Author: Eloy C

Prep time!

Originally shared by Eloy C

Prep for tonight’s game, courtesy of Andrew Shields !

This might be of interest… EDIT: My players should not study the r-maps 😛

Originally shared by Eloy C

”Living” Blades in the Dark Campaign

I’ve started an experiment with BitD. I’m trying to run a kind of informal troupe-style, rotating game. Kind of like a Thieves’ World anthology type of deal.

To do this, I, as the GM, decided to create a crew of Shadows and composed an initial Crew Sheet, and asked half a dozen friends (who have partially conflicting schedules) make up a character.

Since the don’t all have every Thursday night free, the idea is that each session is made up with the GM and whoever can show up that week, usually 3-4 players, which is a good number of players. You make a character, and you show up if you have the time.

The goal is to get some character interaction, some character story advancement, do a score/mission, and run Downtime, which would include advancing the Crew. Crew advancement is done by the players who completed the score, with the GM settling any differences.

So far the first session went fine. Roleplaying/Free-Play is the secret sauce that the game needed, and was missing from the Kickstarter.

If this works, my hope is that we can get a rotating GM setup going as well, so that I can occasionally play a character too.

If my players lose interest, I might open this up to the public, and see who else is interested in trying it out.

As part of prep, I looked at John Harper ’s advice on how to setup an initial situation.

However, I wanted a loose setup that accounted for as many possibilities as possible.

The sections detailing the setting in the book are FAN-TAS-TIC. I read through it a couple of times, and made 1 or 2 small changes (like I ignored the enmity between the Silver Nails and the Spirit Wardens, for example).

I realized that the easiest way was to separate them into 4 rough categories, or spheres of influence. Nobility, Criminal, Weird and the Skovlanders.

I made some relationship maps (see below). Or maybe they’re situation maps (Smaps? Paul Beakley ?).

Anyway, here’s what I did to setup the start of the game. Oh, and Adam Day was interested in taking a look at these.