blades-in-the-dark

I’ve been rereading Greg Rucka’s Atticus Kodiak books on the occasion of him republishing the first four in the series, and it’s been a pleasure. A gloomy, morose pleasure but a pleasure nonetheless. As always they seem like they ought to be quite adaptable to tabletop RPGs, so I spent a while thinking about that last night while I was falling asleep. The super-easy adaptation would use Night’s Black Agents, drop the vampires. It’s easy to dial that flavor of GUMSHOE into gritty dangerous street level action, and the bursts of competence that result from the Military Occupational Specialty rule – automatic successes once per session on your chosen MOS skill – would also fit perfectly. Atticus and his friends spend a lot of time being able to push themselves to unreasonable levels of competence when the situation really calls for it. ...

I ran a Blades in the Dark one-shot for some old gaming pals, S., and one person I hadn’t gamed with. Totally fun, unsurprisingly. Ginger wrote up the session here. There are seven playbooks in Blades, and each of them has five potential friends/rivals. So that’s, what, a 45% chance that someone will choose Slide in a four player game, and then if the distribution is truly random, that someone has a 20% chance of picking Bazso Baz as their rival? So maybe around 10% of the time you kick off a Blades campaign using the book’s starting situation, you’ll get the fun of the crew already hating Bazso Baz? I was an English major, be kind. ...

The point of all this isn’t that I did amazing prep. I wanted to push myself towards sandbox style improvised play and using index cards (total: 115) was an excellent way to keep myself from getting too wordy. I offer my illegible handwriting in hopes that other GMs with crappy handwriting will find the example useful. Here’s the list of posts: The postmortem and closing thoughts All the character and crew sheets (plus index cards for my notes on them) The characters’ long term projects Factions in both Doskvol and Skovland Session write-ups on the wiki Session notes on index cards Two props: a newspaper and a letter The scribbled down prep notes for the sessions

Almost forgot! I handed the players this letter towards the beginning of the last session. “The individual of whom we spoke” was Etty’s demon-possessed mom. Before Setarra possessed her and before she got engaged to Lord Scurlock (the aged child), she was stuck in Ironhook Prison as a result of the fall of their noble house.

And our final chunk of index cards! For some reason I shuffled progress clocks drawn for heists in with the plots and setup stack; no harm done but I’d keep them with the session notes next time. Most of the cards from the stack of plots I actually used are in fact clocks. Among the others are examples of my favorite prep technique; I used the random score generator table to generate three or four scores, which fit tidily on one card, and then mostly let actual play determine which one was interesting. ...

Let’s do the factions tonight as well, I’m on a roll. These are split into two chunks for ease of reading: the Doskvol factions and the Skovland factions. For some reason I didn’t make a card for the Imperials. Those last couple of faction clocks both would have lived on the Imperials card, though. I was not as diligent at establishing proper faction clocks as I might have been, and I mostly slacked on putting together new ones when the old ones were completed. They were still insanely handy. I mentioned this a few posts ago, but literally any game with NPC factions would benefit from faction clocks and the mechanic would graft cleanly onto just about anything. ...

All the stuff the player characters wanted to get done between sessions. Make Owl-Human was probably the worst project they ever embarked upon, but it turned out useful in the end. Here’re the ones they completed: And here’s the projects they didn’t quite wrap up. Figuring out Strangford’s plans and creating the Order of the Feather were both started in our very final downtime at the end of the last session. I admire their perseverance.

By the by, there was a wiki for this campaign and I maintained it pretty well for about five sessions; if you want actual quality write-ups for the early days, go there (original).

I’m not even going to try and make sense of these. And, um, sorry about the handwriting. You’ll note that early on I just filled up index cards; later on I got smart and started dating them. If/when I do this again, I’m going to date every single index card I use – some of the threat clocks in particular are totally mysterious to me and I’d love to know which sessions they’re associated with. ...

Let’s look at some ephemera! We’ll start with the character and crew sheets. This first chunk is the crew in its current configuration, with Crowl possessing Helena and a Hawkers crew sheet. If I had to guess I’d say we played around sixteen sessions. Now the original versions of – OK, it’s complicated. Sal was playing Cassilda, who was possessed by Crowl. When Sal decided to switch characters, she decided that Crowl was now the main character and they’d be possessing someone else’s body. In the end the host was Helena, mistress of an extensive information network. ...