Blades in the Dark: Discussion – Page 7 – Blades in the Dark G+ Archives

Any chance of a blank ship sheet being provided?

I’ve been an avid promoter of Blades in the Dark since the early draft/playtest rules and have run it many times…

I’ve been an avid promoter of Blades in the Dark since the early draft/playtest rules and have run it many times both as a one shot and in some short campaigns. I recently acquired the hard copy of Scum and Villainy for running scoundrels in space. Our local group has been playing a Traveller campaign for about a year on Friday evenings and on being asked to run something at Consquences (a local UK LARP convention) immediately though of running S&V as a low/no prep game in the Saturday evening slot.

My first impressions on going over the playsheets, handouts and GM ref sheets was Wow! The amount of effort that has gone into providing four planetary systems with places and people as a default background for running jobs is wonderful. In the usual Blades style a number of factions are predefined to give the GM plenty of ideas for some interaction between the characters and potential allies and enemies.

One of the players was a long time Traveller fan, one who had played Blades before and one who had experience, but not necessarily with Traveller or PbtA games. I quickly covered chargen and we got down to playing. They choose the Firedrake option and we immediately went into the Escaping from Prison opening sequence. This was very much a Blake’s 7 moment for all of us with distinct memories of the second episode of the series. Having escaped and recovered their ship the team did a short downtime session and started the first real Job.

The Heat and Wanted mechanism having been adjusted for the new setting was extremely well thought out and worked extremely well in practice with the 8 points of Heat swiftly disposed of by heading for a different system. The players checked out the Factions they had gained favour with and settled on the base of one of those as the location for their escape destination.

I shall make up a set of three booklets containing the information about the various Factions to hand out to players in future as that will definitely make it easier for p[ayers to know who and what to work for or against.

I really liked the new Gambit mechanism whereby the characters get extra dice allowing for up to 3 bonus dice on any roll where they can spend those Gambit dice. I’m tempted to take a run at doing the planetary systems from Firefly and run it as a Serenity game at a con sometime, I know there’ll be a load of interest from other Browncoats.

The Sanctorium in Brightstone was designed by the Immortal Emperor himself during his last visit to Doskvol, nearly…

The Sanctorium in Brightstone was designed by the Immortal Emperor himself during his last visit to Doskvol, nearly five centuries ago. He was in Doskvol for a realignment, as a number of civic and religious structures had become wayward and required his personal attention to prevent a civil conflict that could have been on the scale of the recent Unification War. The death toll from the brief trials for heretics and dissidents ran up into the hundreds, and the bones of the executed were worked into the foundations of a monument erected in honor of the Immortal Emperor’s visit.

The Gates of Death, rebuilt; the Sanctorium was intended to echo the impression of the supernatural barrier that was shattered millennia ago. The Immortal Emperor tasked the founding families of the City Council with building the Sanctorium to conform to certain parameters, funded by Imperial coffers. This gift to Doskvol provided a place for its citizens to purify themselves of the traces of death that creep into life through age and impure thoughts, and to oversee the ritual destruction of rogue spirits. Catacombs below protect the remains of flesh without life, ashes of the notable contained in expensive urns, more eternal than memory.

The Founding Families have spiritual authority as well as temporal clout, because the Immortal Emperor laid upon them the mantle of policing the boundary between life and death while offering guidance and instruction to the living. They are stewards of the gates of life and death. They choose what endures and what is silenced forever. If they were merely people, like everyone else only with money, a reasonable person could conclude that their influence outstrips their authority. But if they are gatekeepers for this city’s soul-saddled flesh, we owe them everything. As I am sure you know, they seldom hesitate to collect.

From “Six Foundations for Revolt” by Concerned Citizen

A few new questions: Can the PC’s resist consequences of Entanglement rolls?

Not To Be Trifled With and Sharpshooter: How long do these abilities last? For only one action? Watching Roll Play Blades, it appeared that they lasted multiple actions, even for the entirety of a battle. Is this generally true? If so, does the +1d/+1 effect/etc last as well, or does the PC need to push themselves again to gain that benefit a second time?

As always, thanks for the advice and answers.

Hey, do y’all have any interesting “weird” vices?

Hey, do y’all have any interesting “weird” vices? The Leech in my group overindulged with the hooded proprietor of the sunken grotto, and asked if I could give him any ideas for a new vice purveyor before our next session. Busy life stuff has kept me away from my GM workbench lately so I figured I should try and outsource my brainstorming. Any thoughts?

Scum & Villainy

I’ll be running my first session of S&V in about 12 hours. This will be my first time ever playing any Forged in the Dark product. I’ve read both S&V and BitD, and watched some of John’s campaign on itmeJP’s channel way back.

As per the rules of the game we’ll begin with character and crew creation before moving to the Starting Situation. The group (of three players) has been kind enough to decide on the Stardancer before we even sit down at the table, meaning I’ve had some time to mull over potential factions and elements to introduce.

All in all I feel pretty well prepared in my non-preparation.

Regardless, I feel compelled to ask: Got any tips?

P153 (Downtime Activities): “You can only attempt actions that you’re in a position to accomplish.

P153 (Downtime Activities): “You can only attempt actions that you’re in a position to accomplish. If an activity is contingent on another action, resolve that action first.”

My current set of players keep an eye on their heat tracker and wanted levels, frequently wanting to reduce heat and take dangerous actions to finish projects, train, etc. The characters are often in a position (often, a risky one) to reduce heat in one way or another (which I take to mean being “contingent on another action”). Hence, I read this to be saying Resolve the action to deal with the danger first to get them into position to safely take the DTA, and the reduce heat DTA instructions to then be adding to make a downtime activity roll using an action rating (not an action roll) to determine how much heat is reduced.

Problem is: these are going to be the same action roll, and it feels weird to do that (the first result, for the action roll to get into position, could be a Critical, then the second one to determine the DTA result could be a 1-3, reducing only 1 heat). The alternative seems to be to have them be one roll, but then this directly opposes the instructions in the quoted text. This leads me to wonder: am I reading too deeply into the directions in the quoted lines, thereby placing unnecessary layers of complexity between the PCs and their goals in downtime? Maybe I am missing something? Something else?

How would you model an entanglement (or other reaction) where an enemy crew wants to run a score against the…

How would you model an entanglement (or other reaction) where an enemy crew wants to run a score against the players’ crew? The descriptions of the entanglements kind of suggest a flat payoff to avoid it as the only method, but that feels kind of flat.

My players have severely messed with the Red Sashes and a Leviathan-worshiping drug cult. I want them to be able to retaliate but the entanglements seem a bit tame for the revenge they’ll want to unleash.