mechanic.
Of course, it would be lame of me to leave out mechanics just because I don’t understand them (worse to use mechanics I don’t understand). I also wanted a simpler rule set for the game. There are a lot of movies parts in bitd and felt that bogged things down when I ran it. So for this hack I tried to simplify what I could.
The next reason is the specific to the game. Money just isn’t a consistent theme in this type of story, but social hierarchy is. If students are doing dumb Shit for a resource that they could bank then it’s probably gonna be reputation.
That leads me to my last reason, and that is that the string system in Monster Hearts is just plain awesome and I have reluctance to steal amazing ideas from Avery Mcdaldno.
As far as staff goes, I want them to be outside the social economy of the game. I haven’t written the rules for staff other than the headmaster. That was an element I figured I’d come up with through play
The difference, as I see it, between Hold and Coin (in the context of Coin as favours, not literal money) is that Hold is more about clique power and group entrenchment, whereas Coin is a personal favour liquidity, which you can use to get stuff done on a personal level.
Benjamin Davis, that is the case in BitD. While my game is a hack of it, I’m shooting for a different game with a different feel.
That’s awesome! Looking forward to it.
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