Author: Daumantas Lipskis

The Downloads page on Evil Hat doesn’t have any PDFs links on it (aside from Dropbox, which only has the all-file). Sean seems to have updated the files to version 8.1 recently, so maybe there’s a permissions or publishing date snafu for the page with the links? Or I’m having a very weird bug.

I have most of the stuff printed anyway, but I’m starting a first online session in a few hours, and having handy category sorted PDFs is, well, handy for online games.

“The traits on spirit playbooks are not special abilities, and cannot be taken by living characters by using a veteran advance.”

In the last Blades game I played, I was a Spider with the Vampire’s Arcane Sight.* I used it to read Elstera Avrathi’s mind and find out who her spymaster was, with a view of forcibly making them our crew’s Informants. I also read my fellow PC’s wife’s mind – she was a foreigner from the Islands and it was difficult to parse her language and culture, but I still learned that she was surprisingly content with the situation that her arranged marriage put her in. Later down the line, I was also planning on taking Possession, to be able to control living bodies, because that’s a thing to do. I am also looking forward to playing a demonblood cyborg Lurk with the Hull’s Compartments as the first playbook advance.

As you are reading this, you are probably thinking two things – “fuck, that’s cool”, and “damn, that seems like it would be a little bit difficult to GM.” If you are thinking the first thought, well, thanks for the compliment! As for the second, you and me both know that you will manage just fine.

“Don’t” is the wrong thing to say to this stuff. “Be careful” is enough.

*The GM ruled that I also had to take one of the Vampire’s Strictures. I could not enter a private residence without permission. It was great.

Lets talk about the Claims system.

First off, I love what it does to the game. The fact that you get negative status for every claim you take means that you get into more trouble as your reach expands, which is fun! The hefty faction status penalty also means there is meat in the status management minigame. You can choose to take claims from a variety of factions, making many enemies but avoiding the mechanical penalties of war, or picking a single enemy to bleed dry, but then having to deal with being at war and your targets preparing specifically for you. I love that stuff to bits.

But I think the status penalty being so hefty in practise means that the GM needs to narrow the space of possibilities of how you get a Claim to such actions that will produce a -2 status change. Which basically turns out to mean “eliminate all opposition at location X.”

This in turn means that engaging the Claims system overrides crew playbooks stylistically to a degree – whether you’re Hawkers or Thieves or a Cult, you’re now doing gang-on-gang violence.

Which is fun, but I’d like for stuff like infiltrating the leadership of the gang, or negotiating for a cut, and etcetera to be more viable options to getting claims. But that likely means less of a status hit (or if it’s still the full penalty for this sort of stuff, there’s a bit of an incongruity on what status actually means), and that might take the teeth out of the claims system.

How does your group tend to get new claims? Is my experience of the rules in play off-base here, perhaps? If you’re already doing non-gang violence ways of getting new claims, how did that work out?

So, Blades is quite a bit faction-sandboxy, which means you get to have fun thinking about what all the non-PC factions are doing offscreen. So far, so good. But, well, the web possible of interactions is fat and robust. Even if you’re doing the sane thing and limiting your offscreen musings to gangs either the players or you have an active interest in, there’s still loads of potentially relevant stuff that happens offscreen but has onscreen implications. And you want the players to be informed about these goings on, so they could intervene and change stuff up, right? But at the same time, a session is usually mostly about a score, and a score is usually about the immediate concerns of why demon and when fire. There is only so much bandwith for offscreen information to leak into, especially when you also want to just want to just focus on the characters when they’re not criming.

For the first few sessions of the game, I prepared possible job offers from all the gangs the crew was friendly-ish with. This was good because it forced me to have a very clear idea of what all these people were trying to accomplish, and I could have them move on with their plans if the PCs weren’t forthcoming, creating either new opportunities or mayhem.

After I a while, I noticed that the players would basically pick whichever job I mentioned first, so (and this really should have been obvious to me from the start, I agree!) all the effort put in on the other score offers basically went unused. Also, having a “job offers” system at all meant that the players weren’t planning their own scores, and weren’t engaging with the claims system much.

So we moved on to the players planning out their own scores, and me keeping track of long-term complications(/opportunities) through notes and just a whole bunch of clocks. This has worked pretty well so far, but I’ve been running the game a while, and it turns out just having a bunch of mostly-GM-facing clocks just isn’t that feasible. There are now so many that I keep forgetting about one or the other all time (either because I mentally discount them in a “well, that won’t immediately be relevant for the next session no matter how the roll goes, so I’ll just do it later” manner for several sessions in a row; or just because my notes are more like doodles with questions rather than any sort reliable record), and it just feels cumbersome.

At the same time, the players have created a power vacuum a whole bunch of previously unknown groups will flow in to fill, so being able to introduce new factions and their plans and weaknesses while also allowing profitable scores to happen is definitely something that I need right now.

How do you deal with putting the offscreen on screen in your game?

How does your crew split the Coin? Mine usually does as even a split as possible, with some strategic considerations mixed in (we need X amount of Coin for the next Tier upgrade, etcetera).

I think that’s fine. However, this way of splitting things up means no one PC ever gets a major surplus (and no one PC can ever get a comparative shotfall), so there’s no arguing over money issues, and no real engagement with the lifestyle mechanic.

I was wondering if perhaps I should implement a rule of “the one with their actual mitts on the moolah gets the most say in who gets what”, or some variation thereof.

That seems like it could cause friction between the players, as opposed to just their characters, though. Has anyone already tried something like this?