Category: Blades in the Dark: Actual Play Reports

Christmas in the Dark – A holiday one-shot in snowy Duskwall!

This was also my first game of BitD, played on roll20 with its automated playbooks and such.

My players decided to make a crew of Shadows, named the “Midnight Consortium” because they wanted a name that implied they were way more awesome than they actually were. Of course, they had an ambitious reputation. As a hideout, they had a barge lashed onto that big cluster of boats in the river just south of Crow’s Foot. There are four of them, and what a shabby group of scoundrels they were:

Gloss, a bureaucratic liar and manipulator, with a “patron” that was actually blackmailing them.

Copper, a destitute banker who longed for the days of swimming through piles of filthy lucre. They had an accident one day and can now see ghosts. No, they can’t turn this off. Yes, it’s how they lost their money.

Silk, a social climber who wears different outfits depending on her company. She has a bad drug addiction.

Lark, a tumbler from a family of acrobats. Likes to sneak around, tinker with locks, and has relatives to take care of.

They chose one crew contact, a job-facilitator who immediately had a job to, er, facilitate: They gotta steal a document from a building in Charterhall! It’s filled with awful bureaucrats, and of course Gloss leverages one of their contacts (Lady Dame, a Charterhall magistrate) who was willing to spill some details for a couple coin. The Planning Department has been working on a transcription project, and the document in question is in a safe on the 4th floor. Some noble wanted the document to use as blackmail material, and they’re paying very well.

We had a quick chat about the engagement roll and ended up with three dice for their bold plan to zipline from an adjacent building’s roof onto the roof of the Planning Department. I note, much later, that the adjacent building was the crematorium. Anyhow, they rolled 1,1,2 and discover half-way across the line, through the whipping snow and wind, that the flat roof has about 20 desks set up on top, adjunct-bureaucrats plying their dull trade of cross-referencing, stamping, writing, erasing, and transcribing bits and pieces of some much larger document source.

It’s a desparate position, so of course it calls for a “Surprise bureaucracy inspection”! Gloss and Silk distract the office workers while Copper snatches a couple of their papers to see what they were working on. A list of names? During the holidays? Lark leads them onwards down the rooftop stairwell to the 3rd floor.

There’s a locked gate here, so he picked the lock, rather noisily shutting and locking the gate behind the crew. One of the guards from down in the courtyard is onto them, but they duck into a utility room on that floor and observe the guard patrolling inside. It’s warm enough in here that he’s probably not going back outside again. There’s a flashback and the crew reveals that they sent a package courier in to find out which room had the safe.

The rest of the floor is shut down for the evening, so Lark leads them in a quick team maneuver to sneak around the patrol path. And it’s a good thing, too – he soaks up 3 stress covering for everyone else’s loud footsteps. You know, coughing at the right moment – keeping everyone on track.

Time to crack the safe! Lark finds out that picking a lock that has ghost-field shit inside is more like picking an electrical socket, taking the “tased” level-2 harm rather than using up any more stress. Silk steps outside to pacify the guards, warning them of an imminent “Level 6a ghost breach!”, so they retreat – however, they also call in the ghost squad (spirit wardens?) and they’ll be here real soon. They’re literally next door!

With pressure on all sides, the crew wants to try picking the lock again, but I offered a devil’s bargain – get 1d if you heave it out the window instead, wrecking it. They do, and follow it by rope to the snowy walk outside. The safe busts open, and Copper focuses on the spirit energy inside, luring several ghosts who immediately get into a tussle with the awaiting Spirit Wardens.

There’s one more flashback – Copper had arranged for a “Shop Lyft” wagon to be waiting outside, so they grab the document out of the safe, pile in, and get away while the spirit wardens work on the ghosts.

Afterwards, we did an abridged downtime where almost everyone overindulged in their vices, but the whole night fit into a clean 3 hours.

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Some notes:

We skipped over most of the crew creation steps relating to factions, mostly because I forgot to do those steps. I would definitely follow this more closely next time I play, since bringing in the different factions would make crow’s foot feel more lived-in for the players.

I already had a specific job in mind for this one-shot. My prep was pretty much just “Steal Santa’s Naughty List”, and everything else came out of what the players chose or said they wanted to do. None of the players took any combat-oriented special moves, so I pitted them against paper pushers and ordinary bluecoats rather than specialized armed guards or cutthroat gangs.

The playbooks on roll20 helped smooth out the rules for how many dice to roll, and the game is really forgiving when you forget something. Just press onward!

I had to remind my players a couple times about flashbacks, but they followed my suggestion to use them. Devil’s Bargains were a fun way to negotiate the consequences before a roll, instead of having to improvise them afterwards.

I think this was the smoothest one-shot in any system I’ve played to-date, and it’s pretty easy for me to see now where exactly I should do preparation.

Have fun, and stay warm in Duskwall!