Blades In The Dark

[Manbearcat]

Awesome [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION] .

I think it would be good (for yourself and prospective players) if you, [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION], the lead poster and anyone else who is playing Blades to post their play excerpts and a postmortem.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Awesome [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION] .

I think it would be good (for yourself and prospective players) if you, [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION], the lead poster and anyone else who is playing Blades to post their play excerpts and a postmortem.

Here's a summary of the starting situation, based on the choices the players made for their PCs and for the Crew. We established all this in Session 0 when we made the characters and Crew. I hope others are willing to share this kind of stuff too.

Crew: Hawkers
Reputation: Professional
Ability: The Good Stuff
Upgrades:
Secure Lair
Resolve Training
Workshop
Quarters

Faction Statuses:
The Fog Hounds: +1
The Gray Cloaks: +1
The Crows: -1
The Sparkwrights: -2

Members:
Spider
Hound
Leech
Lurk

They chose the special ability "The Good Stuff" so we decided that they'd somehow come into a stash of a new drug. A significant supply. Their crew contact Lydra, a deal broker, arranged for them to get the supply. She's associated with the Gray Cloaks, a gang of former cops, and so that Faction helped them receive the stash. The Gray Cloaks stole it from the Crows while they were dealing with internal strife due to the death of their leader (per the starting scenario in the book), so the Crew has a negative status with the Crows.

The stash is in their secure Lair, where the Leech is devoting downtime to figuring out the formula for the drug so the Crew can produce their own once the supply is gone. They chose a Workshop as one of their upgrades to help with the research. The Fog Hounds (a pirate like gang of smugglers) helped the Crew get the material for the Workshop, but they stole some items from the Sparkwrights (a very important guild of engineers), so the Crew has a negative status with them, as well.

Their Lair is in Six Towers, a haunted district that was once prestigious, but is now on the decline. They stay in the guest house of a derelict estate. Their Hunting Grounds, or Sales Territory, where they'll conduct their business is in Nightmarket. This is a district on the rise, with an influx of new money, a gentrification of sorts. Perfect location to sell a recreational drug. I decided that the Grinders were the gang in charge of the area, but that the Red Sashes have a foothold here, too. The Red Sashes are currently at war with the Lampblacks in Crow's Foot. Their operations here help to fund that struggle. The Crew paid a Coin to the Grinders to run their business in peace. They may have to pay a tithe from time to time, but we'll see how that goes....

To kick things off, I had the leader of the Lampblacks, Bazso Baz, summon the Crew to his bar the Leaky Bucket. There, he told them he would greatly appreciate it if they expanded their operation in Nightmarket at the expense of the Red Sashes. He didn't ask for a cut or anything else; he knows they're professional and they've paid up to the Grinders already. He just wants them to hurt the Red Sashes if at all possible, because that'll help him. This is a little spin on the starting situation suggested in the book. I wanted to kind of stick with that in general, but give it a little bit of a personal take. The Crew agreed.

So that's the starting situation. The Crew is looking to set up their operation in Nightmarket and sell their product, which they've dubbed "Third Eye" for its psychoactive effects. They're looking to reverse engineer the drug so that they can produce more of it. They've also agreed to do what they can to weaken the Red Sashes.

I'll post their first couple of Scores later on.

 

[cthulhu42]

It's so good to see this post resurrected! I hope to chime in at length when I get a minute to do so.

Right now my group is taking a break from BitD to get back to our high level D&D game, but I'm hoping to get back to it in a month or two.

I will say that our experience was very similar to hawkeyefan's with regard to the way the game kicked off from character generation and just kind of wrote itself. That's one of my favorite things about it and one that I'm sorely missing now that I'm back to running D&D.

Anyway, I look forward to following your progress and maybe adding some of my own.

Oh, and I said it before but I'll repeat, the Roll Play Blades game on YouTube is wonderful, not only as an aide in learning the game, but for it's very real drama. I don't watch campaign vids either, but I've watched that one all the way through twice.

 

[PrometheanVigil]

Does this game support running an organized crime faction? I'm seeing some strategic elements mentioned (particularly hawkeyefan's rundown) that seem a bit too high-level for a heist crew. Or is this something you would have to homebrew to do effectively?

 

[Ovinomancer]

Does this game support running an organized crime faction? I'm seeing some strategic elements mentioned (particularly hawkeyefan's rundown) that seem a bit too high-level for a heist crew. Or is this something you would have to homebrew to do effectively?

Not sure what you mean by organized crime, but I'd hazard yes. The crews are varied in focus, but aren't limited and xan move into different areas.

 

[PrometheanVigil]

Not sure what you mean by organized crime, but I'd hazard yes. The crews are varied in focus, but aren't limited and xan move into different areas.

Let me be more specific: a crime syndicate. Not just the PCs as one crew acting independently with the occasional favor from an associate -- the PC crew is instead the core leadership of a structure involving multiple crews planning and executing various criminal schemes semi-autonomously under their banner. Does this come under the game's prescribed gameplay?

 

[hawkeyefan]

Does this game support running an organized crime faction? I'm seeing some strategic elements mentioned (particularly hawkeyefan's rundown) that seem a bit too high-level for a heist crew. Or is this something you would have to homebrew to do effectively?

I think the game could support that for sure. My players chose to be Hawkers, which means they deal in illicit goods. But they’re not limited to that based on their choices. Wherever they want to go with the fiction is where we’ll be hoing. And they seem to be interested in establishing a large criminal enterprise.

The other Crew types are Assassins, Bravos (muscle for hire), Cult, Shadows (thieves/spies), and Smugglers. As Ovinomancer says, there’s a good deal of variety in the Crews, but there’s still some overlap. You could mix and match your choices to replicate any take on the crime genre, from The Warriors to The Godfather and everything in between.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Let me be more specific: a crime syndicate. Not just the PCs as one crew acting independently with the occasional favor from an associate -- the PC crew is instead the core leadership of a structure involving multiple crews planning and executing various criminal schemes semi-autonomously under their banner. Does this come under the game's prescribed gameplay?

I think the game does allow this to an extent. One of the resources your Crew can accumulate is Cohorts. These can be either a Gang or an Expert. There are several types of each. Your Crew could have a Gang of Thugs to break legs and perform shakedowns, and a Gang of Rooks to deal in vice like gambling and drugs, and then have an Expert that’s a ruthless assassin.

Alternatively, you could play multiple Crews of PCs and have them all connected under the same criminal organization, but there would be some mechanical considerations on how to handle this. Each Crew earns XP and gets new abilities sinilar to a PC, so I think you’d have to treat them separately for this purpose. I’m sure there’d be a few other ways this would come up, but nothing that couldn’t be managed.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Let me be more specific: a crime syndicate. Not just the PCs as one crew acting independently with the occasional favor from an associate -- the PC crew is instead the core leadership of a structure involving multiple crews planning and executing various criminal schemes semi-autonomously under their banner. Does this come under the game's prescribed gameplay?

Not really. Not trying to be a stick here, but a general definition of organized crime wasn't sufficient above and it doesn't help here. As [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION] said, you can run big gangs with diverse capabilities, or maybe mix and match seperate crews, but I'm still not clear on what experience your looking fir, and that is important.

Bkades emulates actually doing crime. It's, at its core, all about the score. It has some really tightly integrated rules for the setting and downtime, but those feed the score engine. So, can Blades do organized crime? I'd say that organized crime is a fundamental part of the setting/structure, but it pushes most of the operation/planning/execution of such offscreen to focus on what big moves the PCs make. If you want to run organized crime like Daredevil shows Fisk doing it -- ie onscreen, personal engagement with all of the actual management offscreen, then Blades naje work for you well. If you want it nitty-gritty operations, not so much.

 

[Nytmare]

And that, I think is where Blades really shines. The rules themselves push the story forward. I don’t do a whole lot of prep work for our sessions because I know that the game will provide hooks and plots and conflict and interesting NPC’s. I’ve been keeping a list of potential plot hooks that now numbers eighteen items, any of which I can introduce whenever I need to. And many of those hooks are related to fctions and NPC’s that are doing their own things in the background which gives the sense of a breathing, living, world spider webbed with intrigue. I’ve got about a half dozen clocks going on that relate to the PC’s and every session they get a little closer to being filled. The PC’s don’t know it, but that bounty hunter is getting awfully close to tracking down the PC who is an escaped slave. The Red Sashes want to know who framed their man and caused his murder, and that clock is filling. The Grinders want to know who assassinated their leader, and sooner or later that chicken will come home to roost.

A big ol' double helping of this. This is why I really love Blades. When I run a D&D campaign, I feel like I'm doing prep work non stop between sessions. When I'm running Blades, I feel like I spend all of that time I'd otherwise be doing prep, wondering what's going to happen next.