Hey folks, I’m looking to run a BitD series as a cut up for my DnD group. Trick is I’m hoping to set it in the main capital of the DnD campaign as a soft lead in to newer game types for them.
Any particular advice, or pitfalls to watch out for?
Hey folks, I’m looking to run a BitD series as a cut up for my DnD group.
Hey folks, I’m looking to run a BitD series as a cut up for my DnD group.
What? That doesn’t seem to make any sense. Duskvol IS BitD. My advice is to play the game in Duskvol and just give them a bare bones explanation of the setting. I mean, the setting shouldn’t be the hard part of switching games.
Sounds fun to me. I like building out a world by telling different stories in different corners. You could check out the Marielda season of Friends at the Table, which did almost exactly this; used Blades in the Dark for a mini-season set in their Dungeon World setting.
Note that they went to some lengths to make the fantasy city match up with Doskvol in terms of technology and themes (to an extent). I don’t know if that’s strictly necessary, but I’d at least consider things that are core to Blades like ghosts and attuning and think about what that might mean in your D&D setting.
Tim Denee Marielda was the inspiration actually. I’ll relisten to it.
I’ll dig in on Attune and ghosts. I figured demons are an easy reskin to devils. Thanks for the tip.
Pistols were a jump, but there are enough firearms in DnD I’m gonna preset that in the 5e campaign.
Blaze Azelski I suppose it’s more of a soft hack. I want to keep them invested in the world while varying games. I really wanna play Blades. A little like Friends at the Table.
Ryan Gregg Do update us on how it goes then, I’d love to know how Blades fits with the D&D setting and D&D players.
I wonder if the easiest fix might be to remove the Whisper playbook, since it’s probably the starkest contrast to D&D in terms of how magic works (and even equipment like a lightning hook).
Something else that occurs to me is the part of what makes Blades tick is that the crew is always in a pressure-cooker; due to the lightning barrier and the deathlands, escape isn’t possible. Things escalate and there’s nowhere to turn. The city is your life. Friends at the Table replicated this in Marielda with the sea of lava. You don’t have to go that far, but I think making the city a pressure-cooker in some way or another is a good idea; maybe there’s a war on and the lands around the city are occupied by the enemy, or maybe due to plague elsewhere in the kingdom the government has put a strict ban on travel into/out of the city. Something like that.
Tim Denee I was thinking of keeping the Whisper as the closest to a classic magic user, but really leaning on the 5e Warlock class for flavor.
I’m going to rework drugs for sure.
I need to go through the tech to see what I can simply reskin, and see what needs removal/rework.
The pressure. Good call. Maybe a session 0 talk? Being stuck in one place is pretty antithetical to the average DnD campaign.
I’ll look at introducing something in the base campaign.
I’m teasing a revolution, so maybe I can push a martial law style lockdown to keep players in the city walls.
Thanks a lot, Tim. You’re really helping.
One thing that makes Blades feel so Blades-y are the factions. Make sure that wherever you set things, there are folk who own it all. “The Elves own Beverly Hills, and the Orcs pretty much rule Compton. The smugglers exert a lot of influence over the beaches, esp. Huntington and Seal.” That sort of thing. If they want to operate there, there are people they will bump up against, and probably piss off.