Ran my first game of Blades on Saturday night and to my relief, it was a great success. Our group usually plays OSR/hack n slash types of games, so this was something new to everyone at the table. But the players were engaged and together we had a great time finding the story. And at least one player at the table really fell in love with the setting and will be grabbing her own copy of the hardcover.
I started us on a variation of the Bazso Baz intro in which he hired them to sneak into a party being held in the Lost District and swap a fake artifact for the real thing that would be found somewhere on the premises. They went the Deception route, snuck into the party with disguises/fake papers and things turned very Eyes Wide Shut from there on out, with a good dose of mythos-weirdness and creepy religious overtones. The Friends/Rivals setup from character creation was SO handy and easy to incorporate into all sorts of complications that were thrown at the party – I was truly blown away at how well it worked.
I really had no idea how the game would work after the initial intro as I’m used to the very traditional RPG “module/adventure” way of running things, but it worked FABULOUSLY. So much fun. I wouldn’t have been able to come up with half of the stuff on my own, and there was just a great flow and energy to everything.
Rules wise: sure, there were moments where the position/effect stuff was hard to figure out/interpret, but we’re an easy going table, so we kept things moving and can sort all that out in future plays.
It was supposed to be a one-shot, but after the game we all decided that we’ll have to revisit this world again soon.
Any highlight moments that stand out?
Nice!
I had a game go very Eyes Wide Shut too. Sounds like it was a GG
I love to hear of people trying something new and it going well first time out. You picked a good game. 🙂
Judd Karlman There were a lot of 4/5 results and more 1-3’s than 6’s, so the entire score was constantly on the verge of falling apart, in the most entertaining ways. The slide was posing as a noble to get into the party and there was some fun rping as he tried to convince the muscle at the door to allow his “bodyguard” (the cutter) to keep his sword on him (“a family heirloom”) while everyone else was frisked.
One of the players had a priestess as their unfriendly contact/rival and sure enough, she was co-hosting the party, so there was some fun impromptu disguising and hiding-in-plain-site shenanigans.
The party was being thrown by this higher up in the Church of the Ecstasy, so sure enough after totally Scooby-Dooing it and splitting up to search the mansion while avoiding staff/sketchy priests (and suffering different little mishaps and goofs), they stumbled onto one of those “museum” rooms you see in movies that the villain has with all sorts of strange pre-cataclysm artifacts.
The cutter got into a nasty fight with a guard that didn’t go well for the player, but was bloody and thematic and let us experience the resistance rules and stuff like harm.
There was some gory “spirit harnessing” that it turned out was going on at this house with the ghosts being put into these sorta golem shells (which I described as looking like the old-timey diving suits). I got to be very Cronenberg here with lots of talk of strange orifices coming out of weird artifacts ala the great Existenz.
And the finale was them trying to leave the party after swapping artifacts as they were hired to do and walking into the ballroom and having EVERYONE there staring at them wearing these grotesque masquerade masks.
Here they rolled decent and threw smoke bombs, used the hounds pet effectively, and hacked their way through the crowd to an escape. I had a clock going for something “big” that the Cardinal at the party was gonna do to them if they didn’t escape in time, but I honestly was a little shakey on the clock mechanics, so that never happened.
Ended with a scene back with Bazso Baz getting the artifact (which seems pretty sketchy and evil) and them being kinda weary of their new friendship/partnership with the Lampblacks.
It was RAD. We didn’t do downtime, but if we play again, we’ll figure all that stuff out and take it from there.