Author: Brock McCord

I have a kinda inconsequential question about the map of the Shattered Isles: What, if any, is the distinction between the cities marked with black dots and those with clear ones? Is that meant to signify something about those locations?

Bonus question: Do you think the stops on the rail lines are the only holdouts of civilization that remain after the cataclysm? It’s said that the people on the Dagger Isles live without lightning barriers, but for everywhere else, I imagine the idea is that humanity has had to retreat to the few locations where enough resources could be pooled to erect the barriers, so the relatively few major cities shown on the map are the only places people can live at all now.

Asked a different way, do you think this is a map primarily showing the major stops on the rail lines (but excluding other cities), or is this a comprehensive view of civilization in the Shattered Isles?

Would Blades in the Dark make for a good high fantasy game?

I’ve seen a few posts on here asking about a fantasy hack for BitD, but I thought I’d ask more theoretically what people thought about the idea, design-wise. Gonna go ahead and guess this is gonna be a novella-length post, because I’m incapable of being concise, so, here we go, and thanks to anyone who reads this… >_>

Forged in the Dark has been my latest system crush– in a word, I think it’s neat! ^^

Similarly, I bounce all over the place in terms of what genres are my current major jam, and recently I’ve been feeling classic high fantasy, Forgotten Realms, LotR, etc. vibes. So, naturally, my instinct is to think, man, it’d be totally rad if there were a high fantasy hack for Blades in the Dark!

While that may very well be true, the more I thought about it, the more I thought I should step back and really consider if the system would serve the setting well. While I think it’s a great system, and it’s obviously a massively popular genre, the two don’t always match up. Games trying to provide an experience that their mechanics don’t actually reinforce usually lead to frustration and disappointment (lookin’ at you, D&D… -.- ).

The baseline method for determining if a system is functioning in this way that I fall back on now, after hearing it from Dungeon World’s Adam Koebel (who I believe took them from another designer, but I forget who), is asking these 3 questions:

1. What is your game about?

2. How does the game do this?

3. How does your game reward/encourage this?

Trying to answer these questions for our theoretical high fantasy blades hack, without yet altering any rules (or let’s say, changing the answer to 1, but answering 2 and 3 as you would for vanilla BitD):

1. Playing daring fantasy heroes who work together in epic struggles to overcome great odds and defeat larger than life foes (or however you’d describe your typical high fantasy adventure)

2. The players work as a crew, taking jobs from powerful factions to improve their wealth and standing. (This could describe a sort of high fantasy experience, but isn’t quite right, I think.)

3. The game rewards players for playing true to the nature of their individual characters and crews, and making desperate rolls.

So you can answer these questions in ways that sort of vaguely check out, and it doesn’t seem like an immediate deal breaker. Still, there’s a number of mechanics that, on further inspection, don’t necessarily fit the genre. Some that come to mind are:

1. Stress and Trauma. Appropriate for low or dark fantasy (as seen in Blades Against Darkness), but not necessarily a staple of high fantasy. However, pushing yourself up against the limit of your resources is a common experience in many fantasy RPGs. I think lots of people will have had some sort of dungeon crawl where they’re about to head in and face the final boss on like half health with no potions and a single spell slot. Could stress and trauma be framed differently for this genre? Is stress now mana/stamina– still a limited resource to be spent on special actions? Does trauma exist at all? Is there some other consequence for maxing this resource out (or draining it, if inverted)?

2. Similarly, characters retiring/the idea that The Crew itself is the only lasting character. Typically, fantasy characters are in the story for the long haul. You don’t start reading about Aragorn, but then he bites it or gives up halfway through and gets replaced by some new dude, who finishes the job of saving the world for him.

3. Crews. Again, not necessarily a common part of the fantasy genre. You have the typical “Adventuring Party,” but you’re rarely an “organization,” and more like a buncha friends who get together and kill stuff. Or, more dramatically, a collection of heroes thrown together by fate and circumstance to overcome some great danger.

The distinction here that seems like it’s off is that you’re often individuals who work together more than you are members of a larger organization. I can see some ways around this, though. The first example that comes to mind is Pillars of Eternity, where you own and upgrade a castle. The idea being, give the players some central thing that ties them together and that upgrades go into. I think the major thing here is not “can you frame the characters as being members of some sort of organization” so much as, what would varied and interesting types of “crews” be in this setting? Is “going places and killing things for loot and the good of society” a baseline for play, or only one type of crew’s style?

4. Scores. The obvious analogue here is quests, but only up to a point. You might all work together to get paid, but there’s usually a point in most high fantasy campaigns/stories where things move up to the sort of epic level of scale where your lives become about something more than doing quests for money. At that point, the cycle of play around Score – Downtime – Free Play – Score, might not always hold up. Sure, you can stay in a town and spend each session taking on manageable tasks, but how does this system represent that epic, continent-spanning quest you’ve undertaken? How does it represent Frodo taking The One Ring to Mt. Doom? Massive tasks that you aren’t going to regularly be taking breaks from or checking back in with an employer on?

Some things I like that already work quite well:

1. The major one: Factions. Not necessarily part of high fantasy, but I actually think this checks out pretty well, and is one of my favorite things in Blades anyway. Which kingdom does your party become allied with, if any? Do you support this guild or that, etc. I think factions are a great way to spice up just about any genre. They represent the important ideologies, motivations, and drives of a world, and give the players a tangible way to consider, and then align themselves with the ones they value.

2. The reward structure. You get xp for roleplaying, not per enemy killed or whatever. It’s great for characterization, it works in just about any genre, it’s great.

3. The bare bones of the system: I think positioning and effect are really cool ways of framing the action narratively. I like skill ratings instead of attributes, dice pools, partial successes, all that really baseline mechanical stuff. I think the big thing to look out for here is that high fantasy (at least in the D&D tradition) is so tied into really granular, incremental power curves. Can a system that’s as fluid and interpretative as BitD handle the curve from being low level and equally matched with goblins, and then going up to high levels where you’re taking down ancient dragons and demigods and junk? Blades characters seem to generally improve “wide,” not “tall,” and there’s obviously very little explicit growth in anything like the damage they do, the health and armor they have, etc. I don’t think this is a dealbreaker, but it’s worth careful consideration.

Maybe the answer is to not try to recreate that curve at all. Embrace how epic and heroic the characters are from the beginning. These are the types of people who kill dragons, now, already. If they were the schlubs whose jobs it was to go clear goblins out of caves, they wouldn’t be the heroes of our story. Start the characters larger than life, and frame challenges appropriately.

Soooo in conclusion, this is still something I’d really be interested in seeing, and I don’t think BitD and high fantasy are outright incompatible. But, I do think some major adjustments would have to be made, maybe on both ends– changing the system to better reflect the high fantasy adventure experience, but maybe also being open to thinking of how the experience and arch of a fantasy campaign plays out differently when done in this system– seeing what cool, unique spin the Blades system ends up putting on fantasy, rather than trying to completely recreate what you already think a fantasy setting looks like, 1-to-1, in the Blades system. I think that could be really interesting ^_^

Hi everyone. Latest S&V prep post:

The setup for our S&V game is coming along nicely, we had a Session 0 to discuss characters and do a little setup today before our first real session next week, and everyone’s real excited.

I think I have nearly everything ready for my character, but the one thing left to do is to decide on my Precursor Artifact from the Mystic playbook. I’m playing as a type of mildly Way-sensitive xeno we’ve added who are basically Space Tieflings™ native to Vos, and since I maaaaay have been partially inspired by the recent Devilman anime in wanting to play a space devil… man… >_>

I was thinking the artifact might be related to some ancient Vosian ability to temporarily transform from nice human-ish person with horns to full on demon monster.

However, I’m having a hard time settling on what the mechanics of that should look like. A fairly uninteresting option that came to mind would be letting it work like the Muscle’s Unstoppable ability, giving the user temporary superhuman strength and/or increased scale while it’s active. We don’t have a muscle in our group, so it wouldn’t be stepping on anyone’s toes, but just taking a playbook ability as is feels like it’s not taking advantage of the potential creativity that could go into creating an artifact, so I don’t love that idea.

Does anyone have any ideas for what a cool devilman transformation artifact could look like? Maybe sweet laser beam powers? Rad fiery punches? Flight?

Looking for advice on two (out of two) players wanting to use the same playbook

Hi everyone, back with another S&V campaign prep question of the day:

The players have been looking over the playbooks, and two of us (out of a total of 3 players, although the 3rd’s attendance may be spotty, so it’ll most likely just be us two) are dead set on Mystic. Neither of us really has any desire to play another playbook, so there hasn’t been any sort of, “oh, well, alright, you can have it, I’ll just be blank” moment.

Doubling up on classes or playbooks or what have you is something I’ve always been pretty fundamentally against in RPGs. While the book says everyone can theoretically play the same playbook, and sure, I see that they could, it seems as if the major overlap in what abilities they can take (Veteran abilities can only go so far), what contacts they have, what their special items are, their exp trigger– all that stuff that comes with the playbooks that uniquely defines one character from another– would really take away from how cool and unique each character should be in their roles on the team and what positions they fit into narratively.

Something I really like about PBTA and BitD is how unique picking a playbook makes the character. Someone playing something like a Cutter is saying they specifically want to be good at, and get into situations that involve, fighting. Someone playing a Slide might avoid combat entirely, and really play up the social aspect of the game. They both get to shine and feel as if they’re the expert at doing whatever they’re good at. In that heist movie sense, they’ll each have that moment, or moments, where they bring something to the job that nobody else could have brought.

In our game of The Sprawl, high speed chases were all about our Driver. Crazy shootouts and cool fight scenes were where our Killer shined, single handedly taking out whole squads of enemies. Our Hacker was the only one who could even come close to dealing with the type of electronic security we encountered everywhere we went, etc. etc.

Everyone regularly had those scenes or moments where they were absolutely the star. Having different playbooks made each character stand out in what they did. There was basically never a moment where someone was just kind of… doing that cool thing someone else just did a few minutes ago, now, too… >.<

The disappointing thing I see happening when two of us play Mystic is something like: Player A has been looking forward to taking the “Sundering” ability for an advance, but Player B ends up taking it first. The first time Player B uses their cool new devastating space magic powers in a cinch is a great moment, revealing a badass new power they’ve obtained. Player A picks up Sundering at their next advance, buuuuut it’s basically that cool thing that Player B has already done, and it’ll always kind of be associated with them.

Thennnnn one player gets Psy Blade first, and the other has to follow it up, or decide not to take it at all. Then one player gets Visions, and the other eventually gets it too, and so on…

Having players picking from the same list of abilities seems like you’re either constantly doubling up and feeling like you’re not bringing anything particularly unique or stand-out to the table, or you’re intentionally being wary to not pick the same abilities, but every time the other player picks one, it’s shutting off an ability you would’ve had available to you, and now you’re in this shitty race with your friend to snag up all the coolest stuff before they do.

The DM has said they’ll think of ways to make this not be lame for the players, but I’m not very confident that a solution exists. Has anyone ever played with a crew that doubled up on playbooks? If so, what did people do to not feel as if they were competing with each other for recognition in whatever that playbook was all about? Are there even any house-rule type solutions people can think of?

For example, something that came to mind would be giving each player greater access to abilities from a second playbook, maybe even to the starting abilities. That way, one is playing something like a Mystic/Muscle in a bigger way than they normally could, while the other is a Mystic/Speaker (ignoring the obvious power creep involved with having free access to more abilities than usual).

I’m thinking vaguely of the Star Wars RPGs like Force and Destiny where you’d have a group where everyone’s a Jedi, but there’s actually a bunch of distinct classes of Jedi to be, so it’s not like everyone is directly overlapping in abilities. Like, “okay, assuming everyone here is just going to be a Mystic, what class of Mystic are each of you?” I understand that specializing in different action ratings and taking a few Veteran abilities allows for some of this already, but I still feel as if there’ll be problems when the players are still going to be picking from the same major list of abilities most of the time.

Similarly, would it be worth taking another playbook’s list of contacts? I have mixed feelings on this, in that maybe it’d actually be interesting to know the same people. Maybe my character’s friend is the other’s rival. At the same time, you’re introducing fewer potential contacts into the game than you would be if everyone was using a unique playbook.

I was also thinking of stitching together exp triggers from other playbooks. For example, for the Mystic/Muscle character, their new trigger might be something like “You addressed a tough challenge with force or the Way,” (no pun intended). It’d hopefully help with each player feeling as if they’re being incentivized and rewarded in actions that are unique to them.

(TLDR: Rambling about various ideas for converting the Hull playlist from BitD to serve as a mech for another character to pilot around, either in vanilla BitD or Scum & Villainy)

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Scum & Villainy (ish, but kinda vanilla Blades too) idea that I was hoping for some feedback on:

My group is starting an S&V game soon, and something I’ve wanted to include in a sci-fi game for a long time is mechs. My idea was to use an idea (I’m sure I’m not the first one to think of it) for vanilla BitD that involved using the heavy frame Hulls with interior compartments as cool eldritch mech type things that the characters would drive around. There’s a few technical issues I never figured out– namely, using a playbook that was intended to serve as its own character as more of a vehicle/tool for other characters.

Some issues that come to mind are: if a character is driving the mech, who should take things like harm or stress (or drain)? Should the mech have its own action ratings that get rolled, or should it rely on the pilot’s ratings, or some combination?

It’d make sense to me that a character who isn’t particularly great at fighting on their own could still be a talented pilot, so having a poor Scrap/Skirmish/Hunt score shouldn’t hinder you while you’re piloting the mech. Maybe just generally rolling with Helm in S&V, and Finesse or Attune in vanilla? All resist rolls made in the mech just being made with those respective attributes? Having a single catch-all action/attribute for everything that happens while in the mech seems a little reductive, but would be the simplest implementation.

At the same time, I like the idea that there’s some semi-sentient consciousness serving as the “operating system” for the mech/hull, either a ghost in BitD or some sort of AI in S&V, so the idea of the mech having its own action ratings and personal talents that it’s employing might be cool. Maybe you could even use “leading a group action,” where the pilot and the mech both get to roll together, to simulate the pilot and mech’s combined efforts and abilities.

I think that could be more interesting than relying on a single piloting action roll, but it’s also more complicated– in that case, keeping the mech leveling up and improving their ratings seems difficult, given that they’ll be brought out in certain scenarios, but frequently left behind as the main characters go on foot, so they would presumably get much less exp, if it were tracked in the normal way.

Maybe a low maintenance workaround would be to allow the mechs to have as many points in action ratings as their pilots, so they progress at the same rate, and the players don’t have to fuss with making sure exp is being spread around between the two. There wouldn’t necessarily be a clear in-lore explanation for why the mech is improving on its own as its pilot advances, but I’m not personally too bothered by that.

Taking a cue from armatures in A NOCTURNE, I’m thinking it’d be fair to let the mech have its own health and take damage/protect its pilot from any damage, but have the pilot take stress for actions that would generate any.

Alternatively, I could see being even more lenient and letting the mech take damage and drain, as per the vanilla Hull playbook, simulating some sort of fuel or energy source that runs out as the mech is shooting lasers and flying around and whatnot. That would preserve the possibility of the mechs developing wear over time, which I think is interesting.

If that were the case, the pilot themselves would basically be protected from any direct consequences while in the mech, which might be alright, but seems maybe a little too cheap. Similarly, I suppose that could be balanced by the characters still having to use up downtime actions to repair the mech’s health and reduce drain, but it might get boring to have downtime actions constantly eaten up with mech maintenance. Then again, having to pay a cred or two for the extra action of maintaining the mech on top of your personal downtime actions seems fairly appropriate.

However, it also probably wouldn’t seem right if the characters went through some particularly intense job that they were constantly exerting themselves on, but came away without any personal stress.

If the mech/hull isn’t tracking its own exp, maybe new traits and frame upgrades could be acquired through research projects by their pilots?

My group’s pretty lenient with penalties and balance– we tend more towards the heroic epic character side of things, rather than being real scrappy underdogs who are all liable to get killed by some stray bullet, so in terms of balancing the penalties of using the mech, we’d probably not be too bothered about making sure the characters are punished particularly severely.

At the same time, I don’t think I’d want what happens in the mechs to feel like there’s basically no consequences– like if a score ends and the characters all come away with no harm or stress to clear because it all got shunted off to their mechs.

Anyway, this ended up being way longer than I expected it would be… >_>

So thanks to anyone who’s read this far, and for any insights you might have ^_^