Blades in the Dark: Hacks and Add Ons – Page 112

Compendium Playbooks?

Compendium Playbooks?

Would there be room within the BitD design space for something like Dungeon World’s compendium classes? After meeting certain in-fiction qualifications, players could choose to take advanced/alternate special abilities, items, and maybe new friends from specialized playbooks.

For instance, there could be a compendium playbook for each of the backgrounds (noble, bluecoat, merchant, etc) , heritages (especially Tycheros), being a ghost or golem, being part of various other factions such as a leviathan hunter, rail jack, gondolier, or deathlands scavenger. There could be compendium playbooks for a character who is demon-touched (after making a Faustian deal), a vampire, a ward boss, specialized scoundrel types (a wheelman, a second-story man, demolitionist, torturer), a military veteran or officer, imperial agent, journalist, agitator, etc.

What ideas would you like to see further explored?

This occurred to me while considering how to add dragonmark effects to an Eberron hack, along with Kai Tave’s great thread seeking more robust special ability options for playbooks, and finally [someone else’s] conversation about giving a character ghost abilities to use while disembodied. (I’m sorry, I forget who was mentioning this last one).

Anybody else making inspiration connections between Duskwall and the 1919 Birmingham gangster drama Peaky Blinders?

Anybody else making inspiration connections between Duskwall and the 1919 Birmingham gangster drama Peaky Blinders?

I’ve only seen the first episode myself, but it offers an intriguing view of the interplay and turf tensions between the various gangs (Peaky Blinders (bookies/racketeers), communists, the IRA, the Italian and Chinese communities, etc), the somewhat corrupt coppers, and uncompromising inspectors. It also offers a telling peak into the huge societal and psychological impact of WWI.

Random idea: Living Duskwall

Random idea: Living Duskwall

What: Some sort of online record of the history of each Faction as it unfolds in play among all groups using the online record. Plus, updated status of each Faction’s Hold, Tier and ongoing endeavor, whenever those things change.

How: The book will give all play groups the same starting info about the same Duskwall Factions. From there, it’s easy enough to check a wiki page for additional info on a Faction you’ve taken an interest in, and then to update that page after play.

Why: In an RPG which challenges you to make your mark on the setting, giving your mark an audience and sense of permanence and reality is very rewarding!

Risks: Since it won’t be practical for Crews to interact with each other during play, some sort of contrivance will often be necessary, and, “No, you can’t go attack/meet with this other group in your city, for, uh, some reason or other,” may the dent the impression of Duskwall being a real place.

But… On the other hand, there’s no reason multiple groups couldn’t strategize with each other in between sessions, e.g. forming deals to both help Factions they both have a stake in.

Self-Selection: Opting into Living Duskwall would be a commitment, and groups that aren’t enthusiastic about that commitment would be advised to steer clear and let their own Duskwall come alive at their own table, period. For other groups, though, some might get a huge kick out of having their deeds immortalized, and on getting between-session updates on the world.

Thoughts?

The Factory

The Factory

You are a worker in a large factory and are trained in one of many tasks, like packaging, production, engeneering or planting in the botanic gardens. Everything is ordered and nothing bothers your work. One day an accident happens, which disrupt the monotony and you are forced out of your track. You and your coworkers just want to get home save and forget the horrorble mishap at the factory.

But when were you the last time on your way home at all? Or do you even remember where your home is, or where the factory ends….?

With each moment, new disturbing things are unveiled: disguised Controlleurs roam the halls, the department overseer seems to be constantly on drugs, the cat seems to be impossibly old and something lives in the pipes. The more you leaves your working routine, the more disruptive and weird aspects of the factory is unfolding in front of you.

The walls have eyes. The dead speak to you out of disfunctional coin-box phones. These are no humans, who work in the cantina. Something hunts you. Dont stick out.

[…]

A band of strangers, forge together by their fatefull encounter with the unreal and grim truth are finding fragments of impossible memories and broken artefacts of a world beyond the factory’s walls. And the things you woked up as you started to see through the thin shrouds between sanity and despair, they will soon be aware of your moves.

The Crewsheet / Ward-Sheet and its head of department are constantly evolving and growing aware of your new point of view. With each secret you discover, with each hiddeous creature you escape or task you master, the factory will move unresting in its slumber. Can you and your allies flee before its too late?

In The Factory I want to combine the crewsheet with fronts from AW/DW and a deck of cards revealing details and questions like in A Quiet Year. I am not sure if this hack will be recognicably stay close to BitD or not, but I am thrilled to find out.

Wow, I am a bit bewildered about such an active community for a game not even published yet.

Wow, I am a bit bewildered about such an active community for a game not even published yet. Most Indiegames communities dont even get near to this in their prime.

According to the Quickstart-PDF, hacks and so on shouldnt appear before the official release, does that also count for small things like new factions and very slim reskins which doesnt includ much more than sheets of archetypes and crews with some background material?

Hacked Cult sheet and Hawkers sheet with factions updated to reflect current faction ratings and renown diamonds…

Hacked Cult sheet and Hawkers sheet with factions updated to reflect current faction ratings and renown diamonds made into squares. I hope you’re okay with the x’s and +’s for faction ratings. I like them myself.

Cult:https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_bG0BM874AbTU82NnBiSTRoNFU/edit

Hawkers:https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_bG0BM874AbRC11MjdESUJQVG8/edit

I’m thinking about a hack where the players play as members of a resistance to German occupation during WW2.

I’m thinking about a hack where the players play as members of a resistance to German occupation during WW2. Inspiration would be games like Saboteur and Wolfenstein: The New Order, or movies like Inglorious Bastards, Valkyrie, or Defiance.

Of course, the objective of every game is to kill Hitler.

EDIT: Okay, I’ve gotten started. Working title is “Redoubled Courage” after a quote by Chiune Sugihara

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wGdBcMmgR40OU_6QfTdzzuD2fsOj1uzibCx_RLv1qNM/edit?usp=sharing

Some rules for on-the-fly character creation.

While working on some setting things for Folded Steel, I hit on the idea of the group changing over time and…

While working on some setting things for Folded Steel, I hit on the idea of the group changing over time and becoming something else. The thought is that certain crew types are tied to certain tier ranges. There is only so high a team of Racers can climb in the setting before they hit their cap, and need to change. I don’t want it to be a full stop change over though. Two different groups that started as different types in the lower tier should have a mechanical difference if they become the same type at a higher tier.There needs to be some sort of legacy crew ability. Something the Racers in my example get to retain when they step up and become involved on the bigger stage, that the other group wouldn’t have because they were Scrappers, or a Street Gang, or whatever.

Thoughts? Am I making it more complicated than it needs to be? Should I just shut up and go back to working on the setting info until I see more mechanics from the core game?

Let’s talk about Scum and Villainy

Let’s talk about Scum and Villainy

Over a year ago I was playtesting an early version of Blades in the Dark with some friends, when one of them suggested we should use the system to play Scoundrels in a very different type of setting: Space Opera (Star Wars specifically). We jokingly dubbed the hack Blasters in the Dark.

At the time it was just a funny joke, but it’s an idea that’s stayed with me for a while.

Blades as a core engine has many parts that fit very well with this concept. The different playbooks give you a good set of abilities to work with genre. Team playbooks can change purpose and genre pretty readily (rebels or smugglers?). Switching the skills over is pretty trivial. So what stops you from just recoloring things?

The answer is the core mechanics.

You might note that the hacks you’re seeing tend towards the darker edge of things. Part of this is no doubt genre (heat forces you to fight the law) which leads to outcasts and ne’er do wells. However there are some conceits at the core of the system that are hard to shake. The way actions/effects/stress are stacked generates a very specific vector of fiction.

By dividing up things into desperate => risky => controlled you make a very specific statements. Things that are controlled you’re far more likely to get away with. Hedge your bets. You only have so much stress. Desperate rolls are really dangerous. That sounds like space opera? Not so much.

So one of the most important things to do in order to make this feasible and fun is to tweak the breakdown into something that encourages more daring behavior. Shift the core actions to keep the ratio of success, but give additional incentive to jump into danger face-first (dangerous => daring => safe bet) by triggering different sorts of moves. An example might be the Close Call rule where if you crit on a desparate action you gain a stress back.

Once that’s in place it becomes straightforward to setting drift to other source materials that follow a similar pattern. Smugglers in the Black dodging the Alliance. Bounty Hunters with a jazz soundtrack hunting for the next big prize. I’m also really excited to add an optional xeno book that can help you make aliens of all various sizes, colors and shapes.

Oh yeah. And spaceships. Can’t forget the spaceships.

Very excited to be working on this. Pyew Pyew!