9 thoughts on “Planning a one shot of Blades soon. Does anyone have any advice or resources?”

  5. I did a oneshot recently, and even tho I intend on running a regular campaign with the same players in the future (and so was using the session more as a tutorial), I wish I wouldn’t have included Crew creation. I think the standard advice is to not use the Crew, so 1.) let me reinforce that – keep it to Scoundrels, and 2.) I wish I would have just started the session with the score planning/engagement roll. Because the game just takes wing from there.

    We “wasted” (don’t get me wrong it was good rp and good worldbuilding, but for a oneshot, show off the core of the game and that’s the Score) a good hour and a half in initial Freeplay and information gathering. Bugger all that for a oneshot. The Score is where it’s at.

  6. I’ve run the same scenario twice and I’ve been pretty happy with the structure, although the score itself could easily be changed as desired. It starts more railroaded than a normal session 1 but that’s so you can get to the action as quickly as possible My structure goes like this:

    1. Provide playbooks with pre-filled abilities and action ratings, have the players look over them and each pick one.

    Also a good time to introduce the city of Duskwall, the concepts and themes of the setting, etc.

    2. They’re entering Bazso Baz’s office. He places a locked box on his desk. They’re here because they heard the lampblacks had a big score on the their hands and the PCs want in.

    Ask them leading questions about the situation – both times time I had a Spider, and I asked how they arranged the meeting. Ask the Slide how they got Bazso’s bodyguards out of the room (and roll to see if they got all, some, or none to leave). The most important things are to push them to have flashbacks, use their equipment and contacts, and to roll their actions to either convince Bazso to hire them, or acquire the lockbox. The scene can be as short or long as it needs to be, as long as they get the idea of what action ratings are used for and how much they can do without planning ahead.

    3. Once they have the job (or the lockbox) give them a payoff and downtime. At that point let them change their action ratings and special abilities however they like, or just erase them and start from scratch. The lockbox contained a coded journal leading to the score – decoding it is a long term project, and if they complete it with downtime actions left they can use those actions to gather information on the score (now that they know where it is), otherwise they get that information at the end of downtime and have to gather information in free play. If they stole the lockbox, opening it is another LTP that must be completed before decoding it.

    This is the part I’m least satisfied with because most of the downtime activities are not applicable to the one-shot, and in the second game the group successfully negotiated with Bazso without getting any injuries or much stress to recover from. In that case, 2 actions each is too many and I’d give them one each and a shorter decoding clock (in that case it was 8 actions and 8 segments, 4 actions and 4 segments should be fine too).

    However, I was happy with the way they were decoding the journal, as it got them thinking about their abilities and their contacts, where their characters hang out in Duskwall and who they can ask for help.

    4. Plan and run the score as normal. By this point they should be familiar with their characters, with Duskwall, and with how much they can leave to “after the fact” planning with flashbacks and equipment.

    In my case, I had a specific set of ideas for a leviathan hunter’s journal that was buried in the basement of a house in Night Market, which Bazso was planning to sell to a rival leviathan hunter. It was stolen by a Wraith, who then hid and died in the foundation of the house, and the coded journal is from a surviving Wraith that witnessed it but couldn’t come back to retrieve the loot.

    Alternatively, to tie it further into the “war in Crow’s Foot” story, the coded journal could be from a red sash, detailing the location of their stash of coin.

  7. Thank you Thomas Berton​, Aaron Berger​, Sean Nittner​, Marcus M​, and David Johnson​. This community rocks. Excellent advice and resources.

    Paddy Valdyr​, it’s a local game, but if I ever run one online, I’ll let you know.

Comments are closed.