Category: Blades in the Dark: Discussion

I realized there is another pitch-perfect genre that the Blades in the Dark rule set would accommodate with a little adjustment.

Racing. Especially illegal criminally connected racing. Either with cars, or with spaceships, or pods, or whatever.

The character types would have to change, but you could have the “heist” replaced with the race. Flashbacks to making deals with other factions and racers, with elements of corruption (throwing the race, sabotaging someone else’s vehicle, seducing a rival, killing a key resource, bolstering a vehicle with an infusion of cash, etc.)

The race determines prestige, requires repairs, involves a payout, and affects rivalries. While there is a pilot (and maybe gunner, depending on the kind of racing we’re talking about) you can have a character offering big-picture guidance to grant advantages and disadvantages, and to handle flashbacks to working with other factions. You could have a fixer who might have acquired the stuff you need at this moment in the race, before it started. You could have the saboteur/face, who deals with other groups to disrupt their unity or their gear, so they falter during the race at a critical moment as needed. And of course the artist/mechanic with the custom vision and methodology to make the perfect racing machine–and get a battered one back out on the track.

So you have like the pit crew and management, and that’s the crew. They have vehicles that they maintain and grant advantages to through custom gear, and sponsorship they must maintain to stay solvent (whether that’s criminal oversight, advertising companies, or a combination, or decadent nobles dueling by proxy.)

So you have downtime actions, then everybody gets a single action before the race (for a little role playing with a mechanical or fictional bite) then you have the race. During the race, mental focus is an issue, as is skill, the machine being driven, and the relationship to other drivers. As well as atmospheric conditions or other race-track specific things to make each race deliver its own challenges.

Then have a deck of challenges (or a table) for each track type, and at intervals, reveal a complication that the team as a whole prepared for ahead of time. If their prep isn’t enough, then there’s bad things that happen to the racer (or someone behind the scenes, depending on the kind of challenge.)