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Just ran my session 0 last night and my players (who are very used to d&d) had a bit of trouble with the sheer amount of choices involved in setting up their crew, but we eventually made our way to a Slide, a Lurk, and a Whisper in a crew of Strange Shadows. The Slide, knowing basically nothing about the starting scenario or the main players in it decided that Baszo Baz was a great name, latched onto him immediately, hell, he even hooked them up with their hidden lair! So, when we cut to the intro in his office, it was like meeting with dear old gang-dad to officially start their crew off right. Offered both of the starting scores to them, and they figured "gently caress the Red Sashes, we'll take em both!" Started with the artifact. The Whisper was desperate for information about it, and we decided that it was a red jeweled brooch that acted like a beacon for bad luck. Don't touch it with your bare hands. The plan was deviously simple: act like nobodies interested in learning the Iruvian sash-fighting, take a tour of the academy, and stuff the brooch in a toilet stall: or "the king of all upper-deckers". Snake eyes on the engagement roll. The Slide, who was carrying the brooch, gets hit with some massive bad luck right at the outset. She spins this as "the need to get to the bathroom is now suddenly, terrifyingly Real." She attempted to Command a tour guide to point her to the can, rolled a 4. Sharted a bit, pissed off the Sashes, and that guy is gonna remember her. Stashed the brooch with another 5, but that odor lingered. Meanwhile, the Lurk and the Whisper are trying to figure out a distraction, the Whisper rolls a 6 on a compel, summons the ghost of someone the Red Sashes murdered to just gently caress their poo poo up, ripping swords off the walls, knocking potted plants over, the whole 9 yards, while the Lurk did his best to just stick with the crowd and keep the Whisper from getting noticed while they all beat feet out of there, with the faint odor of poo poo the only thing in their wake. As far as entanglements, the poltergeist that the Whisper summoned decided it really liked him and wanted to follow him home. Despite my best efforts in setting the tone, it was easily the hardest my group has laughed during a session in months, and they went from not sure at all to absolutely loving the system, even if it was a bit less daring and a bit more slapstick. That said, a question was brought up during play and I couldn't find an answer in the book- if a character has zero dots in an action rating, do they HAVE to get assistance/ push themselves/ take a Devil's Bargain just to roll it? My gut reaction was "if you don't, you're basically rolling with disadvantage (roll two, take the lower), but I wasn't sure if there was an actual precedent set somewhere that I just couldn't find. Also, what in the actual gently caress is a "Weird" Vice? Two of my characters took a weird vice, and none of us could really come up with a suitable meaning for what that actually consists of, outside of the Ghostbusters blowjob scene. (Thankfully, the Lurk just likes playing craps.) The book says "consorting with ghosts", but that's literally just the Whisper's job?
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Mar 8, 2024 13:51
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Consorting with ghosts is a Whisper’s job, but doing it in your downtime could make people look down on you, make you act/smell funny, and distract you from being able to function normally as a supernatural thief. You know, like a vice.
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Mar 8, 2024 14:03
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If you have zero dots, you can still roll it but you roll two takes lowest.
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Mar 8, 2024 14:57
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Weirdly enough, I find that the tone of this game often does stay in the silly range, but at least for my group that makes the poignant, serious moments actually land a lot better.
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Mar 8, 2024 15:13
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I take weird as anything that'll get looked down on society for one reason or another. If BitD were set in the late 80s, D&D would be a Weird vice. But my favorite concept of a Weird vice is based on the Mutter Museum of Medical History in Philadelphia. It's a collection of all sorts of medical samples, from fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva to conjoined twins to everything in between. If it weren't so clinical, it'd be a horror show. Now, it's not named the Mutter Museum because someone named Mutter paid a lot of money to get their name on the building. No, an old-timey doc named Mutter had this as his teaching collection. Even my wife, an MD, thought the guy must have been a little creepy and might have contested Michael Jackson for the Elephant Man's skeleton were he alive to do so. Now imagine if you weren't a sawbones in Duskvol, but a...let's say, cutter. While your companions are blowing coin from their scores on gin, blackjack, and hookers, you get word that your fixer has a lead on a preserved baby's body with a vestigial tail, preserved in clear liquor in a glass jar. You cram some gold sovereigns into a valise and hail a cab across town to the sales point as fast as you can. That's a Weird vice.
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Mar 8, 2024 17:22
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Admiralty Flag posted:I take weird as anything that'll get looked down on society for one reason or another. If BitD were set in the late 80s, D&D would be a Weird vice. I feel like the Weird vice HAS to be poo poo like this rather than some religious, supernatural or arcane practice. Because in Doskvol you might very reasonably do that kind of thing as part of your job already. Worshipping Cthulhu isn't "weird" when half the people down the docks have not only met Him, they've tied Him to a boat and drained His blood into barrels. So it has to be, like, the Hound has a big dollhouse and is very particular about the furniture they stock it with. They spend most of their coin at the few woodworkers they haven't had terrific rows with over the details on an armoire you couldn't store a cigarette in. They once disappeared without notice for a week and came back with a thumb-sized futon. The Bluecoats once nabbed them on a B&E, but they got off lightly because all they'd taken was measurements.
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Mar 8, 2024 19:40
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Shanty posted:I feel like the Weird vice HAS to be poo poo like this rather than some religious, supernatural or arcane practice. Because in Doskvol you might very reasonably do that kind of thing as part of your job already. Worshipping Cthulhu isn't "weird" when half the people down the docks have not only met Him, they've tied Him to a boat and drained His blood into barrels. Rules as written I believe this would be Luxury. The Weird vice is supposed to be supernatural in nature.
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Mar 8, 2024 20:00
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Maybe, but there's no mechanical difference between the categories, they're just prompts. If you get something more interesting out of thinking of a doll's house collection as a weird vice, rather than a luxury one, go for it.
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Mar 8, 2024 20:12
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Pirate Radar posted:Rules as written I believe this would be Luxury. The Weird vice is supposed to be supernatural in nature. If the house and it’s furniture is perfect, then a ritual will bind the ghosts of x to happily play house in the doll house forever. As long as they get a regular amount of renovations done. Ghost heloc? We ended up switching from blades to scum and villainy because the dark and serious tone clashed with the vibe of our group as well as the comic downward spiralling that happened every score.
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Mar 8, 2024 20:59
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Demon_Corsair posted:If the house and it’s furniture is perfect, then a ritual will bind the ghosts of x to happily play house in the doll house forever. As long as they get a regular amount of renovations done. Ghost heloc? Right but this is my issue with Weird as Supernatural. What you're describing would be a perfectly sensible (very cool!) long term project that a character could get up to in the world of Blades. Not a weird vice. Of course, rules as written you're bang on. I just don't like that one of the Vice types seems like something you'd actually quite want someone in the party getting up to and the rest are stupid ways to let off steam. Like, imagine a player in a Cult crew going to "Aranna the Blessed, cultist of a forgotten god" as their vice purveyor. You're already in a cult! It's not weird!
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Mar 8, 2024 21:45
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The above situation is currently occuring in my game, although I'm aiming for it to become a source of controversy that they're two timing eldritch gods; I feel like the various types of vice are mainly there as prompts to get people's brains working, and especially to get them to broaden their idea of a vice to more than drugs, drink, and gambling.
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Mar 8, 2024 22:24
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The book literally explains what a Weird vice is, so it's pretty clear the sorts of things that it means by this: The Whisper's job is dealing with ghosts, not just hanging out with them for fun. The dollhouse probably counts as a bizarre ritual. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Mar 8, 2024 |
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Mar 8, 2024 22:29
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Vagabong posted:The above situation is currently occuring in my game, although I'm aiming for it to become a source of controversy that they're two timing eldritch gods; I feel like the various types of vice are mainly there as prompts to get people's brains working, and especially to get them to broaden their idea of a vice to more than drugs, drink, and gambling. I agree. The prompts on page 299 (examples of vice purveyors) are potentially helpful. For example, one of the weird ones is, "Ojak, Tycherosi rooftop market vendor, Silkshore." OK, so what's their stock in trade that falls into the family of stuff Lemon-Lime quoted? There are two proprietors at the House of the Weeping Lady, but one is faith and one is weird. What's the difference? These are great conversation starters, I think. About the dollhouse, I definitely would not want to make this a by-the-book downtime project (unless it could somehow be used as a planning tool to give boosts on engagement rolls or the like). I'd say, whenever the player indulges vice, let them have a free downtime action to work on a long-term project, only usable on their No-impact-in-the-game haunted dollhouse, to reflect their work on their hobby. After all, imagine what the dollhouse could mean I know it's not strictly by the rules, and maybe it's because of my player group, but I don't want roleplayers to be penalized for their choices compared to the more munchkin-minded.
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Mar 8, 2024 22:48
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The way I see it, the line between weird and other types of vice is mostly social acceptability. Talking to a priest about the nature of death as a calming hobby is accepted, talking to a medium about death isn't. Going to a bar and getting blackout drunk on beer is socially accepted, blacking out because because you do weird Talk To Me stuff with ghosts isn't. And to this example, building out your dollhouse collection as a Luxury vice is eccentric but socially accepted. Building our your dollhouse collection as a Weird vice is the sign that it has gone from a collection to a collection. (And for that matter, building our your dollhouse collection for weird occult reasons as a hobby is different from building your collection for occult reasons as a specific mechanical ritual you're building, but if your vice is making a weird dollhouse collection I'd probably just give you a chunky head start on the construction process.)
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Mar 8, 2024 23:06
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Admiralty Flag posted:I'd say, whenever the player indulges vice, let them have a free downtime action to work on a long-term project, only usable on their No-impact-in-the-game haunted dollhouse, to reflect their work on their hobby. After all, imagine what the dollhouse could mean I don't know why you would need or want to do this. "Working on the dollhouse" is itself the weird thing the player is indulging in and their purveyor is whoever is supplying them with rare materials or helping them with rare skills. You don't need to also make it an LTP where they build things for the same reason you don't make the gambling addict wager actual Coin to indulge their vice; it has all the fictional and mechanical weight of any other indulge vice action. If you're concerned about whether or not a literal dollhouse is Weird enough, just make it Weird by dint of the character's beliefs. Maybe it's some religious observance or some sort of voodoo-esque ritual; mechanically, that doesn't actually matter. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Mar 9, 2024 |
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Mar 8, 2024 23:55
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Lemon-Lime posted:I don't know why you would need or want to do this. "Working on the dollhouse" is itself the weird thing the player is indulging in. You don't need to also make it an LTP where they build things for the same reason you don't make the gambling addict wager actual Coin to indulge their vice; it has all the fictional and mechanical weight of any other indulge vice action. I wrote it in response to this post, but you cut to the essence much more clearly. Shanty posted:Right but this is my issue with Weird as Supernatural. What you're describing [building the spooky dollhouse] would be a perfectly sensible (very cool!) long term project that a character could get up to in the world of Blades. Not a weird vice.
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Mar 9, 2024 00:14
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the ability to give someone a bonus dice on their stress roll by helping then with it is gold, you get great little two hander scenes and entanglements.
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Mar 9, 2024 02:26
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Do people have advice on how to run the free play part of the game in general? My players and I are all pretty much brand new to actually playing ttrpgs, and going into the fourth session tomorrow I've noticed that while things flow pretty smoothly once we're running a score with a clear objective, when we switch to free play things can get quite aimless and I end up having to use a somewhat heavy hand guiding the players towards the next score.
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Mar 9, 2024 11:09
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There are some levers that as the GM you need to make use in order to allow the players to more fully immerse themselves in the character and the world. I've been playing in a regular game of BitD and my GM has used the following: - Using the contacts, both of the characters and of the gang as a whole to build drama: my character, for example, has a troubled relationship with one of my contacts, a local pharmacist, and my character has had a focus during free play to get back into her good graces. Create fiction between the players and their contacts, so that they become actual characters, rather than people you lean towards to get something specific. - Using the entanglements to create new characters, problems and potential scores: we kept getting issues with the spirit of a person that we killed, so we did a score for a local whisper to infiltrate a police station in order to get something for him. This also tied in with my point above, because we robbed the police station of chemicals as well, which I then gave to the pharmacist as a "gift" (which is obviously gonna bite me in the rear end later on). - Show how the vice of your character impacts the wider world. Although vices already have a mechanical framework, you can still work on them in terms of other characters. For example, one of our PCs has a debt (and an associated debt clock), but tends to go spend his money on his vice, and is highly visible during this. Joining those two aspects together has worked well. - Create clocks that represent issues that the gang might have. Our gang is Hawkers, selling drugs: if we don't regulalrly find a supply of raw materials for them, we start to get into trouble. - Lean on the relationship that the gang has to other entities/gangs in the world. - Encourage the players to explore more of Duskvold. They might be interested in exploring another area of the city that normally your gang doesn't deal with. - Create (some) inter-group drama. I would be very careful about this one, however, you do not want to create a situation where you end up PvPing, because the system does not cater for PvP and the BitD absolutely does not work in a PvP setting. However, some inter-group friction can lead to interesting roleplay, and I have been trying to plan my character to be somewhat antagonistic to other PCs, with the understanding that I'm fully willing to lose my character if the narrative makes sense for it to happen.
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Mar 9, 2024 11:32
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Also, some of the best advice I ever got as a player of narrative-forward games is "treat your character like a stolen car". You should be reckless, you should be daring, you should go full speed and not worry about the consequences and if you crash and burn, there's always another character that you can play, so don't worry about it (and creating characters in BitD is super easy). Create a narrative for your character and make sure your players understand that it should be more rewarding to weave an interesting storyline where your character does mistakes and creates their own problems instead of attempting to be super-careful in order to make sure you don't lose your character, which unfortunately is the focus of a lot of the more traditional RPGs. BitD itself directly rewards you for being reckless: make sure your players understand that the best XP generators in the game are both tied to having bad things happen to your character. Getting a trauma and acting on that trauma is a great generator of XP, to the extent that some players will deliberately trauma-out in their first score so that they can use it to generate XP. As well as that, a position of Desperate immediately gives you an XP for that group of actions, and you can easily make a position Desperate by trading position for effect (as long as you give a narrative reason for it, of course). There is a risk/reward formula there in the game beyond just the story-creation aspect of it.
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Mar 9, 2024 11:46
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sebmojo posted:the ability to give someone a bonus dice on their stress roll by helping then with it is gold, you get great little two hander scenes and entanglements. Unfortunately you can't Assist someone who is doing Indulge Vice as it's not rolling an Action, which is specifically the only thing you can Assist with. (Also in general Indulge Vice is such a key part of the DTA economy that I wouldn't let players do this unless someone wanted to sacrifice a downtime action to do it, which is a pretty raw deal for the helper, but that would be cool narratively.) Vagabong posted:Do people have advice on how to run the free play part of the game in general? My players and I are all pretty much brand new to actually playing ttrpgs, and going into the fourth session tomorrow I've noticed that while things flow pretty smoothly once we're running a score with a clear objective, when we switch to free play things can get quite aimless and I end up having to use a somewhat heavy hand guiding the players towards the next score. Freeplay is for hanging out and vibing with the characters (and gathering info once they've decided to do a score, but that's kind of secondary). This is the phase of the game in which you play through the PCs' daily lives, the daily lives of your various NPCs, and the daily life of the city. What do the PCs want in life? What are they doing to accomplish this? What do the NPCs want? What are they doing to accomplish this? All of this is what's happening in freeplay and is what is giving everyone their objectives. If you can't answer these questions, then it's time to sit down with everyone and actually figure it out. Ask your players what their characters' motivations and wants are, and where their contacts and other existing NPCs fit into these. Ask yourself what your NPCs and the factions in play want, and what they'd do to get that. You shouldn't be trying to cut the phase short because it's where the lion's share of what makes the characters and Doskvol believable and memorable is located. The only thing you need to do as a GM is let the players do whatever they want and portray the world honestly (i.e. make things happen in reaction to the fiction-as-established and to what players are doing), calling for rolls whenever rolls would make sense as usual. Just keep an ear out for whenever your players want to do something that seems big enough and complex enough - that's a Score, and the game can then transition into prepping it. e; also, general piece of advice for everything in fiction-first games: make sure your players understand that this works like a TV drama, not like a game. Remind them of this constantly. In BitD, you are all collaborating to create crime fiction - characters should behave in a way that's believable for characters inside crime fiction. The PCs and most of their contacts are all dangerous criminals addicted to dangerous vices, trying to carve out their personal slice of the city, and they should act like it. If a character is behaving in a way that seems like it would be unsatisfying in an HBO miniseries, they shouldn't behave that way. This way, whenever anyone doesn't know what should happen next, they can draw from crime fiction they've seen or read for ideas. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 13:10 on Mar 9, 2024 |
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Mar 9, 2024 12:14
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Lemon-Lime posted:Unfortunately you can't Assist someone who is doing Indulge Vice as it's not rolling an Action, which is specifically the only thing you can Assist with. There is a Slide or Spider special ability that lets you do it though, and then modify up or down 1 the stress amount relieved. It's an incredible special ability. I think it's called Functioning Vice? E: quote:Functioning Vice: When you indulge your vice, you may adjust the dice outcome by 1 or 2 (up or down). An ally who joins in your vice may do the same. Actually, from Functioning Vice's wording, I'm pretty sure assisting with someone else's vice is fine even without it. Maybe not assist, but share the downtime action at least. WhiskeyWhiskers fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Mar 9, 2024 |
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Mar 9, 2024 16:16
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Eh in practice it works fine, and makes downtime much more interesting rather than having everyone off in their bubble, if it's a houserule it's a good and fun one imo.quote:Freeplay is for hanging out and vibing with the characters (and gathering info once they've decided to do a score, but that's kind of secondary). This is the phase of the game in which you play through the PCs' daily lives, the daily lives of your various NPCs, and the daily life of the city. Like exactly. Having players get a modest bonus for hanging with each other pays significant dividends, and if it makes it a little easier to get stress back then so what? Stress is fun to spend.
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Mar 9, 2024 20:00
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sebmojo posted:Eh in practice it works fine, and makes downtime much more interesting rather than having everyone off in their bubble, if it's a houserule it's a good and fun one imo. It also makes being a starting character that doesn't have points in every category much less harsh. You still should if you can, but it's no longer "roll 2d6 and take the lowest for every attempt at recovering stress" bad.
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Mar 9, 2024 22:41
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WhiskeyWhiskers posted:There is a Slide or Spider special ability that lets you do it though, and then modify up or down 1 the stress amount relieved. It's an incredible special ability. I think it's called Functioning Vice? No, that's not assisting with the vice (in the way that you could assist with any other action roll), they're just talking about multiple people taking the Indulge Vice action to do the same thing, and if you have the ability you're basically the tour guide to the (color)-light district and can get everybody the good time they need. Without that ability it doesn't matter how many people do the vice together, they're all just unregulatedly self-medicating. (though as it is a downtime action, you can still mark coin to tweak a bad roll up to a good number) Glazius fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 03:42
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I don't generally like messing around with the stress economy of the game, because it is so central to making the players go down a spiral and be more likely to trauma-out early, which is when things can get interesting for the character, in my opinion. Like there is nothing really stopping you from having the PCs hang out together to indulge their vice in terms of narrative, without having a mechanical effect. Also it's not really that difficult to get to a point where you have two dots in every quality. BitD encourages you to spread early because of both resistance rolls and indulging vice. I don't think I would ever consider starting a character that doesn't have at least one dot in every quality, since it just turbo-fucks your stress economy (both due to resistance rolls and indulging vice rolls).
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Mar 10, 2024 09:08
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It's effortless to make a crews life harder though? If you want them more stressed, just make them more stressed, every single action roll is at gm discretion. Bitd is not imo mechanically tight enough that an extra die on stress recovery will change anything meaningful.
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Mar 10, 2024 11:35
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Stress expenditure is only controlled by the players. In the end you can do what you want but being stressed by stress and making it an heightened cost is a design decision intended to reach specific scenarios, regardless of if BitD is mechanically tight or not. It’s not aomething that I would suggest new groups do, when there are so many other levers that allow players to interact during downtime and you can still make them interact even without mechanical advantages.
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Mar 10, 2024 11:56
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sebmojo posted:It's effortless to make a crews life harder though? If you want them more stressed, just make them more stressed, every single action roll is at gm discretion. I mean sure, the GM has full discretion over score/clock length so you can just make everything require more rolls just to tax your players because you've chosen to let them shed stress more easily, if you want; it's not like it's a crime. I prefer to play it RAW because players not going into every score with all stress cleared produces more interesting situations and it gives me more freedom to set clock length according to what makes sense in the fiction. 
Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 13:22
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what are y’all’s favorite/most creative uses of clocks you’ve encountered?
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Mar 10, 2024 18:01
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Lemon-Lime posted:I mean sure, the GM has full discretion over score/clock length so you can just make everything require more rolls just to tax your players because you've chosen to let them shed stress more easily, if you want; it's not like it's a crime. I prefer to play it RAW because players not going into every score with all stress cleared produces more interesting situations and it gives me more freedom to set clock length according to what makes sense in the fiction. I agree, really don’t like the idea of arbitrarily adding more rolls just to tax players resources. It goes against the spirit of the game in a few ways and would just bog play down. PopZeus posted:what are y’all’s favorite/most creative uses of clocks you’ve encountered? A simple one that can be used in a lot of scenes is tracking the amount of sound being made. This can be used in stealth, combat, etc and can be affected by not only the outcome of rolls, but the actions used in the first place. Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 18:07
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Bottom Liner posted:A simple one that can be used in a lot of scenes is tracking the amount of sound being made. This can be used in stealth, combat, etc and can be affected by not only the outcome of rolls, but the actions used in the first place. In my last Scum and Villainy game, I enjoyed tormenting the Mystic (a Jedi with the serial number filed off) by having his nemesis, a Nightspeaker (essentially a Sith with different rituals), show up repeatedly, and he had linked clocks. The first had to be filled by doing damage to him or otherwise stymieing him to stop him from screwing the crew around with his Way powers (which are legally distinct from the Force -- depending on what type of crew you have, S&V is intentionally derivative of multiple sci-fi IPs). Once that was filled, he would close with his plasma sword and engage the Mystic until the second clock was filled, whereupon he would try to make his escape (and always succeed, sometimes at a cost). I had to increase the size of the clocks as the campaign went on to keep it a challenge (justifying it as the Nightspeaker acquired artifacts and delved into forbidden Way powers), and of course in the final conflict the Mystic defeated him after cleaning his clocks (ha!) and chasing him down. Can someone explain to me how else linked clocks are different from just having one bigger clock? Is it just like my example above or, "No one can make any progress on looting the vault (progress clock 2) until it's been cracked (progress clock 1)"? Or is there something else I'm missing to this?
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Mar 10, 2024 22:59
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Just multi-staged clocks basically. Think of them as boss fight phases in video games. They can also have different triggers for each phase. Be careful to not use them to dictate the outcome of a scene as they are easy to push things in a set direction.
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Mar 10, 2024 23:27
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I like push-pull clocks personally. The obvious use of them is in a fight, since they can represent the ebb and flow of battle, with either the clock being fully filled to represent your side winning, or fully empty to reprent the other side winning. I think I gave an earlier example where we did a negotation that had like 3 push-pull clocks, which were all targeting different parts of the negotation, which lead to incredible give and take and made the negotation much more interesting than a simple "get them on your side" clock.
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Mar 10, 2024 23:33
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Blades players, pitch me your favorite non-traditional interpretations of the crew types. I have a BitD game doing session zero on Wednesday and while my players are all extremely hype for this, they're leaning toward the crew types that I've never run a game for before, and have the least interest in: Assassins, Smugglers, and Shadows. I’ve taken in a fair amount of Blades-relevant media, but all of it related to those crew types has been pretty traditional stuff that doesn’t super inspire me. In return, I offer a couple of weird ones that I've actually run: Cult: The Supplicants at the Threshold The Cataclysm broke the world, and sundered the Gates of Death - but the world could be made whole again if some fragment of the divine order could be reinstated, a seed crystal around which the cosmos could regrow. You have come into possession of certain mysteries which might serve that purpose: a Forgotten God, bound outside of time, whose return could herald the dawn of a new age. But others strive at cross-purposes with you. The state-sanctioned Church of Ecstasy, the Spirit Wardens who can't tell the difference between your holy work and your rivals' mad designs, and the simple ignorant brutality of Doskvol's underworld. Worst of all are the cultists of nameless horrors, who seek to tear open the veil of reality and bring their dark masters forth. This is a Cult crew that hunts other cults (Sacred Site: Sacrifice), while trying to create a foothold for the Forgotten God whose return might allow the reconstruction of the Gates of Death. People working toward a noble purpose, but who are - to outsiders and the authorities - indistinguishable from the cultists of cosmic horrors they contend against. Something perilously close to a “good guys” Cult. Character concepts might include: * A sacred guardian (Cutter) * A spirit warden gone rogue (Spider, Slide) * A cult assassin (Hound, Lurk) * A keeper of sacred texts (Whisper, Leech) Hawkers: Spectral Geometries The grimoire was never meant to be used in this way. The strange rituals and ancient spellcraft within it predate the Cataclysm, and their nature no longer aligns with what the world has become – but they remain efficacious nonetheless. Your crew has unlocked the barest fragments of its mysteries: the Echo-Gate Rite, which aligns the currents of the ghost field to call up “echoes” of feelings and memories or to generate subtle but long-lasting supernatural effects, using occult geometry, strange talismans, and arcane runes. Cheap geomancy breaks down faster, covers less area, and is less reliable. The spells have a shelf life: living or working in the space introduces chaos into the pattern, creating repeat customers. Deeper mysteries await within the grimoire, accessible by long-term projects. Your services are occult and poorly understood: clients may ask for things you aren’t certain the grimoire’s patterns can provide. How or whether you choose to provide these services – or claim to do so, regardless of the truth – is up to you. Some of the services your clients might ask you for include… The poor: increasing foot traffic; helping with “marital issues;” deterring thieves The wealthy: creating the perfect ambience; improving fertility; engineering scandal The underworld: tilting the odds in a gambling den; luring or abjuring spirits; intoxication and obsession Character concepts might include: * A snakeoil salesman whose latest product actually works (Slide) * An occultist becoming obsessed with the grimoire (Whisper) * A former architect, now constructing spectral geometries (Leech)
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Mar 18, 2024 04:10
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Hawkers but they're a maid cafe and what they're selling is the experience of comfort and kindness that only the rich get. Hawkers but they're magical girls.
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Mar 18, 2024 05:12
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Kestral posted:Words I haven't got much to contribute, other than to add that these two concepts are really cool and interesting!
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Mar 18, 2024 07:26
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Vagabong posted:Do people have advice on how to run the free play part of the game in general? My players and I are all pretty much brand new to actually playing ttrpgs, and going into the fourth session tomorrow I've noticed that while things flow pretty smoothly once we're running a score with a clear objective, when we switch to free play things can get quite aimless and I end up having to use a somewhat heavy hand guiding the players towards the next score. My advice would be to cut it like a TV show. If the players have things they want to explore - great! If not, zoom out or cut to the interesting thing. I often find players and GMs trend towards doing "the next thing" but I find it can really slow the game down. also, be interested in the characters yourself and ask questions you want the answers to. "Brenner, what are you up to over the next week? Doing anything with your newfound wealth?" "Dhal, you'd mentioned that you had some contacts in the university. How did you meet them? Should we have a scene of you meeting up after the score?" Weave the entanglements into scenes like these rather than dropping them all up front. So maybe dhal starts at the scene but one of his friends is a no show. You could then take the camera behind the bar to show his friend getting beat up by red sashes in the back alley. One great tool I use for this is stakes questions. If there's something I want to know about the world or something in it, rather than answering that myself I jot down the question instead. These questions might be a good way to prompt yourself for things you might want to see the characters explore if the players haven't got ideas. I also found that doing a little set of headlines to prompt the start of each session helped the players keep track of what was going on in the world (and let me hint at things that had come up during prep that I thought would be good opportunities for scores) Macdoo fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Apr 5, 2024 |
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Apr 4, 2024 22:00
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Kestral posted:words My last campaign was a blast for this. they were initially hawkers but we switched to using the (absolutely fantastic) grifters playbook from the blades website. They were playing as white collar conmen. Initially the grift was using confidence tricks to steal leviathan blood from the docks which they were then selling at a big markup to the city's new money - but they quickly expanded their remit to every kind of scam under the sun. Rigged card games with the city's elite, fake seances, managing protection rackets from a distance in the abandoned quarters of the city, setting up Doskvol Eel Day (as a cover for a smuggling operation) which ended up breaking even because the brass band and hired ship cost so much and eventually weaseling their way into a gambling syndicate to capitalise on some incoming legislation hitting Doskvol. I loved it. Blades handled all of the players' weird and wacky grifts incredibly well, and there was a lot of scope in the setting for things that were a little more subtle than Blades' usual affair. We had a hound who was the down and out failure progeny of a once grand leviathan hunting dynasty. Asset rich, cash poor because he lost it all gambling. Absolute bastard who was obsessed with channeling the ghost of his dead uncle (whos spirit was entwined with that of the leviathan that ate him). We had a no-show alchemy professor who drank all day, lived above a brothel and who only ever set his class one assignment the entire campaign (make a bomb) and we had a theatre reviewer who's side hustle was showing rich out of towners "the real Doskvol" (where he paid a bunch of actors to fake muggings to ingratiate himself into the city's upper circles). My main inspirations when trying to suss out this stuff were these podcasts (all great podcasts covering real modern gangland stuff): Gangster Underworld Crime World Lords of Soccer (focused on the FIFA corruption but was great for seeing what a big institutional grift looks like) Macdoo fucked around with this message at 11:15 on Apr 5, 2024 |
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Apr 5, 2024 10:58
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Just wanted to let the thread know about a little trick my group did to completely revamp the way we play. My group has been playing Blades on and off for a couple years and it was been a great system for our narrative heavy, low prep, high improv style of play. But we've also had trouble maintaining momentum in our campaigns, and I had an inkling as to why. My theory was that we simply weren't correctly establishing stakes and consequences, or enforcing the effects of non-6 rolls well enough for the mechanics to really work. So as a bit of a shot in the dark, I found this very cool table for position / effect that lists consequences and outcomes for rolls. I had the design printed onto a large mousepad like material that now sits on the table and serves as the major prop or focus of our rolls. Put plainly, this had an immediate and drastic effect on our sessions. We went from several years of relatively easy heists and sessions to almost having a full party "wipe" overnight. If you are having difficulty getting the roll mechanics to "click" with your group, or finding momentum hard to keep up with vague or undefined roll outcomes, I highly suggest giving this method a shot.
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Apr 16, 2024 23:14
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