Singing in the Dead of Night
Without question Blades in the Dark is a cornerstone of the current RPG landscape. It has DNA in Apocalypse World but it is very much its own game and has spawned numerous children of its own. Today I’m taking a look back into the past of Blades in the Dark designer John Harper. Back in 2009, a year before Apocalypse World was released, he created a game called Lady Blackbird. It was a self contained one-shot in a scant few pages and it has a lot of the hallmarks of Harper’s design sensibilities.
Although Lady Blackbird is billed as a one-shot I ran it over three 1.5-2 hour sessions. The game is free to download. I have never been on the player side of a game.
Please note that the game name will be in italics, Lady Blackbird, whereas the character name will be in non-italic, Lady Blackbird.
A slight heads-up before we begin. As I approached my final session of Lady Blackbird I realised there was an updated version of the ruleset with new character sheets and some changes to the mechanisms. The version I am talking about is the original game and the core of both versions is very much the same. The version I played is called the Classic Version, and the Updated Version is on the same page.
Lady Blackbird has a very specific setup, so much so that I am going to quote it directly
“Lady Blackbird is on the run from an arranged marriage to Count Carlowe.
She hired a smuggler skyship, The Owl, to take her from her palace on the Imperial world of Ilysium to the far reaches of the Remnants, so she could be with her once secret lover, the pirate king Uriah Flint.
However—Just before reaching the halfway point of Haven, The Owl was pursued and captured by the Imperial cruiser Hand of Sorrow, under charges of flying a false flag.
Even now Lady Blackbird, her bodyguard, and the crew of The Owl are detained in the brig, while the commander of the cruiser, Captain Hollas, runs the smuggler ship’s registry over the wireless. It’s only a matter of time before they discover the outstanding warrants and learn that The Owl is owned by none other than the infamous outcast Cyrus Vance.”
Now not only is that an excellent setup to get the action going it then also asks these questions, right below.
“How will lady blackbird and the others escape the hand of sorrow?
What dangers lie in their path?
Will they be able to find the secret lair of the pirate king?
If they do, will Uriah Flint accept Lady Blackbird as his bride?
By the time they get there, will she want him to?”
This is straight up brilliant. It sets the scene but also foreshadows the arc of the whole story, setting questions to percolate in the player’s minds. Each player will take on the role of one of the characters, some of whom we have already met in the preamble, others who are still off-screen. There is of course Lady Blackbird herself, in disguise as a commoner. Her bodyguard Naomi is along for the ride. Captain Vance and his crew Snargle the pilot and Kale the first mate make up the crew of The Owl, the ship that has been commissioned to take the Lady across the Wild Blue Yonder.
The Wild Blue Yonder is the setting of our game, an area of space where magic and science come together in a steampunkish world. It is rife with potential allies and enemies. Maybe you’ll hide out in the Lower Depths avoiding the enormous Sky Squid. Perhaps contacts can be found on Haven, a Union world, that will let you navigate the Remnants where Uriah hides his fortress. Maybe Nightport offers more options, its tidal locked dark side hiding all manner of opportunities and dangers. With only the setup and two pages of background Harper evokes a setting that is easy to grasp but has infinite potential for embellishment and expansion. This is a signature of his work that we find again in Agon and Blades in the Dark: giving us just enough to spark the imagination without locking us inside a cage.
The core system is very simple. When you want to do something the GM sets a difficulty from 3-5 successes needed. You then form a pool of six-sided dice, getting one for effort, one for a trait you can apply, and then more for any tag under that trait that may be relevant. You also have a pool of seven personal six-sided dice that you can add to any roll. Looking for 4+ as a success.. If you succeed, your personal dice go away, giving you a dwindling resource to dazzle with. Throw in some Secrets that can allow the manipulation of dice and you have most of the core test system. That is not the core of the game though.
Back to our setup and the trouble the protagonists find themselves in. Everyone wants to escape from the Hand of Sorrow, but their motivations for doing so come from the explicit setup and the emergent properties of Keys. Each character has 3 of these and they are at once a roleplaying prompt and a dramatic beat to potentially hit. They are the glue that binds all this together.
Let’s take a look at Lady Blackbird’s Keys, by way of example:
Here we have the core of her character laid bare. From the pre-amble we know she is a noble in disguise and that she wants to escape to get back to the Pirate King Uriah. However the Keys make this setup real. When you incorporate a key into a scene, into your roleplaying, you get an XP or a dice to add to your personal pool. If doing this puts you in danger you double those rewards.
Every 5xp you earn allows you to buy a new tag for a trait, a new Key, or Secret. Now the buyoffs accelerate this. When you buy off a Key you immediately earn two advances, the equivalent of 10xp! This is obviously meant for a dramatic moment, a sudden twist in the story.
The updated version of the rules is more generous, giving you a trait with 3 tags for your 5xp and making extra tags cost only 3xp. It also changes the way buy off works, making you take a replacement Key as part of the cost and giving you 5xp in addition rather than the straight up 2 advances.
Keys also imply some of the story to come. For instance Captain Vance does not have the Key of the Mission, he has no idea about the real nature of his passenger but we know he fancies her with his Key of Hidden Longing. Snargle, the pilot is equally clueless. However Kale, the first mate, does have the Key of the Mission, implying that they were the contact that Lady Blackbird had on The Owl. However, Kale also has the Key of Fraternity which rewards the player for showing loyalty to Vance or being influenced by the Captain.
There is a clash setup within Kale and from Kale to Captain Vance and Lady Blackbird. Should they tell Vance the truth? What will happen when they do? Can Kale see that Vance is falling for the Lady? This is juicy, interesting, and actively encourages the players to lean into the drama the game wants to create.
Let’s stick with Kale for a moment. This character also has a trait called Petty Magic. The only other player character to have magic is Lady Blackbird and it comes in the form of Secret of Stormblood. A small GM focused section has new Secrets and Traits including a bunch of (name)blood abilities. Does magic only exist in noble bloodlines? Is Kale therefore a noble? I can’t speak to how you will interpret these details, but in my game that was the implication that I went for.
I love this kind of emergent storytelling in boardgames and it suits my GMing style in RPGs. I don’t want 100s of pages of setting material I have to read and memorise. All I need is just enough to spark my imagination and let me fill that fruitful void with my own ideas. Lady Blackbird has this in abundance with just enough detail on the worlds you could go to, how The Owl operates, and the setting to allow you to run with it. It also has a brief list of names, surnames, and noble families which I want to highlight. If you are like me, coming up with setting appropriate names is hard and little tools like this in the text are a god send. Please all designers think of these things when putting your game together. It’s also a great way to build your world, giving me an idea of the kind of names the setting has.
Lady Blackbird is a fantastic example of how much game you can get in only a few pages. As Zine culture is so popular I would encourage those creators to look back to Lady Blackbird as a game very much produced with that philosophy. I have found some games in this mode to provide too little gameable material but Lady Blackbird feels like a perfect mix of setting detail with space to imagine more. It is easy to play, starts with a bang, and never lets up. It’s going to become a permanent part of my convention kit so I can easily show people the magic of RPGs.
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