The Bone Street Krew episode one.
Me and a couple of my friends decided to start a blades game, I really wanted to play one but only have enough time for one game and couldn’t find one to join so I just ended up Gming this one for my friends instead. First episode was pretty smooth, there are some things I know I fudged up and have fixed/are going to fix in subsequent weeks, but here’s the more report part.
Player Backgrounds: Mike/ YoFizz our veteran youtuber has been doing youtube content for years and years at this point including a brief pathfinder game recently and some offline experience in DnD.
Eric & Alex, our 2 newbies, neither of who have every played a rollplaying game before in their lives. They’ve watched some of Mike’s DnD game but have never actually played anything themselves.
Character/Crew Creation notes and thoughts:
We didn’t record any of this we did it mostly over a few days on Discord via text so there isn’t a reference for it. The biggest hurdle was pushing what Fiction First meant and how that hanged the game, how loose mechanics are and that the players have to decide things. The “what’s a sentinel?” or “who is this guy” popped up quite a few times, but eventually it got through that they get to define it.
The “problems” came with the Contacts and Friends/Rivals and how much of a rival or antagonist someone is how much to tie them into the setting vs tying other things. Eric made a character with a great backstory and strong ties to Ulf setting himself up for some great future encounters with the character but then still has to go back and pick a “rival” contact. Alex goes through his contacts and makes his rival contact someone he’s pretty much going to want to hunt down and kill at some point, so figuring out how to balance that aspect with them being an actual contact is going to be really interesting. Not impossible, but muddy at first.
The Good Ol Heritage/Background problem. This is a thing i’ve struggled with every character I’ve made and now see my characters kind of struggling with. Everyone’s so familiar with picking a DnD race that it’s hard to explain “yeah you’re kind of picking a race but they’re all super vague and you’re kind of going to set the entire tone for the way the race an those people interact ” and then the “make up a background. Okay, you’ve got a really cool story background how does it fit in with this list of things?” So really I just kinda let them make up backgrounds and ignore the list if they wanted to and if we’re in a situation where their background is relevan to whats going on I’ll just give them the increased affect, seems to be the intended result without limiting it to the list anyways.
Besides those things Character and crew creation was pretty good.
Episode 1:
Overall: Complication Engagement roll + bad rolls = hillarious comedy of errors.
Mission Summary:
So I didn’t start with one of the specific predefined starting points, instead I gave each of the 3 players a potential lead on a job because I wanted them to come at this from a character perspective straight off the bat but to have options, I thought my two new players might struggle with the openness of just “Hey crew pick a job” so this way they all have 3 options that they can choose to share or hide (I like asymmetrical aspects) and communicate as a group their thoughts on the leads and figure out what to do without feeling lost in the sandbox. Mike (Thursday) took charge as I kind of figured he would because he was the most experienced and comfortable, I made up a newspaper article as a bit of character creation pre established lore because Thursday has a bit of a tiff with the Ink rakes and likes to steal and destroy newspapers, so I knew that would be an easy way to plant a story lure, then just tailored it to her backstory a little bit and included one of the accepted crew negative Factions (Lord Scurlock, and a hint of another thing tying into the Bloodletters game (I like it, it adds cool lore and characters to include them so I did). Thursday pushes the mission and our crew of assassins decide their first mission is a pro-bono community oriented mission: Kill Cyclops.
The Engagement roll happens and there’s a complication, I decided to go a bit all in on pulling the Bloodletters into the world as flunkies of Scurlock at this point, so I decided that the complication was going to be some suspicious bait in the form of the mysterious unknown Oskar Scurlock showing up well before Cyclops ever wood. The impatient and proactive Skovlan warrior takes the bait signalling for the take down of Oskar in the absence of Cyclops himself. This eventually leads them on a loud flashy chase across town resulting in many bad rolls and fumbles as our Hound and Cutter struggle to keep up and track the more nimble and fleet footed Oskar and Thursday (lurk). Eventually Thursday corners Oskar and hesitates trying to let the rest of the team catch up and I decide to go ahead and unleash a Tempest on her and introduce her to the less mundane world of Blades in the dark. After being thrown across the street twice with her crew unable to catch up Thursday herself, the least lethal member of the team by far stumbles across Cyclops now tasked with rescuing Oskar at all costs and managed to accomplish the ACTUAL mission and kill Cyclops, but this time however the bloodletters loyal crew of dock workers and ex-sailors have managed to get in a position where Thursday isn’t going to be comfortable hanging around she bails, as Mattias and Sigbjorn manage to find the sight the (rightfully) frustrated Skovlan at this point launches into an attack despite not being in a position to at all, luckily in part for them the crew’s orders are to get Oskar out of there safe and sound, and they leave a few thugs to stall our “heroes” out while Oskar escapes. Thursday manages to pocket all the mission gold for herself (and I love it, go asymmetry and character choices) and the crew heads home never once thinking about doing anything about the body (this will be fun later).
Rule fumbles and issues:
* Way too many controlled situations because I was thinking of them as the default, corrected this in episode 2.
Gave people too much stress for teamwork rolls, realized this in between sessions and recounted them up and adjusted them correctly.
* I struggled with consequences a lot and pushed them to desperate a lot instead of finding other complications, and I think I may have double dipped a time or two and did a consequence and a drop. But to be fair they failed A LOT.
* Probably made them roll prowl a bit too much, but to be fair they’re the ones who wanted to traverse the rooftops to chase Oskar.
* Forgot Crew Xp. We forget it episode 2 as well, I did it in between sessions.
* We did Vice indulgence rolls wrong (also wrong in week 2 and week 3) because I didn’t read the rule book all the way and thought I knew what the macro did but didn’t. Not a huge deal in the end, but whatever.
* Didn’t really explain how armor was used during the game and it put Sigbjorn (Eric’s character) in a much worse position than he probably should have been so I helped him out between sessions and tweaked the injuries a little bit.
If anyone actually watches the entire thing (over time is probably how i’d recommend) let me know anything else I messed up or could have done better. We’ve played twice since then and they’ll be up and i’ll post about them and the changes we’ve made as well but there could be other things i’ve missed and ways to improve that I haven’t thought up yet for sure.