I’ve been thinking about this question for a while and I can’t put my finger on it.
I’ve been thinking about this question for a while and I can’t put my finger on it.
Why do people like Doskvol?
First of all, don’t get me wrong, I adore this setting just as much as I adore the system it was built for. But I can’t quite grasp why.
The Blades-verse is incredibly complex and defies simple description. It’s like industrial fantasypunk but not really steampunk, and there are ghosts, but not ghosts like we think of them, and big demon whales that kind of aren’t whales have electrical blood, and it’s always nighttime, and no one has any answers.
It’s not simple or elegant. It’s complex and weird and busy, and it’s not something I’d imagine new people would be able to get super into without reading the book. But they do!
Every time I’ve introduced a new player to the system, they’ve immediately fallen in love with the setting, just like I did, just like you (presumably) did.
What makes this setting so alluring? The way it meshes with the system? The way it demands you to define your own lore? The fact that since there are a million weird things going on at once, you’re sure to find something cool (which ties in to the excellent faction game)?
Tonight we finished our first threat. The details don’t matter here especially much. What’s important is that the system worked as designed, and we soon realized that’s not the same as working as intended.
We all had a lot of fun. However, we soon realized that some of the game’s holdovers from Blades don’t really work when you make the PCs boarding school students rather than hardened, murderous criminals.
The Harm system is the big issue here, and I’m going to need to rewrite a lot of it. Believe it or not, it just isn’t okay for bad guys to constantly threaten kids with lightning bolts or broken arms, or kids to do the same to them. When’s the last time Harry Potter murdered a goblin? Never.
Additionally, Academy as written focuses a lot on the students rather than their school, their work, and their NPC relationships, which are incredibly important in this fiction. We’ve identified several other issues which need work as well.
I still think this game is best Forged in the Dark because of its fictional positioning system, the way it packages action, and its approach to relevant abstracted resource management.
So we have bittersweet news here, folks. The game I’ve been working on is a fun game, sure. However, it is not at all the game I wanted it to be. It will undergo several drastic changes in the near future and I think the game it is now isn’t yet ready to go public. I’m pulling it offline for now. I am very, very thankful for my playtest group, who helped me see the issues inherent in Academy. This is a very frustrating situation, but a good one, I think.
Hey everyone! I got to run another session of Academy, my magical schoolkids hack. I’m going to do a few more of these regularly and then just do it every once in a while so as not to overwhelm you guys.
The Circle spent their first week recovering from their first brush with the Unknown. They studied, exercised, made friends, and did research in order to prepare themselves for their next mission. Importantly, Flag accidentally let his friend Phoenix into the Circle, which no one was very excited about–at first.
That Friday, October 13th, the group decided to lure Mark Esperanza, their ghost-possessed lead actor off-campus with the promise of weed and tickets to a J.J. Abrams movie adaptation of Hamlet that thankfully only exists in this fictional universe. After a successful engagement roll for this Parley mission, Mark agreed to come along. As the film progressed Mark got more and more worked up, mouthing Hamlet’s lines, whispering “THE GHOST HIVE”, and eventually standing up and proclaiming he would be Hamlet, for real, and then walking out.
The Circle followed Mark into the parking lot, where he began to talk about being Mark and feeling things like fear and excitement for the first time in a long time. Eventually, this confrontation escalated until Phoenix punched Mark, driving a shimmery white figure out of his body, which whispered “Here comes…THE GHOST HIVE.”
Arthur had a flashback of stealing holy water from his church, which he then tried (unsuccessfully) to splash the ghost with. Ghostly reinforcements showed up, but Ben calmed them down until Arthur used his new magical power to tear the ghost out of Mark’s soul. A slow-speed car chase followed, where THE GHOST HIVE pursued a pickup truck full of underage drivers through the city. Holly took the wheel, and the team finger-gunned magic back at the ghosts while the Ghostbusters theme blared on the radio. The Circle finally escaped after taking a handful of Devil’s Bargains, Danny maxing out on Stress and taking a Strike, and Mark suffering level 3 Harm to his soul.
Several minutes later, he woke up in the back of their pickup truck, bleeding from his mouth and nose with no memory of the past hour.
Needless to say, this mission generated the Circle a lot of Trouble.
Over the next week, as Danny recovered from his Strike, Holly watched The Princess Bride with her friends, Phoenix went to a party with their volleyball team, Arthur and Ben were ambushed by a lone member of THE GHOST HIVE, Flag’s car broke down, and Ben smartly used his Haunt Talent on THE GHOST HIVE to learn they had been recently driven away from their home cemetery.
Will they drive off THE GHOST HIVE before Hamlet‘s first showing on October 31st? They’ve only got about a week left!
I was very, very pleased with this session. It was smooth and snappy, downtime worked better than I expected, and everyone was always engaged. I really underestimated the importance of Devil’s Bargains in Forged in the Dark games–they really helped everyone participate in the fiction. If anyone has any suggestions for new names for Devil’s Bargains in Academy, I’d love to hear them (someone suggested Extra Credit once). I’m really excited and hopeful for next week!
Hey everyone! Academy, my magical-schoolkids Forged in the Dark game finally has a playtest group! As a refresher, this is a game where teenagers with special powers try to manage their academic and social responsibilities while trying to prevent chaos from erupting from the mysterious Unknown.
This game takes place at Alabaster Preparatory Academy, a mundane prep school built on a green campus hidden away in a grey city. Our heroes are:
Danny, the Rebel, a cynical slacker.
Arthur, the Ace, an uptight control freak.
Flag, the Muscle, a well-meaning misfit.
Holly, the Tinker, a worried costume designer.
Ben, the Loner. That guy’s name is Ben, right?
They’re all part of the drama club’s stage crew, but never really met otherwise. That is, until they witnessed a ghost possess their star actor, their Hamlet, Mark Esperanza. Bound together by this strange experience, they meet in secret to discuss their new secrets, new powers, and new plan. What are these mysterious forces, and how will they stop them before Hamlet opens on Halloween night? Spooky!
I’m really excited for this. We spotted some easy-to-fix mistakes, but the fiction is really working. This idea/concept/experiment has spread its wings, and I think it’s about to fly. Expect weekly updates!
(This is just a little doodle I made because of how excited I was. I might polish it up, redraw it digitally? Not sure.)
I got inspired watching some Blades actual plays over the summer and Adam Koebel’s playthrough of Persona 5 and decided to hack the system to fit what I call the Magical Schoolkid Genre (TM). I’ve called this hack Academy.
Academy is about students being thrust into a supernatural world (called the Unknown) and having to balance their normal, mundane lives with saving the world. The passage of time is marked through a calendar set up by the GM and visible to the players, who will have certain missions to complete and threats to deal with before certain deadlines. It is meant to be setting-agnostic and will include collaborative worldbuilding rules for Session 0.
This is my first ever game design project. I had no idea what I was doing, and only converted this into a Blades hack after a few dozen hours of work. It’s not pretty right now. I learned a lot through this pre-alpha-creation-process, but I feel like you guys are more knowledgeable than I am, not only in game design but also in terms of “how do I turn this from a poorly-organized google doc into something readable?” and “what path do people usually take if they want to get their hacks published?”
Inspirations include:
– Harry Potter
– Persona
– Percy Jackson
– RWBY
– Ender’s Game
– Soul Eater
– Monsterhearts
– Life is Strange
– The Kingkiller Chronicle
– Tales from the Loop
– Masks
– Buffy the Vampire Slayer
– Kill Six Billion Demons
– My Hero Academia
– Misspent Youth.
Academy is ready for playtesting locally, with people at my university, though the rules aren’t in a fit state to be shown off in front of the critical eyes of the internet. I’ll keep you guys updated. Thanks for your time.
