The Prestige in Play
We played our first session of a new Blades in the Dark games last night : following a crew of Shadows calling themselves The Phantom Assembly, essentially commissioned by the Circle of Flames to perform a series of jobs after the Wraith failed to get the job done.
In return for a safe place to call home in the Old Rail Yard, the crew helped Belle Brogan by breaking into Master Slane’s offices to recover documents proving that disappearing Coalridge workers were in fact being shipped off to parts unknown (supposedly a Strangford Workhouse) against their will.
The Phantom Assembly is made up of :
Rasal Sahm, a daring Iruvian Lurk
Vey, an Akorosi orphan Artificer
Targos, an ex-military Tycherosi Hound
Chey, an Akorosi servant-turned-Illusionist
It was for Chey that I originally created the Prestige Playbook, and Catherine created a neat background for her : The servant of an abusive occultist who subjected her to increasingly terrifying experiments until she eventually made a bargain with one of her master’s devils to get rid of him.
She’s terrified that he’ll come back, so her Vice is an Obligation to keep working for him despite his absence : she takes care of his house, continues his experiments, maintains his affairs, etc.
Catherine picked the Ghost Dreams as her starting ability and used it a couple of times during the Score. Once to distract some dogs so that the crew could sneak past the guards unnoticed, and once to distract the guards while they broke a window to make their getaway.
She rolled Sway in both cases, although in retrospect it should possibly have been Wreck, and both rolls were abject failures (to be honest, I kind of wish that I had simply hand-waved those rolls).
All in all, I quite like the general gist of the playbook, but it needs a little work to better fit into Blades in the Dark :
I might need to rethink exactly what the player rolls when using Ghost Dreams. My logic so far was essentially that you roll as if you were doing it yourself, the ability simply lets you do it without making your presence known.
I need to work on the Xp trigger. As it stands, it’s pointlessly ambiguous and resulted in a round of puzzled looks when we went through Xp.
In general, the game itself was a mixed bag :
* Rasal fell in love with leading group actions and used it to excellent effect several times. Aaron’s probably the most comfortable with the rules and the general concept (and was also the only one to suggest betraying Belle).
* Vey did a fair bit of lock-picking and was instrumental in a couple of flashbacks to create distractions, but generally spent the session getting her bearings. She decided to define her gadget later.
* Targos was spoiling for a fight but never quite got one, and made a glorious job of Commanding his way past a couple of security guards when he caught their attention while casing the factory area.
These guys hadn’t played Blades before, and struggled quite a bit with the concept of risk, Stress and Consequences : they were quite shy about taking on Stress, which led to them powering through consequences rather than resisting them, which meant I was a little careful about how hard I hit them.
They seemed to get it when we went through experience and vices etc. at the end, so I’m hoping next time they’ll feel more comfortable about diving into danger and playing to their character 😉
All in all, a bit of an awkward start but it looks promising.
#ArtistPlaybook
