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BitD Unbroken Sun: Session 0
Welcome to the inaugural post in this journal! I made this account to serve as kind of like a Goodreads for non-books - minus the linkage to the GR community, the affiliation with Amazon, the dubious backup capabilities, the focus on star ratings and the topic of a specific thing... ... so, as a repository for writing thoughts on things, basically. This is also an experiment in a little corner of the internet that isn't governed by the terrifying forces of Web 2.0 quite yet: which seems like a much better place to be writing about interactive fiction, indie tabletop, and independent games in general. And other things that strike my personal fancy.
Today's post is an introduction and recap for the Blades in the Dark campaign I've just started running as of a few weeks ago for three exciting friends. I've wanted to play or run Blades from the time I first heard of it, and the more I learned about the system and the world the more determined I was to make a Blades game happen one way or another. It looked to combine several of my favorite things: a Fallen London-esque, Dishonored-esque dark steampunk setting, a post-cataclysmic Dickensian 'dystopia' of sorts, a system that supported and encouraged clever and daring characters in a not-strictly-violence-based stakes-and-resolution system - and I also vastly prefer 3-4-player parties over the 5-6 that end up being common in tabletop. And right now I've got the honor of trying all that out.
(Blades is currently part of a charity Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality on itch.io, by the way. $5 minimum for literally hundreds of tabletop and video games - go check it out if you haven't.)
Our "Session 0" - ground rules and character and crew creation - started out in early May with a discussion of play goals and content and tonal agreements. I'm not at liberty to divulge most of this conversation and to some extent I think it would be counterproductive: a big element of trust at any good table is the idea that our limits aren't for performance or public consumption by default, and anything else risks compromising the honesty of that discussion - but anyway, GM philosophy aside, we had a good and fruitful conversation. One thing I do want to revisit later are the setting modifications I proposed and we've been making to the basic Blades setup, and I'd rather touch on that in an overall post about the base game itself, but basically it involved some discomfort with the fantasy tabletop assumptions built into the setting which were very stereotypical and othering - in short, it can be painfully obvious where Manifest Destiny and the British Empire still bleed through from any fantasy map, even one that purports to be 'cynical.' The genre unfortunately is saturated with that subtext.
But again - a topic for another time - except to establish a policy which I think is actually very much in keeping with Blades' approach to worldbuilding, which is that we play fast and loose with determined world detail until it's brought into our play, at which point it becomes a consistent element of the world the characters inhabit. The world is a spotlight that expands around and follows the crew, not a complicated trove of externally determined lore.
The crew, in this case, is built on the Smuggler template (though some interest in the Cult template and the idea of being tethered to a cult/an underground faith also built this into the crew's background). It's comprised of three characters - Nico (a Spider), a junior architect disgraced and turned to crime and forgery, but not before making off with her employer's most fascinating blueprints; Aphra (a Leech), a physicker precariously and sometimes frenetically straddling the worlds of 'legitimate' medicine and apothecary work and her zeal to modify, improve, and transcend the human condition; and Calida (a Whisper), a former scholar and mage who abandoned the 'academy' in contempt and frustration to chase her lifelong obsession, founded in a childhood experience with possession by a pre-Cataclysmic spirit.
(ETA for context: The Cataclysm is a defining part of the lore of the Blades world - Blades in the Dark takes place in the fortified dark steampunk city of Doskvol, protected from the hostile magical Deathlands outside by a magical-electrical wall known as the lightning barrier: as far as everyone knows, this bleak situation was caused by the shattering of the sun and the destruction of the gates of death in an event known as the 'Cataclysm' historically, creating a world flooded with darkness and haunted by the undead.)
Nico, Aphra, and Calida are united by a shared business venture, a shared vehicle (the Turtle, a converted submersible mailboat), a shared lair (a grotto in a forgotten subterranean canal in Six Towers - the advantages of a submersible!) - but in fact, they wouldn't be united by any of these things were they not more permanently united by something else: a harrowing shared supernatural experience. They were hired by the society known as the Unbroken Sun - interested not just in the pre-Cataclysmic sun, but the heretical idea that an intact version of this sun exists, not just emotionally but literally, somewhere, and that this could be accessed - to replicate and 'scry' on the gates of Death which famously shattered at the time of the Cataclysm, after a mysterious 'mourning period' after they shut. The plan was for Nico to render the image of the gates, Aphra to put Calida in a controlled chemical trance, and for Calida to attunedly look at the image, through the image, and see what she could discover about the past.
It's hard to say what exactly she did see. In the end something seemed to be going wrong, terribly and intensely wrong, and Aphra and Nico ended the trance and destroyed the images before the gates could shatter. But Calida now is one of the few - maybe the one and only of the living - to have seen the blue sky.
The strange thing was that something didn't only change about Calida - it changed about them all. Mechanically, they gained the ability 'Ghost Passage' - in their lives, this has meant that something has changed about their selves, physically and spiritually. They can no longer be possessed. This is an advantage in their very, er, specialized trade that they're now developing for themselves - but it bodes uncomfortably for what they went through. And now they transport and deal in strange goods, in jobs that only their very particular skills and very particular vehicle can handle, and have generally remained an underworld oddity, as they return to the question: what really happened there? They each have their own reasons to be interested.
... but they also have bills, enemies, creditors, and there are some very big fish in the waters around them! Hence: Blades in the Dark.
Today's post is an introduction and recap for the Blades in the Dark campaign I've just started running as of a few weeks ago for three exciting friends. I've wanted to play or run Blades from the time I first heard of it, and the more I learned about the system and the world the more determined I was to make a Blades game happen one way or another. It looked to combine several of my favorite things: a Fallen London-esque, Dishonored-esque dark steampunk setting, a post-cataclysmic Dickensian 'dystopia' of sorts, a system that supported and encouraged clever and daring characters in a not-strictly-violence-based stakes-and-resolution system - and I also vastly prefer 3-4-player parties over the 5-6 that end up being common in tabletop. And right now I've got the honor of trying all that out.
(Blades is currently part of a charity Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality on itch.io, by the way. $5 minimum for literally hundreds of tabletop and video games - go check it out if you haven't.)
Our "Session 0" - ground rules and character and crew creation - started out in early May with a discussion of play goals and content and tonal agreements. I'm not at liberty to divulge most of this conversation and to some extent I think it would be counterproductive: a big element of trust at any good table is the idea that our limits aren't for performance or public consumption by default, and anything else risks compromising the honesty of that discussion - but anyway, GM philosophy aside, we had a good and fruitful conversation. One thing I do want to revisit later are the setting modifications I proposed and we've been making to the basic Blades setup, and I'd rather touch on that in an overall post about the base game itself, but basically it involved some discomfort with the fantasy tabletop assumptions built into the setting which were very stereotypical and othering - in short, it can be painfully obvious where Manifest Destiny and the British Empire still bleed through from any fantasy map, even one that purports to be 'cynical.' The genre unfortunately is saturated with that subtext.
But again - a topic for another time - except to establish a policy which I think is actually very much in keeping with Blades' approach to worldbuilding, which is that we play fast and loose with determined world detail until it's brought into our play, at which point it becomes a consistent element of the world the characters inhabit. The world is a spotlight that expands around and follows the crew, not a complicated trove of externally determined lore.
The crew, in this case, is built on the Smuggler template (though some interest in the Cult template and the idea of being tethered to a cult/an underground faith also built this into the crew's background). It's comprised of three characters - Nico (a Spider), a junior architect disgraced and turned to crime and forgery, but not before making off with her employer's most fascinating blueprints; Aphra (a Leech), a physicker precariously and sometimes frenetically straddling the worlds of 'legitimate' medicine and apothecary work and her zeal to modify, improve, and transcend the human condition; and Calida (a Whisper), a former scholar and mage who abandoned the 'academy' in contempt and frustration to chase her lifelong obsession, founded in a childhood experience with possession by a pre-Cataclysmic spirit.
(ETA for context: The Cataclysm is a defining part of the lore of the Blades world - Blades in the Dark takes place in the fortified dark steampunk city of Doskvol, protected from the hostile magical Deathlands outside by a magical-electrical wall known as the lightning barrier: as far as everyone knows, this bleak situation was caused by the shattering of the sun and the destruction of the gates of death in an event known as the 'Cataclysm' historically, creating a world flooded with darkness and haunted by the undead.)
Nico, Aphra, and Calida are united by a shared business venture, a shared vehicle (the Turtle, a converted submersible mailboat), a shared lair (a grotto in a forgotten subterranean canal in Six Towers - the advantages of a submersible!) - but in fact, they wouldn't be united by any of these things were they not more permanently united by something else: a harrowing shared supernatural experience. They were hired by the society known as the Unbroken Sun - interested not just in the pre-Cataclysmic sun, but the heretical idea that an intact version of this sun exists, not just emotionally but literally, somewhere, and that this could be accessed - to replicate and 'scry' on the gates of Death which famously shattered at the time of the Cataclysm, after a mysterious 'mourning period' after they shut. The plan was for Nico to render the image of the gates, Aphra to put Calida in a controlled chemical trance, and for Calida to attunedly look at the image, through the image, and see what she could discover about the past.
It's hard to say what exactly she did see. In the end something seemed to be going wrong, terribly and intensely wrong, and Aphra and Nico ended the trance and destroyed the images before the gates could shatter. But Calida now is one of the few - maybe the one and only of the living - to have seen the blue sky.
The strange thing was that something didn't only change about Calida - it changed about them all. Mechanically, they gained the ability 'Ghost Passage' - in their lives, this has meant that something has changed about their selves, physically and spiritually. They can no longer be possessed. This is an advantage in their very, er, specialized trade that they're now developing for themselves - but it bodes uncomfortably for what they went through. And now they transport and deal in strange goods, in jobs that only their very particular skills and very particular vehicle can handle, and have generally remained an underworld oddity, as they return to the question: what really happened there? They each have their own reasons to be interested.
... but they also have bills, enemies, creditors, and there are some very big fish in the waters around them! Hence: Blades in the Dark.