1. Is someone (basically) already working on this?

23 thoughts on “1. Is someone (basically) already working on this?”

1. its not exactly ‘new world’ themed. but i have been working on something with pretty much those exact crew types.

   welcome GoD: https://goo.gl/i6pV9L

2. Im torn, i want to say im really not keen on the ‘subdue the natives, spread the faith’ bit (certainly blades has an anti-hero vibe, but there’s a point of no return you want to be careful of), but the idea of seedy trade deals and company backstabbing and securing funding for ships and looting temples and whathaveyou, certainly has promise. But its a short post, im not trying to paint your idea where it may not be heading

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4. I hear you, Greg Barnsdale, and I’m not so smug as to think my amateur writing skills are good enough to thread that needle.

   The idea was not originally so starkly “colonial.” It’s based on D&D game I ran for a while, where the characters were agents of a new trade city on a new continent. Establishing contact with the swamp dwelling halflings to secure their rice, while trade with the goblins lead to the (somewhat unwanted) formation of a goblin tent town outside the walls of the city.

   I’m not sure where the idea is going yet exactly, but I’m aware of how horribly wrong it could go.

5. I’ll take a look Manuel Fischer

   I assumed that, if the idea didn’t suck, someone was already doing it. My first instinct for a hack is usually cyberpunk, but of course that’s being done at least 8 different ways already.

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7. At the same time. I keep thinking of things like Alexander’s conquest and the expansion of Rome, and how much I’d like a game that focuses on the “frontier” element of those stories.

   Anyway.. I’m gonna write some stuff, and let you all tell me if it’s worth pursuing further.

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9. Regarding the difficulty of the “conquering the land” bit, if you lean into that and deal with it carefully, it might work. A core part of Doskvol is that everything is owned by somebody (and when yiou think about it, that’s a pretty important bit of how the Blads design works). Why not carrry that into your idea? Instead of this “new world” being a terra nullius sparsely inhabited with hapless “natives” for you to conquer, its an already thriving, complex society that your group and their associates happen to be newcomers too. That way, when they try to conquer shit, they anger people, upset balances and cause trouble, which leads to fun play and (hopefully, if done carefully) avoids trivializing the actual, real-world history of colonization.

   It also might give you the possibilty of having a crew type who were already from here and now have to deal with these newcomers fucking everything up.

10. Not that race or colonialism should not appear in a game, right players, right story, could be excellent, but its a touchy one. You could hit nerves if you dont handle it right.

    Also, show called Frontier. Jason Momoa, hudson bay company, fur trade, colonial canada, might be worth some watching

11. Travis Heldibridle I’m toying with a hack (based on a pre-existing idea) called “Caravan”, which has some similarities to your concept. Mine is set in a fantasy world where the wilderness is “alive” and reconfigures itself from time to time (making journeys between cities extremely perilous.

    Still working out what the faction equivalents will be, but I’m thinking there will be some that are local to cities, and others that are powers in the wilderness, like the Elf Lords of the Great Forest or the Lich King’s Army.

    We should share/discuss ideas.

12. I’ve only read through the book once and haven’t had a chance to play yet, so I could be way off base…

    I thought the idea behind the “contained” nature of Duskvol was because you can’t just leave. Heat rises and there’s someone looking for you around every corner. I think that tension would be diminished if, after every score, you just went on to the next town.

13. Brian Holland But if you could move on, so could those chasing you. How fast will they catch up? How bad do they want you? Will you have time for a new score before the law, or bounty hunters, or assassins show up. Its a different tension, but tension nonetheless.

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15. Brian Holland, I agree it’s a key element of the setting, which is why my eye landed on it as a potential place to pull at the seams of the game.

    This would be a hack, so those mechanics would not be included, be replaced with something else , be changed to fit the fiction, or be given fiction to support their continued use.

    I’m not envisioning this game having more than one small town (to start), actually. It’ll be a place of relative safety for most crews though. The ideal location for downtime.

    “Scores” would be replaced with excursions into the wilderness of the new world. In this game, it’d be what you do outside of town that generates the heat.

16. Greg Barnsdale , I had a 10 hour drive today and lots of time to consider this. I was thinking too big in my first post. My making the crew responsible for the colonization, they are forced to participate and condone every bit of it.

    Bad things happen in Duskvol (e.g. human trafficking), but crews have some say in how involved they are in that side of things or if they even agree with it.

    Colonialism is a backdrop here, and stands in for things that make Duskvol so depressing. The players shouldn’t be forced to be the ones doing (or even condoning) it though.

    I much more enjoy the idea of them as trading companies and other profiteers seeking to exploit the new world, while getting to explore the nature of their relationships with the factions of both the old and new.

17. Travis Heldibridle​ so how do we save it, how do refocus the idea? Im glad you took my post with some thought but i dont want to kill your jam, i liked a good part of it.

    A thought, what if you’re crews and explorers are reclaiming something that was lost or changed after a magical disaster? Adds that element of distance and fantasy, mix familiar with new, still claim and explore?

    Dont cash out your idea sir, please, im not here to poop on anyone, i just thought id be remiss if i didnt speak up

18. Greg Barnsdale I think this is a good change actually, and more in line with the kind of game blades already excels at..

    You could still play the bastard ruffians going to war with the current residents to take their stuff, force them out, or convert them.. if that’s what your group really wants from the game. You’re just doing that to gain the favor of old world factions instead of being the old world.

    Instead of being Alexander himself, you’re a group of mercenaries in his army. That’s honestly closer to what I wanted originally from this.

    I’ll be home on Monday. I’ll start writing then and see what we have.

19. So, and i might be confusing this, you’re newcomers to the old empire? Like the arrow is reversed from before, instead of exploring new territory, you’re claiming or reclaiming old territory? Interesting. What set the change in motion, that gave these new-comer merc trouble-makers room to move in the established order? I like it, i like the flip, it still sticks with the daring rogues sort of idea. But what other twists does the setting bring?

20. Nope. Same arrow as before. You’re working in the new world (ostensibly to gain fame and fortune in the old). The only real shift is that instead of the free agency, and some responsibility for the progress of colonialism my first post hinted at, you are more caught in the middle of the two worlds.

    You might totally be the colonial soldier, but you may also be the fur trader who finds they have more in common with the locals than you do the old world? You might even be the buccaneers, stealing from both sides and pissing everyone off for personal gain.

    LoL, I hope I’m making some sense here. Typing this on a phone in Starbucks. 😉

21. Saul Alexander has some ideas above on how this might work in an existing land.

    I’m personally kind of stuck in the hex crawl and exploration as a valid “score” type.

22. Travis Heldibridle​ I’m interested, looking forward to seeing what you put together, ill stop rustling your jimmies for abit 😉

23. Yeah, I’m also working on a “Blades on the Frontier.” I’ve had a lot of the same thoughts shared above. The concept definitely strays a bit from some of the default assumptions of the base game, so it’s been a good game design activity to work through those assumptions.

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