#Duskvol

[onemorestepinduskvol]

Heartbeat Scale

Blades in the Dark has something very valuable that many TTRPGs lack; the ability to hop, skip, and step over time parameters quite easily.

It's perfectly common for you to roll to Survey a dock for traffic over a a month or two. Similarly, you may need someone's name... and to get it, one of your crew might spend several weeks Consorting to find it.

Maybe in the downtime after a big score, your crew spends months consolidating their hold while the thugs you transgressed make progress in their revenge.

I call this the Narrative Scale.

Classically, you may take a single Prowl to not just climb one wall, but this wall, cross the court yard quietly, and slip a foot between the servants door and its frame, to keep it from locking, and quietly step inside. That may take any number of seconds or minutes.

Let's call this the Action scale.

That 'scale' tends to zoom out more than it zooms in, in my experience.

But in some instances, it is neither months nor minutes but seconds, and fractions of a second, that we want to dwell in.

Sitting at a felted table, your character clocks the quiet click of a pistol. Your compatriot tries to flick you a card from his hip and you have to catch it, without anyone noticing. You can hear your breath catching and what you do in the next half a second will determine whether you live or die.

I like to call this the Heartbeat scale.

It's the kind of timeframe where time slows down as adrenaline aggressively pours through your veins and arteries. It's the kind of timeframe where it feels like the volume of what's happening is turned down... until you can hear your own, throbbing heartbeat.

It's the very moment that matters most.

Afterwards, maybe when the jig was up, the Head smuggler let the mask drop that they knew who you are all along, where they were never really going to let you leave. It's in that moment that you kicked the table, snapped a wrist and ran.

It's back to the action scale as you slide down bannisters, and crash over carts and tables to get out as fast as you can.

And it's back to the Narrative scale when you are back in your hideout and know that they are looking for you and it won't be too long before they find you.

Scaling in and scaling out helps add a tempo and contextualise the narrative arc of a score and its surrounds in a way that can feel quite visceral and taut and bitter.

[wheelie-butch]

[indiaboeckh]

My Whisper character for the Blades of Darkness campaign I’m in

[ashenpumpkin]

I don't know how many of you are also TTRPG players

but you can't tell me Banks does give off the vibes of someone you'll meet in Duskvol (the setting for Blades in the Dark)

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

Blades in the Dark

https://johnharper.itch.io/blades-in-the-dark Sun's gone, lets do crimes about it

Touchstones: Peaky Blinders, The Wire, Bloodborne, Thief (game), Dishonored

Genre: Heist, Dark fantasy

What is this game?: Blades in the Dark is a game about playing as a gang of rowdy thieves in an eternally dark city, its core mechanics focus on high tension and drama

How's the gameplay?: BITD has a very complex and granular system, meant to keep tensions and drama at a constant high, trying to fully explain it would take a bit longer than i'd like but I'll try my best Blades uses a system where you roll an amount of die equal to your bonuses and take the highest, in addition the game also utilizes a Risk system, determining how bad things get if you fuck up, Characters can also take on a Devil's Bargain, guaranteeing bad consquences for better rolls. BITD also has many subsystems related to character's traumas, injuries, and more importantly, vices, things that your character falls back on if they get overly stressed. BITD's game design is entirely meant to make dramatic and stressful scenarios, as well as to make sick as hell heist scenarios, characters are scummy criminals who do bad things, and the gameplay reflects that, moves like being able to flash back to a prior preparation are a great example of this, showing how a player prepared for the current heist. Alongside this, the game also has a "Crew" playbook, which plays into faction shenanigans with your party, a crew playbook is shared across the entire party and determines your origins and methodology, while character playbooks are more about the personal character, how they're like and how they work

What's the setting (If any) like?: BITD is set in Duskvol, a city under eternal night, shit kinda sucks here! a corrupt empire calls all the shots, doing usual oppressive empire here, as well as some usual imperialism. The Courts are more corrupt than an Oblivion save file, and its often said that everyone in Doskvol's guilty, so its better to line your pockets with cash before you get caught.

What's the tone?: Doskvol pitches you a dark, opressive city, filled with corrupt officials and evil rich assholes who get away with their crimes by just coughing up the dough to get away from it, it is a very dark game, players are often the scum of the town, doing bad things to get ahead in life. BITD is a very very dark game, but goddamn does it work

Session length: Short, BITD's resolution mechanics make it so you can usually get a lot done in a short amount of time, 1-2 hours should be plenty of time

Number of Players: 4 or more is recommended 

Malleability: Blades' setting seems pretty stiff at first, but you can definitely hack it to set it in different worlds, its not the most malleable game but it can definitely be changed quite a bit

Resources: Blades in the Dark is a very popular game, so there's a ton of fan-made content out there, as well as a ton of great official content as well.

I have mixed feelings on Apocalypse World, but Blades in the Dark is phenomenal, really does deserve its legacy, its dark, gritty, and its mechanics complement it very very nicely, great game

[txttletale]

bundletober #15: the sunless seasons

almost halfway there. woah. living on a prayer and all that. today's bundletober is interesting in that i'm not looking at a standalone game. the sunless seasons is a blades in the dark--i hestitate to call it a supplement, it's more a play tool or as the cover proclaims, a toolkit--by eskur.

so, for those who haven't played it--blades in the dark is my favourite ttrpg. it's a heist game set in duskvol, a city in the middle of a blighted perpetually dark wasteland, a dark and brooding take on a world like that of dishonored or bioshock that embraces character competence, the over-the-table conversation, and cutting out all the parts of stories and games that aren't the fun parts.

the sunless seasons is a very short set of pages containing tables of plot hooks, vignettes, and weather conditions for each of duskvol's seasons.

the weather tracking works with a pretty ingenious hex grid--you roll to move a counter between these hexes at different intervals--you can base it off in-game time passing or between scenes for when you want a dramatic hard cut. it's a simple thing but it takes another element of 'being the world', of creating an immersive and breathing space to play in, off the sole shoulders of the GM.

the plot hooks provided on the 'weird weather' hex are very cool, too. this toolkit gives duskvol a pulse--i'm always talking about how games can be co-authors, and this is pure game-as-co-author, this is game as someone who interjects 'oh, and it's raining' at the most dramatic point. if you play blades in the dark, you should 100% read the sunless seasons, if not to use it, to get some inspiration for how you describe duskvol. even if you don't, it might inspire you for whatever ttrpgs you do play, or to include something similar in your own game.

this, imo, is better to make a place feel real than any amount of lore or timelines or family trees or could be. it's something material and present, something you use in play rather than just read and forget about. this is how you make your world feel real.

the sunless seasons can be downloaded for free through itch.io

[utilitycaster]

If you've read that recent article on polygon about Candela Obscura - "Critical Role’s Candela Obscura fails to differentiate itself enough from its inspiration" (6 November 2023) - I don't know much about the other systems and have trouble being objective about things I love, I was wondering what your opinion is

Hi anon!

I have! I will also admit I don't know Blades in the Dark terribly well, or rather, I have roughly the same BitD knowledge as I have Candela knowledge: I've watched (or in this case, listened) to a actual play show run in it (TAZ Steeplechase) and I've looked at the SRD. The Candela full rulebook doesn't come out for a week, so I really can't judge it for myself. So this isn't going to be objective either, but hopefully it will point out what I think the flaws in this article are regardless of the merits or failures of Candela Obscura as a game.

I think my overall issue is what I said about Polygon on the whole earlier this week: it really feels like their metric is first, is this innovative; and second, "does this reinforce my pre-existing political values in a way that allows me to feel warm and fuzzy and virtuous because I played a fun game/watched a fun show and lets me continue to ignore that I haven't actually engaged in any of that tiresome and inconvenient meaningful anticapitalist action."

I also, for what it's worth, think that this mentality very explicitly conflicts with what Critical Role is doing. I think a lot of people interpret the whole "a group of friends playing games" image as encouraging parasocial behavior (which, frankly, is weird in that while the CR fandom has had a parasociality problem, it's no different than any large fandom - Laurisha shippers or the Twinnies & Husbands crowd are literally just the Actual Play Fandom equivalent of Gaylors and Larries; also like, the pitch for WBN earlier this year was basically "hey, we're four friends playing games" and no one has blinked at that, nor should they have) when I think it's intended to mean "we are friends having fun making and playing the games we want to play; it's great if you'll join us but we're doing what we want." Given that Polygon has shown something of a bias towards those shows that give them early access, I do think it might be that they're just cranky they're not being given any special treatment or catering by an actual play show they've been shitting on for years, and this is simply a vicious cycle.

All that aside, more importantly in this case, I think the article shows a notable lack of Ebert's law: "A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it." Samantha Nelson, the author of this article, appears to be both incapable of evaluating Candela Obscura outside the context of Blades in the Dark - which is frankly, in my again admittedly limited opinion, vastly overstated as an influence (the Forged in the Dark engine is certainly a strong influence, but that's purely mechanical and also it's still only an influence - more on this later) - and also seems to want Candela Obscura's rulebook to flesh out Newfaire and Oldfaire in the same way that Blades in the Dark fleshes out Duskvol.

The thing is, those wide-open spaces and the vagueness of OldFaire? That's deliberate. The Looper interview with Spenser Starke and Rowan Hall as well as the Tabletop News interview both make this clear. The aim of Candela Obscura is to be very easy to pick up, to not have a bunch of intimidating lore that players and GMs need to know before they jump in (and I say this as someone who, when invited to her first D&D game, was the person who read the PHB and sent the other new players a brief summary of each race and class; I love intimidating lore), and to accommodate a wide range of styles. They considered making Oldfaire much more detailed in the book and then decided not to so that GMs felt more free with the world. Again, my knowledge of Blades in the Dark is heavily skewed by an actual play of it that's explicitly not in Duskvol (which I think is a very interesting commentary, namely, maybe Nelson just really fucking loves Duskvol but no one else gives a shit). I genuinely think they are, as more and more Polygon TTRPG/Actual Play coverage seems to be, barely paying attention to what's in front of them and just deciding based on who put it out.

As I said in my earlier posts I do think Candela distinguishes itself from BitD in a number of ways mechanically. The gilded dice mechanic is obviously one of the biggest ones. The lack of flashbacks - a pretty core element of Blades in the Dark - is another. The fact that scars change your stats rather than dealing a permanent penalty (as Trauma does in BitD) is seen as a flaw, as is the lack of lair-building, but I think these things work in tandem. Blades in the Dark is very much about growing territory and becoming a more and more powerful crime syndicate; while four traumas will take you out of the game the same way scars will, there's a lot more opportunities to heal and I believe you have much more room to take stress. Candela Obscura, as another interview I read states (ScreenRant), is a gothic/eldritch horror game about normal people in unfathomable circumstances. You don't really get much better! You adapt, but progress against these monsters is always a long shot. Candela as an organization has been operating for millennia, and the war seems to be one of attrition, and the mechanics, from what I know from the show, reflect that.

The bit about the criminal crew and the lair is honestly kind of funny to me, because in the TAZ Steeplechase wrap-up I listened to last week the McElroys noted that the lair element of BitD was actually really hard to incorporate and they largely ignored it. Obviously that's not true for everyone, but famously D&D in the earlier editions guided high level play towards running one's own dungeon, and there is a reason that hasn't survived to the newer editions, namely, that shift from being a crew out there doing wild and exciting heists and adventures to painting the walls of your clubhouse and hiring guards is not actually fun for a lot of people.

So in summary: I really don't think the author of this article paid a single scrap of attention to the motivations behind design choices, is mad the horror game doesn't give them a kiss on the cheek and tell them they're So Good at Leftism (the comment about not understanding that the restrictions on scarlet aren't tied to anti-immigrant sentiment is particularly egregious), and generally is like "why is this game that shares some similarities but ultimately rather different goals than Blades in the Dark not literally Blades in the Dark but with slightly more aggressive ghosts."

[forgedinthedark]

Evil Hat are running a public playtest of The Dagger Isles! Remember that place that somehow manages to not have a lightning barrier? Well, we're getting a whole book about gaming there! Blades in the Dark is expanding beyond Duskvol.

You can register interest below. I have just done so and am excited to see the playtest.

[dungeonofthedragon]

Kiwi RPG Bundle Final Days

There's little time left to grab the Kiwi RPG Week Itch and Drive Thru bundles. Both contain a collection of awesome titles from kiwi creatives, for an 80% saving!

We've got everything from standalone games, to expansions for Mausritter and Monster of the Week. We've got adventures aplenty, and some wonderful maps of Duskvol for Blades in the Dark!

My own work is in both bundles as well. Voidwalkers and The Tower in the Meadow are in the DriveThru bundle while Explorers of the Forever City and Super Unnatural are in the Itch bundle. If there's something here you've been eyeing up, now's a great time to grab it!

[theterry]

Our Cult of Eekaroux... Managed to actually summon their deity, Shemesh. The angel who will bring back the sun to Duskvol.

Behind are Zacharia (Leech), Nyx (Whisper) and Lavan (Lurker) managing the summoning, while in the foreground is my boy Eddie, warding off no other than Lord Scurlock himself from stopping the ritual.

[onemorestepinduskvol]

Web of Relationships

One of the core tensions in BITD is your crew's relationship with the other factions in the game.

If you draw a dodecagon (12 sides), each point can represent a faction and you can keep your crew's relationship with them clearly displayed in the same (nice) diagram.

Yes there are more than 12 factions in Duskvol but realistically your crew will not have a relationship with all of them.

They won't even have a relationship with 12, quite possibly, so it's advisable to start with a line or trianble between the crew and one or two factions they encounter first and add more as they appear.

What's fun about this is is that you can then connect those points to each other as your crew discovers the relationships those factions have between each other. Very valuable information indeed..

[wheelie-butch]

It's a tough life for a gay 5 year old with no shoes in Duskvol

(I'm working on a backstory comic about Cross, my Hound for BITD, and his missing older sister. This comic is a joke summary of what it'll be about.)

Cross grew up in Charhollow with a big family, but was only close to this one sister who looked out for him. She ran away when he was 12, and he always hoped he might find her while he travelled in the military.

[aydascomprehendsubtext]

Thinking about mistborn ttrpg again... I truly feel like both Mr sandy the Mormon and I are noticeably unqualified to tell stories in his "only barely not literally American Chattel Slavery but Superpowers" setting BUT I do wonder if I could pull off my little guy Duskvol with mistborn powers instead of ghosts...

[zoetic-tome]

Prompt 25: Unhidden

Prompt: Call it a Day - FFXIV Write 2023  Characters: Kelyr/Priest, Wolf (@thedarknesssings), Finch (@liminal-storage), and Hutton/Quellyn (@roses-and-grimoires) Content Warning: Mentions of blood, violence, knives. Note: This is a story based around a Blades in the Dark campaign. 

It had been a matter of life or death. Make a decision and make it fast. Let your tongue spill words that will get people listening to you. They look almost Tycherosi, the people scattered around you. Their features are twisted. Leviathan-warped. For a these few moments here, you feel like you’re home. 

You can feel Finch beneath you, struggling to get to the red haired man who had shoved his knife deep into Wolf’s belly. You don’t want to strike Finch beneath you, any more than you Wolf seemed to want to strike the red haired man with the knife. 

It’s a split second decision. Make it and make it fast. You reach a hand up and rip the mask and hood from your face with a tug. Horns are freed to sight, and you blink in the light of the tavern, your eyes so used to the filter of darkness that your mask provides. 

“I am a Malum, of Tycheros.” You feel the words resonate in your sharp tone, words you haven’t uttered since you came to Duskvol. The tavern grows quiet, despite the way Finch continues to struggle to grab purchase. It is only that you are larger than they than has kept them down. 

“Now help me!” The last is a command, and there is a stuttering moment before people jump to obedience. How long has it been since people obeyed you so readily? Since you wielded your authority like others might a sword? You can smell the blood before you can see it, Wolf bleeding out under the table with the knife in his gut. 

You can hear his words, feel the hum of your God’s presence like a strum along the soul. A ritual. A sacrifice. You can feel when the knife Wolf had been holding vanishes, when the blood streaming from him comes faster and quicker. 

Hutton stands there, demanding answers, and you provide them. Or at least, you provide them as quickly and easily as you can. Your face is bare and you have yet more to do. Explanations to give. A healer to call. A comrade to patch up. A demon to summon. 

Quellyn has come and begun their work on Wolf and you try to keep the worry from your eyes and your voice. For him and for Finch alike. The former is a longstanding companion. The latter a new one you are growing fond of, and had fortune not favored you all, you would have lost both. 

Never more than now have you simply wanted to be done with your work.  Take those who you call companion and lock yourselves away from the world for a night of rest. Pretend that no one had seen the face you were working to hide from the world. 

They know. And eventually, others may know. But none of them Tycherosi, and so you may be spared. You hope. You still have work, Kelyr, and it will not wait just because you want it to. 

You want nothing more than to call it a day, even if you now fear what tomorrow might bring.

[open-hearth-rpg]

Since I manage the community feed occasionally I boost some of my own work.

Age of Ravens: Volume II: Running

I've now released the first two volumes collecting work from AoR from last 14 years. This second one brings a host of tables, resources, generators, game guides, and more . This clocks in at 261 pages with 29 pieces.

You can pick this up on itch or DrivethruRPG

So what do we have in this book? The first part has lists of all kinds:

Oceans Rise, Empires Fall: 100 random kingdom events 72 Sci-Fi Heists: challenges for hi-tech intrusions Fight Scene Elements: 100 random places & items for conflicts 150 Details for Swashbuckling Scenes: inspirational details for gambles, stunts, and color There and Maybe Not Back Again: 100 random events for journeys The Fall of Summer: 36 threats for urban fantasy communities 36 Mood Elements for the Wastes: new exploration details for post-apocalyptic rpgs Wasteland Plots: story seeds for post-apocalyptic character archetypes 36 Mood Elements for an Alien Planet: exploration details for a space colony world Space Colony Events: random events for any space colony game The Many Names of Gamemasters: 202 alternate titles for game facilitators

The second part offers a host of different approaches for play

Tools for World Building: Techniques for names, shared maps & campaign maps Arcana Innominata: a story game of fantasy tarot creation On Icons: ideas for using icons and icon relations outside 13th Age Iconic Examples: a new pantheon of icons from a homebrew world Party Down: galas, celebrations, and events in rpgs More Than Coin: FitD rewards for expeditions, jobs & beyond In the Halls of the Monkey King: racing Forged in the Dark clocks Community Playbooks: using playbooks to create collaborative neighborhoods

The third part is about unpacking different rpgs

On Fate: a new player’s system guide to the Fate rpg Gumshoe Guide: A new player’s guide to the Gumshoe system Understanding 2d20: a new player’s guide to Modiphius’ 2d20 system Legacy: Life Among the Ruins: a new player’s system guide to the Legacy rpg Unpacking Voidheart Symphony: a guide to running & playing Voidheart Symphony Lessons from Duskvol: Learning Blades in the Dark Running Kuro: playing j-horror with a cyberpunk edge Strixhaven for Storygamers: exploring this D&D 5e sourcebook & setting Loops and Floods: Resources for Tales from the Loop & Things from the Flood Race and the Modern FRPG: a look at Against the Darkmaster & Worlds Without Number

If that kind of stuff sounds cool to you, I hope you'll check it out.

[queenjulia11]

[the following was originally posted as a twitter thread on 1/15/2023. Also I fully acknowledge that the Haunted City fandom is like maybe 10 people, but if this gets at least one person interested I did my job].

Ok. Spoilers up to ep 13.

I need to talk about this show because I feel like no one else is and that's a crime. This is unlike any actual play l've seen in that EVERYTHING is improvised, including character backstories and relationships. This only makes it more impressive when the theme reveals itself:

Haunted City (if you ask me) is about what happens to people when their addictions are no longer available to them/no longer able to help them, and how that hurts both the addicted and those surrounding them.

Juliette is addicted to the idea of Ophelia, but when she finally has her back, she realizes that the person she loved and wanted more than anything is gone. Life can never be normal again. The Ophelia she knew can't be the thing that keeps her moving forward anymore.

But she still goes to her. She can't just go back to life without Ophelia again. She knows this devotion is bad, she sees how it's hurting Ekeprag, but she can't stop it. She doesn't want to.

Valkos is addicted to giving himself to the spirits of Duskvol because it makes him feel alive. He knows it's bad for him, and he does manage to turn it down a few times. He refuses to be Ophelia's vessel not only because it won't help Juliet in her grief, but also because it'll continue to tear him apart. He thinks The Path of Echoes will help him to control and manage this, but they turn him away. He isn't ready. They can't help him feel alive.

So he falls down the hole of The Builder — a being who won't refuse anyone who is willing.

Seljak doesn't start the series with an addiction. If anything, he's the one warning Valkos against it. He doesn't recognize that summoning Ophelia is feeding Juliette’s addiction; he wants to help his friend and a lost ghost. To Seljak, being a servant to the spirits is the greatest thing he could possibly do with his life. He wants to help. In doing so, his faith becomes an addiction and he doesn't even notice.

The Builder is his dream come true: a god who needs him. It doesn't matter that serving The Builder makes all the other ghosts fear him -- this is bigger than all of that. *This* is what he was put on this earth to do.

But when Valkos compares Seljak's devotion to Juliette's, he doesn't deny it. He knows. But it'll lead to freedom eventually, right?

They're trying to make each other understand their perspectives, because they all genuinely care about each other and seek to protect the family they've built, but they've just barely begun to realize that they're going in circles. And Ekeprag suffers as a result.

I can't help but remember how this crew started. Vowing to make towers fall.

And what are they doing now?

Building a tower.

Sorry for the longer one, but I have to thank @JCVIM, @rossbryant, and @Abzybabzy for their brilliant storytelling and performances. I can't wait to see where this all goes. (Hopefully somewhere where Ekeprag's okay? Poor guy…)

[I did add to this thread later, but I think I’m gonna post that as a reblog because this is already a longer one]