Blades in the Dark is one of my favourite RPGs. A masterpiece of design, layout, and guidance it is a game that I have run a lot. I love it so much I’ve written guides on how to play and run it in the hopes that others find as much joy in this game as I do.
Blades in the Dark has spawned numerous games referred to as Forged in the Dark (FITD). In the not too distant past the core game received an expansion from its designer John Harper, called Deep Cuts. Honestly I am still to properly read that one through, but it was basically a modular supplement including timeline updates and mechanism changes.
Blades 68 is the second expansion for the core game and it is a radical reimagining of the Doskvol setting. Designer Tim Denee, author of Deathmatch Island and Odysseey Aquatica, takes that city and drags it 100 years into the future. This is a funkier, brighter Doskvol, the equivalent of the swinging 60s and liberated 70s, with an undercurrent of spies, conspiracy, and dark secrets buried deep.
Skim Read articles, formerly called First Read, represent me going through the book in question for the first time. It is my initial impressions of the mechanisms, themes, and setting presented within its pages. I have not played the game at the time of writing.
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I backed the recent Kickstarter for Blades 68 and while the full game isn’t out yet, the PDF sent to backers is text complete, I’ve checked this with Tim, so I wanted to take a look at it and see what it brings to the Blades in the Dark game system.
Right from the off Tim makes it clear that Blades 68 is a supplement not a standalone game. You are going to need a copy of Blades in the Dark (Blades) to play this game. It does feel a little weird that this is the case as Blades 68 clocks in at 445 pages to the originals 327, but I guess it would have been even larger with the core rules as part of it and the expanded page count is an asset for sure. After a quick overview of the book Tim gets right into how to use it, highlighting the “System Changes” section, and also some of the “Special Procedures” that this version of Blades brings to the table. It’s a nice touch that Tim tells you that it is ok to ignore certain parts of those systems until you are ready to use them.
Touchstones for the game are included to set you in the right direction and some talk about the different tones you can set, honing close to the original grittier Blades or embracing the technicolour future. The book then wastes no time in getting into the nuts and bolts by introducing its suite of characters. It starts with the Hound, a nice link back to Blades which immediately makes me feel at home. The rest are all new ideas or reimagined classes. Hulls come out of the extra rules section of Blades and make their way to a regular character class as the captured souls of prisoners shoved into the robot bodies. Intellectuals, Operatives, Paranormalist, Radical, Swinger, and Veteran round out the classes, all fitting with the swinging vibe.
Flicking across these characters I really like what Tim has done with the classes. The Hound becomes more of a detective style character with abilities like “Hound’s Instinct” that lets you push to figure out where to go next, or “Learn the Hard Way” that lets you clear stress equal to the harm you just took and Gather Information as you do so. The Hull gets a whole set of different rules around stress, the Paranormalist gets to speak to the supernatural and basically be a Ghostbuster. Creating different rules to fit what these characters can do feels like a really good evolution of the core Blades ideas.
Tim also introduces his first rules flourish here with Keys. These are effectively personality traits like Flamboyant, Shy, and Curious. They come with two possible Deadlocks. Flamboyant can become Demure or Self-Obsessed for instance. The first of these flips the key, the second intensifies it. You have 4 keys and they effectively act as guides to your personality. One of the Keys can be ticked per session for an experience as you act towards it, and they can be turned towards the positive as you tick them off, or the negative as you take enough stress to take you out. It’s an evolution of the Trauma system in Blades and feels more integrated into the character play at the table.
There are lots of nice little prompts in the character and crew creation. The Radical chooses who they are radicalized by, the Swinger gets to customise their sweet Autopod, the Veteran decides the Tour of Duty they have done. All very gameable but with that same loose description and fruitful void style that marked out the original Blades as something special.
When we get to Crews there is a similar attention to gameable ideas. Bases now have flair and you choose a couple of things like Cinema, Ball Court, or a Meditation room. This just adds a little bit of colour to something that was a bit more abstract in Blades in the Dark and starts you thinking in terms of what your ‘home’ is like. Cohorts have also had a bit of a polish getting the ability to help during downtime and also go on Secondary Scores. This makes them feel instantly more useful and interesting, and you start to think about them as more than just an appendage to your crew.
Crews have had an upgrade as well with the crew sheets adapting like the character sheets. For instance the Dealers claim sheet is all about the different areas of production and distribution of whatever they are selling, and it doesn’t need to be drugs. The Hit Squad can run up towards hitting a Legendary Target, The Utopians, start off on circle one only getting to go up when they have enough gold, then again when they have enough kills, then again when they reach Tier 3, going deeper and deeper into their beliefs and aims. Claims here feel more tied to Campaign progression, giving each crew a clearer direction of travel.
Past character creation Tim gets into an Overview of what is different about this game mechanically speaking, a nice quick guide to let you know there are changes and where you will find them.. Let’s get into the nuts and bolts.
The first radical change is that harm no longer has an in session effect, at least not straight away. You still take harm in the same way, as a consequence of action. You can roll to resist, multiple times should you so wish, but the impact to your character is initially minimal (unless you take mortal damage). This means that characters are going to feel more invulnerable, more like action heroes, which feels like a good fit for the brighter, pulpier setting of ./.
We’ve already touched on Keys and that they are both trauma and character personality as well as giving you XP. As well as the more regular ways to get XP, playbook triggers and desperate rolls, Blades 68 also gives you XP for rolling a skill you have no dots in. I’m in two minds about this change.
Blades does a great job of niche protection, meaning every player has something specific their character is good at. Usually rolling a zero dot skill is something to be avoided, the system disincentivising you to do so. Here it is giving you a reward for doing so, and if the roll is desperate that’s another xp on top. It does mean you get something other than a higher probability of failure for looking in the direction of a zero dot skill, which may encourage some more creative roleplaying. No idea how this will shake out in play.
The main big change to Blades is a more detailed gameplay loop called the Trouble Engine. This is taken from a|state by Handiwork Games, a game I own but am yet to get to the table. This starts with Personal Business, a sort of more involved downtime from Blades. It being a cycle it is a bit hard to say where it starts but lets assume that it starts with the job, the section that is the most similar to original flavour Blades
From there we move into Downtime activities and here the options are familiar and expanded. All the Downtime activities from Blades are here with some specifics related to the new setting and some improvements. For instance the Recover action now clears all level 1 harm regardless of the result you roll, allowing you to shake off being bruised and battered from a job more easily. You can also go to hospital but expose yourself to heat from having to explain your injuries, or stacks (money) to go private. A really evocative touch.
Of course no good gang rests on their laurels and you have to plan the next heist. In Blades this is pretty much down to the GM to offer ideas, of course players make their mark as well. In Blades 68 this is specifically a group activity for all players at the table. Each player writes down a Client, a Target, or an Operation type. Each of these opportunities gets a payout assigned to it, and then the players debate which one to go on next. They can sketch out the details of the opportunity, like giving an operation a client or a target an operation type. I really like this as it lets each player put out what is important to them without debate. Even if your idea isn’t picked this time, it hangs around for the next planning session. You can even send some cohorts to go and do it!
The Score happens pretty much as in Blades and then we get back into the changes with the Aftermath part of the cycle. You can see how turned on to Blades Tim Denee is when he introduces Imperial Mandates, a special task force of sorts assigned to pursue crews that may be up to all sorts of criminality but manage to stay under the Heat radar mechanically speaking.
Harm comes back into focus next with players rolling to see if there are complications from their current level of harm for the next job. The regular -1d that was part of harm in Blades is much rarer here, with a wider range of consequences that can affect the arc of the story. Importantly players get to plan for the fact their characters have an injury, giving them space to narratively mitigate or fold in their injuries to the story. Really like this change and the Unwind scenes that let players destress a bit without having to spend an action indulging their vice.
The Trouble engine I mentioned earlier is a more involved way for the GM to make the world feel lived in and reactive. The Crew generates troubles based on their heat and local trouble, where the crew is based, also gets generated. These troubles are more varied than the equivalent and feel like a more interesting escalation. The way that local troubles work means they are likely trifling to begin with and escalate slowly. Mechanically it incentivises the characters to make nice with the locals, or have issues to deal with as the population becomes displeased with their presence. Troubles undealt with can also escalate and guidance is provided for that.
There are a bunch of extra little systems here mechanising things like Time Skips, that Blades encouraged for campaign play, having Factions back certain characters and what that means for them, Raids, the first session, types of campaign and more. It is all well considered, light, but full of flavour. More foundations to build the game on in the way you see fit.
Finally Tim pulls of one more trick before getting into all the colour of the setting with Factions and Districts: Cold Opens and Ticking TImebombs. Well I guess that is two tricks but they feel of a piece.
Cold Opens are basically a fully worked out setup, and a template for what comes after it that the GM can just throw into the start of their game. This is a really great way to show GMs the sort of game they might get out of Blades 68. Ticking Timebombs act like the underlying arc of a TV series, something that maybe starts in the background but slowly reveals itself over the course of the run. These could be the backbone of a campaign. In these two sections Tim really provides scaffolding for GMs to hit the ground running in Blades 68.
The rest of the book lays out the setting with the only really significant addition being a lot more about the Geopolitics giving you lots of interesting spy ideas to play with. Their are some weird playbooks here, including Time Traveller which if from the past has a playbook that looks like the original Blades one. I really like the faction layout of Blades 68, with each one having a page to itself, a business card that gives a feel for the faction and a bunch of data about each one that you’ll find useful. Districts are two page spreads, similarly dense with information. In a final flourish Tim provides a bunch of spark tables about what various parts of the city look like, people that inhabit it and similar.
Blades 68 is an incredibly impressive piece of work, a bold piece of design in conversation with one of the most influential games of the modern era. It takes the core of Blades and provides additional structures to not only make Blades 68 a pulpier version of the original Blades in the Dark but to give GMs a better chance of getting their game off the ground. I could even see retro-engineering parts of this, like the Trouble Engine into my regular Blades in the Dark games. In making these changes Tim Denee shows respect for the original but no fear in making the changes that he sees fit and I hope it brings Blades in the Dark to a whole new audience.
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