After writing about my first experience with Blades on the Dark, I heard from a friend who recommended that I also look into Scum & Villainy. It is a sci-fi interpretation of the Blades in the Dark rules following the Forged in the Dark license. I use "sci-fi" intentionally since the rules and setting lend themselves to space westerns or space operas—anything with scoundrels on spaceships—but it would be difficult to do science fiction with them. The rulebook makes it clear that it's drawing on the "rag-tag group of outlaws traveling across the sector" trope as seen in Firefly and Cowboy Bebop. Both are clearly space westerns.
This theme is a good thing, and those two shows are among my favorites. It is a shame, then, that one of the first things one notices on opening the book is that it doesn't mesh with these themes. Blades in the Dark sings out its theme in graphic design and illustration. In contrast, Scum & Villainy feels like it cannot decide what it wants to be. This is exacerbated by the initial impression given when the structure of the book and much of the copy itself are taken verbatim from Blades in the Dark. None of this is inherently bad, but it gave a negative first impression after having been given such a strong recommendation to read it.
The few mechanisms added to Blades are quite good. Developing your ship rather than your headquarters captures the theme well, also lending the feeling of an episodic series. Getting bonus dice from gambits is a welcome addition to my group, since they have a penchant for beating the odds by rolling consistently low.
My favorite addition consists of the three starting scenarios, one for each of the ships. Playing Blades in the Dark, or even just reading and imagining it, it wasn't quite clear where to start. Scum & Villainy gives more tightly scripted introductory scenarios. At least two of them boil down to simple chase sequences, but there is nothing wrong with that. Each of these scenarios has just enough background to fill in details as needed, and each one provides clear hooks into the next episode. On top of that, there three outlines for other, unrelated jobs that are fit for the theme of the selected ship.
We got the game to the table yesterday morning, and I played with my three eldest sons. My third son had previously expressed disinterest in tabletop roleplaying games, having not enjoyed whatever fantasy game we had tried together once years ago. I convinced him to try this one, knowing that he's a storyteller at heart, and he and his two older brothers had a great time. They chose to be bounty hunters on a Cerberus ship, playing a Scoundrel, a Pilot, and a Mechanic. We played the recommended started mission: tracking down a member of the Ashen Knives gang with multiple bounties on his head. There was a little hiccup due to an ambiguity in the scenario description, but once we got into that, we had a blast. The two older boys had a handle on the action resolution protocol as well as the role of flashbacks. They used flashbacks much more successfully as part of the storytelling than in our two Blades games, using them to set up a two-pronged assault on the mark's location, and then using one to set up and soup up hoverbikes for big chase scene. A glorious failure by the Mechanic led to a potentially disastrous desperate situation for the Pilot, but he used a gambit and pushed himself to ace it. It was exactly the kind of thing one wants out of a chase scene.
There are a few places where Scum & Villainy falls short of its august predecessor, doomed perhaps by its own lineage. For example, in Blades in the Dark, there are sensible limits on how much coin (or value in coin) a person can carry or that one can stash. This is actually quite interesting, a point that I don't remember seeing before: you can only carry so much money, and you can only have so much liquid cash, particularly in a Victorian setting. Scum & Villainy borrows this mechanism despite it describing money as being kept as software on credsticks. Also, while both games admit that any given action may be sensible under multiple action ratings, the action articulation in Scum & Villainy feels more forced than Blades'. I suppose, due to my career, I am particularly puzzled by how the Doctor action rating is for "doing science" and the Study action rating is for "doing research." It makes me wonder about how I would take the Forged in the Dark idea and put it into a setting of my own choosing, as many others have done. For example, making Kapow! years ago was a great exercise in understanding how Powered by the Apocalypse ideas could apply to campy 1960's superhero action.
I find the setting of Blades in the Dark to be more intriguing, but the setting of Scum & Villainy appeals to me personally while also being a "safer" space to explore with my boys. One could do a sci-fi criminal gang drama, but maintaining a ship vs. expanding gang turf really pushes toward the Firefly vibe. Scum & Villainy certainly stands alone, although there are parts whose rationale would make more sense if one is familiar with Blades in the Dark. Reading the Blades book was enough to see why there has been so much excitement about it, even though I know I'm late to the party. The Scum & Villainy book may have lacked some of this pizzazz, but the table doesn't lie, and we had a great time.
