Category: Blades in the Dark: Actual Play Reports

Another wall of text incoming. My crew of thieves has now finished their second score, which, again, took two 45 minute sessions. We’ve also added a 4th member to the crew, Zephyr the Whisper (who has never played any kind of TTRPG before). I imagine we’ll probably end up with one more player at some point, but not everyone will be available for every session, which was why I went with Blades for a lunch game in the first place. I’ll start with some notes and then move on to the recap.

– Still working on effect, but I did use it more during this score. The alchemist and his pet hull spider were deadly combatants and had clocks representing their health.

– By default I allowed resistance to decrease harm by two levels (as fictionally appropriate), and the PCs are still battered after this mission, but not as much as they could be. I think everyone enjoyed this more.

– Don’t split the party! Teamwork moves are powerful, and it hurts to not be able to use them.

– I was hesitant at first of a TTRPG noob playing a whisper instead of something simpler like a cutter, but the player did a great job. He had creative solutions to problems, and he owned with his Tempest ability.

– Seeing the Whisper’s Tempest ability in action was pretty great, although it does leave some of the players wishing they could do things like that.

– I used the entanglement roll for the first time, and nothing happened because the crew doesn’t have any gangs yet. I’m considering rolled a d8 instead of a d6, which would allow for at least a 25% chance of no entanglements after a job going forward. 

– I may be doing minor harm wrong, because I keep handing out things like “stunned” or “dazed” and my players want to know how they can clear their “stunned” condition during the score. If I want to stun a player, I should probably just decrease the position of his next roll by 1 instead of making that a minor harm. Minor harms should be for things that you can’t just shake off in a minute or two, unless there is a mechanic at some point to do that as an action.

– On the subject of harms, I keep forgetting to actually impose their penalties. The Leech’s back was tweaked, but I never gave him -1d on all the physical rolls he made. Similarly the cracked rib that the Hound suffered from the hull should have probably impaired his fighting ability. Just another thing to work on.

The crew present today was, Caveman (Leech), Bones (Hound), Cobalt (Lurk) and Zephyr (Whisper).

The Chimney Sweeps spent a few weeks engaging in their vices and trying to recover from numerous wounds received in their previous job, until they were summoned by a lackey of Bazso Baz. Bazso was unhappy because the Red Sashes have decided not to lay down and die after losing their war chest to thieves a few weeks ago. Instead the Red Sash alchemist and a group of sword fighters have been waylaying the certain Gondoliers who have been transporting drugs for the Lamp Blacks. The Gondoliers have placed a bounty on the head of the Red Sash alchemist, and Bazso would like the Chimney Sweeps to be the ones to collect it.

The crew decides to go with a Deception plan, borrowing a boat from the Gondoliers and appearing to be weak while actually springing a deadly trap on the alchemist. They also recruited a Whisper named Zephyr for his ability to control water, which would certainly come in handy in the canals. Zephyr and Cobalt paddled the boat while Bones perched on a rooftop with his rifle and Caveman rode along the canal in a Cab. Unfortunately the engagement roll came up (1,1,1), and it turned out that a spy in the Gondoliers informed the Red Sashes of the trap, allowing the alchemist to set a trap of his own. All at once a green acidic mist started to rise from the water into the boat, a pair of thugs ambushed Caveman and pushed his cab into the canal, and a spider shaped hull attacked Bones.

A round of resistances left Cobalt hanging from a bridge over the canal, Zephyr suffering minor acid burns, Caveman hanging by a grappling hook on the side of the canal, and Bones ineffectually fighting the hull with his pistols. The alchemist was nowhere to be seen, and things were looking grim for the Chimney Sweeps when Zephyr came to the rescue. His eyes turned blue and small bolts of lightning cracked around him as he tried to summon a cyclone to whisk the mist away. Zephyr’s Attune rolled landed (6,6,6) and I asked the player what his ideal scenario would be. We decided that the cyclone not only captured all the mist but also the alchemist who was hiding under the water. Zephyr pushed the mist away down the canal and the alchemist was flung from the water and landed, stunned, on the bridge near Cobalt.

At this point the fight was against two main targets, the hull and the alchemist, both deadly opponents. Caveman swam to the boat revealing a catapult that he had made earlier that he used to launch Bones’ dog at the alchemist which greatly helped Cobalt as he fought the deadly alchemist with a penchant for acid bombs. At one point Zephyr attempted to create a great hand made out of water to throw the gondola up to the bridge and land on the alchemist, but a failure resulted in the boat missing the bridge but dumping its occupants in front of the alchemist. The alchemist drank a potion turning himself into a cloud of acidic mist that enveloped Cobalt and Caveman, but Caveman happened to have a clockwork fan that he used to blow the cloud away. At this point Zephyr realized that acid is mostly water, and he attuned to the cloud, freezing it and killing the alchemist.

The fight with the hull spider was not going as well, as Bones’ pistols were doing little damage to the ghost controlled machine. In a eureka moment, Bones recalled that he had some ectoplasmic shot that might damage the ghost. He fired, and the new ammunition seemed much more effective, but the hull tackled him off of the roof onto the ground below. The spider was about to land a killing blow when Zephyr saved the day yet again by pulling the spirit out of hull and into a waiting spirit bottle. Unfortunately in its death throes the hull put one of its legs through Zephyr’s heart, appearing to kill him. However, in a flashback it turned out that Zephyr’s heart was actually located on the right side of his chest, and so he survived with only a punctured lung. With the alchemist dead, the Chimney Sweeps went to collect their reward.

Without quite as many injuries to recover from this time, the crew has expressed interest in starting some long term projects. Caveman took the Hull body with him, and would really like to learn how to bind a friendly ghost to it himself. In addition he would like to make friends with a tailor and add him to his list on contacts. This is mostly because he wants +1d on his vice (luxury) rolls from a contact. 

Warning, there is a massive wall of text incoming. I ran my first two sessions of Blades this week, and I thought I’d share my experience so far. As background, I play 5E D&D with a bunch of guys over lunch at work (we’ve also played Pathfinder and Dungeon World), but finding a day when everyone is available is a hassle. I thought it might be cool to try to run Blades on days when not everyone is around, because it seems pretty easy to adjust difficulty on the fly, and also explain why some PCs aren’t around (lost in vice, locked up, etc). At first the group balked at playing bad guys, but I described the game as a mix of Ocean’s 11, Firefly and Dishonored they got pretty excited. Of course, we only play for an hour at a time, so it took us 2 sessions to complete 1 score, not including downtime.

Here are some general thoughts I had.

1. The players had an absolute blast. I basically let them describe the layout of the building they were infiltrating, and attempt the robbery anyway they wanted. This is a level of freedom they don’t get in D&D. 

2. In our D&D campaign these guys are your archetypal over planners (even though they hate it), and the planning system was a godsend.

3. The players made ample use of the flashback mechanic (3 times I think), and that was probably their favorite mechanic overall.

4. The leech was an artificer and would frequently want to flashback to tinkering on just the right tool he needed for the job. It was definitely cool, and he loved it, but then should I retroactively increase his load to account for more tools? I’m not really sure how to handle this, and I don’t want to tell him no. I anticipate this coming up a lot.

5. We had frequent conversations about the position of actions rolls, and what the PCs could do to make them more or less controlled. Conversely, we had no conversations about effects because I generally let single actions finish the job. I need to be better at thinking about effects.

6. Because I wanted to try and finish the score before the second lunch was over, I think I favored harm over complications. While this made the score shorter, the crew is pretty banged up now. I should strike a better balance in the future.

7. I was the only one who read the rules beforehand, so there was lots of confusion about resistance vs action vs fortune vs engagement rolls (and we haven’t even gotten to downtime rolls yet). I sort of sold this as a rules light game like Dungeon World, but while it is has similarities to Dungeon World (fiction first), my players thought the rules seemed, at times, arbitrarily complicated. This was probably my fault, since I didn’t always explain the rules succinctly. Complexity-wise, Blades probably falls somewhere between Dungeon World and Pathfinder, perhaps somewhere close to 5E D&D.

And here is the actual mission report:

The Chimney Sweeps are a creative crew of thieves operating out of Crow’s Foot, which currently consists of Caveman (leech), Cobalt (lurk) and Bones (hound). Caveman is a dandy focused on clockwork contraptions, Cobalt is an ex-bluecoat turned pick-pocket and Bones is a down on his luck Sailor with a ghost greyhound companion. This crew ended up in Bazso Baz’s office and accepted his job offer to rob the Red Sashes’ HQ.

The group Gathered Information on the HQ, and discovered it was a large 2 story building, with the vault most likely in the basement. The plan was to infiltrate the Sashes’ HQ via the chimney into the 1st floor kitchen. Fast-forward to being on the roof, and Caveman tinkers a pulley system to get everyone silently down the chimney. Unfortunately a poor engagement roll lead to Cobalt discovering 2 guards in the kitchen. He tugs twice on the rope up the chimney in a prearranged signal for trouble, and Bones commands his ghost dog into the house to distract the guards. The roll was a partial success, which caused the dog to run into a guard wielding a lightning hook, and he was captured.

With the guards occupied, the whole gang made it into the kitchen without a problem, but there was now a 6 segment clock on the board the read “Dead Dog” that was slowly filling up. The group split up at this point. Cobalt rode a dumbwaiter from the kitchen to the basement, Bones went to rescue his dog, and Caveman stayed in the kitchen with a plan. 

We flashed back to when the crew discovered that, unlike most buildings in this rundown part of town, the Red Sashes’ HQ had all electric lighting and the generator was in the kitchen. Caveman did an assist action and desperately attuned to the generator to knock out all the lights in the building, and also create an arc of electricity to the guards lightning hook to destroy it. A partial success was going to leave him very badly burned, but he resisted with his special clockwork grounding vest that absorbed the electricity causing him to merely spasm and throw his back out. 

Downstairs Cobalt made use of Caveman’s assist by employing his dark-sight mask to ambush a guard, slitting his throat (so much for not being evil). He also managed to pick the lock on the vault with minimal fuss, and got a large chest of silver back up the dumbwaiter to a waiting Caveman.

Bones snuck up on the guards that were fighting his dog, arriving with only 1 slice left on the clock that would result in a dead dog. He fired a warning shot in the air, commanding his dog to come with him and the guard to not pursue on pain of death. A partial result cowed 2 of the guards, but the third was a badass and was not deterred. A fight broke out and Bones opened fire on the Red Sash, taking a devil’s bargain that the muzzle flash from his pistol would light up his face allowing him to be identified. A failed roll left Bones disarmed and with one fewer finger from a lighting quick sword slash. A resist roll brought that down to just the tip of his pinky finger cleaved off. At this point Bones thought it was be best to retreat, and made a desperate leap from a second story window, taking a devil’s bargain that he’d need to somehow dodge a deadly throwing knife. The leap was a success, but Bones tried and failed to shoot the throwing knife out of the air, earning him a nasty shoulder wound.

All that was left was for Caveman and Cobalt to escape back up the chimney with the treasure. Caveman decided to use some explosives from his wrecking tools to collapse the chimney after them but got a partial success. The explosion was much larger than they anticipated, caving in the roof underneath them. They leapt to an adjacent building, but Cobalt dislocated his shoulder in order not to drop the chest of silver into the alley below. 

So the Chimney Sweeps got away, though each member ended up with 1 standard harm, a few lesser harms, and quite a bit of stress. They also racked up 7 total heat from a rather explosive mission. On the positive side, Baszo split the take with them, leaving them with 2 coin and quite a bit of rep for wrecking the Red Sash HQ. They’re probably going to need to spend some of that on extra actions to heal some harm and reduce heat, but we’ll see.