I’ve been GMing BitD at the local FLGS (acronyms ahoy!) and I’ve questions about the match-ups between Scoundrel,…
I’ve been GMing BitD at the local FLGS (acronyms ahoy!) and I’ve questions about the match-ups between Scoundrel, Crew, and Score. Some match-ups are obvious:
Cutter, Bravos, Assault
Lurk, Shadows, Stealth
Cutter/Lurk, Assassins, Assault/Stealth
Whisper, Cult, Occult
Slide/Spider, Shadows, Deception/Social
Smugglers isn’t an obvious pairing with any of the Scoundrel playbooks but it’s clearly matched with one of the Score plans, Transport.
What Scoundrels and Score are best suited for Hawkers? The business of dealing illicit drugs makes me think of a workshop management game more than it makes me think of BitD-style harrowing action. My group is using the Hawkers playbook and we’re telling a story we all enjoy, but I think that’s in spite of the playbook.
Is it just the case that the Hawkers playbook is a less obvious fit for the available Scores, that a story about Hawkers requires more finagling than another Crew? Am I missing something?
I’m daydreaming about running a campaign for some friends on Roll20, and I keep thinking about the awesome design…
I’m daydreaming about running a campaign for some friends on Roll20, and I keep thinking about the awesome design work folks have done in the environment.
Is there a place online where I can find public-use art assets for BitD? I’m thinking specifically about the logo, the “black with orange embers” background, and other stuff like that.
First session in Taelor Mcclurg’s game is in the books!
First session in Taelor Mcclurg’s game is in the books! We only got as far as creating characters, a crew, and the starting situation but WOW. In this crew of assassins, I have found an unexpected heaven. See for yourself:
Lair: A prop room in the attic of a Vaudevillian opera house.
Story: Somehow, we were all in the room for an opera about a war against ghosts. Likewise, we all ended up at the riotous after party. Somewhere in the midst of the hazy bacchanal, we became so inspired by the opera that we decided to learn to kill ghosts for a living.
Business Model: General-purpose assassins growing into ghost-killing work. We kill ghosts and make ghosts to kill. Sometimes, we bottle the ghosts to torture them later.
Starting Situation: The Path of Echoes wants to weaken the Spirit Wardens by pitting them against the Wraiths. The Path approaches us to make some key murders happen to set this plan in motion.
My qualms from the first session were almost totally erased here in session two.
My qualms from the first session were almost totally erased here in session two. As I suspected, things felt especially gamey because we were pretty rushed for time after character creation.
This time, we spent almost half of our session in Free Play. We had a chance to ease into roleplay, interact as PCs, introduce a few hooks, and Gather Information before we jumped into the Score. This makes two sessions in a row when the party split up for the whole Score, but it wasn’t too complicated to manage in play.
I find I’m especially enjoying the Downtime phase and faction-level play. The Factions of Doskvol and Campaign Tracker pages from the digital Player’s Kit are near-perfect tools for staying organized, and the way character/crew playbooks and faction relationships build stories from scratch is deeply cool. On the one hand, it’s delightful that I don’t have to do any GM prep before the game. On the other hand, flying by the seat of my pants with a brand-new-to-me game gets hectic! Looking forward to building up some additional system mastery.
Originally shared by Eli Kurtz
#TableSelfie from session 2 of our Blades in the Dark #Campaign! Our crew of Hawkers decide they sell poisons (specifically not drugs) and they were joined by a new scoundrel, and Skovlander Hound from the frontier of his homeland.
The Hawkers heard a rumor that prostitutes and pleasure houses in Crow’s Foot were being possessed by rogue spirits. Our Slide is connected to that world thanks to his Vice for Pleasure, so he convinced the rest of the crew to investigate with them. They infiltrated the lair of a Path of Echoes cell in a Nightmarket mausoleum. They ended up finding a plot to bring Roric, the recently deceased leader of The Crows, back into the world as a ghost!
Thanks to PK Sullivan, newcomer Marshall Jacobson, Eric Simon, and Graham Ziolkowski for another great game!
I ran my first session last night! My players created a Cutter, Leech, and a Slide organized into a Hawker Crew. The Cutter encouraged connections with the Red Sashes, who gave them a task: infiltrate an art auction and steal a famous portrait, the “Brona Misa.” It was a quick Score (only about an hour) but they didn’t get away without plenty of stress and a few entanglements.
The session was really fun but we found the game to be surprisingly procedural and gamey, especially considering the regular “fiction first” reminders in the book. We were able to get snippets of roleplay, but the lion’s share of gameplay was very technical. Is this something that will become more balanced as we become more familiar with the rules? We all like gamey games but we wanted a strong narrative experience as well.
I’m about 2/3 of the way through my first read (skipped over the GM Section to read the world info, but now I’m…
I’m about 2/3 of the way through my first read (skipped over the GM Section to read the world info, but now I’m jumping back to tackle that). I remember reading the word “initiative” near the beginning of the book but it’s not in the index and everything else I’ve read hasn’t helped me figure this out. So, my question:
Is initiative in BitD determined purely by the narrative? eg when it makes sense for a character to act? Is it always just clockwise around the table?
Hi everyone, I’m new to the community and BitD. Does anyone know if there’s an MP3 format of this YouTube chat available? I’d like to be able to listen to it on my podcatcher and I’d rather not convert the video to an MP3 with a third-party website. It feels a little gross to me.
