Last night, three friends and I made a start on the Blades in the Dark Quick Start.
Last night, three friends and I made a start on the Blades in the Dark Quick Start.
We’ve been having a ball co-GMing the last few systems we’ve played (Monsterhearts and Dungeon World Funnel) so we didn’t hesitate to co-GM Blades in the Dark.
We all made characters and then the crew called “The Twelve”. The backgrounds, looks and occupations were easy to flesh out into interesting characters.
We wanted to pick all the crew upgrades, which is kind of good I guess. To narrow down our options, we did the crew creation out-of-order and asked lots of questions. We first fleshed out a few things like where our lair was located, what brought our crew together, what’s motivating us to keep working together.
For the record, our lair is an abandoned library sealed off from the rest of an otherwise occupied house because it’s considered possessed. The haunting should be good cover should we make too much noise. A few of us are on the run from the bluecoats and have aspirations of grandeur and taking a few factions down a notch or two.
The questions on Starting the Game were good and helped make explicitly some of the tensions and stories that were bubbling between and within our characters.
Then we dived into the intro scene. After quickly agreeing with Basco, our Slide started to haggle on the crew’s cut of the treasury score. I picked up GMing Basco and pushing back hard that “the Twelve” were a two-bit operation, get off my turf, etc. After a Risky Action roll (-1D against a prepared opponent) and an Effort roll avoiding the danger, the Slide landed the crew +1d on the Development roll after the score, at the cost of taking two stress herself, two stress on the Hound as her backup, and word leaking out about “someone’s gonna raid the Red Sashes.” We could already see this was going to get messy fast.
We settled on a plan smartly: infiltration. We agreed everyone knew the Red Sashes were Allied with the Cabbies, possibly because we were on helpful terms with the Cabbies. So, in lieu of gathering info, we used the Cabbies as an in, and the Whisper barrelled into the Red Sashes temple forecourt in a cab with our Lurk and Hound hidden on-board.
The plan was the Whisper would set up a diversion to allow the Lurk and Hound to infiltrate the HQ. We wanted a short diversion, Set Up and Follow Through as part of one plan, but misunderstood how it worked and ended rolling effect against a 4-segment clock. This muddle up of course led to a longer scene but it was entertaining so no one minded. The Whisper, a noble trained in the curved sword, challenged the school champion to a duel, which was clearly a desperate action against a veteran opponent. It took two goes to fill the 4-segement clock, he took some stress, made some enemies, and all together wishes to forget the whole experience, but he survived and made enough of a commotion to let his other crewmate’s infiltrate with ease.
We’re shall continue to co-GM weekly, with one player playing fortnightly, so we’ll have plenty of time to see how co-GMing works with Blades in the Dark.
