Tag: Andrew Shields

There’s a gap in my play experience of Blades in the Dark. Most of the games I’ve played or run have been with strangers banded together for the short term, or people who don’t hang out in real life.

I think this game would just SING, it would give a crew a tremendous advantage, if the players knew each other well enough to drop fictional hooks through flashbacks and improvisation that were customized to their fellow players and characters. I imagine a level of trust and experience with each other would give a group of players the PLAYER tools they need to give the CHARACTERS great advantage.

I’ve seen a lot of infatuation with the more drama-oriented “fun” of making life more difficult by working out individual character whims at the expense of the other characters. What I think would be intriguing would be to see the “fun” of players who learned to work together in OSR or other more cooperatively focused games leverage that experience to heighten the effectiveness of their heists.

It’s time to distract a guard, and the two players drop into a silly debate about coconuts from popular culture that they both have memorized. One player had a character who was all about gems once, and came up with a hundred uses for them and ways to stash them and built up some player knowledge about stones; so we go heisting gems and do stuff with them. One character is a sucker for doomed love, so we gotta work that in. Yes, of COURSE I’m lying to him and we’re going to burn it all down.

Knowing what devil’s bargains will appeal to which players, and how to make the story more fun for everyone, and having a background to pull from for improv, would really add something I have not yet experienced with this game at the table.

You hear them gloating about trailblazing new technologies. They crow about their methods of discovery. It’s foolish. They batter open a metal door and pretend the bone door was never there, or that both doors do not lead into the same house. Have they forgotten that this city is five centuries older than its lightning towers?

We harvested leviathan blood, we emptied ghosts, we drank from the rivers behind the Mirror. We paid a cost for it, and we learned what was safe and what was not, and we had respect. They move too fast, take too much, and ignore all warning signs. The energy they treasure is not defenseless. There will be consequences.

From the Whisper Grizelda Slake’s personal correspondence to Nalia Finn, her apprentice

It was the early 30s, war was on the horizon, and the Sepulcherian Company of the Silver Nails had staked out some territory in the Lost District outside the city’s lightning barriers. The Severosian cavalry found that was the safest place to handle training their horses to fight ghosts, and to discourage tampering with their expensive horseflesh.

Like all the officers, Grainer was an adept. He was on an errand into the city when he saw a little girl, not even ten, chased by a ghost. He was ready to swoop in and save the day when he saw her take hold of the ghost and rip it open. When he found out she was homeless, he adopted her.

Silver is a noble metal because it does not corrode. It also holds enchantments well. When Grainer gave her the first of many silver weapons, she solemnly told him she wished her blood was silver too. After that, he gave her the nickname Red Silver. He had no way to know what her eventual betrayal would cost him or the Company, but even if he had, there’s no way to know whether he would have loved her any less.

From unpublished notes on Silver Nails and the Lost District by historian Garnel Taldorian

I could never wrap my head around it. Teacher said it was not about the material world and the immaterial world, any more than ice melt flowing from a glacier was otherworldly. Matter and energy back and forth, life and death as different clothes for the same body. Demons were the waking of the elements into sentient shape, ghosts were the thoughts that outlive meat, breath is our reminder that energy moves in tides both in this state of being and in the next. All that is one single unknowable idea that is speaking out through you, even if you do not hear it. Your thoughts are not yours, nor are they real, but they are byproducts of your being that are as ephemeral as mist and as indestructible as color.

All that? Just a jumble of images and nonsense to me.

So my cousin was accepted to train as an adept, and I just learned to paint the charms and guide the boat. It’s not a bad life. I tell you this because when you look at adepts, you are seeing people who grasped the depths of their ignorance enough to fundamentally change how they see the world. They see life, and death, and existence in a way you never will. When you look at Whispers… don’t mistake them for people. Whispers have touched the root of the Real. When they deliberately alter their perceptions, the whole world shifts.

From “Reflections on the Waterways: a Gondolier’s Truths” by Simael Trent

For the second novel set in Doskvol, every other chapter heading is an “origin story” about how one of the scoundrels got the underworld nickname. This one is for the Hammer.

Commander Tarrant assembled Tarrant’s Toolbox–code names for the four officers that managed the bloodiest work of the battlefields on Kronen’s Point, the Alabaster, Icerock Narrows, and the Chord naval engagement.

The Awl was his assassin, the Hacksaw handled scouting and ambushes on enemy supply lines and stockpiles. The Prybar was a terrorist interrogator; the mention of her title was enough to loosen resolve among the Skovs. Then there was the Hammer, a war leader with a gift for crushing enemy formations and fortifications. By the third year of the war, if word circulated that the Hammer was headed for a fortification, there were even odds the defenders would pull back before he arrived, leaving their strong points empty.

Tarrant was arrogant and he felt success made him untouchable, so when he caught a bullet at Flatstone and his command was split up among rival commanders, they had little interest in preserving his tactics or his legacy. The Awl turned up dead, and the other three disappeared; since they operated with code names, they could still be in the military now for all we know.

From the “History of the Skovlan Unity War, volume III” by Hubert Cacrassi

I heard a new swear in Doskvol today: “Slit the Ink Sea!”

You think this is the only place with weather? We’re a coastal city, of course we get hammered with great storms and the like. Do you never look up to see the great gusts of energy boiling away as sheaves of ghosts are hurled through the defenses of the lightning towers? If you listen, they wail as the energy tears them apart. It was a wind that blew them into the city, but not a wind on this side of the Mirror.

I didn’t realize there was weather on both sides of the Mirror until I was on the Fifth Star, one of the Strangford leviathan hunter ships, before I captained the Shiv. A blind old man we called Seeker knew more about the hunt than anyone alive, and he growled to me that weather is the same on both sides of the Mirror; if there is low pressure, then the high pressure will flow into it. That’s wind. Everything’s built on that. Like gravity, everything drawn to the low point. That’s why the climax of a hunt was so often a storm.

Now when I sense a shift in the weather on the backside of the Mirror, I wonder who is making a low point, and what they’re doing with that energy. Changed how I saw Whispers and their rituals, that’s certain. As the weather is fickle, I realized that what they do leads to consequences we’ll never understand.

From Captain Nyala’s personal correspondence to his son Jack

Oh, it was the Ebon Wings, in the Runwater Flats, in the east wilderness of Crow’s Foot before the fires cleared ‘em out. They were these tough leg-breakers, a gang working for the Crows, but they were all into that freaky Forgotten Gods worship and they were drinking from some spirit well down in the filth.

They fought ghosts, and ghosts rode them, and they threw ghosts like weapons; it was a crazy pack, generally hopped up on drugs and plasmics, and the Crows used them for terror tactics. The boss was Bloodletta, this crimson-haired fury. Back in the day, the word was she could “scream ghosts,” whatever that means.

Her kid grew up practically living in the spirit well, and her nannies were freaky cultists. Before she could talk she was drawing Hadrathi symbols on people with charcoal, and she was tattooing everybody who would hold still by the time she was ten, and by the time puberty hit she was a force of nature on both sides of the Mirror. So Bloodletta’s kid was called Inkletta, a joke that stuck. Far as I know she’s the last of the Ebon Wings, and that’s just because she got out before they crossed the Ferals and perished.

From Growler’s entry in “Crow’s Foot Ephemerals, a Collection of Oral Histories,” by Crayla Hurantis

An article about Blades in the Dark, spotted in the wild.

https://geekandsundry.com/this-year-old-rpg-about-thieves-is-already-hugely-influential-blades-in-the-dark/

https://geekandsundry.com/this-year-old-rpg-about-thieves-is-already-hugely-influential-blades-in-the-dark/

At the root of the crisis, you need three things from your leaders; applying consistent vision, demonstrating speedy reaction, and owning hard choices. That’s how the aristocrats held on to power back when the world ended; they served the people with their leadership abilities.

Now they offer none of these essentials. The city wallows, rudderless in the murk, bled dry by those in power. Should a proper crisis rise, the city will crack along its fault lines, and the tectonic masses left will reveal local leaders.

The current flood of Skovlanders into the city is building the tension and may well lead to the flash-point that shatters the city’s unity. An ironic outcome of the Unity War meant to weld Skovlan and Akoros together may yet be the fraying and dissolution of Doskvol.

From “War of Politics, Politics of War,” by Chen Roslith