Author: Jeremiah Frye

One thing I, and the other players, in my group have struggled with a bit is the 4th crew xp trigger “express the goals, drives, inner conflict, or essential nature of the crew.”

We’re not having much luck coming up with goals or drives. Immediate thoughts seem like things all crews would be doing and not particularly unique. Like taking over more territory or earning respect or something like that.

So I’m curious what sorts of goals, drives, or essential natures people have seen/used in play and what that looked like.

What do people consider challenges?

Every playbook has an xp tracker about “addressing a challenge” with something appropriate to the class. Violence or coercion for the Cutter, calculation or conspiracy for the Spider, etc.

Action roles seem obvious.

But what about gather information? What if my Cutter beats up a few people to get information out of them?

What about downtime activities? If my Cutter scares some people or beats them into submission to stay quiet and reduce hit, is that a challenge?

We had a player at the table make the argument that things like gather information and downtime activities don’t have any real stakes. You can’t really fail per se. Which does make sense.

On the other hand, it’s still adding to the narrative. If my Cutter is always going around beating people up for information or whatever maybe word gets around and it makes my life difficult in some way. Who knows. Seems like either way it’s playing to the Cutter’s nature.

So I’m curious what other people think.

I’m curious what other people do to prep scores for their scoundrels. Like, how much do you like to have ready? Are there specific things you try to be ready for? Specific things you don’t worry about prepping for?

I have a love/hate (mostly hate) relationship with prepping. I want to feel ready, but I never know how much is enough and I get a bit of decision paralysis.

In general I’m pretty comfortable improvising a lot of stuff at the table, but Blades seems like the kind of game I should come to the table with at least something.

So far I’ve just run one job, which was for the crew to ransom some information out of a guy. All I came to the table with was the target, the client, and where the target lived. I feel like it went okay, but I feel like it could have gone better if I’d had a little more in my back pocket.

Any input/advice is appreciated!

I ran my group (an Assassin Crew) through their very first score the other night. The job was to get some information about the location of some artifact that only this noble knew. I phrased/offered in such a way that the job could be framed as a ransom job (ransom the guy for his information), because that’s what they get a bonus for in their hunting grounds. I figured a relatively straightforward job for their first outing would be good for all of us getting our feet wet.

Anyhow, it brought up a couple question (well probably more than that, but two main ones).

I asked them what kind of plan they’d be going with. The Spider wanted to be a sort of man on the inside while the rest of the crew find another way in, which I thought seemed fun. I said I thought Stealth made the most sense. In hindsight the two-prong attack felt a little weird — the Spider going in to talk with the guy while everyone else sneaks in. Any tips/suggestions for dealing with that in future? Should I have just done the Spider’s part as a setup maneuver sort of thing?

For the second, once they were able to have a direct confrontation with the mark, the Whisper wanted to set something up with his ally, a possessor Ghost. The idea being the ghost would possess the noble and then give the crew the information they wanted. I loved the idea so I just had him spend a little stress for the flashback. He basically ended up letting the ghost hitch a ride in his body and then had the ghost transfer into the noble. I still love the idea of that, but I don’t want it to become too much of a crutch or a solution to a lot of problems. I don’t want to totally disincentivize using his ally contact, but I feel like I definitely made it too easy for this first time around. What might be some appropriate consequences to doing something similar in the future?