I had the dumbest idea for a Blades in the Dark hack yesterday so I figured I would share it with you all, because sometimes dumb things are funny things. The basic idea is to take the subtext that John Harper keeps putting in about how Blades in the Dark is a genre crime show of our own making, and making it the text.
I present: Shows in the Dark.
A game about playing actors playing characters on a tv-genre show. Touchstones are Star Trek, Xena: Warrior Princess, Power Rangers, Beastmaster, the New Adventures of Robin Hood, etc etc.
The crews are replaced by types of show, such as Sci-Fi, Space Opera, Fantasy, and instead of criminals you have actor types, such as the Thespian and the Heartthrob presented below, and the Hollywood Action Guy, the Comedy Relief and the Wrinkly Forehead Alien Man.
As factions you’ve got the gamut of the Producer, the Props Department, Costume Design, Hair and Make Up, the Food Cart, etc etc. As well as rival shows trying to get ahead and claim that prime time slot.
Instead of turf when it comes to claims, you have Sets, so maybe you need to set a couple of episodes on a jungle planet to keep Frownar the Warrior Bearbarian from claiming the jungle set. As well as valuable things like New Uniforms for Sci Fi Shows, and Extra Extras.
Reputation becomes Ratings, and Heat becomes Budget. The more you go over budget the more likely you are to be sent out on the con circuit to make money for your show. Of course rising in tier gives you a better chance at snagging that set from that pesky Bearbarian show as well as a host of other benefits as per usual.
Of course you can do things like make Bottle Episodes to keep budget down and make the Producer happy, or do a big sword fight and ruin all the prop department’s lovely work making them very sad.
Flashbacks become cuts, resistance rolls become reshoots. I’m struggling a fair bit with what the various actions would translate to, but I made some headway.
I’m toying with the idea of replacing the regular trauma with things like cocaine addiction and nervous breakdowns, and of course your character gets written out of the show when their trauma gets too much for the showrunners to handle.
And of course between shoots, you can relieve your stress, try to acquire a celebrity for a guest appearance, that kind of a thing.
I really have no idea what to do about items and load. Props of some kind I guess? Maybe they’re just not that important.
Obviously, you know. I’ve done about three hours of work on this and it shows in how really awful the playbooks are that I shamelessly copied, and brutally savaged.
