Help me figure out if Blades In The Dark is the right system for my mini-campaign?
Blades in the Royal Court – The newly wed (and apparently blissfully happy) royal couple are establishing their new court and household. But there are whispers that powerful forces are not happy with the direction that they plan to take the kingdom, and are willing to do desperate things to stop them. You play highly skilled secret agents disguised as various innocuous seeming courtiers and servants, trying to uncover the plots that would snuff out this golden age before it has even begun.
I’m aiming for a political thriller/espionage/heist sort of feel, with perhaps a dash of unconventional swashbuckling. Mini-campaign length of three sessions or so.
My first skim of the Blades rules has not given me a deep enough understanding of the system to tell whether my mini-campaign idea is a match or a mis-match.
Opinions and advice welcome. Thanks. 🙂
Edit: This would take place in a unique setting (probably based on Renaissance Europe) rather than Doskvol.
I’m afraid I haven’t run Blades yet so I’m not 100% sure, but it sounds like you could make it work. I’d certainly be interested in hearing more and what other people think about how good Blades would be for it.
Take what I say with a grain of salt because despite the hours of theory crafting I put in this and other rpgs, I rarely get to play them and
haven’t played Blades at all.
The first thing that comes to my mind is that Wanted level could be changed to Scandal and Heat replaced with Rumours. They would function the same but would represent the flak the royal couple gets for the dubious behaviour of the PCs.
The Tier and Rep mechanics could either be ignored because 3 sessions won’t get you far up the ladder, and gaining reputation counterintuitive to the goal. Or Rep could be replaced with Info and Tier could become Conspiracy. Instead of equipment and powerbase Conspiracy would indicate secret knowledge, spy networks, and so forth. Instead of rising to the top, you plunge deeper into the mysterious depths of secrecy. In the context of an espionage and political games, knowledge is power. I’d also say that Info is the primary reward for a Score instead of coin, like the Vigilantes variant in the base game.
I imagine ways how you could spend Info on all downtime actions except for vice indulging. Which could lead to an interesting situation where stress recovery is more limited then anything else. This is a idea that changes mechanics instead of reskinning them, so it’s one of the things that fits in the should be playtested category.
I will hack almost any game. But I’ve played and ran a lot of Blades, and at first glance this doesn’t look like a great fit. I would highly recommend running a one shot of Blades to get the basic mechanics down and you will also have a better idea of the possible fit for your mini campaign.
I played 7th sea with blades for courtly intrigue yesterday and it went just fine.
However we only used the heist mecanics so I have not given à though about the downtime part of the game.
I would use houses of the blooded for this mini-campaign. That said, you could make blades work, though you have a lot of work cut out for you re-skinning the factions and fine tuning the score engagement rules, but it should map ok. Gorinich Serpant advice is solid regarding turf, rep and tier.
Blades plays really fast and offers lots of opportunities for improvisation, both for the GM and the players.
So if you want to do a scenario like this in one session and without a lot of preparation, Blades is definitely a good choice!
If on the other hand you plan on guiding the players through a carefully crafted story composed of a string of scenes: I strongly doubt that would work!
In my opinion, the main points of blades are:
1) every dice roll is supposed to change or even completely resolve a situation.
For example a combat that would take half a gaming session in D&D can easily be solved in 5 minutes.
2) don’t plan ahead, instead use flashbacks. The flashback mechanic offers a powerful tool to the players to take control over the story. It’s hard to grasp at first, but once everyone is used to it, it’s lots of fun.
3) NPCs don’t have stats. All you need is a general understanding of the person to figure out positions/effect levels/consequences in the game.
My advice would be to build a sandbox and throw the characters into it, then watch what happens 🙂
I realized this morning that things will probably go poorly if I start the PCs in a reactive position (waiting for the assassin to strike, learning that there’s a nasty rumor going around the court, trying to stop the embezzlement of the royal treasury). But if I present them with a couple of problems, and tell them what they know so far, they can cook up schemes and be proactive.
Thanks Jörg for the hints, that all lines up with what I had in mind. I’m hoping to make this as much like a double episode of Leverage as I can.
Thanks Gorinich for pointing out the Vigilantes variant. I’d been looking for that chapter, but hadn’t found it yet. Making Info and/or Rep the main payoff sounds promising, and I think I like the other variations you suggested as well.
If Blades doesn’t work, I expect I’ll try using Fate Accelerated with Thug, Magus, Face, Schemer and Sneak as the 5 approaches, or maybe hack Lady Blackbird. 🙂