I’ve asked this before a few months ago, but I’ve been fairly absent since then so I want to ask again. Is anyone working on a standard high fantasy sword & sorcery hack for Blades? Last time I asked it was merely hypothetical. Now I have a group potentially interested in playing a D&D setting but with Blades rules. If someone is already working on this, I don’t want to duplicate work, and I’d really love to see what they’ve come up with. At some point this week I’m going to tinker with some ideas for converting the standard player’s handbook classes into playbooks. I think for this hack I’d have to do away with the group playbook entirely, but I’d need something to stand in for racial modifiers instead. Anyone have other thoughts?
I’ve asked this before a few months ago, but I’ve been fairly absent since then so I want to ask again.
I’ve asked this before a few months ago, but I’ve been fairly absent since then so I want to ask again.
There is the Blades Against Darkness hack that does the dungeon crawling setting. However it’s not quite D&D as it has it’s own world with it’s own quirks, but it does strike the same general theme.
I was hoping to avoid dungeon crawls, but maybe I can port what I need out of that hack. I’ll take a look.
I’m pretty sure Blades Against Darkness is almost entirely dungeon crawl.
I’ve been slowly working and playtesting a hack of blades. It’s kind of a sword and sorcery hack, but at the same time it’s distinctly different.
I don’t have a nice clean written up version currently to share. Perhaps after my travels I can get back on track with it.
Would add that blades against darkness is also similar and worth looking at.
I’m curious how this would work. The structure of Blades in the Dark revolves around scores/missions/whatever. I could see a Dungeon Delve being the mission, and then having downtime stuff.
Would a Sword and Sorcery hack keep this basic mission based structure?
Jeremy Williams What if they were selling monster pieces for alchemy/wizards. Trip into a dungeon is the heist. Selling is the downtime. I’m still reading BitD, so I can’t elaborate much more than that unfortunately.
Sure! I totally agree that one could come up with a setting in which PCs were professional dungeoneers. IIRC there was a setting much like this, where PCs were the equivalent to reality-tv gladiators, delving into dangerous dungeons.
I just wasn’t sure whether that’s what Kyle was after, or if he was making more changes to the structure of the game.
Jeremy Williams yes and no. It looks like I’ll need to put together my own hack, and I’ve got some ideas. First, I’m calling it Blades & Bugbears. Second, I’ll have to tweak the Scores system to accommodate less curtailed “Quests.” Third, I’ll need to add races. Fourth, I want the class playbooks to have a few more options. Fifth, I still want a separate playbook for the adventuring party as a whole, but I think it needs to be less crunchy than what we have for normal Blades. The crew types would focus on why the party is adventuring out in the world–like Sellswords (straight mercenaries), Missionaries (agents of a religious institution), or Protectors (agents of the local or regional government). I’ll have to give that some more thought. Mostly the crew needs its own playbook to keep track of crew assets.
I’ve seen/used two schools of thought for this. Create a playbook for the races, and come up with a scheme for selection from it. Or just handle it with fictional positioning and let players select it during the heritage step if they care about it.
I am not sure if one is really better than the other, but I think I prefer the latter except when I want there to be specific variants thereof to rise to the surface (to show off a common difference between wood elves and high elves, for example).
Mark Cleveland Massengale I was just going to come up with simple racial abilities/bonuses and include a space in the playbook sheet to write those in. Something simple, like dwarfs get +1d to resist poison.
To be clear, the racial abilities will all be physiological or magical. Anything cultural can be addressed in character creation through heritage or profession.
Oh right: makes sense.
And to be clear, I am saying those can be fluff instead as well. You don’t have to give them “+1d to do Thing” – and in fact perhaps you shouldn’t. You might instead say “dwarves are immune to poison” and be done with it. Or that “elves are magical creatures, capable of detecting the use of supernatural power more innately than humans. This factors into effect.” rather than +1d to Cast (which is actually quite different) etc
I’m very interested in seeing what you come up with!
I’d also love to see a more traditional sword & sorcery hack ala Conan, and Fhafrd and the Gray Mouser.