I heard about John Harper's Blades in the Dark tabletop role-playing game from a talented undergraduate student around 2018. He was creating his own RPG as part of a games research group I was running, and he regularly brought up Blades along with the Powered by the Apocalypse movement as inspirations. I came across it again when looking for information about non-hit-point damage systems, which Blades has, although not via inventory manipulation—the particular topic of my investigation.
I bought a copy of the rules, read them while on family vacation at the end of the summer, and found them quite inspirational. It made me want to run a session or two in order to see the systems in motion. As anyone who enjoys tabletop games knows, it's one thing to read the rules and another thing to try running them: the latter exposes ones incomplete knowledge from the former. I hesitated to invite my boys to play though because of the vicious nature of the game. Blades in the Dark is a game in which you play a scoundrel who is part of a criminal crew. You advance in the game through illegal and immoral activity. I prefer to encourage fantasies about heroic living. Yet, I found myself thinking about how one can learn from stories of heroes and of villains, and if nothing else, I knew my boys would also enjoy experience the game and exploring its setting.
In my retelling of our experience, I want to highlight places where I felt unsupported by the book and online resources. This is constructive criticism meant that I hope myself and others can use to improve future sessions of this and other games. Note that in this blog post, I will be freely referencing rules and lore from Blades in the Dark. If you are the type who enjoys reading or playing role-playing games, I recommend you pick up a copy. That said, you can also get an overview of the rules from the public System Reference Document.
We played for about three hours on Sunday afternoon, during which time we created characters and crew and completed one score. I had downloaded and printed the recommended materials, and so we dove into character creation. I had also crammed a lot of lore into my memory, which made it harder to introduce the game at a high level. I would have liked a canned paragraph I could read to set up the experience for new players. It was also too late for coffee, which could have been a contributing factor. Also, my boys, because they are my boys, are probably not familiar with any of the cultural touchstones that are referenced in the rulebook: we just don't watch stories about criminals and antiheroes, and I myself had not heard of most of the things in the list.
The playbooks were useful for letting the boys start creating their characters. One picked a Leech (saboteur, tinkerer, alchemist) and the other, a Hound (sharpshooter, tracker). Among the first decisions one makes in character creation is choosing a heritage, and here is another area where a handout would be useful. The book has short descriptions of each, but the playbook only lists the name. A simple handout that gives a single sentence about each would be sufficient for a table of players to pick the one they like; otherwise, the GM has to explain each while players hold the lore in their heads. When it came choosing vices, we had a similar problem: I explained that one had to choose the category of vice, then the particular vice and its purveyor (for example, "Poker at Spades' Tavern"). The boys looked at me rather blankly: without knowing more about the world, it was not at all clear what kind of creative boundaries they had for this. I remembered that there was a list of vice purveyors in the appendix, so I turned to page 299. They readily chose from this list, and this makes me think that this, too, should be a handout in the starting materials.
When we turned to creating the crew with the corresponding playbooks, I realized that we should have inserted a step before the character creation: a quick discussion about what kind of game we wanted to play. They didn't talk much during character creation, but when we got to crew selection, it became clear that the Leech wanted to do sabotage and the Hound wanted to do assassinations. I ended up encouraging them to compromise and create a Shadows crew, which leans more into Leech styles but should have room for the Hound as well. In part, I was thinking about an initial score that would resonate with their crew playbook, and I did not want to open with an assassination.
We had some trouble with defining the crew's hunting grounds. The district map from the downloadable resources was useful, and the players figured that their lair could be in Crow's Foot while their hunting grounds was across the river in Whitehall. After all, wouldn't a band of spies want to spy on something worthwhile? I looked up more details about the district in the rulebook, and I found that it was listed as having maximum wealth and maximum security. That doesn't seem like a reasonable target for a crew that is just starting out. Mechanically, the Shadows were Tier 0 but their targets would all be much higher tier. If there were a recommendation for new players, we could have just taken it. In the absence of this, setting up the crew felt overwhelming, being high-stakes and made almost blindly. We ended up shifting the hunting grounds to also be in Crow's Foot.
A related complication came up in the required decision of how to deal with the faction that controls the turf containing your hunting grounds. Unfortunately, there is no concise summary in the rules about which factions control which hunting grounds. For Crow's Foot, I remembered that the Crows claimed control over the whole district, but that there were also smaller factions who were trying to take it over. When the crew thought they would use Whitehall as their hunting grounds, I had no idea who controlled it. Would the Bluecoats—the corrupt law enforcement officers—be the faction that gets paid off? This is another case where a simple reference or a table of defaults would really help new GMs who don't have the spare cycles to memorize the litany of factions. A GM can always override a default, but in the absence of a default, I felt stranded in 150 pages of lore.
The book gives a recommended starting score that brings in three competing factions and gives the player some choices about whom to trust and whom to target. I was intimidated at the thought of doing this because it introduces several important NPCs and multiple factions, and the scenario is still likely to require improvising believable within this complex setting of Doskvol. I had previously searched for tips about how to start a Blades game, and I had read an article by Justin Alexander about alternative starting situations. I liked the simplicity of his "Aim at a Clock" advice. The book provides long-term goals, with progress clocks, for each of the factions. Given that, Alexander recommends picking a faction whose goal plays into something the crew could do, then having them pick up a score on behalf of that faction. This felt more controllable, and so as the players were finishing up their crew details, I had already started pulling pieces together: the Red Sashes and the Lampblacks each want each other eliminated, the Lampblacks are pushing some new drugs in Red Sashes territory, and the Red Sashes want the players to stop the production of these drugs. This would advance the Red Sashes long-term goal to eliminate the Lampblacks, and it would give the upstart players a powerful ally. However, the players had already decided that their crew had paid off the Crows for their hunting grounds, which also introduces a little conflict, since the Red Sashes and the Crows both want control of the district. Also, while arson is hardly virtuous, I liked the idea of having my boys focus on stopping the manufacture of drugs rather than, say, assassinating a union leader.
Part of the art of running and playing Blades in the Dark is knowing how much planning is too much planning. It is so important that the designer put the planning constraints right onto the character playbooks: choose a plan and provide the detail. The crew knew where the drugs were being manufactured, but they knew they did not want to go in guns-blazing. They asked where the raw materials came from, which is a great question. In the moment, I decided that this was an Information Gathering move. That would make this the first dice roll of the afternoon, and in retrospect, I don't like it. Information Gathering is a roll without stakes. I would not have recognized how this put the wrong foot forward until reading Matthew Cmiel's thought-provoking (although hyperbolically titled) article, "The Unbearable Problem of Blades in the Dark." I like his heuristic that dice rolls should always be with stakes, but Information Gathering just gives you better results the higher you roll. Also, it wasn't clear to me if the fact that an action rating was being used for Information Gathering meant you could aid each other, take it as a group action, or push yourself. Looking back at it (in light of Cmiel's analysis and other reading), I think the intended answer is no. In any case, the players rolled, and they discovered that some materials come by carriage regularly and some come by ferry intermittently.
After having thought about it, I think this step could have been a small score of its own. It would have made a decent introductory mission to gather this information as part of a long-term plan to take down the factory. Indeed, this would have helped me meet my own goal of understanding the whole Blades in the Dark system, including downtime. As it is, we did not have time to wrap up the score or do the downtime actions since real-life obligations interrupted the session—including the need for the dinner table.
The crew decided that this would be a stealth mission, sneaking into the factory via the river, starting a fire, and then getting out. A few times, the players wanted to get into details such as whose gondola they could use, but I assured them that Blades wants us to get to the action. They made a standard engagement roll, and we picked up the action with them silently sliding their boat into the factory. I described an enclosed dock with several rowboats moored to it along with two thugs, chatting and smoking. The players and I had a good short discussion about how to use the game's rules to indicate the character's goal in a fiction-first approach, and they decided that their goal was to sneak past the guards and into the main body of the facility. They succeeded at this but with the complication that the factory floor was just beyond the crates.
The players talked about trying to sidle up to the work tables and pretend to be laborers, and we discussed how a flashback could be used to set up an insider. Instead, they decided to go for broke, with the Leech tossing a vial of flammable oil into the midst of the work area while the Hound fired off a few rounds to cause a panic. I told them that this was a desperate move, and the Leech botched the roll. Here is where things started to go badly for our Shadows. The Leech badly failed the roll, getting all ones and twos. Since it was a desperate move, I described how he botched the throw and spilled the oil mostly on himself, inflicting Tier 3 Harm. This allowed me to introduce the rules for Resistance rolls as well as Armor, and by using both, he reduced the consequences to minor burns, Tier 1 Harm.
As part of my post-play reflection, I realize now that I violated one of the GM rules for Blades in the Dark: "Don't make the PCs look incompetent." I treated the roll like a critical failure in part because of the incredible number of ones that the player rolled. It was also funny, in a tragic sort of way. However, if I could do it all again, I would have had him throw the vial and have it hit something else, something dangerous to them but not immediately deadly, and certainly not something as incompetent as wandering onto a factory floor and setting himself on fire. Alternatively, since I had already established that the workers were dealing with open flames as part of the production process, they could have immediately followed a fire suppression protocol.
Their cover blown, the Hound decided to use his special ability to lay down suppressing fire to buy them some time. Unfortunately, despite having taken a Devil's Bargain that this action would anger the Crows who claimed control of the district, the Hound botched this roll, too. This was clearly a desperate move, and after accounting for armor, he took a bullet in the chest, Tier 2 Harm.
At this, the crew decided to beat a hasty retreat while trying to start a fire near the docks. The Leech had plenty of fire oil to attempt this. They wanted to escape, but they also wanted to succeed, so I offered them another Devil's Bargain: they fling the fire oil recklessly and end up setting fire to the very boat they came in on. The Leech took it and got a partial success, so I described how this area went up in flames, but several Lampblacks from the work floor were charging at them, wielding pistols and clubs.
The crew charged at the two guards who were still standing by the rowboats, and the Hound incapacitated them with some quick shooting. The complication for this filled up the clock I had started for the Crows' tolerance. At this point, the big faction controlling the region was going to take action against our Shadows for causing such chaos. The crew was more concerned at this point about survival, so they tried to unmoor a boat and get out before the charging reinforcements arrived. You guessed it, they botched this roll, too, and both of them took a beating in the attempt (Tier 2 Harm).
Faced with no other viable option, they undertook a desperate maneuver and dived into the water to swim away. This, dear reader, resulted in the first and only six that they rolled the entire afternoon. Despite their burns, bruises, and bullets, they swam out of the dock area and into the river. To me, the fiction demanded that some of the Lampblacks grabbed a boat and chase them, but I also realize that this was a place where we could have made their exact goal more precise in our discussion: did they think that their diving into the water was to get completely safe or to simply get out of the immediate scrap? I interpreted it as the latter, but we could have been more clear.
I started a four-slot clock for them to evade the Lampblacks and gave them one tick for swimming out into the river. The players thought their only choice was to swim for shore, and I pointed out that there were some other options, such as swimming out into the river, or pleading for their lives. That said, swimming for shore made the most sense in the moment, so they tried... and botched the roll. The Lampblacks in the rowboat got into the river and took a few shots at them. This was enough to max out the Leech's Stress, and he took the Trauma of being Unstable, which is completely understandable given how badly this mission had gone.
Now we were in a strange situation. I had established a progress clock for the crew's escape, although it was down to just the Hound now. He said he would just swim for shore, but I recognize that this would violate the Blades GM advice, "Don't roll twice for the same thing." It felt like it would just be "Swim again, but better this time." That didn't feel right, so I retconned the previous situation so that the Lampblacks had brought their boat between the swimmers and the shore. Hence, the Hound could do something like swim out into the ocean (with his punctured lung and bruises) or do something else, like beg for his life. He chose the latter, and I don't blame him. I offered him a Devil's Bargain on this attempt to sway the ruffians: he could have an extra die on his attempt if they let out their bloodlust by killing the Leech. To my surprise, he took it. The Hound knew that they were both as good as dead anyway. It was better for one of them to live than for both of them to die. The Hound succeeded at a cost, so they beat him with Tier 3 Harm and left him for dead on the shore.
We completed neither the score wrap-up nor the downtime activities. Both seemed moot with half of the crew dead, and as I previously mentioned, there were real-world pressures to clean up the table and get one of the boys to a youth group meeting. I plan on reading through the rules regarding how to wrap up a score later today so that I can do a mental walkthrough of how it would go. If the three of us play again, I think we'll just start afresh with a better understanding of the world and the rules.
And I would play again. Despite the game going badly for the crew, we all enjoyed the experience. It was a little rocky at times when I had to reference rules or lore, but that's the way it goes when you learn a new system. Every review of Blades that I have read says that you have to play several sessions before you really get into its way of playing. Although I would play again, I do not currently have plans to play again. I think it would be great fun to play with an adult group with beer and snacks, but getting a bunch of fathers together for a game night is already a desperate move where the dice are loaded. In the meantime, my boys and I got to share a fun afternoon together, and now they have a story to tell about what happens to those who turn to a life of crime.
