Has anyone done a Planescape / Blades in the Dark mash up? It could be a fairly easy conversion:- BitD playbooks and crews as written. Use Planescape’s factions. Everyone starts with a Vice related to their alignment. Or would one of the upcoming settings, like blades against the dark, do a better job?
Has anyone done a Planescape / Blades in the Dark mash up?
Has anyone done a Planescape / Blades in the Dark mash up?
Seems like the place to start would be the faction list and the turf map. Maybe the place to end too! I also recommend checking out Sig, a recent multiplanar fantasy city setting by Jason Pitre. I think it might be as or even more interesting from a Blades perspective.
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I never played actual honest to god Planescape, but I would straight up steal the map from J Walton’s Dark Heart of the Dreamer, which is basically Planescape for Dungeon World. I’d steal its map, and all of its D6-based tables and ideas and just run all of that with BitD playbooks and crews. It has some named factions, and there’s a few others in On a wintry plane, a freebooter so I’d steal from those and ad lib the rest.
Alfred Rudzki yeah I’d totally use the City of Dis.
I think I’ll definitely use Dark Heart of the Dreamer (such an excellent little book), and I’ll also have a look at Sig. But the draw card for our group of nostalgic gamers is revisiting Planescape, but with a new game system that suits our current playstyle.
Speaking of Planescape, there’s an OSR sale right now on DTRPG that has the Planescape core set and some of the splatbooks in a bundle. May be of interest, and now the idea of Blades in the City of Doors intrigues me.
Played in a Sigil/Blades game in February at Revelation, a PbtA only con in the UK. Paul Mitchener ran the game but I don’t know how much work he did outside some Factions and a bit of background.
Hey Paul Mitchener, any pointers on running Planescape with Blades, if you have the chance?
Dan Hall, it was quite a light hack for “Blades of Sigil”. Same playbooks and crews. My changes were:
Any Move involving ghosts changed to one involving portals, or magical outer planar creatures in general.
Channeling was generic magic rather than involving the ghost field.
The places of origin, rather than the nations in the book, were Outlands, Sigil, The Prime, Upper Planes, and Lower Planes.
The fun bit was coming up with a list of factions. I used some of the Factions in the Planescape sense, and for lower powered stuff some groups within factions and a couple of organisations from various Planescape books. So I used The Harmonium, The Athar, The Dustmen and some but not all others. I also used the Planar Trade Consortium, the Temple of the Abyss, the Tacharim, the Will of One. I also gave each group one or two “faces”; NPCs the player characters deal with as enemies or with offers of missions.
I came up with a bunch of sample missions; just an outline with one sentence of what was involved and a bullet point list of three things needing doing. For example, stealing a specific memory from the Sensorium in the Civic Festhall, or raiding a Planar Trade Consortium caravan.
My prep amounted to two pages with NPCs, two pages of Factions, and two pages of missions, and one page of rules shifts. That was enough for a two session convention game.
Tl;dr: no rules changes apart from Channeling and Ghosts. But some flavour changes, and statting out a list of factions you want in play, which include some Planescape Factions but aren’t limited to those.
The result felt like Planescape, but didn’t feel much like a D&D universe game. I guess to get something more D&Dish, you might want to add in racial backgrounds and maybe Moves, but that becomes much more work. And I liked my result in the end.
Thank you Paul Mitchener! I really appreciate your insights. The ghost – planar/portal conversion sounds good. Factions sound great. I’m still thinking about race etc also. Probably one of the harder things to convey with Blades. Thanks again for the assist!
Given how minimal species ends up being for characters high level enough to make a go of it in Sigil you could just have someone circle their species and give it no further effect.
Jason Corley yeh, fair enough. Maybe circle species, and also fill in a relevant action dot… That’s when I’m at, at the moment anyway.
I’ve remembered one other change I made. No healing clocks; complete healing is available as a single downtime activity, because D&D priests and healing spells.