I’m, uhh, planning to build a Blades in the Dark hack called Ravens where the protagonists are politicians vying for power for their parties in a (parliamentary?) democracy.
The whole thing is going to be a pretty heavy edit. There are a number of reasons for this, but the primary is that my general mode of play is play-by-post. BitD has a lot of moving parts that we’ve found don’t translate well to the PbP paradigm (games move slowly, and people forget about some of the things, for example).
Instead, I want the focus to be on narrative, fiction, inter-player power struggles and character development, so the whole environment will be more free-form.
Yes, I’m going to be running this by play-by-post, and yes, it’d be swell if I could have some playtesters / co-conspirators.
I was going to wait for the SRD, but I’m not going to – I’m going to get started.
Colour me intrigued, what sort of setting are we talking about?
Well, I’m British, so the British parliamentary system is what I’m most familiar with. I’d like it to be broadly setting-free, viz-a-viz Fate, Spark, Noirlandia, but generally realistic over fantastic.
Ooooooh. I like it very much!
EDIT: Meaning I would be willing to volunteer for any playtests.
This whole concept is bouncing around in my head, refusing to die. It’s massively pre-alpha, and I don’t have access to an RL group. So my choices are: give all the game’s gory details to someone else, to inflict a playtest on their group, or go for PbP, which is usually not great for BitD, but may be better for Ravens.
If you are interested, have a look at tavern-keeper.com – TavernKeeper where I’ll be hosting the rules/setting wikis, the discussions on the ruleset, and some alpha stage playtesting when we get that far.
Volunteers and playtesters will receive my undying appreciation. UNDYING.
So, two updates: I realised that it’s a Parliament of Owls, not Ravens, so it’s temporarily called Owls (TBC).
Also, for the sake of playtesting, I’ll be putting a setting together, which’ll be something like a fictional post-dictatorial island in Latin America. Think Tropico meets, umm, House of Cards?
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There’s another post about this with some extra comments. The system is coming together gradually – right now, it’s a lot of defaulting to BitD baseline, but ideas are coming out of the woodwork.