Blades in the Dark: Discussion – Page 162 – Blades in the Dark G+ Archives

Speaking of Canting Crew…

https://archive.org/details/newdictionaryoft00be

Our game’s crew started as Thieves, but we rapidly moved in a very strongly occult direction and about half of the…

Our game’s crew started as Thieves, but we rapidly moved in a very strongly occult direction and about half of the claims on the map aren’t really appropriate for these characters. I’m working on adapting the Thieves map using some of the elements from Cult and some claims that are narratively different but mechanically similar to the examples from the other maps.

Has anybody else found the need to customize a claim map to better fit the direction your game has gone?

So I’m trying to wrap my head around how Arcane Magnitude interacts with Effect.

Say a Whisper wants to use Tempest to take out an opponent: The Position is decided as normal. She chooses the magnitude of the magic and takes the stress for that, rolls Attune and succeeds. How is the Effect decided? I’m guessing that the magnitude effects Potency but I’m unsure quite how. Is this one of the gut feeling judgements? For me that feels like Moderate magnitude is standard Potency with Minor and Weak being -1 and -2 respectively and Serious +1 etc but it might not be as hard and fast that that.

And how does Tier factor into this? It seems to me that an unarmoured Tier 2 Red Sash with his fancy blade is just as vulnerable to be pummelled by marble sized hailstones as his Tier 0 apprentice. Or is it better to think of Tier as a wider abstraction just as hit points are in D20 style games? A Tier 2 swordsman is better prepared to deal with giant hail than a Tier 0 fighter even though it’s not so obvious from the fiction, just as a Tier 2 Whisper is better able to direct the same hail to greater effect than a Tier 0 apprentice would find possible.

I’ve not really seen play examples of how a Whisper goes head to head with a non magical opponent and the rules don’t make it completely clear.

On intimidating warring factions (standing up to bullies):

Our group ran into something that might be considered a problem. To our players, it made a lot of sense to do a job to mess up a faction who decided to start a war with us (See Entanglements: Show of Force) to send the message of, “This war ends when you stop deciding you want our turf so damn bad.” We wanted to make a plan to steal a few of their smuggling boats, showing them we’ll take what’s theirs until they decide they don’t need to take what’s ours. We saw this as a job capable of narratively moving the faction status to -2. We even considered putting heads on spikes and painting the walls red with blood. Ya know, the usual.

Our GM pointed out that the mechanics seem to make this kind of idea impossible, and as far as I can tell, he’s right. The rules say, “When you execute an operation, you gain -1 or -2 status with

any factions that are hurt by your actions.” Being

at war means your status with a faction is -3, and vice versa. As a result, it seems like after the job we’d just immediately go back to being at war.

Was this an oversight? Is this the kind of situation where you forego the rules due to house common sense? Is it supposed to be impossible to teach a faction that their war with you is unwise, because all factions in Doskvol are hardened/ambitious enough to not care?

All thoughts appreciated!

I have 2 questions from my most recent session.

Question 1 – On page 18 of the QS, it seems pretty clear that you get to mark XP each time “you address a tough challenge” in the way your playbook prefers to do so. What is considered tough is obviously up to the individual group. However, in the most recent playthrough of the Blood Letters, Jon mentioned that the max you could get for tough challenges was 2. So was John Harper mistaken (shit happens), or is this a new rule coming in a future version?

Question 2 – When gathering info to provide the detail for the chosen plan, is that always a downtime action, or should it be considered part of the score and not cost rep or coin?

So, I were about to finally print the quick start pdf, and then my printer decided the printer head needs to be…

So, I were about to finally print the quick start pdf, and then my printer decided the printer head needs to be changed. :I

Would it be fine to deliver the file to my local Staples-equivalent and get it printed there? John Harper

Blades in the Dark caught my attention because it merged neatly in with many of my interests.

Blades in the Dark caught my attention because it merged neatly in with many of my interests. I thought this community might be interested in an anthology of three novellas I wrote that play with some similar ideas in a setting I developed before I ever heard of Blades in the Dark.

https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/2016/05/13/chalice-anthology/