Blades in the Dark G+ Archives

The Back Pocket.

Every game I run has one. That is a metaphorical space where I tuck away things I want to use in the game, ready to be pulled out when the time is right.

It can be concrete, like a table to roll on or a stack of note cards or a Word document with a column of stream-of-consciousness phrases. Maybe you have a folder on your computer with pictures, portraits, and documents, or maybe you have a Pintrest board. Or it can be something you keep in the back of your mind, if your mind is organized that way.

I learned a very important lesson. SOMEDAY will probably never come for your campaign. So, if there are things you want to use, jam them in as quickly as you can. Build the whole game around the coolest things you can think of doing in the setting with the characters.

That is related to another idea: if you do all the coolest things you can think of, you won’t run out–you will think of more cool things. There is no finite amount of coolness. It is more like a muscle; the more it is used, the stronger it gets, where if it is held in reserve too long it atrophies.

A third idea about the back pocket: participation is different than spectating. You can take the loose plot of your favorite movie and use it for inspiration to set up a situation in the game. You can repurpose characters as NPCs. Steal liberally from your favorite monsters, magic, and challenges.

The reason this is okay is because your players may have seen Predator, but that’s not the same as playing in a game where there is a Predator hunting in their city. The shift from audience to participant adds the necessary novelty.

We rely on formula to make things familiar enough to be enjoyable. We don’t want the exact same thing over and over, but we do like recognizable plot structures, ancient stories told in new ways, and interesting executions of basic well-explored themes.

In summary, fill up your back pocket! Be intentional about it. Collect and organize your ideas for stories, NPCs, cool places to show off in the game, excellent treasures, exciting challenges, and so on.  Pull out your very favorite ones and get into them as quickly as you can–tomorrow may never come. And don’t be shy about stealing intellectual property for your game table; show off the best of why you like it, and use those booster rockets for your own cool execution.

The best part of the back pocket is you don’t have to force it. One of the brilliant parts of Blades in the Dark is it is very, very low prep. For the first little while, you don’t know what they’ll latch on to, which way they will go. What you CAN do is think up some people who might need help, and some jobs they might pull the crew into. You can put some general thought into scores you’d love to showcase for your players.

When you are on the spot and have to improvise in a hurry, you GET to showcase things from your back pocket, instead of being forced to make something up on the spot. Keep the prep low, and the inspiration high, and that’s the mix that will burn like rocket fuel and make Blades in the Dark soar.

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.