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A review by mburnamfink
Blades in the Dark by John Harper
5.0
Perfection is worth waiting for. John Harper used the delay to do more playtesting, polishing his RPG system to a fine sheen. What remains is sleek and stylish game of fantasy scoundrels, searching for the next score in a dark gothic ghost-haunted world. This is a tightly focused masterpiece of game design, that demands that you play by its rules.
The system is elegant. State your intent and roll d6s equal to your action rating. Beg for help from your friends, push yourself, or take a devil’s bargain for more dice. Only the highest result counts. 1-3 is a failure. 4-5 is success with consequences. 6 is success, and multiple 6s are a critical success. Where the game excels is in driving fiction first play. The core gameplay loop involves the player setting their goal and choosing an action. The GM sets the position (controlled, risky, desperate) and the effect (great, standard, limited), the player finds extra dice, you roll, and tick off clocks.
The system has enough bits to communicate difficulty, but is fast and light and gets out of your way, because what this game is really about is making the city of Duskoval and the dangerous lives of scoundrels come alive. Play is divided into three phases. In free play, players wander the city talking to contacts, getting into and out of trouble in a traditional linear RPG style. When they’ve gathered enough information to identify a likely target, the play switches to the Score. Pick one of six plans, fill in a detail, roll Engagement, and hit the ground running in media res to demonstrate that these are professional scoundrels. Rather than tediously planning a heist, players spend Stress to create flashbacks (“of course these are the guards I bribed”, “I memorized the canal schedule and a barge is passing underneath right now”, etc). Finally, in the third section, downtime, players indulge their Vice to recover Stress, work on long-term plans, upgrade their crew and territory, and watch the gangs around them respond. This pacing mechanism, with brief bursts of action interspersed with longer periods of slower work, is an RPG design innovation, and I’m interested to see how the moving parts, between Coin and Reputation and Heat and Stress, all work together.
The setting of Duskovol is mashed together from a bunch of sources, the Dishonored and Thief video games, the Vlad Taltos series, The Lies of Locke Lamora. The result is evocative without being specific. This is a city ruled by cruel and decadent aristocrats, inhabited by downtrodden workers, and infested with criminals and cultists, where the dead linger and forgotten gods lurk around every bend. There’s a district by district break down, but the setting mostly comes through in one sentence descriptions of NPCs and organizations. Lists and tables in fine Gygaxian style provide enough material for a GM to skeleton an adventure, but this is a game that demands that everybody improvise in visualizing and inhabiting the city, rather than specifying everything in advance.
This is a tightly focused game. Reading it, I’m confident that within its wheelhouse it’ll be perfect. The active Google+ community has tons of hacks (and I hacked a much earlier edition for Stross’s The Laundry series). That said, this may not be a game for the faint of heart, and with its mechanics so tied up in pacing and danger, it may not be as flexible as it appears. One-shots are doable, but a lot of the cooler features about crews and downtime won’t come into play.
Compared to earlier editions, the rules for teamwork and leadership are much reduced, probably for the better. On a minus point, there’s a lot of mechanical similarity. A desperate back alley skirmish, binding a hostile ghost, and making contact with a noble at a swanky party are all the same type of action: working down a clock. My personal point of confusion is the Coin stashed away for retirement-the goal of the game-when every bit of narrative around thieves says that your career ends in One Last Job that is too rich to resist, and too dangerous to survive. Still, these are minor gripes for a damn good looking game. Put BitD on the top of your list.
The system is elegant. State your intent and roll d6s equal to your action rating. Beg for help from your friends, push yourself, or take a devil’s bargain for more dice. Only the highest result counts. 1-3 is a failure. 4-5 is success with consequences. 6 is success, and multiple 6s are a critical success. Where the game excels is in driving fiction first play. The core gameplay loop involves the player setting their goal and choosing an action. The GM sets the position (controlled, risky, desperate) and the effect (great, standard, limited), the player finds extra dice, you roll, and tick off clocks.
The system has enough bits to communicate difficulty, but is fast and light and gets out of your way, because what this game is really about is making the city of Duskoval and the dangerous lives of scoundrels come alive. Play is divided into three phases. In free play, players wander the city talking to contacts, getting into and out of trouble in a traditional linear RPG style. When they’ve gathered enough information to identify a likely target, the play switches to the Score. Pick one of six plans, fill in a detail, roll Engagement, and hit the ground running in media res to demonstrate that these are professional scoundrels. Rather than tediously planning a heist, players spend Stress to create flashbacks (“of course these are the guards I bribed”, “I memorized the canal schedule and a barge is passing underneath right now”, etc). Finally, in the third section, downtime, players indulge their Vice to recover Stress, work on long-term plans, upgrade their crew and territory, and watch the gangs around them respond. This pacing mechanism, with brief bursts of action interspersed with longer periods of slower work, is an RPG design innovation, and I’m interested to see how the moving parts, between Coin and Reputation and Heat and Stress, all work together.
The setting of Duskovol is mashed together from a bunch of sources, the Dishonored and Thief video games, the Vlad Taltos series, The Lies of Locke Lamora. The result is evocative without being specific. This is a city ruled by cruel and decadent aristocrats, inhabited by downtrodden workers, and infested with criminals and cultists, where the dead linger and forgotten gods lurk around every bend. There’s a district by district break down, but the setting mostly comes through in one sentence descriptions of NPCs and organizations. Lists and tables in fine Gygaxian style provide enough material for a GM to skeleton an adventure, but this is a game that demands that everybody improvise in visualizing and inhabiting the city, rather than specifying everything in advance.
This is a tightly focused game. Reading it, I’m confident that within its wheelhouse it’ll be perfect. The active Google+ community has tons of hacks (and I hacked a much earlier edition for Stross’s The Laundry series). That said, this may not be a game for the faint of heart, and with its mechanics so tied up in pacing and danger, it may not be as flexible as it appears. One-shots are doable, but a lot of the cooler features about crews and downtime won’t come into play.
Compared to earlier editions, the rules for teamwork and leadership are much reduced, probably for the better. On a minus point, there’s a lot of mechanical similarity. A desperate back alley skirmish, binding a hostile ghost, and making contact with a noble at a swanky party are all the same type of action: working down a clock. My personal point of confusion is the Coin stashed away for retirement-the goal of the game-when every bit of narrative around thieves says that your career ends in One Last Job that is too rich to resist, and too dangerous to survive. Still, these are minor gripes for a damn good looking game. Put BitD on the top of your list.