It’s able to take two more moves from other playbooks.
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There’s been some chatter here and on the Discord about the Chimera and getting it some more special abilities. Here’s a draft of what I’ll be testing myself:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1V8JRyoQR7OUEBR99bL_0-N2uWWamVwsp
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Now we’re talking! some feedback:
- do you start with monsterheart and another ability, or only monsterheart? it’s unclear.
- what’s up with the Chimera’s XP triggers? it’s unclear what are your original tiggers and what get’s switched when you take monsterheart
- can you take monsterheart as veteran advance?
- Torque is amazing! does underline move from the sacrificed action to Torque or lost forever? what happens if you try to use the sacrificed action? can Torque be of any attribute as long as it matches the sacrificed action (physically twisting the flesh like clay\mutating it with chemicals and abominable science\making flesh dance to your unnatural music and songs)?
- what exactly is the “monstrous trait” mentioned in “blood to fire” and “antibodies” is it the same as monstrous harm slot? if so, do you immoderately recover it or does it become regular harm?
1: The intent is Monsterhearts + another ability.
2: Xp triggers are on the back of the sheet… which I didn’t actually… include so it’s in the file now:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1V8JRyoQR7OUEBR99bL_0-N2uWWamVwsp
3: Yes, other characters can take Monsterhearts as a veteran advance, but they have to eat a monster heart.
4: So this is untested, but the intent was that the sacrificed action was gone. So any underlines, etc would be lost. You can’t use the sacrificed action, so it changes who you are. And yeah, its use and description needs to match the Attribute it’s attached to.
5: yes monstrous traits and monstrous ability in a harm slot are the same thing, I’ve unified the language. In the case of Antibodies the idea is that you sacrifice the monstrous trait (the spell, as it were) and ignore the harm. So lose the spell and free up a harm slot.
3 Likes
Blades Against Darkness is again entering that phase where what I’m doing is writing a lot and playtesting the game and I won’t have a lot to say beyond that. I’m writing 500 words a day on the core text. This text is at something like 40K words right now. I’m not going to put it here because it’s rough and parts may change and that will probably only confuse folks.
Instead, here are links to the current version:
Quick Start Kit:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1sjC0qz1WqTtAmulmRXtijFwhsYUXJyYO
GM Packet:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XSEZLXVzLMndDcjH_urz8TeaCFu6CoRO
What would help right now is some help with copy editing and people letting me know what stumbling blocks they hit so I can provide content to help them. The GM packet explains my process for running the game in, debatably, pornographic detail. But, just because this makes sense to Dylan (that’s me) doesn’t mean it makes sense to anyone else.
So, post questions here. Let me know what you think and what you need. I’ll answer your questions as thoroughly as I can, and incorporate the answers into the quick start kit.
Thank you.
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This land is being picked apart by scavengers. Foreign invaders strip it for wealth. Petty warlords carve out kingdoms for themselves and their cronies. Mad sorcerers wrench power from demons and worse. They use people. Hollow them out of all the labor they can provide and cast them aside. But, you are different. You don’t fit cleanly into the ranks of their servants and sycophants. You’re an outsider. A wanderer, thief, reaver, or student of the arcane. You fulfil their contracts and bide your time. Gain wealth and power and work slowly towards your own ends. You pit them against each other, taking a job from this warlord against that sorcerer. You botch it up on purpose, and escalate tensions. In the ensuing chaos and slit throats you make off with their secrets and treasures. It’s all part of your plan. You set them up like pieces on a board.
Perhaps you will be a Witch King. Ascending, glorious and terrifying, to the godhead abandoned by the empires of old. Your worshipers will offer you the most true and pure forms of tribute: fear, awe, and blood.
Or maybe you will be a warlord. You will lead armies, broker deals, beat them at their own game. You will twist the serpents back on each other until they drown in their own poison. You alone will remain. Ruler by your own bloody hand. The only survivor on the road of kings.
Deep down, you know the truth is you will probably die trying. Your name will adorn no statues. Your legacy written in no history books. A footnote at best. You try not to contemplate this. It does no good. Better to focus on your dreams and the distractions of pleasure, stupor, obligation, and faith.
But there is one other possibility.
Someday, somehow, you could make things better. It will probably cost you everything. If you are remembered it will be at best as a martyr. At worst, as the villain. But if anyone can do it, it’s you. You could be the one to bring warlords to heel and seal the cancerous sorceries they disturb. Maybe you could be a savior, a hero, a blade against darkness.
8 Likes
I love the sense of real ambition here, like it’s got to be about something more than plundering for treasure! Goosebumps ^___^
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Yeah, that text is great. Can’t wait to play this again.
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No questions, just enthusiasm. I love the cut down action dice, and I love what you’ve done with resistance. I’m looking forward to trying out the quickstart as soon as I can put a group together.
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Okey, I had a short one-shot session with my group because one of my regular players couldn’t make it for tonights game.
Short introduction: I started this group with BitD but we went on to other gaming systems because it didn’t click. Huge part of that was me struggling to GM BitD with no real prior GMing experience and no real feeling for how the game should work either. We tested some other things and settled on Into the Odd and stuch with that the last couple of months.
Nevertheless I was eager to see if out experience with a FitD game would be different now.
My players were up for it and I tried my best to create a scenario on short notice. I used some dungeon creation tables from the Freebooters on the Frontier playtest coupled with the guidlines on scenario creation in Blades against Darkness and sent my players to explore the Floating Archives.
Character creation was fast, they loved the flavor of the playbooks, the Chimera especially.
I had brewed up a little conflict inspired by quickstart. The Silver Flame needed some notes on divination from a secret library in the Archive. The Strychnine Syndicate was trying to get as much loot out of the newly discovered site as possible and was ready to defend their right to plunder. Finally some plants in the Archive’s herbatorium had mutated and had turned the whole Archive into a semi-organic structure with some non-euclidean spaces for good measure. The plants had also developed the ability to see into the future (because of strange divination experiments) and were trying to avert an apocalypse they had seen in their vision.
As we started playing I noticed that I had some real difficulties switching from my more prep focused playstayle to the more collaborative nature of FitD. I tried my best to adapt and in the end it worked out okey. We had some good fun, but I handwaved much of the mechanics so sadly I can’t comment much on them. They had to deal with a sniper from the Syndicate and an labyrinthine wood as well as an half lion half plant monster which the chimera swiftly consumed. They got their notes and hurried out of there, happy to tell the tale.
I liked the different format of the action roll, which catered to the playstyle I was familiar with from the OSR inspired game I’ve been running. And I really appreaciate the concrete advise for prepping a game in the GM section. There was one minor confusion about how the inventory for armor works for the chimera with the skin as armor variant of the Twisted special ability.
I’m excited to see how Dylan will go forward with BAD and the players voiced support for hacking some of the more abstract Downtime mechanics into our maingame so I’m grateful that I got some new ideas I can think about.
Hope this helps a little 
3 Likes
There’ve been some minor changes to both the GM packet and the Quick Start Kit including the addition of the art!
A couple of questions for you:
How low did people’s resistance values go? In my tests people rarely get below 3d, and I’m considering shortening the ladder by one unit.
How did declaring gear and the slots work for you? Was there any confusion about what the time requirements for the different slots were? Did people feel that they had tactical choices about where to store stuff and leaving some slots unfilled? If you had confusion where was it?
How did Action Rolls work for you guys? Were the positions clear? Did people do much trading position for effect and if so was it clear how to do so?
Did you feel comfortable developing a job? Was there any advice for how to set up that you wish you had?
Hey I played this a couple of weeks ago in two one-shot sessions with two separate groups. We had a lot of fun playing in the setting and both the squads had more trouble dealing with the stress and trauma than actually getting hurt by any demons.
The action rolls, declaring gear and armor worked great and caused tension with having enough space to escape with the treasure.
My players had trouble remembering what their special armor protected them from and when to declare it.
Resistance values never got below 3d and one session I had a player burn all their Stress and go out from Trauma. Is it your intention to have the resistance rolls approach 0 near the same rate as stress? In our experience the stress racked up far quicker from resisting, assisting and harm.
We had a lot of fun. Playbooks are great. I would love more direction on how to make jobs. It’s been a while since I read the GM packet, but I remember it almost clicking but I just couldn’t get there.
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@C_Santee Hey thanks for the feedback and welcome to the forums.
The whole resistance/stress thing is something I’m working with right now and that’s why I’m looking for some feedback. My experience is similar to yours. Resistance values never get very low, but Stress is still topping out. Personally, this isn’t a problem flavor wise. Getting out by the skin of your teeth is the goal. But it doesn’t seem that Resistance is driving that.
Regarding GM advice, what specifically did you struggle with?
1 Like
The never went further than 3d. But I wasn’t perticulary harsh with consequences (most of them were combat related and they all had heavy armor)
Declaring gear worked great. The players were familiar with the procedure from BitD and took to the time requirements easily. The only question that came up was how declaring armor works for a chimera with the Twisted special ability and the power stored in her skin. The text says that her hide now counts as armor. I ruled that she could additionally declare heavy armor on a Slung slot without normal armor in Packed.
After talking things through with you on Discord it was intuitive and fluid. I think it caters nicely to my more OSR shaped sensibilites.
I tried combining the procedures for job development with some random tables from other products to give myself some interesting creative input to play with. Which led to interesting developments. One thing I struggled with was travel between the nodes. i’m normally running a dungeon crawl focused game with my group and wasn’t comfortable with switching from an explicit representation of space to a more abstract one.
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Resistance:
I’m going to test a change to resistance on my end. I’m going to experiment with just giving a pool of dice and just letting people roll however many they want. Probably something like 8-10 dice. That should be enough to do a couple resistance rolls, but still have resources run out OR do more rolls at fewer dice and lean on stress.
I’m considering changing Resistance a little:
6 you avoid the concequence entirely
4/5 you reduce the concequence
1-3 you take the full concequence.
With this you could actually get rid of Stress and just have resistance dice. Things that cost stress now would either cost resistance dice or have a concequence. This streamlines the mechanics further, but it also means the game is no longer really compatible with the core game. So I have mixed thoughts…
Twisted and Armor:
Based on your feedback I added an armor symbol to the playbook near Twisted. It was intended as armor that didn’t require a slot.
Navigation Rolls:
Yeah, I might need to explain that more. It’s not intended that every movement through the dungeon should require a roll. Sometimes it’s perfectly fine to explore part of the dungeon in old school room by room style. You can use it when the players want to get somewhere specific and but the path there isn’t perfectly understood.
We know we need to get to the old library in the East wing of the manor to get the book. We are here in the East wing, but we don’t know exactly where the library is…
Rather than going brute Force room by room until you find the library, you can roll to find the thing you want. On a 6 you get there and probably get know what’s in store before it knows you’re there. On a 4/5 you get there, but you’re in the thick of it. On a 1-3 you end up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
This is to avoid a lot of fumbling around through corridors and rooms until you find the thing you want. It saves the GM from having to build dozens of rooms or figuring out when is the right time to have them get where they should.
Once your in the library, you can zoom in and do more detailed exploration. Here things get more old-school. You can have hidden doors and multiple rooms. Like a small dungeon of 3-5 rooms. Then when you want to go to the clock tower or whatever it’s another navigation roll to another micro- dungeon.
Does that make sense?
That being said, if you’re comfortable with a more old school approach and enjoy it, use that! This was a tool I developed because I find the prep required for that daunting and sometimes I find the moment to moment play exhausting.
Also! I have set up a Discord for the game:
Not a lot of action there yet, but since I’ve had a couple of people contact me there I figured I’d make it public.
PS: also probably going to get rid of Thews, Wits, and Charm and return to dots or points. Figuring out how many dice to roll is cumbersome.
2 Likes
Okay this is kinda rough and untested, but I think there might be something worth exploring here!
Here is a super minimal version of BAD. Let’s call it Blades Against Darkness: Super Turbo!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HgpkE0dtOAFkdS7Vs_HC_tBKcveP_IxP/view?usp=sharing
This is just a Character Sheet and Player Aid, right now, but I’ll keep adding to it. As I get to test this idea a little more, I may fold these changes into the main game (similar to what happened with Turbo before).
This assumes a generic fantasy setting, but you’ll probably need things like factions and a job if you plan on actually trying this. If anyone out there gets a chance to give this a go, let me know! I’d love to hear how it went.
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This looks awesome…and puts a kink in my plans I have for high fantasy hack
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@CasterShell
Hello there Mr. Green! I’m making my own hack of Blades and I’d like to know if it would be okay with you if I used some of your material in Blades Against Darkness (crediting you, of course). I’d mainly like to use some of the special abilities from the Chosen playbook. Is that okay with you? Is there anything you want me to avoid using at all?
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Aaaaah, I was just tooling around with some ideas and I came up with ditching stress and using resistance dice, then went looking for your game and what do I find in the comments…
In the hack I’m sort of writing, you spend resistance for pushes, but there is a kind of stress you only get after you’re wounded, so the more injured you are, the more effective you become (until you die), in a reverse death spiral.
Of course, then there are death moves, and you’re a ghost until you eat enough ghosts to revive yourself and then and then and then.
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