Author: David Rothfeder

Ran a one shot of Blades in the Dark using the quick start scenerio. The group consisted of a whisperer named Danger, a Slide named Demetri, a Hound named Nicodomeus, and a Lurk named Liza. The group decided that they wanted to see what Lyssa was offering for a job. She told them she wanted a large influx of cash so she can quiet down the gang war. She suggested that the crew could hit the vaults of the church of the ecstasy of the flesh after the festival of peaking when they pulled in a ton of donations (for some reason the players assumed this was a sex cult, I wonder why.). The group chose an infiltration plan and they followed money runners to a building and saw that the back door was unguarded from the outside.

The crew quickly chose to do a flashback to procure priest robes so they could pretend to be church officials. Thier first obstacle was the two guards at the interior of the back door. The group decided to try and convince the guards that the vault was in danger from a red sash raid and that they needed to examine the stash. Of course the danger of doing so was the guards putting the whole building on alert. Unfortunately this route didn’t go so well, and things got complicated when Danger called some ghosts to scare the guards. It turned out (through a devil’s bargain) that one of the ghosts was an old buddy of Demetri, and that the ghost (Isaac) very much wanted a body to possess. This made it easy to convince the guards to attack the ghosts, which convinced Nicodemus to start killing. Demetri decided that he was too much of a wuss to fight on his own, and that Isaac’s spirit had far more experience, so he tried to convince the ghost to use his body to help kill the guards. Meanwhile, Danger just wanted to convince the ghosts to kill the guards and accidentally (through a devil’s bargain) instilled bloodlust in the ghosts. The guards didn’t stand a chance.

Of course at this point they had to deal with the possessed slide who had a hankering for some strangling. Danger tried to remove the ghost with his lightning hook, but that just convinced Demetri that the whisperer was the one he really wanted to choke. Unfortunately, the players needed to separate a this point and we couldn’t finish the job.

Things I learned:

This was my first chance to run or play. Players had trouble remembering the flow of rolling. I was running off the first quick start sheets, so I didn’t have the flow chart. That might’ve helped. In general, things took longer than I expected, but it might be because this was everybody’s first time seeing the rules (other than myself) and nobody had role played with each other before. I also learned that teamwork is critical for PC’s being able to advance.

Questions:

If the character on point does the set up action and the backup character who tries to follow through fails thier action, is the set up still available?