Hey peeps. – Blades in the Dark G+ Archives

So I had been running as a GM blades in the dark for about 4 months when I went to GoPlayNW with my goal to run blades in the dark in most of the sessions.

It was a hard lesson in which I learnt alot and off of which I am working on a con ready kit called Children of the Cat God.

I started not sure if it would even work and ended the con very happy and wanting to run a similar thing in the future.

Especially in the first few sessions I needed to readjust the game style to make it work in the convention setting, this post discusses what I learnt and what I found.

First lesson is use pregenerated characters and crew. More than that the crew and the characters should be existing characters who in the fiction have existed prior to the con starting in the fiction.

The players are likely going to see these characters once during the convention which means the crew and the characters should start a little bit boosted and with something interesting about them.

Crew

In blades the crew is the key mechanism of the game it establishes so much of who you are and what you are doing.

Rolling tier 0 quality sucks, so start them on tier 1, with some turf and claims, as the builder of the setting for the con use your discreation as to what to give them, however dont give them too much, I would limit it to 1 turf and 1 claim.

Additionally when picking the special ability and the crew upgrades keep in mind that these guys are only going to play one session, and how to be leavage that.

As well as the standard starting special ability and crew upgrades I strongly recomend giving th crew a cohort (based on the flavor of the setting you are building).

The most important thing when creating the crew is to also give the crew Glory incarnate or Patron. Personally I recommend glory incarnate as the individual in question needs to be powerful enough and bored enough meet the following role without threat or complication.

This individual serves as the guide/host of the convention group. The crew isn’t going to be able to decide on what score to do based on past scores like a normal game of blades would, the players just dont have that history or investment.

So to avoid asking the players each time what score are you going to do, rather you have the crew’s god and patron sumon the crew into the inner sanctum of the lair and tell the crew that their master commands they steal x, or kill y, or find z, or whatever the whims of the individual.

Additionally to reinforce the statelessness of running the score at a con I like the impact to be both meaningful and meaningless. One example is when I got the god to get the crew to steal a ancient and scared leviathan killing spear, with ancient prophecies on it. Because he wanted it as a back scratcher (something I held off revealing to the very end of the session).

This gives the temporary crew a reason to do a thing, and a guide to ease them into the world. I will say if you chose patron chose one who is stupidly powerful to the point of indolent boredom, for example the (imortal) son of the imortal emperor. So that for all intentions and purposes it is a non divine god itself.

Characters

The characters themselves are key for player engagement. As I discuss above each player will only get one shot at this, so if you dont engage them early it can fooster callousness, which in term can rob the game of it’s punch and the player from their fun.

In order to get this engagement there are a couple of useful techniques you can use. The first is the pick an interesting character to base the personallity of each character off and provide a call out to it in the description and model the character after them. This has multiple benefits, the first is the players can connect easier to the characters as a result and have a mental model of that character already in their heads.

Characters I find that work well for this are: Krieger from Archer, Ma Higgins from ducktales, Brock from Venture bros, the captain from sea lab 2021, Commander Vimes from discworld… You get the idea.

The next is I always tell the player that this character will bear the consequences of their actions the rest of the con. While I clear the character sheet of stress and harm at the start of each session, any xp they get, choices they make or skills they select will stay on the character the con.

I then tell the players that regardless of that for the next 4 (or whatever) hours it is their character, and if they dont like something (maybe the character is gay and the player wants it to be straight for example) that they are free to change it, for the next 4 hours it is their character, and then later it will be someone elses.

I found to incredibily increased peoples sense of investments leading them to run long term projects that they would never see the outcomes of, finish other peoples projects, have complicated romantic relationships with NPCs and generally completely invest in this character, which they otherwise would have treated as a throw away character.

Finnally I remembered what the players did with the characters and would tell later players stories about what that character had done earlier in the convention.

Taking these rules you need to pregenerate male and female sheet for each playbook. That way people can double up and people can chose the gender they want.

When creating the sheets I would grant 2 special abilities and would assign 6 dots to the skills, this is to again allow the characters to start with a bit more kick.

Playing the game.

I have found it is highly worth it to lamment the maps of duskvol, the charactersheets, the action breakdowns and the crew sheet. Firstly because it makes it look really good, secondly because it makes running the game so much easier. Doing so is alot easier than you’d think. You can get a lammenter for about $20 (for example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BUI5QWS/ref=asc_df_B00BUI5QWS5136292/?tag=hyprod-20&creative=394997&creativeASIN=B00BUI5QWS&linkCode=df0&hvadid=167142477999&hvpos=1o2&hvnetw=g&hvrand=12987441118919024139&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9061288&hvtargid=pla-284197699141) and the pouches to lameniate with for around $12 for a 100 (for example: https://www.amazon.com/Scotch-Laminating-11-4-Inches-100-Pack-TP3854-100/dp/B007VBXB48/ref=pd_bxgy_229_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=VAXN83KZJV4K0KWQZMJD).

Get perment markers to write on them and you can use hand sanitizer to clean them.

Then just have fun with it, you’ve done the hard work and now can enjoy guiding this band of rogues through their crazy adventures over the course of the convention.

I hope this helps, I know it is quite alot of information but believe me it is less work than you’d think and alot of fun.

Good luck

patron

glory incarnate

5 thoughts on “Hey peeps.”

Andy Owlington (The Owlington) says:

August 13, 2017 at 9:26 am

Oh, we’re going to limit the gang playbooks to Bravos, Shadows, Hawkers and Smugglers to start with. We’ll also put together a number of pre-organised heists, maybe ones that are quite quick to get through, to give the players the ability to execute a few different engagements. These will link directly to the larger clocks for the “convention” or whatever.
Ben Wright says:

August 13, 2017 at 10:38 am

There were some cool Blades games run at GoPlay from what I heard, I’m not sure what kind of prep was involved for those though. Definitely pre-make or limiting some of the initial creation stuff though will give some extra time for playing through a score and possibly hitting a downtime. (I like the idea of shooting for score/downtime/score for blades oneshots but haven’t quite figured out the pacing/ correct way to go about that yet)

gl w/ the con prep!
Ben Morgan says:

August 13, 2017 at 12:55 pm

I’ve run the game at a couple of cons so far, and plan to do so much more in the future. A couple of things I can tell you right now:

1. Don’t try to pack everything about the game into one session. If it’s going to be an intro, just focus on the basics. Drop them right into a job and let them get on with it.

2. Pregens are a must, or least partial pregens. Hand out playbooks that have action dots, special ability, background, and heritage filled in with pencil, and let the players change them if they choose. Let them pick their own name and vice, but give lots of examples of each. This will cut down on a lot of hemming and hawing at the beginning.

3. If it’s a one-shot, give them some extra toys to play with. I give everyone an additional ability, and I give the crew a couple of extra upgrades.
Luke Cartner says:

August 23, 2017 at 11:32 pm

I ran blades pretty close to every session of go play nw. Based on my experience I am currently working on a con pack for blades. I will update this post when I get home but I have a few pieces of advice around running blades at conventions.
Luke Cartner says:

August 24, 2017 at 12:40 am

So I had been running as a GM blades in the dark for about 4 months when I went to GoPlayNW with my goal to run blades in the dark in most of the sessions.

It was a hard lesson in which I learnt alot and off of which I am working on a con ready kit called Children of the Cat God.

I started not sure if it would even work and ended the con very happy and wanting to run a similar thing in the future.

Especially in the first few sessions I needed to readjust the game style to make it work in the convention setting, this post discusses what I learnt and what I found.

First lesson is use pregenerated characters and crew. More than that the crew and the characters should be existing characters who in the fiction have existed prior to the con starting in the fiction.

The players are likely going to see these characters once during the convention which means the crew and the characters should start a little bit boosted and with something interesting about them.

Crew

In blades the crew is the key mechanism of the game it establishes so much of who you are and what you are doing.

Rolling tier 0 quality sucks, so start them on tier 1, with some turf and claims, as the builder of the setting for the con use your discreation as to what to give them, however dont give them too much, I would limit it to 1 turf and 1 claim.

Additionally when picking the special ability and the crew upgrades keep in mind that these guys are only going to play one session, and how to be leavage that.

As well as the standard starting special ability and crew upgrades I strongly recomend giving th crew a cohort (based on the flavor of the setting you are building).

The most important thing when creating the crew is to also give the crew Glory incarnate or Patron. Personally I recommend glory incarnate as the individual in question needs to be powerful enough and bored enough meet the following role without threat or complication.

This individual serves as the guide/host of the convention group. The crew isn’t going to be able to decide on what score to do based on past scores like a normal game of blades would, the players just dont have that history or investment.

So to avoid asking the players each time what score are you going to do, rather you have the crew’s god and patron sumon the crew into the inner sanctum of the lair and tell the crew that their master commands they steal x, or kill y, or find z, or whatever the whims of the individual.

Additionally to reinforce the statelessness of running the score at a con I like the impact to be both meaningful and meaningless. One example is when I got the god to get the crew to steal a ancient and scared leviathan killing spear, with ancient prophecies on it. Because he wanted it as a back scratcher (something I held off revealing to the very end of the session).

This gives the temporary crew a reason to do a thing, and a guide to ease them into the world. I will say if you chose patron chose one who is stupidly powerful to the point of indolent boredom, for example the (imortal) son of the imortal emperor. So that for all intentions and purposes it is a non divine god itself.

Characters

The characters themselves are key for player engagement. As I discuss above each player will only get one shot at this, so if you dont engage them early it can fooster callousness, which in term can rob the game of it’s punch and the player from their fun.

In order to get this engagement there are a couple of useful techniques you can use. The first is the pick an interesting character to base the personallity of each character off and provide a call out to it in the description and model the character after them. This has multiple benefits, the first is the players can connect easier to the characters as a result and have a mental model of that character already in their heads.

Characters I find that work well for this are: Krieger from Archer, Ma Higgins from ducktales, Brock from Venture bros, the captain from sea lab 2021, Commander Vimes from discworld… You get the idea.

The next is I always tell the player that this character will bear the consequences of their actions the rest of the con. While I clear the character sheet of stress and harm at the start of each session, any xp they get, choices they make or skills they select will stay on the character the con.

I then tell the players that regardless of that for the next 4 (or whatever) hours it is their character, and if they dont like something (maybe the character is gay and the player wants it to be straight for example) that they are free to change it, for the next 4 hours it is their character, and then later it will be someone elses.

I found to incredibily increased peoples sense of investments leading them to run long term projects that they would never see the outcomes of, finish other peoples projects, have complicated romantic relationships with NPCs and generally completely invest in this character, which they otherwise would have treated as a throw away character.

Finnally I remembered what the players did with the characters and would tell later players stories about what that character had done earlier in the convention.

Taking these rules you need to pregenerate male and female sheet for each playbook. That way people can double up and people can chose the gender they want.

When creating the sheets I would grant 2 special abilities and would assign 6 dots to the skills, this is to again allow the characters to start with a bit more kick.

Playing the game.

I have found it is highly worth it to lamment the maps of duskvol, the charactersheets, the action breakdowns and the crew sheet. Firstly because it makes it look really good, secondly because it makes running the game so much easier. Doing so is alot easier than you’d think. You can get a lammenter for about $20 (for example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BUI5QWS/ref=asc_df_B00BUI5QWS5136292/?tag=hyprod-20&creative=394997&creativeASIN=B00BUI5QWS&linkCode=df0&hvadid=167142477999&hvpos=1o2&hvnetw=g&hvrand=12987441118919024139&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9061288&hvtargid=pla-284197699141) and the pouches to lameniate with for around $12 for a 100 (for example: https://www.amazon.com/Scotch-Laminating-11-4-Inches-100-Pack-TP3854-100/dp/B007VBXB48/ref=pd_bxgy_229_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=VAXN83KZJV4K0KWQZMJD).

Get perment markers to write on them and you can use hand sanitizer to clean them.

Then just have fun with it, you’ve done the hard work and now can enjoy guiding this band of rogues through their crazy adventures over the course of the convention.

I hope this helps, I know it is quite alot of information but believe me it is less work than you’d think and alot of fun.

Good luck

patron

glory incarnate

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