Blades in the Dark: Discussion – Page 133 – Blades in the Dark G+ Archives

I saw Assassin’s Creed movie yesterday and it was not bad and not good in my opionen.

I saw Assassin’s Creed movie yesterday and it was not bad and not good in my opionen. I liked the visual style (I learned that my Doskvol is not dusty and not crowed enough) and I recommend to check out the soundtrack if you’re using background sounds/music during your games. Cool vibes and a lot of athmosphere fitting for my Blade games.

Gangs of New York – Lessons for Blades

Gangs of New York – Lessons for Blades

I just watched Gangs of New York. Twice actually. Once to enjoy the story and once to track the progression of gangs as factions in Blades.

The story has a lot about gang war and ward bosses, and personal drama. Lovers and vengeance and all of that.

But…it also has a TON of political issues that exacerbate and fuel the central drama. It takes place in 1863, right in the middle of the Civil War and though it’s in New York (far away from the fighting) that is a major driver throughout the movie.

Two things I saw that were remarkable about this:

1.Politicians (as they always do) needed voters, and they were more than happy to use the disenfranchised (in this case Irish immigrants) to establish their voter base while at the same time employing anti-immigrant gangs (literally “The Natives”) to keep them down. Powerful people pitting one gang against another for their own profit. Sadly familiar IRL, but put in a very gamable context for Blades.

2. People will just let the world fucking burn to see their vengeance delivered. There is a scene at the end (trying to avoid specific spoilers here but if you’re sensitive to them, I’d skip this paragraph) where I’m just amazed as Bill “the Butcher” Cutting (a character that John has referenced as an inspiration for Bazso Baz) and Amsterdam Vallon are at each others throats despite the world falling apart around them. As far north as it is, war came to New York (in a fashion) and it destroyed lives, but these two fuckers didn’t care. They just had it out for each other and everyone else could be damned.

So I wonder…

…have you used powerful NPCs that are ostensibly not criminals to fuel the conflict between gangs to further their own political agenda? Are the gangs pawns of the nobles, the other way around, or a bit of both?

…have your Blades ever had political aspirations or sided with a powerful notable to do their dirty work?

…how much of the Unity War or the Skovlander refugees have you seen in your games? Anyone set a game few years before Blades normally starts while the Unity War was still going on?

…do you see the Blades being part of the larger ecosystem of Imperium, or are their actions so insignificant that they are unnoticed by the Ministries? What would it look like if a noble or government official took notice of the Blades? What would they want to do with them? What do the Blades think about politics or are they too focused on their own battles to even care?

…finally, I’ve seen this a lot with the Bloodletters. Do you think that Blades, by their nature, profit off misery, because if they don’t, someone else will? Because its the only way they can?

I mean, what Arcy and Canter and Oskarr do is just awful. They sell Leviathan blood to people to shoot up with and turn them into catatonic demon-human hybrid monstrosities and then sweep that under the carpet by giving the bodies to a vampire. What the fuck is wrong with these people? The fuck is that by their account, that is the only way to get ahead. Is there any force of morality or civic responsibility or scrap of patriotism that would ever make them reconsider their actions? Would they keep doing what they do if it hurt their city? Yes, we seen that. What about the whole Imperium? What about their friends? Their family? I’m just not sure.

Love to hear your thoughts on Blades and how they fit into the world of Shatter Isles.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0217505/?ref_=nv_sr_1

And maybe someone is making something like this in Doskvol.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/21/upshot/Mapping-the-Shadows-of-New-York-City.html?smid=tw-upshotnyt&smtyp=cur&_r=0

John Harper I’ve been picking up the impression lately that a v8 ruleset, and be association, QS, might be near at…

John Harper I’ve been picking up the impression lately that a v8 ruleset, and be association, QS, might be near at hand? Just an assumption based on scattered mention of mechanical tweaks you’re still making, like faction ticks at character creation. Am I way off base here?

Normally I stream Legend of the Five Rings and D&D5e, but going into the new year I am thinking about a Scum &…

Normally I stream Legend of the Five Rings and D&D5e, but going into the new year I am thinking about a Scum & Villiany campaign in addition to my current streaming lineup. I will also be playing Chroma Squad while discussing an upcoming blades the dark hack I am working on for Super Sentai style games (ideally ready for playtest with the new power rangers movie launch). Is Scum & Villany something people would want to watch?

So I’m running a big(ish) group of players on a rotating schedule and we’ve come across a couple of tricky bits and…

So I’m running a big(ish) group of players on a rotating schedule and we’ve come across a couple of tricky bits and pieces. One of the issues we’re having is people not being scheduled for sessions. At this point, at the start of each game I’m giving players 1 limited downtime activity for each session missed, or a player can forgo all of their accumulated downtime to get mini-lost and clear all harm and stress. This represents time spent at the lair, and one of the positive side effects is that players have a little extra stuff that they can do to mitigate the chaos that the “shift” before them cause.

Crew upgrades are being handled through Google forms, and players vote for the upgrades they want, and we have a pretty good vibe happening on the discord, with a lot of discussion about the rules, how we need to interpret them for our group and what shenanigans they’re going to get up to.

So far the game has been a really awesome, and I’ve been having a blast.

I have a metaphysics question.

I have a metaphysics question. I just listened to ep6 of the Bloodletters AP (still Six Towers Gang back then), to tell you where this question’s coming from. The Dunville Masquerade.

So you’re a Whisper, and you buy the whole Church of Ecstasy of the Flesh party line. Spirits aren’t really people, they’re just echoes of what a person was, and it’s totally okay to rip them out of a dead body, mix them up with Leviathan blood and use them to power the grid. Because spirit=bad, electricity=good.

But, how do you reconcile that with Hollows? As a Whisper you know the spirit can be taken out before the guy’s even dead, his body will survive, but he’ll be in this weird half-living totally docile state.

Where do you draw the line between person and not-person?

Lets talk about the Claims system.

First off, I love what it does to the game. The fact that you get negative status for every claim you take means that you get into more trouble as your reach expands, which is fun! The hefty faction status penalty also means there is meat in the status management minigame. You can choose to take claims from a variety of factions, making many enemies but avoiding the mechanical penalties of war, or picking a single enemy to bleed dry, but then having to deal with being at war and your targets preparing specifically for you. I love that stuff to bits.

But I think the status penalty being so hefty in practise means that the GM needs to narrow the space of possibilities of how you get a Claim to such actions that will produce a -2 status change. Which basically turns out to mean “eliminate all opposition at location X.”

This in turn means that engaging the Claims system overrides crew playbooks stylistically to a degree – whether you’re Hawkers or Thieves or a Cult, you’re now doing gang-on-gang violence.

Which is fun, but I’d like for stuff like infiltrating the leadership of the gang, or negotiating for a cut, and etcetera to be more viable options to getting claims. But that likely means less of a status hit (or if it’s still the full penalty for this sort of stuff, there’s a bit of an incongruity on what status actually means), and that might take the teeth out of the claims system.

How does your group tend to get new claims? Is my experience of the rules in play off-base here, perhaps? If you’re already doing non-gang violence ways of getting new claims, how did that work out?

I highly recommend watching the Bloodletters Youtube series, GMed by John Harper with a stellar cast of players.

I converted the whole video series into audiobooks so I can listen to them while travelling and doing chores. You can download each session as a separate audio-only file from here:

https://app.box.com/s/gplta5ov08abgzy1lh4liodcqtdtzghf

FYI the playlist of the Bloodletters Youtube videos:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQQW3Ew6DKsN0-Iv7n7144RbqKKRneqHH

Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQQW3Ew6DKsN0-Iv7n7144RbqKKRneqHH