So, I took the updated Empty Church scenario (based on the format by Sean Nittner) to Dragonmeet today! I was also using Andrew Shields one-shot “Gang” rules. I had a group of six (six!) that had never played Blades in the Dark before.
Well, to begin with, they all seemed to gather the rules of the game and character creation fairly easily. Next, the Gang rules were also easy for them to understand even though they had never played the actual game. Finally, the questions asked by the sheet seemed to lead to some quick and productive answers to form the shell of a scenario. So, all’s well!
I won’t go into the session because suffice to say, I got a pounding headache about thirty minutes in. I managed to survive for the whole 2+ hours and ran a session of some description, but it was not my best. But I don’t think that was the fault of the rules, whether it be Mr. Harper’s, Mr. Shield’s or my own; it was definitely my fault though. The players seemed to come out pleased but I came out with a list of things they had established prior to the mission and some of them only glazed over and with the players without actually having an answer to the question of why exactly this Spirit Warden’s body is wanted.
Anyway, here’s the updated Empty Church. I still think Mr. Nittner’s Patron/Score/Complication is much more suited to BitD, but in the event that you have a Score already in mind, Patron/Gloom/Foe (latter two very bad words which I couldn’t find alternatives for at short notice, but essentially abstract threat/physical threat) worked well.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/owp2rhzh0a8ajlc/Empty%20Church.png?dl=0
I can confirm this went very well! 🙂
Yes, I also enjoyed it. I’m sorry about the headache. Thanks for running it for such a large group, including my two children.
I think the preamble questions were good for providing fodder for the session. It’s not a problem that some of them weren’t addressed while we were busy with other things.
A good session, and thanks for running it.
Glad to hear you guys enjoyed yourself, your kids were charming Neil Smith. The headache was entirely unrelated to you guys, I just don’t deal terribly well with GMing in large, noisy rooms. And my, was that one of them.
Sounds like fun. Was it in the Games on Demand track? I was lucky, as the first to submit a game I managed to get a table in a two table room upstairs. Although the other table (A Matt Sanderson Cthulhu fest I think) did get a little excited and noisy at times, it was generally good, not too hot and stuffy.
I envy you! It was in the Indie RPGs On Demand area which was surrounded by a bunch of boardgame playtests I seem to recall.
I’d planned to run Blades in the afternoon slot but was asked to let the slot go to other GM’s as they had issues with reduced RPG play space being allocated and a surfeit of GM’s..