Tag: Cédric Ferrand

Sorry, English is not my first language.

So, we tried Blades in the Dark in Wastburg.

It’s a free city where magic disappeared two generations ago. A few magical objects still contain a little bit of weird energy. When you’re destroying them, you’re releasing sometimes enough power for a spell, if you’re lucky.

The players were more in a mood for The Wire / The Corner than Ocean’s Eleven, so they chose to embody Hawkers. Their band makes money by using the remains of spellbooks’ pages. These pages still contain some residual magic, so they cut them into small patches that customers apply on their tongue to have a buzz.

When the action begins, the PCs (which call themselves the Rummagers) are in their lair panicking because they just found a dangerous document: the list of Bluecoats who infiltrated the various criminal gangs in the city. They wonder how to handle this hot potato when a detachment of the Bluecoats knocks at their door. Oops.

I will not explain everything in detail, but the list is quickly cut into 4 pieces and scattered among the gang members while everyone is trying to get out of this mess. One PC disguised as a Bluecoat sneaks out of the area, another one is running down the street with guards in pursuit, another PC attempts to spiel off the Bluecoats because he’s an ex-Bluecoat himself … The situation got complicated when one character has lost patience and stabbed to death a Bluecoat. Fortunately, his accomplice got reinforcements from a friendly band by killing the Bluecoat infiltrated in their gang.

The conclusion was a little messy with a PC who was arrested by the Bluecoat who chased him from the beginning of the evening and a Bluecoat who grabbed a piece of the list, but without realizing the nature of the document. At the end of this introduction, the PCs had 2 missions to self-assign for next time: to help their buddy to escape from the cell where he’s languishing and to seep in the house of the Bluecoat to retrieve the list.

The system runs well, even though I fumbled a bit to find the right rhythm and that I was not in full mechanical control of the stress system. The PCs did not act as a team, so some of the game mechanics were not used, and as it was a short one-shot, all campaign rules that make the charm of management band have not been used either. I was sometimes lost in translation, too. But the atmosphere was there. The missed dice rolls that can be retried by increasing the stakes still work well. We created the small world of the PCs in a few minutes, there’s really way to play quickly.

My players got a message for John Harper : “Your game is really fun. We want to play again when the game will be complete, for sure.”