Yesterday we blew the dust off the boardgame “Lords of Waterdeep”. A couple of years ago while playing it, our group was lamenting how there isn’t really a good way to get the games concept – secret lords sending agents on missions to claim power in a fantasy city – into a viable rpg. Two of use tried to write up a dark victorian world, built on a harbour with steampunk elements, but it fizzled once we couldn’t really settle on how to make the rules work. In our research online we discovered Blades.
I really recommend Lords of Waterdeep as a board game, and a part of me would love to reskin the whole thing as Spiders of Doskvol (curse you expensive printing supplies). It would fit so beautifully!
I would play the hell out of Spiders of Doskvol. And you might want to check out this Kickstarter (with which I am unaffiliated) – sounds like the closest thing to the RPG you were trying to make that I’ve heard of. kickstarter.com – Cabal
Waterdeep and Lankhmar are the two cities that I could see myself using in Blades.
Jason, the closest thing we imagined was Blades. The gang mechanics are what I’ve been looking for for years. I tried homebrew systems and adapting other systems (ORE, HQ and FATE were close but lacked the ‘spark’). To be honest when I heard of the Blades I reacted with a mental table flip of my concept and walked away from the project for a while because someone beat me to the idea. Avid fan now. Will check out Cabal anyway, looks promising.
Do try the board game, I actually dislike the D&D theme of it, but the gameplay is perfection. There is even a faction called the Red Sashes…
Steve – I’m interested in the Adrilankha add on…
I recently designed and facilitated a collaborative world building process for a new campaign based on the same premise. One of my fellow game masters and I used the board game content to come up with a lot of the structural questions to determine, city design, civic factions, criminal factions, lords, agents, and other game related accouterments. All in all is was an unforgettable experience shared by all.
Might be time to re-read my Lankhmar books. Especially since maps like this exist: http://valkann.free.fr/phpBB3/images/Lankhmar/Lankhmar-g.jpg
valkann.free.fr – valkann.free.fr/phpBB3/images/Lankhmar/Lankhmar-g.jpg
oooh
This will not help you right away but the Free League made a Swedish game called Svavelvinter — before they made Mutant: Year Zero — that used a more boardgamey faction shadowplay.
Each player character have a direct connection with missions and plots issued from a shadow character controlled by another player. Mostly these shadow characters issue order and tries to gain political power over the others. The orders in turn is used to get more dice as one completes them, so preferably small things that can be accomplished during a session.
In the shadow part of the game, these can’t be killed, but sometimes they have to step into the “regular” play as well and then all bets are off.
Hopefully someone will want to translate it properly because it’s a quite nifty game. And it feels like something that could be hacked into Blades if one wants to add more complexity and cooperating with the players on the factions as well.
Translated quickstart rules sadly not with much about the stuff above but perhaps a bit of a better explanation: http://frialigan.se/2013/try-the-svavelvinter-rpg-in-english/ but perhaps this information is enough to make you figure out something similar and write a hack.
frialigan.se – Try the Svavelvinter RPG – in English