Crew creation: Establish your hunting grounds
The rulebook, on page 93, says:
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Your crew is brand-new, but you have chosen some small part of a district as your hunting grounds. This is the area that you usually target for your scores, and you know it well. The area is small, only three or four city blocks […].
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What do you mean with “block(s)”? How do you usually choose your hunting grounds on the Doskvol map?
I’m trying to understand how big should the hunting grounds be and how you should define them on the map.
Thanks in advance. 😉
US city blocks are around 100 yards long in their grid layout cities so I expect that is what is meant. I don’t actually worry about the size of hunting grounds just the general district of the city. The area is abstracted by the crew sheet into several claims so there is no need to specify individual places outside of the general identifier like “Lord Scurlock lives in a house in the Six Towers district”. There is no mechanical reason for defining hunting grounds on the map beyond the district your crew operates in..
Pavel Berlin, that’s what I’m trying to do: understand how other players manage hunting grounds.
I think that part of the solution is that your lair has not necessarily to be in proximity of your hunting grounds, so you can still be shadows in Crow’s Foot and steal from people in Charterhall.
Nigel Clarke, maybe you are right. In fact, I noticed that the factions on the rulebook just indicate the district but, in that case, I think it’s logical: you cannot be excessively precise about an aspect such this, which changes too much in every different game.
I keep it abstract, too. Sometimes I turn it the other way: Ok, you made out your target. Let’s make a fortune roll to see if the target is inside your current hunting ground. Yes? Take extra downtime action to preper. No? Pay coin for downtime action or go in prepared as you are now.
In earlier incarnations of the map of Duskvol some of the homes of certain people were identified but the final release doesn’t have any more than the district and not even that for the Dimmer Sisters who had a location shown as Dimmer Manor in Brightstone plus there were a number of taverns and watchstations on those earlier maps. I never precisely locate anything that isn’t shown on the map as that locks down the fiction too tightly. Does it really matter where the Shadows Loyal Fence actually is. Only who currently controls him/her is important if you are trying to take that piece of turf.
In my humble opinion, it is important to know, at least vaguely, the physical extension of the crew’s hunting grounds, since:
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When you prepare to execute an operation of your preferred type on your hunting grounds, you get +1d to any gather information rolls and a free additional downtime activity to contribute to that operation.
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I’ve run Blades for the best part of a year and never needed to know the extent of the crew’s hunting grounds. I’ve always had the crew operate on their hunting grounds period, never engaging in any fiction that put’s them outside those grounds and the crew certainly don’t go outside their usual area, or perform anything but their preferred type of operation as that’s what they do best, aside from any meta gaming preference for things that gain them experience.
When providing hooks for a score I never push them outside their hunting grounds as that would be unfair and ramp up the difficulty too much. Why in the fiction would they overreach themselves unless pushed into a very desperate situation. It’s not very much fun to be continually stressed to the max and taking Harm so frequently that crew members are having to retire very often.
I’ve come to think of it less of a ‘zone’ and more of a style or approach. I renamed it in my head as Crew Style or Crew Speciality.
Two things going on here Daniele Di Rubbo. That is, the hunting grounds is two things: a location, and a type of operations. The physical location tells us which faction controls it (so we know who they paid /or didn’t/ for permission to operate there). Whereas the hunting grounds’ operation type tells us the preferred type of work (for the bonus +1d and downtime activity).
So I just describe the districts, and they choose one for the crew’s hunting grounds; they get a few blocks in that district. I define it only so much as to give it context; “the 3 or 4 blocks of bars and eateries in Nightmarket” for example. This tells me the Wraiths (who likely control the area) are who they paid or didn’t – and gives context for scenes.
And the players’ chosen type of operation tells me whether they get the bonuses you quoted. I never need to know the location of the hunting grounds beyond at character creation and as context for the narrative.
I’ve considered the Hunting Grounds to be mostly important in terms of whose toes you’re stepping on. If you’re in Crow’s Foot, for example, you might be bothering the Lampblacks, The Red Sashes, The Crows, or some combination of the 3. For my group, I’ve defined the locations of the main streets in the district and those (and specific businesses) are a measure of territory.