Blades Against Darkness

Blades Against Darkness

Blades Against Darkness

A little sneak peek at one of the playbooks:

The Arbiter

Playbook Moves

• Tactician: When you lead a group action in combat you suffer -1 less total stress from all failed rolls.

• Assault Leader: +1d effect when you seize contested ground, drive the enemy back, or secure an advantageous position.

• Battlefield Awareness: You can immediately read a combat situation. When you gather information with Battle you and your team get +1d effect when acting on the answers you receive.

• Gunslinger : Ricochet shots off of things, shoot objects out of peoples hands, draw and reload your weapon in the blink of an eye, etc.

• Cold Blooded: Clear 1 stress when you kill an enemy.

• Breach: +1d when you do violence to inanimate objects.

• Full Metal Jacket: Armor you’re wearing doesn’t count against your load.

• Battleborn: You get special armor against physical attacks in combat. When you roll a critical in combat, clear 1 stress.

Unique Gear:

• Fine dragoon revolver

• Bandolier of specialty ammunition

• Fine tower shield

• Chokesmoke Vials

• Wrecker tools

Blades in the Dark Noir

Blades in the Dark Noir

Blades in the Dark Noir

I found this very inspiring. A funny fact is that they seem to use the same font as Fiasco for the game, making it look like if John had done the Layout 😛

The hounting music, doesnt match the action game feel of blades but i can imagine such would work fine on a real hounted Noir setting.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xtj5eSVgKM4

Finally got to run a session of Blades the other day.

Finally got to run a session of Blades the other day.

Finally got to run a session of Blades the other day. I’ve had great feedback from my players and I had a lot of fun putting on a plethora of questionable Cockney/Scottish accents. I’ll probably do a play report soon, but wanted to get some advice on managing obstacles.

We reached a point where the crew had infiltrated a distillery and needed to secure their way into an office, which was guarded by patrols of thugs. For this I opted for a 6 segment clock – reasonable difficulty but not super hard.

The crew ended up taking 4 action rolls to overcome the obstacle, avoiding any danger each time (6 – 5/4 on controlled).

– 1 Stalk roll to find the pattern of their movements = 2 effect

– 3 Murder rolls to eliminate the guards – 2 effect, then 1, then 4.

They justified every roll as controlled, as they were going slowly and methodically and they had narratively scouted the guards out beforehand with the Stalk roll. However this feels like it may have been a little too straightforward/nice to the players.

As a GM should I feel I probably should have introduced Soft Moves (to use the *World term) to change the scenario at some point and perhaps tried to enforce that going more slowly might lead to more Risky moves the longer they continued the same course there.

How to you handle situations like that? Players avoiding danger but acting with diminished effect for multiple rolls. Are multiple rolls an inherently bad thing?

Some illustration I made to practice on a tablet.

Some illustration I made to practice on a tablet.

Some illustration I made to practice on a tablet. Completely amateur, specially on digital, so don’t bash me too hard. 

Nienna the Lurk (played by Mariana), one of  #theMalkavs , using her shadow vials and sneaking out with some noblewoman jewels. 

OMG I finally convinced my co-workers to create a crew for Blades.

OMG I finally convinced my co-workers to create a crew for Blades.

OMG I finally convinced my co-workers to create a crew for Blades. We just spent an hour devising the skills, lair and history of the Gentleman Bastards, who have a hidden lair beneath a clock repair shop in the north of Crow’s Foot.

I was concerned that the dense clustering of vague details, especially the factions, would bore or intimidate them, but the stories just started pouring out from the evocative words.

In one hour, we had everything ready for the first score, and instead of waiting until next week, we’ll probably play on Friday. 

THIS IS MY EXCITED FACE.

Last Saturday I ran my first game of Blades for my group of five.

Last Saturday I ran my first game of Blades for my group of five.

Last Saturday I ran my first game of Blades for my group of five. It’s rare we can ever all be there so we wanted to play Blades as a drop-in drop-out from week to week but for the beginning we all wanted to be there. None of us have played anything other than 3.5 and Dark Heresy. Warning: a bit long winded.

The crew had a blast with character and crew creation and though I expected the heritage to be glossed over it turned into a great time as this was the first game where we really felt encouraged to paint the world ourselves (never played any –World games). Skovlan turned very Skyrimesque and our Slide, who’s never read or seen Dune, came up with Sand Leviathans that haunt the deserts of Iruvia and have important minerals growing in their bodies. I encouraged the group to learn more through play and it was on.

We started in Bazso’s office as suggested in the QS and immediately hit a snag. Baz is one of the friends listed on the Slide’s sheet, but the crew chose the Red Sashes as the faction that had helped them set up in Crow’s Feet. There was confusion as the group wasn’t sure what to do and had to make a hard choice.

We flashed back to the crew getting two invites, one from each boss and the crew went to the Red Sashes first. They agreed to plant a box of unknown purpose inside the Lampblack HQ and then went to the Lampblacks to gather information while talking to Baszo. He asked them to rob the Red Sash treasury.  He’d heard they met with the red sashes but the slide was on point and overcame with deceive–with the Trust Me special ability she passed perfectly and they returned to the Red Sashes under cover of night.

They met up with Mylera (sp) and asked her to pretend to be robbed and give them some items to make it look like the Red Sash had genuinely been robbed. They offered her 1 coin from the Lampblack vault without prompting and supplied half the supplies from their “Packrat” lair: one of the PC’s decrepit ancient family home. With that offer it didn’t seem necessary to make any action roll: agreeing to those terms seemed natural for her so I just let them succeed. Next they asked her to create a ruckus in the morning, and they took the “loot”, mystery box in tow, back to the Lampblacks. The lurk led the group in slipping the bags past the search checkpoint without the box being discovered and took a couple stress covering for the others. In the end they planted the box in the vault, swiped a bit of coin without being seen to pay Mylera and were out scot free.

All in all, I know the group had a ton of fun. I explained to them that early on, with their notoriety being so low and the scales of the jobs relatively small, that smart plans may let them ease through with minimal stress, but things should get more difficult in the future which everyone seemed excited about. They were good about playing into what the NPCs were trying to achieve and focused on the party’s strengths (mask and cloak skills) so they didn’t take much stress or even have to roll very often. They marveled at how much we got done even though it took us four hours to do characters, crew and 1 score. One thing I would really like to see in the future though is option rules for advancing the fiction around the players through the other factions. Anyway, a ton of fun. Will play again next week.

Am I the onyl one who sees Bloodborne and imidately wanted to add that to a BitD Campaign?

Am I the onyl one who sees Bloodborne and imidately wanted to add that to a BitD Campaign?

Am I the onyl one who sees Bloodborne and imidately wanted to add that to a BitD Campaign?

https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5605/15214512813_ceeccf9510_b.jpg

First Session BitD and we were creating our crew and characters within ~3.5hrs.

First Session BitD and we were creating our crew and characters within ~3.5hrs.

First Session BitD and we were creating our crew and characters within ~3.5hrs.

It was a lot of fun talking about the Capitol of Skovlan, as I had prepared a small city map and some sketches. Everyone had a lot of fun building it all up. 3 out of 5 Players had experiences with DW and AW, as well as Fate. So there were a great agreement on the fact that rolling 4-5 on a risky move will be the most fun rolls and add to narrative play styles. As we didnt yet played a score, they players seemed very enthusiastic to the Flashback Scenes, comparing it to Fiasco and Heist-Genre-Films.

Three Years ago the Capital of Skovlan, Arvead, was under siege by the 17th Legion of the Imperium. It was a locked down situation for many months, but as rumors said, a special force consisting of hightly trained whispers executed a fiendish plan in the city. They may have used an ancient device that was oce used by those who wrecked the gates of death, ages ago, to rip apart a large area of the ink-black starry sea, and summoned leviathanes and crashed them upon the helpless city, destroying the eldritch defence rings and allow demons and ghosts to ravage.

Only the appearance of a mysterious fleet of never before seen airships, who came out of the same void could turn the tide on the terrible massacre. Crews of seasoned airship sailors (some may say pirates) used their arcane technology to ward of the hordes of demons, among them mighty mages of strange powers. The most fearsome was their leader, an elderly woman, who could control the lighting energy of the towers by sheer force of will, her name onyl whispered with respect and slice of fearfull admiration: Lady Blackbird.

Another strange figure appeared in the aftermath of the siege, an old man, only known as the Magister, fighting the hidden crews of demonic cultists and their minions. Soon, gifted locals joined the fight of the old Magister to cleanse their city of infernal evil. Soem rumors said that he was once imprisioned in the large Bloodstone crystal, in the collection of the University, which was smashed under the weigth of a Leviathan, crashing the city. Of course, no one could ever expect an old man to cut his way through a leviathans body, do we?

There were plenty of other tie ins, like the cult of the palid masks, happy to rebuild the city in their own twisted architecture, very popular on the locals, as they provide cheap labor and quick actions to rebuild the new defence walls.

They like to wear yellow tatters….

More soon, after the first game-sessions.

Now one third of the city still lies in ruins but is slowly rebuild.

There’s been talk about how some players are having problems with accomplishing goals in Blades sessions, and PCs…

There’s been talk about how some players are having problems with accomplishing goals in Blades sessions, and PCs…

There’s been talk about how some players are having problems with accomplishing goals in Blades sessions, and PCs getting stressed out too quickly.

I’ve found both in games I’ve ran and games I’ve played in, that how you avoid this problem, and adjust the feeling of power to the level desired by the people at your table, is by reducing the number of effect segments required to do things, and not being a slave to the number of clocks on the table.  You don’t always need to fill them all!  Try making a lot of the obstacles not actually have clocks, effectively clock size 1, (skip effect roll)

Another big aspect is that there’s actually and invisible 4th position to the right of Controlled.  You could call it “You Win.”  The positions in BitD are literally a way to adding mechanics to narrative positioning, how well you’re set up in the fiction to accomplish something.  A lot of the time your players have made a great plan, or are trying to do something that is effectively trivial, (or you don’t want to slow the game down spending too much time on it…) in those cases, when you can’t think of a danger use the “You Win” position, skip straight to effect.  (and a lot of those situations would be 1 segment clocks anyway)