So, Law of the Dark, blades hack for Craft sequence inspired game were the law is dark magic, you pay for stuff with pieces of your soul and gods are basically big corporations of faith. It’s a thing.
I’ve pretty much forgotten about it, until Ганс Андроид awoke me from my dogmatic slumber and remind me I have a game to hack.
So, here are the news:
* There are five (almost) finished playbooks: The Archivist, The Attorney, The Trickster, The Warden, and The Theologian. There are three unwritten playbooks: The Investigator (a detective, noir style) The Herald (basically a journalistbloggerbard) and The Wretched (a vampire, or some other debt ridden unperson).
* I’ve written a basic description of the setting (it’s not exactly the sequence, more like a sequence fan-fiction, hopefully in a good way). the main extra features – 1. the hack’s default city is called Babylon and they are building space elevator to harvest starlight 2. there is internet now, it’s powered by dead gods and accessed by praying to dead gods.
* there is a draft for justice system game system and atmosphere. It’s basically the heist rolls as written, but instead of picking a plan and a detail, you pick a client, a goal, and a plan. it’s basically the same.
* there is a glossary page, for glossary.
* The Attorney have now horrible coffee in his spacial equipment list, it’s probably temporary.
* The Theologian have now impressive ceremonial headgear in his spacial equipment list, it’s defiantly permanent.
here is the system document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lRe5y0Eqz9JixHsqZPge3RTjVDh-xNgpS_t7D0MMn7M/edit
and playbook slides:
and a link for Max Gladstone website:, because he explain what’s awesome about his books much better than me:
Just out of curiosity before I dive deep – who’d be your examples of trickster/archivist/investigator from the books? I can’t seem to find a single trickster there.
No, it’s not from the books. The trickster is inspired by the protagonist of the web serial Twig. you could argue that Caleb is an investigator, but the investigator is not yet written. The Attorney, the Warden and the Theologian are the book-inspired playbook, though the Archivist is also the necromancy expert.
I’d guess wretched is also book inspired since vampires. Caleb indeed is closest to an investigator, thnx)
Oh, yes, the wretched is planned for vampires, student loans. and wage slaves. Good at Damage and Blend.
Question. I plan to show on Metatopia convention (NJ, Morristown) in November. Is it OK if I run a game based on this and gather feedback?
YES you can, and please do, could you share the feedback here in the group afterward?
Ганс Андроид
Say, did you run the game at metatopia? Which rules you’ve used? How did it go?
I’ll write down detailed report later this week. In short – very basic BitD rules (anything more would’ve halted 2h session). Results – it can work, but there’re some things to focus on
That great! I would love to read the report and it’s good to hear the idea is feasible
Ганс Андроид say, did you happen to write some of your insights? I want to run some play-test soon in a con, and anything you happen to notice that could help me would be valuable
OK, I still plan on the long write-up (tons of backlog here), but you’re right, I’ve dragged you for too long.
So, in a brief but with important points:
1) I’ve wrote up a module using essentially book’s setting and specific city from the first game, ‘Choice of Deathless’ because it was easy to come up with and it invoked particular themes I liked (demons and who they are), also it was very character-focused game
2) as Metatopia is game-design convent, you essentially have 2 hours to do everything (essentially 5-10m meet-and-greet, 80m game, 20-30m feedback), so I couldn’t go through all intricacies of the system. In the first try I did print out your character sheets, in second one I’ve planned to ditch them and only use the core of the system, though it didn’t really work, more below
3) By the point of being close to the con I realized that my goal at least 40-50% was not just to test particular system/game, but to test the way I did my prep for the game (more in a separate post later, possibly this weekend), which in any case meant less focus on your work, so I apologize for not giving you enough data to work with
4) My first play test was ~15min of talking about the setting, followed by character choice and first scene. By the end of that first scene it was clear that things don’t work the way they may need to. In particular:
a) Magitek as a concept requires a lot of buy-in, it is very similar to our day-to-day world, yet different, and requires people to ‘get’ all the ways in which it is different. By trying to push infodump onto people from the start I made them disinterested
b) While Blades is a cool game, not many people know it, and it has sizeable mechanical focus as well as rich character sheet. On the 2h game it was a problem, since immediately upon getting their charsheet people started getting distracted by all the stuff on it, most of which was not important for the particular moment in game (possibly we could spend the whole time just generating characters and it would’ve helped more, but it was not precisely my goal).
5) as a result of my first playtest I’ve planned to
a) write down 1/2 A4(letter) sheet of bullet-point setting info as it is both easier and faster to digest and easier to refer to later in the game
b) write simplified charsheets with just 3 ‘aspects’ of a character plus their skills and one ability.
Both of those failed as hotel printer was simply not available exactly when I needed it. So I essentially didn’t have any physical prep
c) defocus from the setting and mention it in passing when necessary, focusing on characters and their interactions with the story. Also forget about any emerging story since it is literally impossible to do such in 2h timeslot
In short: I’ve been around 21% successful. We’ve got through almost whole story, and we’ve bounced core Blades gameplay around a bit, I’ve tested my character concept lines. Main complaint which essentially failed the feedback loop was that there was no prep to work with (see above), and that setting was essentially too term-heavy for such environment.
6)Mechanics of Blades while were used felt tacked-on and not really helping the game process – core seemed too empty to me, like if you tear from D&D everything but d20, attribute bonuses and DC.
7) While in neither case I’ve got to the final case-presenting part, it was clear to me that very clear mechanical support has to be there, as this is ultimately Court Drama the RPG, and people (especially ‘owner’ of the firm) need to understand precisely how they win and lose cases.
So, summary:
I) Be ready with small writeup of the setting and key points of where you are, as those are key parts of why Craft sequence is awesome, and those at the same time can sink it
II) Do not do single infodump, use said writeup as 5-minute question starter, then dive into the story and let people ask questions as they go along.
IIa) One of the points which I found out is that it isn’t clear which role Craftsfolk can fill in the society and what they can actually do – while they’re advertised as ‘magical lawyers’, they certainly can be warrior-mages and probably mystical scientists, too. Is police to an extent aware how to use Craft in this particular city, do they need specialized tools for that (I’ve gone with copper rods) or are they mundane and only rely on external powers (e.g. Mantle or in my case pet zombies)? Is Craftswoman walking home basically heavily armed, and how muggers know not to engage her (they probably do by this point in setting)? How does she measure in power against Warden, is she ‘Damage Dealer’ for his ‘Tank’ and so on? (such questions are bound to be clear to characters in setting, and players need to be clear on those points).
III) Think hard what is your goal here, create Craft Sequence-like game based on Blades or create Court Drama game in Craft Sequence-like setting without requirement for Blades in particular – I personally plan to at least try using GUMSHOE next time, as I feel that core of Blades is not helping much, and its extensive ‘dog-eats-dog gang tier system’ may not be very useful to the Court Drama (no offense to John, he did marvelous job).
IV) Whatever underlying system ends up being, get working Case Defence move before you present it, otherwise whatever characters do on the streets will still fall on GM fiat since their results end up in court against their opponent and they can’t predict how it will work. It is something which John did very well, as it is exactly clear how to move through his tier system to get to the top.
Hope it helps. Still more details will be posted separately.
It helps, I thanks you dearly. There is no need to apologies for ‘not giving me enough data’. I’m already thrilled you went out there and run the game, anything more you do is a blessing. Admittedly, most of the problems you run into seem to me like result of the time limit (80 minutes is insane time to run any game, and especially so for unknown unplaytested ones) but your advises and criticism are good, and I’ll try to address them.
I’ve personally never played GUMSHOE but from what I’ve heard it can be great for Sequence-Inspired game (at least for the investigation part).
Please, share your goals and progress on this.
From my PoV points I’ve listed in the end are essential to the game/setting, and would’ve showed as much over the longer session. I myself like to spend 4-5 hours for a game, but it’s neither a given nor a requirement in practice – to make people want to go with this you need to capture their attention and make it interesting, and having short pre-load works in any case.
In terms of what I specifically want to pursue in regards to Laws, – it is to both
a) hold and preserve the atmosphere of the setting and its feel, even though it is a hard task in itself
b) build a game of Court Drama, which are at the moment almost non-existant in the community, which makes it an interesting challenge in itself.
By the way, two more points to think about when you work on the setting, be it generic points in your main document or something for a particular campaign (which I think is better, as one of the features of the setting is diverse and different cultures/laws of different places):
a) with Craft as main regulator of the world post-Wars, are there any governmental structures in place? If there’re local and supreme Courts of Craft, are there FBI- and CIA-analogs? In books we see Church of Kos as effective ruler of the city, but it is official or is there a non-arcane governor somewhere? In Kavekana priest of the Pool feel like a megacorp to an extent having state-like powers, but is state completely nonexistant? Dresediel Lex is somewhat easier in this regard, as it’s explicit that King in Red rules it, but in city I used, Shikaw, which featured in game, it’s not clear whether there’s Craft ruler or some God in place of the ruler – main Craft firm feels like corporation but not a city-ruling body.
b)in terms of Craft regulating remaining Gods and the world at large – how exactly it works? Were Gods made to sign some sort of final treaty after the Wars? Were Craft Laws written into some Universal Book Of Law? Craft is postulated to be based on belief, but how do you build your basic belief (that Craft Law is the right way) into the world so you can use it later?
It reminds me of Mage the Ascension, where current magic-less Consensus Reality had to be enforced upon the world by Enlightened inquisitors who basically burned as many witches as was needed to convince people at large that world does not allow fireballs anymore.
Again, I understand that you may feel that those questions do not need a hard-given answer, but in a game about law I would expect people to want some sort of basic axioms of sort, which are to be used to build their arguments in court (since it’s more interesting to actually state arguments at least to some extent than just roll some dice saying ‘I win the argument’ ). I would have, definitely.
Any updates on your current plans with this?
I’m planing to condense the rules and character sheets to be more usable for convention games and run the game in the upcoming convention to see what can I do about the problems you’ve found and older suggestions. Also – I going to catch a law-student role-player friend of mine and build with him a structure for a default trail and the “Axioms of Law”, so I could test it. admittedly, there is some time until the next convention over here. I might just run it for some friends or friendly looking strangers and see how it goes.