Category: Blades in the Dark: Discussion

I have a thought on focusing that helps improvisation be easier.

Long-running fiction series’ with supernatural elements tend to have a lens they use to unify many of the unusual things they want to do in the series. In the Fantastic Four, science(!!!) was the answer. In Marvel, it was a boon to have mutations; now if you want something unusual a mutant is behind it. In both Smallville and Warhammer, you’ve got mutagenic warpstone that hooks into a victim’s deep desires and makes them horribly manifest, power at a cost. In the tv show Supernatural, most things can be traced back to souls as the power source of the supernatural. And so on.

For Blades in the Dark, the supernatural is all grounded in electroplasm. Ghosts, other undead, leviathans, industry, Whispers, even runic magic all trace back to electroplasm. That is a great unifying lens.

So, as you improvise, be intentional about that. The vision of Duskwall carries with it electroplasm as a theme, from technology to fighting fire with fire dealing with ghosts to the major industry of the city to the haunting of your rickety lair.

If you are hard pressed and need to think up something valuable to reference, steal, or wreck, how does it relate to electroplasm? If you need to think of a cool site for something to go down, keep that electroplasm lens in mind to give it unique touches. Maybe you need a quick obstacle; maybe it relates to electroplasm.

Having that supernatural touchstone can bring unity to the game. Can you overuse it? Yes, but that’s a lot harder to do if you use it in lots and lots of different ways.

You don’t want people to run across electroplasm walls to keep out the undead as an obstacle over and over. But there could be a restless spirit that manifests and is intensely territorial. Or maybe a group of spirit wardens picked tonight of all nights to do an alley sweep to wipe out the residuals. Or maybe there is a Whisper with an independent agenda in your way, communing with the spirits, and you’re reluctant to interrupt. Maybe when you were casing the location an illegal leviathan blood vendor spotted you and thinks you’re spying for the bluecoats, and sends thugs after you.

Need someone who is rich? Maybe they own a leviathan hunting fleet of four ships. Maybe they made their fortune from whispers prodding ghosts for blackmail material. Maybe they manufacture the restricted electroplasmic barrier technology. Maybe they curate a museum of art made by ghosts.

Both those sets of improvisations were based on thinking on how it traces back to electroplasm, but also thinking of the breadth of how that could apply.

Finally, the power of Gothic storytelling (for me) comes in the uneasy clash of rational intellectual scientific worldview, and superstitious emotional magical worldview. Electroplasm has that built in, as people were coping with it before industrialization harnessed it properly as a mass-produced energy type. As they lost sight of its identity as anything but a resource, they lose the respect the superstitious showed. If you feel you are at risk of getting stale in improvisation, jump back and forth across the Gothic line.

They go to meet a contact, you want to make him interesting. Maybe he’s proud of his taser walking stick run on electroplasm, and he lights his cigarettes with it. Or, to jump to the other side, maybe he’s got a hat band of runes so he can trap a ghost in his hat’s crown if he gets in a pinch. Either way, bam! Your contact just got more interesting, and also is a flavor fit for Duskwall.

You need a heist location. On one side of the Gothic line, it’s an abandoned distillery for leviathan oil. The spirit wardens were underpaid and sloppy in clearing it out, and all the dead in a half mile congregate here, corporeal or otherwise. But the office still has the safe…

On the other side of the Gothic line, three ragged basements connect, to get into the cellars of a wealthy aristocrat. One of them houses a squatter who has covered all surfaces with chalk runes, trapped by a paranoia that there is a specific ghost out to get her. Maybe tonight there is.

I hope that’s helpful.

I have some thoughts about this game that do not line up with the thoughts of others, and that’s okay; as John Harper said, the game is like a guitar, and different musicians will play differently.

There are many RPGs, and when I start running a new one, I look for what it does well. What is the specialty that inspires you to use this game instead of half a dozen others?

For me, the answer is in the heist structure (specifically skipping planning, and player-facing challenge mechanization) and the down time structure (quick mechanization of ongoing life.)

Characters emerge through play, downplaying the significance of the individual encounter and instead building characters by shading with many light washes. Patterns of behavior emerge, rather than focusing on individual encounters being role-played through.

If you want a game that goes step by step through the days, and spends a lot of time delving into character backstories and looking at how they are connected, there are dozens of games that do that. If you want to role-play through conversations and take on a leisurely pace to address many details, you can do that in this game. That can be done in Blades in the Dark, but using those methods turns aside from what makes the game unique.

I feel the game is more successful when it DOES NOT go into backstory before you start, when it DOES NOT establish everyone’s relationships in detail. You are a crew, drop in and play, and as you improvise flash-backs and act out the heists and make decisions for down time, THERE is where we’ll see who the scoundrel is. Players are even rewarded for revealing the character in play rather than in exposition, with the experience structure.

I feel like in a half hour or less the play group needs to be on a heist. Leave the detailed backstories and languorous explorations with developing questions to other games where that process is a feature–let Blades in the Dark be fast, crisp, and focused on heists.

The players move around the house of the characters’ lives, peeking in different windows to see scenes play out, but not following them around their daily routines. Player experience of the characters is incomplete, jump cuts, telling moments, and flashbacks. Let that mosaic build a portrait, and let it be sketchy for a while.

If we follow the characters around and role play all their encounters, then it’s jarring to try and use the heist structure and downtime structure around that, since it is so much less granular. Also, individuals or pairs of characters can dominate play time while everyone else watches and waits to get back to the shared action.

My two cents!

So you want to have leviathan bone and leather, but you also want to go with John Harper’s vision of immortal and unkillable leviathans. How can you have both? 

You can use my limmers. That will get you there. 

https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/2015/05/07/leviathans-of-duskwall/

https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/2015/05/07/leviathans-of-duskwall

A Whisper tinkered together a device to try and capture the etheric whispers of ghosts surrounding the half-sunken ruin of the old canal boathouse that used to connect to the gaol. This is what she captured.

https://youtu.be/4Oyo4Bcy1Sc

https://youtu.be/4Oyo4Bcy1Sc