Warning, there is a massive wall of text incoming.

Warning, there is a massive wall of text incoming. I ran my first two sessions of Blades this week, and I thought I’d share my experience so far. As background, I play 5E D&D with a bunch of guys over lunch at work (we’ve also played Pathfinder and Dungeon World), but finding a day when everyone is available is a hassle. I thought it might be cool to try to run Blades on days when not everyone is around, because it seems pretty easy to adjust difficulty on the fly, and also explain why some PCs aren’t around (lost in vice, locked up, etc). At first the group balked at playing bad guys, but I described the game as a mix of Ocean’s 11, Firefly and Dishonored they got pretty excited. Of course, we only play for an hour at a time, so it took us 2 sessions to complete 1 score, not including downtime.

Here are some general thoughts I had.

1. The players had an absolute blast. I basically let them describe the layout of the building they were infiltrating, and attempt the robbery anyway they wanted. This is a level of freedom they don’t get in D&D. 

2. In our D&D campaign these guys are your archetypal over planners (even though they hate it), and the planning system was a godsend.

3. The players made ample use of the flashback mechanic (3 times I think), and that was probably their favorite mechanic overall.

4. The leech was an artificer and would frequently want to flashback to tinkering on just the right tool he needed for the job. It was definitely cool, and he loved it, but then should I retroactively increase his load to account for more tools? I’m not really sure how to handle this, and I don’t want to tell him no. I anticipate this coming up a lot.

5. We had frequent conversations about the position of actions rolls, and what the PCs could do to make them more or less controlled. Conversely, we had no conversations about effects because I generally let single actions finish the job. I need to be better at thinking about effects.

6. Because I wanted to try and finish the score before the second lunch was over, I think I favored harm over complications. While this made the score shorter, the crew is pretty banged up now. I should strike a better balance in the future.

7. I was the only one who read the rules beforehand, so there was lots of confusion about resistance vs action vs fortune vs engagement rolls (and we haven’t even gotten to downtime rolls yet). I sort of sold this as a rules light game like Dungeon World, but while it is has similarities to Dungeon World (fiction first), my players thought the rules seemed, at times, arbitrarily complicated. This was probably my fault, since I didn’t always explain the rules succinctly. Complexity-wise, Blades probably falls somewhere between Dungeon World and Pathfinder, perhaps somewhere close to 5E D&D.

And here is the actual mission report:

The Chimney Sweeps are a creative crew of thieves operating out of Crow’s Foot, which currently consists of Caveman (leech), Cobalt (lurk) and Bones (hound). Caveman is a dandy focused on clockwork contraptions, Cobalt is an ex-bluecoat turned pick-pocket and Bones is a down on his luck Sailor with a ghost greyhound companion. This crew ended up in Bazso Baz’s office and accepted his job offer to rob the Red Sashes’ HQ.

The group Gathered Information on the HQ, and discovered it was a large 2 story building, with the vault most likely in the basement. The plan was to infiltrate the Sashes’ HQ via the chimney into the 1st floor kitchen. Fast-forward to being on the roof, and Caveman tinkers a pulley system to get everyone silently down the chimney. Unfortunately a poor engagement roll lead to Cobalt discovering 2 guards in the kitchen. He tugs twice on the rope up the chimney in a prearranged signal for trouble, and Bones commands his ghost dog into the house to distract the guards. The roll was a partial success, which caused the dog to run into a guard wielding a lightning hook, and he was captured.

With the guards occupied, the whole gang made it into the kitchen without a problem, but there was now a 6 segment clock on the board the read “Dead Dog” that was slowly filling up. The group split up at this point. Cobalt rode a dumbwaiter from the kitchen to the basement, Bones went to rescue his dog, and Caveman stayed in the kitchen with a plan. 

We flashed back to when the crew discovered that, unlike most buildings in this rundown part of town, the Red Sashes’ HQ had all electric lighting and the generator was in the kitchen. Caveman did an assist action and desperately attuned to the generator to knock out all the lights in the building, and also create an arc of electricity to the guards lightning hook to destroy it. A partial success was going to leave him very badly burned, but he resisted with his special clockwork grounding vest that absorbed the electricity causing him to merely spasm and throw his back out. 

Downstairs Cobalt made use of Caveman’s assist by employing his dark-sight mask to ambush a guard, slitting his throat (so much for not being evil). He also managed to pick the lock on the vault with minimal fuss, and got a large chest of silver back up the dumbwaiter to a waiting Caveman.

Bones snuck up on the guards that were fighting his dog, arriving with only 1 slice left on the clock that would result in a dead dog. He fired a warning shot in the air, commanding his dog to come with him and the guard to not pursue on pain of death. A partial result cowed 2 of the guards, but the third was a badass and was not deterred. A fight broke out and Bones opened fire on the Red Sash, taking a devil’s bargain that the muzzle flash from his pistol would light up his face allowing him to be identified. A failed roll left Bones disarmed and with one fewer finger from a lighting quick sword slash. A resist roll brought that down to just the tip of his pinky finger cleaved off. At this point Bones thought it was be best to retreat, and made a desperate leap from a second story window, taking a devil’s bargain that he’d need to somehow dodge a deadly throwing knife. The leap was a success, but Bones tried and failed to shoot the throwing knife out of the air, earning him a nasty shoulder wound.

All that was left was for Caveman and Cobalt to escape back up the chimney with the treasure. Caveman decided to use some explosives from his wrecking tools to collapse the chimney after them but got a partial success. The explosion was much larger than they anticipated, caving in the roof underneath them. They leapt to an adjacent building, but Cobalt dislocated his shoulder in order not to drop the chest of silver into the alley below. 

So the Chimney Sweeps got away, though each member ended up with 1 standard harm, a few lesser harms, and quite a bit of stress. They also racked up 7 total heat from a rather explosive mission. On the positive side, Baszo split the take with them, leaving them with 2 coin and quite a bit of rep for wrecking the Red Sash HQ. They’re probably going to need to spend some of that on extra actions to heal some harm and reduce heat, but we’ll see.