Blades in the Dark G+ Archives

I recently ran my group’s first session of Scum and Villainy in our custom setting, to great success. We were continuing our Fate campaign’s storyline, so having stolen a highly valuable data crystal from the Carthic governor of the Mycenae Reach, the crew of the not-so-good ship Cydonia stopped for fuel at a distant, broken-down space station. Their contact asked them to the bar for a drink, and when they arrived, he was dead. Cue the rest of the Stardancer’s starting situation.

This went very well, as did the downtime afterwards – each of my players started a Long-Term Project as they hadn’t taken much stress during the start (I may need to dial up the consequences from partial success, but they rolled a couple of key 6es and crits), and that generally worked well. However, I do have a question: for their Entanglement, I rolled Ship Trouble. Does that still apply if the crew has paid Upkeep? I didn’t apply it during Downtime, since they were at a port, but I could certainly apply it during the next job.

Also, can PCs make multiple Setup actions for a roll? I had a situation where two players wanted to Set Up a group Skulk to get back to the ship – our Arcanist (a custom playbook) cast a veil to turn the group invisible and our Muscle shot a pipe to create a distraction. Since both of these succeeded (and the Muscle’s setup was a crit) I put the Skulk to Controlled. Should I allow multiple PCs to Set Up a roll like this, or is that too much? Should PCs be limited to one Setup for a later roll, or should I simply apply logical consequences from repeated Setups or time pressure as needed?

Overall, the group seems to really be enjoying the system, and I’m excited to see where they go with their projects.