Blades in the Dark - First Impressions (Patreon)

Last night I played my first game of Blades in the Dark. For those who don't know, Blades is heist tabletop RPG with a Victorian steampunk setting, in which you play as a member of an up-and-coming gang in the city of Doskvol. If you've ever played Dishonoured, you'll feel somewhat familiar with the setting, though add in vampires and demons to that, plus LOTS of ghosts. 

I had an absolute blast playing. It was run expertly by Fran from the London RPG Community via Discord and Roll20. The first step was character creation. As I was joining in the third session of the campaign, everyone else had their characters up and ready to go. I had wondered whether it would be a bit of a time sink creating my character at the start of the game, but lo and behold, within 5 minutes Werrel the Scrivener was born. 

Werrel Eskildsen is a Whisper, closely attuned to the supernatural, with a knack for forcing ghosts to obey his commands. He hails from the Scandinavian-esk land of Skovlan, where he worked as an administrator for a demonic whale oil company (yes you read that right). Poor Werrel put slightly too much of himself into his office work - he now finds it near-impossible to relax without a pile of paperwork in front of him. Now an immigrant in Doskvol, he worked alongside a spirit trafficker known as Flint for a time, though Werrel's less-than-moral ways for acquiring new souls did not sit well with his new friend, and their partnership was quietly terminated. Stressed and looking for work, he heard of the exploits of the Fogcrest Gang through a mutual contact - Petra the Clark, for whom he works free-of-charge as her personal Scrivener to control his vices.

Sounds bonkers, right! I had no plans for what my character would be going into the session, and I'm so pleased with how he ended up.  The system uses a system 'playbook' style system to Powered by the Apocalypse games, where everything you need to build your character is contained within the sheet. With a few leading questions from the GM, I was able to craft a character that felt grounded in the world with a sizeable chunk of backstory ready to go! All of this is thanks to how Blades in the Dark forces you to justify your character's place in the world, even to take a role that feels more like GMing at times, where you invent characters, locations, and objects on the fly.

So the session started with a simple question from the GM. "What do you want to do next?". In front of us was a map of the city, with notable locations around us marked. For a moment the freedom to do anything felt somewhat paralysing, and my natural inclination to think of things from the GMs perspective meant I was trying to figure out how on earth Fran could plan for us to do anything! But lo and behold, when we finally decided on our mission to steal from a local gang whilst they were distracted by a feud with one of their rivals, he was ready to go without hesitation. From what I can gather, the rulebook has all the information a GM needs, and the rest is filled out by everyone's imaginations, even the players.

Cue our preparation phase. I asked if I could track down a member of this gang - The Wraiths - kill one of them and take their soul to interrogate.

"Where do you look for them?" Fran asked. "A pub, a drug den?"

"A seedy pub," I said.

"What is it called?"

Well, this is new, I thought. In D&D, the players don't even decide these things. The world is presented FROM the dungeon master TO the players. But here I was, naming the pub the 'Rotten Toad Inn'. 

"What does it look like?"

At this point I really do switch to GM mode. "It looks a bit like it's name. It's squat and painted a faded green. I think the roof at the centre of the building is kind of sagging down so that when you walk from one side to the other you have to duck."

And thus, a location was born. I'm delighted to see that the map has now been updated with the Rotten Toad pub, something plucked out of my imagination that now lives as a permanent structure in this world - until the roof collapses of course.

A similar moment happened later on, when i went to see my constant Flint the Spirit Trafficker. This time it felt more like a collaboration between myself and the GM, which was wonderful. First I asked for a graveyard as a meeting point, but was informed that the city of Doskvol has no graveyards due to the ghost problem. So a morgue then? Well, there is only one morgue in the city, belonging to the Spirit Wardens. But it could be an illegal morgue, Fran suggested. How is it hidden? Well, beneath a flower shop of course, I say. Fran tells me that flowers are incredible rare, and so we decide that these flowers are grown via the enemy / ectoplasm from Flint's spirit farm below. 

Cue a hilarious scene in the spirit equivalent of a weed farm, in which me and Flint shout to each other over the background screams of hundreds of souls whose energy is feeding the flowers. The best moment happened when Fran described Flint turning the souls 'off', and they all made a simultaneous 'sigh of relief' noise. Flint's Flowers has now also been added to the map, much to my joy.

This to and fro between players and GM is something I've always been a bit sceptical of. It's always made sense to me that this is something you can do before a campaign gets started, but once things kick off, the GM owns the world. But thanks to my Blades game, I'm starting to come around. It depends on the kind  of story you want to tell, but I could see myself getting more into this way of running games in the future.

I should talk briefly about the dice system. When you attempt something that requires a check, the GM tells you the 'position' and 'effect'. Position basically means what are the consequences of failure, and effect means what are the consequences of success. A 'controlled' position and 'great' effect means if you fail, the situation won't meaningfully change, but if you succeed the outcome will be really good for you. A 'desperate' position and 'limited' effect means you're attempting something which will only make a slight difference if you succeed, but if you fail the consequences will be bad! These can be mixed and matched in all sorts of ways, with various mechanical ways to change them. 

This let's the target numbers always stay the same whilst allowing the narrative to change depending on how easy / hard something should be. You roll multiple d6s depending on your skill, and look at the highest (or lowest if you're rubbish at something). 1-3 is a failure, 4-5 is a success with a cost, 6 is a success, and if multiple dice show a 6 it's a critical success. One interesting aspect is that the player chooses the relevant skill, not the GM, but it's up the GM to then decide what position / effect that skill choice warrants. 

Once the heist is underway, Blades has some great ways to streamline things. Whilst we did spend a good hour or so preparing for the mission in the ways I described earlier, once we were on the heist we were free to spend 'stress' to invoke a flashback, in which we describe our characters preparing for the mission and setting things up to help us out. One example came when we wanted to watch a building without being spotted. I invoked a flashback, telling of how we scouted this place out a few days earlier and found a ground floor flat across the road occupied by an old senile man who thought we were his family, from which we could easily watch the building whilst enjoying a cup of tea. You have to be careful with how often you invoke these though, as stress can also be accumulated in other ways and getting too much of it makes your character go a little mad, in a permanent kind of way.

One more mechanical aspect I'd like to mention is the harm system. You don't take damage in the strict sense in blades. Rather, when you're injured you take a specific form of harm dependent on what the cause was. When the ghost I commanded broke free and attacked me, my 'harm' was that I started to constantly see visions from the day before. This hindered me when I was trying to track someone later in the game, but came in handy for seeing what that same person was up to the day before. Different harm can effect you in different ways, such as a shoulder injury I sustained which gave me -1d6 on any checks involving the use of my arms. Fill up your harm table with different forms of harm and you end up dead. Werrel ended the session dangerously close to this point by the end of the session, and rather foolishly I used the 'downtime' phase which comes at the end of every session to investigate the mysterious demonic hand we had stolen from our rivals rather than heal up my various physical and phycological wounds.

Overall I had a fantastic time. Every aspect for the game is so flavourful, and there's so many things I've not talked about. There's a separate character sheet for the gang itself, noting things like your reputation and wanted level. Your inventory isn't something you plan beforehand, but rather when you decide you need to have an item with you, voila, you have it and mark off one slot from your total inventory size. I want to type more about this but I'll stop now for fear of overloading this post with mechanics. As you can tell I'm really fired up from playing this system, and can't wait to hop back into it.

If any of your are looking for a new RPG to get into, I would highly recommend this one. It's also great for online play, with a superb Roll20 setup including interactive character sheets where you can simply click on an ability to roll the corresponding dice.

One thing I will say is that I've heard this game ain't easy to GM. The sandbox nature of the game makes it hard if not impossible to plan, so you have to be good at thinking on your feet and knowing the right pages to land on in the rulebook. 

But I always do like a challenge, so maybe I'll run this myself at some point! If that day should ever come, I'll be sure to let you know how it went.