How do the GMs out there prep for blades?

How do the GMs out there prep for blades?

How do the GMs out there prep for blades?

I’ve started experimenting with quick ‘n dirty prep for Blades to help make the city feel more alive. Aside from jotting down a few names and descriptions of people & buildings, the main thing I’ve started doing is giving the factions I find interesting secret clocks to roll between sessions.

Right now, for instance, The Spirit Wardens are tracking down the spirit well under one of my PCs ancestral home. Also their crew of leg-breakers, The Black Derbies, are starting to take over new turf and establish themselves as a gang in their own right. And finally the Iruvian Consulate is sorting out who in their ranks is a mole for the Skovlans.

I’ve found this gives me plenty of stuff to set the table, but nothing I’m overly worried about the players ignoring. As clocks start to count down I make sure they know something’s up with the faction in question – rumors and newspaper articles, etc. It also really helps when something like complication rolls give me something I’m not ready for.

I’d be interested in knowing how other GMs have started to prep for Blades games though! It feels like a totally different beast from other games I’ve been running.

18 thoughts on “How do the GMs out there prep for blades?”

  1. I roll the clocks for every faction that the PCs managed to put on the faction sheet. So as of now that’s about 6 to 8. Usually 1 or 2 of them tick over giving me lots to work with. I do this before hand and prep some scenery, encounters, or tags to use either during a heist or better, downtime. If the clocks correspond to entanglement rolls I’ll tie them in as well.

  2. I don’t do much pre-game prep as the players will inevitably go off at a tangent anyway.

    I might roll up buildings and street scene info for a particular location but that’s about it. Between sessions I adjust the clocks that are running mostly by fiat rather than using a die or two.

  3. Everything in my game has an index card, and if I’m not already primed, I draw two of them as a prompt to figure out what’s happening between those two elements.

  6. The box is not within reach, but off the top of my head:

    * Every PC

    * Every Current Clock

    * Every Faction that has a Relationship with the gang

    * Every named NPC (starting with the ones on the character’s sheets, then adding through play)

    * Other random crap, like places or rumors, that comes up in play.

    The ones I get fancy about have pictures attached to them and nice looking notes, but mostly I just scrawl on them (Since their actual purpose is to be spread out in front of my as I GM)

    I should note: Not every draw is a winner. If I pull two PCs, that’s kind of a dud pull, for example. But conveniently, I can just do it again.

  9. Rob Donoghue

    Given my love of random tables and oracles for GMing I can’t believe I never thought of using simple index cards for that stuff, so thanks for sharing.

  11. I think about what’s going on in the world, and how it might react to the PCs actions. Then I pick two to four named NPCs to be “bearers of bad news”, and frame scenes of the NPCs informing the PCs of these developments. I usually also have one scene based around the entanglement rolled in the previous session. Four out of five times, this is sufficient for players to come up with a score.

  12. I was about to say that my kit is mostly index cards & sharpies, but then i realized I do have a few edge case items I tote along that may be worth writing up. Ok, writeup pending.

  13. Hey Rob Donoghue, have you ever heard of a game called Fate? It seems that a lot of your prep for Blades is similar to what you might do for a Fate Game 😉

    Top stuff mate, thanks for sharing.

  15. I do mostly the same, depending on the game. I’ll roll for each faction that matters in the story to see how much they progress on their clocks, and that may colour how I introduce the next session if something major goes down.

    In my current game I’m GMing a group of Shadows being employed by the Ministry, and they receive orders through coded messages in the Doskvol broadsheet, so I spend some time thinking about what the headlines will be, to reflect what the crew has been up to and what’s happening in the city that I think is relevant to them.

    Most importantly I’ll plan what the first scene is. Maybe it’s a result of the crew’s entanglements from last time, or a clock that got filled, or maybe the crew is ready to do a score. Whatever it is I’ll set something in motion so we can hit the ground running. Usually that’s all the players need to get going and we’re off to the races.

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