Author: Andrew Shields

One of my players has a long-term project with 4 segments to get a mirror-eye cat’s corpse taxidermed (I named the clock “Caturdermy.”) She approaches Flint, the spirit trafficker.

“What do you know about taxidermy?” she asks innocently enough.

“It’s quicker than dating,” he replies with a leer, not missing a beat.

The party contemplated that for a long moment.

I love my NPCs.

So, I have been playing Paving, today was the third session.

I made a 6 segment project clock to prepare everything I need; stone box, glyph painted inside that traps the ghost in it, and evidence that incriminates someone Paving doesn’t like. Today I filled that clock.

So, next session, if there’s anyone who deserves it, I have a box ready to bury them alive under a busy street or building and drive their ghost insane forever.

Feels good. When you’ve got something like that ready to go, people can see it in your eyes when you size them up.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/113881370051836623777/posts/SpqKNSTqYAt

I have an idea for using Blades in the Dark in a way that it has never (to my knowledge) been used before.

I’m going to use the gangs structure, so all the characters work for the Crows. I’m going to host four open table online Blades sessions; repeats are welcome, but not needed, since I’ve got the gang structure instead of a crew.

I will have a big “event” happen in Doskvol that requires the Crows to respond, if they want to prevent disaster from sweeping the city, perhaps gutting it past the point of recovery. Each of the four sessions will be a crisis point inspired by what came before it.

As it begins, the city is in the crushing grip of summer heat. Water recedes, leaving stinking gummy clay and mud exposed to the swarms of flies that lay eggs in it. Shrooms are shriveling, and their spores and dander are thick in the air, dusting the world and fogging the lights, turning sweat to mud, as though the people breathe ashes. Even the elderly cannot remember a summer so hot.

The heat, and related deaths, must be what’s making the winds of the Ghost Field so erratic and peculiar.

Pay no mind to the fortunetellers. It’s their business to be convincingly spooked by bad omens, after all; that’s what sells the protective charms. Only a fool is spooked by weather, on either side of the Mirror.

Still, they whisper; “Something is coming. Something in the dark. Something hungry.”

When I did “The World Between for Fictive Hack” I took some Gothic conventions that Jack Shear identified and added a few more. If you want to make your game a little more Gothic, consider adding one or more of these conventions to home in on that flavor. Since they are all baked into the setting already, that’s easy; this can help really focus in on using them.

It was originally done so you could roll 2d10 to randomize it. =)

2. An imperiled heroine who’s life and/or virginity is at stake.

3. A Catholic setting (generally Spain or Italy). [Use the Church!]

4. Focus on terror (psychological fear) or horror (disgust) or both.

5. A long-buried secret from the past can no longer be repressed.

6. Monstrosity (human or inhuman) or villainy (often a patriarchal figure of power).

7. Violence and sexuality that passes beyond the border of the socially acceptable.

8. Incest.

9. Doubling (dopplegangers, mistaken identities, etc.)

10. A decrepit castle, monastery, fortress, dungeon, or other medieval structure as part of the setting.

11. The Inquisition and the misuse of religious authority.

12. Specters, ghosts, or phantasmal visions (remnants of the past that cannot be repressed).

13. Mysterious veiled women.

14. Fragmentary narratives (framed narrative, missing text, etc.)

15. Enclosure, premature burial, and imprisonment.

16. The sublime power of the elements.

17. Setting as character; buildings or landscapes are an active part of the story.

18. The tenuousness of sanity, its vulnerability.

19. Enlightenment as willful ignorance of folk wisdom, dismissed as superstition.

20. The authority of breeding and class in determining quality and values.

The Sparkwrights have finally begun to put some muscle behind their boasting that they would render the leviathan hunters obsolete. Tired of being dependent on traditional electroplasmic condensation methods, they’ve devised a series of machines that generates electroplasm in two ways.

One, it sips at the etheric winds and angry ghosts that snarl at the lightning barriers. Once fully developed, this technology could make the lighting walls self-sufficient!

Two, each tower is capable of receiving “sacrifices” of life energy from the living; not enough to kill or do serious harm, but a little tax of blood and life that can then be condensed down into electroplasm, in large enough quantities. (They are working on a proposal that the poor of the city earn bread by donating life at the towers.)

Inspiration: https://www.facebook.com/georgehtakei/videos/1648951788479328/

https://www.facebook.com/georgehtakei/videos/1648951788479328/