Author: Nigel Clarke

Any chance of a blank ship sheet being provided?

I’ve been an avid promoter of Blades in the Dark since the early draft/playtest rules and have run it many times both as a one shot and in some short campaigns. I recently acquired the hard copy of Scum and Villainy for running scoundrels in space. Our local group has been playing a Traveller campaign for about a year on Friday evenings and on being asked to run something at Consquences (a local UK LARP convention) immediately though of running S&V as a low/no prep game in the Saturday evening slot.

My first impressions on going over the playsheets, handouts and GM ref sheets was Wow! The amount of effort that has gone into providing four planetary systems with places and people as a default background for running jobs is wonderful. In the usual Blades style a number of factions are predefined to give the GM plenty of ideas for some interaction between the characters and potential allies and enemies.

One of the players was a long time Traveller fan, one who had played Blades before and one who had experience, but not necessarily with Traveller or PbtA games. I quickly covered chargen and we got down to playing. They choose the Firedrake option and we immediately went into the Escaping from Prison opening sequence. This was very much a Blake’s 7 moment for all of us with distinct memories of the second episode of the series. Having escaped and recovered their ship the team did a short downtime session and started the first real Job.

The Heat and Wanted mechanism having been adjusted for the new setting was extremely well thought out and worked extremely well in practice with the 8 points of Heat swiftly disposed of by heading for a different system. The players checked out the Factions they had gained favour with and settled on the base of one of those as the location for their escape destination.

I shall make up a set of three booklets containing the information about the various Factions to hand out to players in future as that will definitely make it easier for p[ayers to know who and what to work for or against.

I really liked the new Gambit mechanism whereby the characters get extra dice allowing for up to 3 bonus dice on any roll where they can spend those Gambit dice. I’m tempted to take a run at doing the planetary systems from Firefly and run it as a Serenity game at a con sometime, I know there’ll be a load of interest from other Browncoats.

Congrats to John and the crew for their wins in the Indie RPG Awards at Gencon:

2016 Indie Game of the Year

2016 Best Support

2016 Best Production

I just got an email timed 16:54 today, 22/6.

It’s from GamesQuest.

It says,

“Your Blades in the Dark Kickstarter order is shipping now and you should get it in the next 3 to 5 days”

I got the email from the Royal Mail telling me it had the parcel at my local office on 21/6 timed at 5:10AM and an email telling me it had been delivered at 10:03 AM the same day. Checking the shipping data it was picked up on the 15th June.

It’s the first time I’ve had notification of shipping a week after it was shipped and 2 days after it was delivered.

Still I suppose it was nice that they bothered.

It arrived this am.

My Blades in the Dark Heist Deck arrived this morning. Shipped on the 6th so the trip across the pond was reasonably quick and it didn’t attract the attention of the UK Customs and Excise people thanks to a value on the CN22 of $16.99 rather than the total inc shipping I paid Game Crafter which was $28.06.

Looks like UPS Mail Innovations have a way past the USPS expensive international shipping even if USPS ‘ name is all over the shipping label.

Thanks to a recommendation I picked up a copy of “A Burglar’s Guide to the City” by Geoff Manaugh. It arrived this morning and a quick glance through the first chapter revealed it to be a goldmine of material for any sort of heist game. So for some good ideas regarding things for your crew to do and ways to do it I’d recommend this book.

Congratulations to John Harper and the crew for winning the Golden Geek RPG Game of the Year 2016