Hey JayWalt, long time no speak. I’m really interested in some remarks you made in another thread about using Blades in the Dark to run Planarch games. Do you have any musings on what’s necessary to do so? Would you re-skin the factions for Dis or just run with them as is?
Hey JayWalt, long time no speak.
Hey JayWalt, long time no speak.
Muchsub.
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Hey Robert! I think the amount of changes and reskinning is a bit open, from doing very little to doing a ton of work. It’s easy to imagine most of the stuff in Blades working just fine if it was set in the City of Dis, especially if you imagine Dis along more Victorian/ghostpunk lines. As a minimum, I might suggest replacing the kingdom/region/ethnic backgrounds of the Shattered Isles with something more diverse and dungeonpunk-y, like a random race/background table from some flavor of fantasy adventure, and maybe roll on such a table multiple times, combining the results in a a way that speaks to Planarch’s multiculturalism and the way that characters tend to have complex histories right from the get-go. In terms of things like Heritage Moves, I think the Ghost and Vampire provide a good model of characters taking Stress to use special abilities, so you could do something like that for character backgrounds that seem like they should provide powers/advantages, while keeping it a bit more open-ended in terms of what characters might be able to do.
The next level of hacking could involve the Factions, for sure, though a bunch (or maybe all?) of the Factions seem like they would work well in Dis. Maybe also the Locations & Claims, though they might involve less work than the Factions. Scores are already pretty good for Dis, as long as the game is focused on planar freebooting. To emphasize the Planarch elements, you might also want to add a table where different Scores often appear on other neighboring planes in addition to within the city itself. That drifts Blades a bit toward planar adventuring and not just urban gangland and occult stuff, but I bet it would still hold up okay as long as the planes neighboring Dis were also portrayed as being mostly urban, even if some of them were ruins and tombs and such (which is kinda how it’s implied in Planarch, where the urban parts of Dis connect to urban parts of other planes). But you might want to de-emphasize the dungeon-exploration parts in favor of running inter-planar heists and other kinds of jobs like that, if that makes sense.
In any event, those are my initial thoughts, though I haven’t run Planarch with Blades yet and still haven’t played the newest draft of Blades.
Thanks, those are good thoughts. I have run Planarch a number of times with varying tones and various outcomes (mostly good, some really good) and I knew you and John Harper had gamed together so I could see some obvious points of connection with Blades.
I’m reading Blades right now and enjoying the mechanics but maybe I want to run it straight a few times before I start hacking and drifting it.