Author: Adam Sexton

I listened to a man with a crime-touched youth talk about his experiences yesterday. He said something like, “At any point in my early twenties, I could’ve named about 10 people I knew as friends or acquaintances who were in currently prison.”

It gave me an idea for an easy hack of the Close Friend/Rival step in Character Creation. I think I maaaay ask my players to pick a 3rd person who they know is in Ironhook or off somewhere 8 miles away in the Deathlands, striking across the up/down arrows or filling in both or something like that. We’ll see!

It’s a subtle factor in Blades in the Dark, but I like that this game is doing what I think future games will or at least should do in encouraging the idea that players are people who have tricky schedules, social anxiety, and bad days, and that doesn’t have to weigh down the group. You can release your character to be lost in their vice for a session or have them do long-term projects or have them help the crew in flashbacks. The GM can pass their notes to someone else and make a PC. It’s fairly easy to add players, subtract players, and rearrange roles, something that several other RPGs I’ve played do not forgive so easily.

Hey y’all. This is my first post on… Google+, even? Sure.

I’m running my second campaign of Blades, and I’m about to run (currently) two groups in the same ‘consensus’ Duskwall. I only do faction clocks once for both groups: so for a random example, the Inspectors’ll be trying to pin down the smuggling routes of Fog Hounds in both groups if both tables tried to talk to them. I’m not planning for direct contact between the two crews, but more going for interesting reactions with how their actions ripple through the network. One group’s Thieves, the other’s Smugglers, and judging from how their Faction Statuses COMPLETELY contradict on 2 factions, I think they are destined to wind up competing against each other. Which is cool!

Any suggestions or comments? Has anyone else done this before? I’ve got a finger tapping on my lip for how I should handle the possibility of direct confrontations. Maybe wrapping that into entanglements or flashbacks? There’s always resistance rolls and maybe I can use the other group’s actions as some of my GM fuckery instead of making it up myself which’d be the case in other scenarios. I’m also considering what “Hold on lightly” says about rewinding and reconsidering events.

Interesting stuff, I’m prepared for it to fall to pieces and be unpleasant and terrible, and then we’ll pick up the pieces and fix it as we go along. And that’ll be okay.