I’ve been thinking about this question for a while and I can’t put my finger on it.
Why do people like Doskvol?
First of all, don’t get me wrong, I adore this setting just as much as I adore the system it was built for. But I can’t quite grasp why.
The Blades-verse is incredibly complex and defies simple description. It’s like industrial fantasypunk but not really steampunk, and there are ghosts, but not ghosts like we think of them, and big demon whales that kind of aren’t whales have electrical blood, and it’s always nighttime, and no one has any answers.
It’s not simple or elegant. It’s complex and weird and busy, and it’s not something I’d imagine new people would be able to get super into without reading the book. But they do!
Every time I’ve introduced a new player to the system, they’ve immediately fallen in love with the setting, just like I did, just like you (presumably) did.
What makes this setting so alluring? The way it meshes with the system? The way it demands you to define your own lore? The fact that since there are a million weird things going on at once, you’re sure to find something cool (which ties in to the excellent faction game)?
I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this.
It is dark, mysterious, and open to interpretation.
It is fantasy, but not Tolkien/DnD. It is weird, yet coherent.
For me, it’s the fact that it’s a gigantic city (fantasy or otherwise), with a long list of competing factions all vying for control, and the PCs are in a position to influence that.
Years ago, when Planescape first came out, I was really intrigued by the city of Sigil as a campaign setting. The whole idea of hidden portals to various outer planes was actually the least interesting feature of the setting to me.
It’s weird (in a cool way), unique, thought-out enough to give people springboards for ideas but still has enough blanks for people to fill them in with said ideas, and has enough familiar tags (humans, industry, etc) that it’s easy to identify with.
I like all of these theories. To synthesize, it sounds like all these elements of familiarity in Doskvol all tend to have a weird twist but are otherwise completely open to interpretation. That means that people are intrigued enough to get the creative wheels turning in their heads and the setting just says “Yes, whatever you say is right.”
This is a tiny bit off topic but …
There’s a thing that I don’t think is talked about enough (and I may have to write a bit on this) but one of the parts of blades that isn’t 100% clear is that it can’t exist in a vacuum.
You don’t know if something is risky, unless you understand how risk is calculated. We can figure out if swinging a sword at someone is dangerous. But is tackling a ghost zero effect? Risky? Desparate?
So you need a setting. Most of the hacks I see fall down on the “assumed” setting or generic fiction of type X which isn’t enough to establish this sort of thing. And what makes blades compelling is that it has enough set, and enough fixed that you’re not floating in that sort of question space, but it gives you enough to play with.
Also it leaves a bunch of things unanswered, so that you can either project your own answers and make the setting your own, but mostly makes it feel bigger than just doskvol and your own issues, makes it feel “lived in”.
Stras Acimovic That’s a great point! The setting provides context, which is entirely necessary when fictional positioning plays into every roll. I’ve struggled with this when hacking the game myself. Thanks for expressing it so clearly!
It has a lot of hooks for player-driven gameplay.