I’ve been an avid promoter of Blades in the Dark since the early draft/playtest rules and have run it many times…

I’ve been an avid promoter of Blades in the Dark since the early draft/playtest rules and have run it many times both as a one shot and in some short campaigns. I recently acquired the hard copy of Scum and Villainy for running scoundrels in space. Our local group has been playing a Traveller campaign for about a year on Friday evenings and on being asked to run something at Consquences (a local UK LARP convention) immediately though of running S&V as a low/no prep game in the Saturday evening slot.

My first impressions on going over the playsheets, handouts and GM ref sheets was Wow! The amount of effort that has gone into providing four planetary systems with places and people as a default background for running jobs is wonderful. In the usual Blades style a number of factions are predefined to give the GM plenty of ideas for some interaction between the characters and potential allies and enemies.

One of the players was a long time Traveller fan, one who had played Blades before and one who had experience, but not necessarily with Traveller or PbtA games. I quickly covered chargen and we got down to playing. They choose the Firedrake option and we immediately went into the Escaping from Prison opening sequence. This was very much a Blake’s 7 moment for all of us with distinct memories of the second episode of the series. Having escaped and recovered their ship the team did a short downtime session and started the first real Job.

The Heat and Wanted mechanism having been adjusted for the new setting was extremely well thought out and worked extremely well in practice with the 8 points of Heat swiftly disposed of by heading for a different system. The players checked out the Factions they had gained favour with and settled on the base of one of those as the location for their escape destination.

I shall make up a set of three booklets containing the information about the various Factions to hand out to players in future as that will definitely make it easier for p[ayers to know who and what to work for or against.

I really liked the new Gambit mechanism whereby the characters get extra dice allowing for up to 3 bonus dice on any roll where they can spend those Gambit dice. I’m tempted to take a run at doing the planetary systems from Firefly and run it as a Serenity game at a con sometime, I know there’ll be a load of interest from other Browncoats.