I’ve been GMing BitD at the local FLGS (acronyms ahoy!) and I’ve questions about the match-ups between Scoundrel, Crew, and Score. Some match-ups are obvious:
Cutter, Bravos, Assault
Lurk, Shadows, Stealth
Cutter/Lurk, Assassins, Assault/Stealth
Whisper, Cult, Occult
Slide/Spider, Shadows, Deception/Social
Smugglers isn’t an obvious pairing with any of the Scoundrel playbooks but it’s clearly matched with one of the Score plans, Transport.
What Scoundrels and Score are best suited for Hawkers? The business of dealing illicit drugs makes me think of a workshop management game more than it makes me think of BitD-style harrowing action. My group is using the Hawkers playbook and we’re telling a story we all enjoy, but I think that’s in spite of the playbook.
Is it just the case that the Hawkers playbook is a less obvious fit for the available Scores, that a story about Hawkers requires more finagling than another Crew? Am I missing something?
Even though there are clear match-ups between certain playbooks and crew types, I try to de-emphasise that connection. Mostly because I want every player to feel valuable to the crew, not just the star-playbooks. Also, I think it’s more fun to keep an open mind to all sorts of scores for all crew types (not just street-fights for bravos, not just thieving for shadows, etc).
To that end, the Hawkers playbook is a great example of that approach because, as you say, the “core business” of the crew can’t be what’s on screen. Which is great! An iconic touchstone for hawkers is the Barksdale gang in the Wire, and when I think back to the Wire the most interesting Barksdale activities aren’t handing over drugs for money, they’re all the work the gang does to facilitate their trade; gun fights to gain corners from other gangs, Stringer Bell’s political wheeling and dealing, etc etc. Their “crew type” provides a stage and backdrop but their on-screen activities are diverse and interesting action.
I think you could also say the same about the Peaky Blinders; they’re probably hawkers (hawking gambling), but those activities are just a motivation and backdrop for a whole variety of on-screen action (very little of which involves taking bets and collecting money).
Yep, what Tim said. 🙂
I would also agree with Tim. But I do think that along the same lines you were thinking, the Slide is a good fit for Hawkers, and the Spider fits well with Smugglers. Ive ran a Shadows crew, a Assassins crew, and a Bravos crew and have seen a bunch of different combos within those. Blades is darn flexible by design, so jump on that as an opportunity to break expectations a bit.
Thanks for the responses everyone! I hear you loud and clear about scrapping expectations. Our Hawkers deal in poisons (“and other alchemicals”), but the adventure so far has been split between possessed prostitute friends and a brewing war with the Rail Jacks (of all factions!). From a design perspective, I expected Crews to be the primary narrative fuel but these stories are all spun off from individual character backstories. It’s been a great surprise!
It’s good to hear that the business of Hawking is essentially designed to take place off camera. This game is made with such obvious intentionality that I worried I was missing something! But this setup–where some Crews are no-brainers for multiple Scoundrels and Scores and some others are more open-ended in their application–is a cool thing to include in the game. In a way, it provides a menu of narrative difficulty settings.
I’ve recently started a game with a crew of Smugglers and struggled at first to think of Scores about moving goods… some good advice on this community and a few sessions in they have yet to do an actual “smuggling” score – so far they’ve lifted a consignment of someone else’s narcotics (and framed their rivals), chased off an up and coming gang of bravos and stolen their turf, and stolen a crate of guns from the military. The next score IS moving the guns to their buyer but really you’ll find the type of score can be almost anything for any crew.
Finn Cullen I kind of feel like Smugglers either need to make runs out into the Deathlands, ride the rails to Whitehollow or Wintercliff, or get on a ship and cross the Void Sea. Not every score, but often enough to actually be smugglers. (Just selling stuff in Doskvol is Hawkers. Stealing other people’s stuff is Shadows, really.)
In my headcanon, there are totally rebel/bandit settlements out in the Deathlands, like Mad Max. Their lives suck, but they don’t kneel to the Emperor. It is, of course, illegal to trade with them. Enter Smugglers.
Technically, if you want to be Smugglers without leaving Doskvol, you could set up a business smuggling in or out of Ironhook (Freedom 35!). I’m not exactly sure how you keep that one from becoming repetitive, but I’m sure it could be done.
colin roald I like the idea of smuggling things into and out of the city but I think there’s plenty of room for smuggling within the city too. Every other Crew will have a moment when they need to transport something shady from one district to another. They can do the transporting, but it’s the specialty of the Smugglers.
colin roald The crew type doesn’t really define the scores. Like Tim Denee said earlier the “Peaky Blinders” are pretty much Hawkers but their exploits didn’t focus on that. Moving stuff around inside Doskvol is plenty challenging enough to justify the name Smuggler, not that I don’t intend to send them out and about from time to time.
Eli O’Sullivan Kurtz Absolutely – the very next score my players are getting up to, now that they’ve lifted some guns from the military, is to sneak them into the locked down workers areas of Coalridge to supply The Lost and aid them in their battle against the bosses and the dreaded “Rope Ends” hired to keep the working man down. They also offer a discreet “getting people past the Bluecoats discreetly” service.
Finn Cullen I’ve been squawking elsewhere about how badly I want to run a pro-workers/revolutionary game in Blades. Sounds like you’re having a great time!
Eli O’Sullivan Kurtz I really am – only three sessions in, but the bloody game just generates ideas and complications without even trying. We just got finished watching the magnificent “Peaky Blinders” so I think that helped get into the right mindset, and my player characters are all enjoying the opportunity to be devious bastards. I hope to play up the Coalridge struggle more as the campaign goes on, but it really does depend how they team want to take it (though being an equally devious bastard myself I made sure the member of the Lost who approached the team for help was an old war comrade who’d served in the same regiment as the three PCs during the siege of Krusskeim. Now his cause is their cause in a way it wouldn’t have been if a generic patron turned up)
Finn Cullen I did say, “not every score, but often enough to actually be smugglers.” I just mean, as a player I’d be disappointed if we took Smugglers and then only did the same things we would as any other crew type. The crew type doesn’t limit the type of score—you can still fight for turf or steal drugs or whatever if you want—but, if nothing else, you get XP for different things. Presumably the players picked them because they want to do those things (“execute a smuggling operation or acquire new clients or contraband sources”).
I’m not saying you couldn’t run Duskwall as the kind of place where moving from district to district feels like smuggling. That’s not how I take it mostly, but that’s probably a matter of interpretation. (I could definitely see it for getting on and off Whitecrown Island, and locked-down blocks in Coalridge sound cool, too.)
colin roald The players are the ones to determine what scores are run, so if you are feeling like you want an actual smuggling score, propose a plan to the group. At least for my group the only time i have given my crews a score is for the first session, or if they intentionally go ask an NPC for work in which case that would be a good time for the GM to give a job that fits with the type of crew you are known to be.
colin roald All good points and I’m certainly not saying you’re wrong – the crew are choosing what their scores are though, they’re emerging from the opportunities I put in them and they decide what to do. When I tipped them off about the Red Sashes’ narcotic delivery in my opening episode (or Baszo tipped them off) I half imagined they would take possession of them and then run a smuggling type score to get them to a safe storage… instead THEY chose to play both factions against each other and frame a third group. When they want to head out of the city I’ll be more than happy to encourage them.
Finn Cullen Players. Whatcha gonna do.
(I don’t know what your group is like, but sometimes mine get hypnotized into following whatever plot thread was most recently mentioned, without really thinking about whether it’s even what they want to do. Throwing out a straight up, “you guys are smugglers, right? What do you smuggle, anyway?” kind of GM question-of-curiosity sometimes helps a lot.)
colin roald They really keep me on my toes. We’ve established that they have a few routes and commodities that they move just in the background, not as “on-camera” scores – at the moment their goal is to take advantage of the chaos in Crowsfoot to make more of a name for themselves, and win some turf and influence. I think I’ll have to be the one keeping up with their plot threads rather than the other way around, which suits me just fine.
Perhaps you could incentivize cohort use. I have been tinkering with giving each character cohort focused on the “work” of the gang & giving them an extra “cohort action” during downtime. The characters give cohorts tasks to accomplish behind the scenes (like getting more product, smuggling lower value things, selling product, researching better variations of the product, etc). Players roll for success / failure. since most rolls lead to a consequence, it provides a natural way to add heat & introduce new scores to pick up the pieces from their cohorts messes.
I know this is exactly what cohorts are intended for. The only thing that I did differently was to give each player their own cohort and add the extra downtime phase to force/encourage cohort use. It feeds into their story very well.