lady-blackbird

This post was prompted by a recent Rob Donoghue tweet (original). To save you a click, he’s arguing that most RPGs have bad endgames: there’s no set process for what happens at the end of a game. I recently finished up a Lady Blackbird game, and yep, there’s nothing explaining how to finish up the game. I mean, sure, the PCs achieve their goals probably, and perhaps those goals have changed over time, but. Look at it this way: Lady Blackbird explains exactly how to start a game, with situational advice and a solid reason to act. Nothing much on endings. ...

Finished up that Lady Blackbird campaign I mentioned earlier, which was a blast. I might actually be about done with feeling like I’m a mediocre GM – still had the same tension I always have right before a session, but we got through this one with zero delays on account of my stress levels, which is pretty good for me and I feel great about where our improvisation led us. More to the point, I’m completely sold on Miro. I’d been thinking I needed to do a ton of work to make a Miro board useful, and that I’d need to be messing around with it a lot during play. This is in fact untrue. I just set up an image board for NPCs and dropped a couple of reference images in it (one map, one picture of The Owl), and that was immediately helpful. Later on, I added a couple of rules references. Again, useful immediately without any serious work needed on my part. ...

I’m running a brief Lady Blackbird campaign for S. and some old Boston pals, and it’s going swimmingly. They’re all happy to help drive plot and I’m happy to throw in complications and the game sings pretty well under those conditions. I was curious to see how forgiving the mechanics were; it’s easy to make dice pool mechanics pretty brutal (hi, Blades in the Dark). In this case the huge dice pools and the ease of refreshing them means the characters feel pretty heroic. The players also seem to enjoy the part where you put together dice pools, so that’s all good. ...