May 2017 – Page 17 – Blades in the Dark G+ Archives

We finally had our third Scum & Villainy session.

We finally had our third Scum & Villainy session. Due to scheduling issues we ended up with a two-part downtime between the second and third sessions.

Second session:

– The crew arranges a rendezvous with the Yaru in Brekk to deliver the box.

– Ct. Flex decides to ignore the meeting and reach out to Hicks, an old friend of hers, to better understand the box.

– The crew lands on Indri to visit Hicks’ Shop of Curios and after a tense research learn that the box connects to an unknown reach far off in deep space, and that they’re not the first ones to carry the artifact: it already left a trail of six spaceships destroyed in its path.

– Thugs from the Cobalt Syndicate assault the show. Die and Pikey blow up the shop while Hicks helps them escape through some underground passages.

– The Stardancer darts through the automatic spaceport, dodging heavy blaster-fire by using the power of the Way. They escape, with Hicks’ shuttle attached to the landing bay.

– Pikey remembers his days of piracy to find Censer, a cove hidden in the Belt of Fire. The crew ends up pawning the rover to buy access into the hideout.

Third session: we had some last minute player drops, but my girlfriend came to the rescue like a champ, creating a weird jellyfish, hanar-like mechanic to support the scoundrel and pilot:

– Nails goes out to look for a mechanic to repair the failing jumpdrive and damaged smuggling compartment and reaches out for Triv to ask for a trusty mechanic nearby and gets a hold of Nisa, owner of the best repair shop in town.

– Pikey follows his luxurious vice and buys a beautiful, trained space-peacock in the black market. Unknown to him, the bird carries a tracking device.

– Nails get Nisa into the ship where Pikey sexes-up a discount and work-as-payment for the repairs.

– Nisa sends her best mechanic, None, a jellyfish alien she has under indentured service to repair the Stardancer. None pleads the crew to help it escape from its imprisonment.

– Nisa assigns the mission for the crew: they must recover a derelict spaceship deep in the Belt of Fire for her. Pikey convinces her to lend them None for this job, with the intent of helping it escape.

My custom form-fillable sheets have been completely updated.

My custom form-fillable sheets have been completely updated. I shuffled some stuff around, so now there’s room for veteran advances, the crew-specific gear is in the same column as the standard gear, and there’s room to add new contacts/friends/rivals/enemies/etc. I’ve done similar work on the crew sheets as well. They are available on my public Dropbox page:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/cntykz7xbpgwh88/AADEvkJC6Zgwx3S4LU7ijjOEa?dl=0

as well as my brand new website (along with the other character sheets I’ve done over the years):

http://ad1066.com/bens-character-sheets/

Share and Enjoy.

— Ben

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/cntykz7xbpgwh88/AADEvkJC6Zgwx3S4LU7ijjOEa?dl=0

Last Friday I got my copies of Blades in the Dark.

Last Friday I got my copies of Blades in the Dark. Today, I finished delivering them to my players with instructions to read The City Guide to Duskvol. We’ll see if they actually read that for me before we start our game this week.

My players just got one of them engaged to a minor noble for political reasons.

My players just got one of them engaged to a minor noble for political reasons. the catch – said player wasn’t there. He is going to find out he is engaged when the bride will swing the lair’s door and demand to know if they are the ones who burned down the local church (they where) and where her dear vampire groom is (right here, say hey!)

#Sepia

I’ve been reading the book over the past couple of days and I really like what I see.

I’ve been reading the book over the past couple of days and I really like what I see. However I do have some questions about the Incarceration section:

1) Do you only make an Incarceration Roll when a PC does a stint in jail, or also when a cohort or crewmember does? (Obviously a friend or enemy taking the fall doesn’t seem like it can generate Prison Claims for the crew).

2) What is the purpose of the Smuggling Prison Claim? What does one do with gear on the inside? The rest of the section makes it seem like you gloss over the time in jail with just the Incarceration Roll, not more fine grained scenes.

3) I’m confused about the timing of incarceration. Everything else in the book works on a Score/Downtime cycle with no mention of how long that takes. So for some games that might be running a Score every week, others may have a month or longer between notable Scores. Incarceration is measured in time though, so it isn’t clear to me how that interacts with Scores/Downtime. Is the expectation that you sit out of some number of scores if you are arrested and the player just plays a different character then? If the assumption is that we gloss over the jail time, what happens to the Downtimes of that character?

Hey guys and gals.

Hey guys and gals. I was wondering how everybody was handling animals in their games. I have a Hound player and we came up with a kind of giant salamander/feline hybrid that he called a Depth Stalker for his pet, but it was a little challenging to create a beast that fit the world.

I was wondering what kinds of creatures y’all had come up with in your games. I’m interested in Hound pets, but any kind of fauna would be fantastic.

Is there absolutely no animal life outside of the cities, do you play that ghosts only desire human life force so animals are relatively safe, or have your animals adapted to life in the Deathlands and dealing with hungry ghosts? I’d love to see what animal life populates your worlds.

Since I’m going to be running Blades as our weekly game starting this week, I wanted to check out the “People”…

Since I’m going to be running Blades as our weekly game starting this week, I wanted to check out the “People” tables to see what kind of characters I could get! I got some awesome and detailed characters when I engaged all of the tables from those fruitful pages.

However I found that the process of using all of the tables took too much time and too many dice rolls (and I did it a few times before I realized that I was getting too much detail). Since I don’t want to necessarily just roll on EVERY table for every NPC, but I like having a common starting place for the descriptions I have of NPCs (cuz that’s what inspires me), I wanted to set up some guidelines for myself so that I could get about the same kinds of information on many NPCs, quickly. So I decided to make a “template” that would give me a sketch of NPCs to use in my game. So, based on the tables found on pg 302 in the book, I made the following template:

A [2d6 Looks “description”], [2d6 Herritage ] [1d6 Looks “gender”] (optionally: with the [2d6 “… and Faction” from pg 307])

(S)He is [ 3 x 2d6 Traits ]

Prefers the application of [ 2 x 2d6 Methods ]

– Name (chosen from the name list)

This took a little tinkering, but I used this a few times and got NPCs in a timeframe that I liked and at a level of detail which I find fruitful! So, of course I want to share with you guys a sample of this template at work. The examples:

An Athletic, Dagger Islander Man.

He is Gracious, Daring, and Sophisticated.

Prefers the application of Study and Theft.

– Vellerys Slane

A Dark, Severosi Man with The Fog Hounds

He is Cold, Secretive, and Dishonest.

Prefers the application of Strategy and Violence.

– Helles “Thorn” Skora

A Young, Ambiguously gendered Akorosi with The Hive.

They are Defiant, Vicious, and Cavalier.

Prefers the application of Commerce (rolled 2xCommerce so they’re REALLY into it)

– Arvus Haig

I was able to complete these three NPCs in about 5 minutes, which is quick enough for me and gives me enough detail to start building a character on top of. I can also roll on the tables more to add further detail (which I might do to young master Haig).

So there you have it; my “quick” NPC generator template!

How have you guys been using the tables to help your games/prep?

On blow guns and zero load.

I am running a game with a leech and in another game I am a leech, and I mean I have to ask, why are blow guns zero load?

In preparing for my leech I googled blow guns, and I mean they are huge. See for details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowgun

It’s not some pan flute sized thing, its a long pipe.

So I have to ask whats with the blow gun and 0 load? Oh and what is the view of ammo, can it be anything in the bandolier? Can you load it with spark(you know the drug in your bandolier) because spark is made with electroplasm, and use it on ghosts? What about fireoil, grenades, or smoke bombs?

Are there any limitations on ammo? Is it one per bandolier slot? That sounds overly restrictive, or is it unlimited? which sounds exploitable.

Also in terms of the economy of actions how does it work, is shooting a dart one action? Or do you need to fill the dart, then load the dart, then shoot?

Im hoping someone (or even John Harper himself) can provide insight here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowgun

I finally had a chance to sit down and read BitD and I’m loving it.

I finally had a chance to sit down and read BitD and I’m loving it. Will physical copies be available for purchase in the future, or was the only way to gt it via KS?

CREATE SOMETHING BEAUTIFULBECOME SOMETHING HORRIBLE

MORTALLYBANKRUPT

June 24-25 for Roll20Con

The unleashing and unraveling of MORTALLYBANKRUPT v1 and its Roll20 sheets. I’m planning on playing and doing nothing but and sleeping for those two days, so if you want to play a game, let’s do it.