Blades Against Darkness

Excited for Blades Against the Darkness, love the look of the backer only download that I received as part of the BitD Kickstarter from years ago. I’ve been trying to find out more about the creator Dylan Green in order to see what he’s worked on in the past (other than the additional material listing in BitD). It looks like he had a Google Plus account but that’s obviously been shut down.

Anyone have a link to a blog/patreon or list of other projects? Cheers.

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Maybe you find some contact data / hints in the G+ archive:
https://bitd.gplusarchive.online/?s=Dylan+Green

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Howdy! This is Dylan. Being myself, I can happily answer any questions you might have!

What did you want to know?

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Hey Dylan! Primarily I was interested in what other projects you’ve worked on. Any other published games? I love Blades Against Darkness and would like to see what else you’ve put out.

Also, I’d love to run a playtest of BAD but seeing how you have it envisioned first would be excellent. Do you have any recorded playtests or know of any actual plays? Do you have any plans of running a playtest that could be signed up for?

Apologies for the question barrage, BAD has me very excited. It lead to me finally breaking down and picking up Darkest Dungeon in order to experience one of your influences first hand. :smiley:

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Well shucks… I’m glad you’re excited! If you get it to the table I would love to hear tell of your adventures.

I wish I had other works I could point you towards, but there is nothing noteworthy. If the glacial pace of this project wasn’t any indicator, Blades Against Darkness has been a journey of me learning about how to be creative. Trying to learn how to create has been something I’ve struggled with my whole life and Blades Against Darkness is me trying to “eat the elephant” all in one bite.

Regarding how to play the game, I’m unaware of any actual plays floating around on the internet. If there are any I’d love to hear about them.

Regarding guidance, I have some best practices written up that I’ll share… in a week or three… along with some other stuff :zipper_mouth_face:

Here’s a quick peek:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MYSiGs-nQUv9N6YbZhVYKNJqsxFx-ckR/view?usp=sharing

In the meantime, I’m happy to answer any questions anyone out there has about the game.

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Thanks for sharing that tease, really loving the tone/vibe the sheet gives off with its font choice and aesthetic! Good luck pushing through! BAD is gonna be great when it gets out :slight_smile:

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Many bold strides are being taking in the blackness behind the forums! Good luck with it, Dylan, really looking forward to seeing a version which satisfies your vision. If it helps, I’ve loved everything you’ve put forth thus far, and will continue mining it for my home games in the meantime.

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@Syth I chose that font very deliberately. :wink: It’s the font from the Red Sonja opening text crawl and it took a little digging to find it.

@elstiko thank you for the kind words. I’m glad what I’ve written has given you stuff to work with. Are you running a fantasy blades game of your own?

In the mean time, I made roughly 2000k words of “how to run a game content” today thanks to @entropyrat giving me the nudge, so here’s hoping I can have a functional kit again soon.

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In a way?
[INHALE]
I’m running Ironsworn in a version of Symbaroum’s Davokar as an All-Elves Casual West Marches Campaign with plenty of mental and aesthetic influence from your original beta alongside the unreleased Delve supplemental rules for Ironsworn.
[EXHALE]
…so I am treating it like a treasure-and-danger laden series of forays into a forest which has swallowed the ruins of prior civilisations, and there’s an otherworldly corruption tearing itself out through it, our characters just as vulnerable to that corruption as the flora/fauna/denizens around them.

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Exciting news! There is going to be an actual play of Blades Against Darkness in June!

https://twitter.com/JWall7z/status/1129019776800624643?s=09

More good news! I’m scrambling to get a new playtest package together for the event. I’m about 4k words into writing the “how the hell do you use all this stuff” portion. So, stay tuned!

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Sorry @CasterShell you posted all those updates and I just vanished for a few days. Work took over my life.

I would love love love to play in your AP if you have any open spots. Even if not possible I’m incredibly excited to see this taking off and am happy to help in any way possible.

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@entropyrat Sorry to break your heart, but it’s not my AP. I dunno if the guy running has any slots, but it’s worth asking.

In the meantime, I’ve been hard at work trying to cobble together some tools for him so he can run his game smoothly. There’s lots more to come, but this should give you a sense of what the final beta will look like. Here’s playbooks and a rules summary:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sjC0qz1WqTtAmulmRXtijFwhsYUXJyYO/view?usp=sharing

This encapsulates most of the changes to the game as a whole, although it doesn’t provide a lot of detail. If you have questions, I’m happy to expand.

Here is the stuff I’ve written about how to run the game. There’s more coming, but this should give some good insights into your questions about how I run the game. It also points towards some of the biggest changes that you can expect to see in the final iteration of the beta.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XSEZLXVzLMndDcjH_urz8TeaCFu6CoRO/view?usp=sharing

I’ll continue to updated this over the next few days until I get all the bones in place for the final beta. Hopefully I’ll have all the functional parts by the time his AP starts. One way or another I’ll have the majority of a final beta by next month!

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@entropyrat Sent you a message on Twitter about it now! :wink:

The timing is funny since I’ve wanted to do a Darkest Dungeon-y game for a while now, and after streaming it very recently I became even more certain I wanted to. So I went ahead and asked the people I GM Numenéra for and they all pretty much wanted straight in, haha!

I’m looking forward to trying everything out from the playtest packets, and hopefully providing an entertaining actual play!

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New content in GM Packet:

How to Dungeon Crawl and some minor updates:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XSEZLXVzLMndDcjH_urz8TeaCFu6CoRO

Still to do:

Combat

Magic

Gear/Economy

Extraction

Downtime

Factions: 5 for final beta

Example Jobs: 4 for final beta

Minor updates to Player Sheets: Spelling and some minor errors. Unfortunately “Dadly” Venoms has been updated to the much less cool “Deadly” Venoms. :wink:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sjC0qz1WqTtAmulmRXtijFwhsYUXJyYO/view?usp=sharing

@entropyrat any way you can change the title of this thread to “Blades Against Darkness” and remove my name. We’ll just make this an “official” page for the project.

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Updated the name as per request.

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Latest update includes advice for gear, treasure, and the economy along with combat.

I still need to provide faction sheets for the economy section to be really applicable, but those are still in the shop. Still this should get the idea across:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XSEZLXVzLMndDcjH_urz8TeaCFu6CoRO/view?usp=sharing

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Still “Dadly Venoms”, I’m not even cranky about it. Should’ve kept my mouth shut…there’s still time if I just don’t click the “Reply” butto

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Weird, I updated that a couple of times. Apparently the changes didn’t stick. There are a few minor changes to the playbooks… including THAT.

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Minor corrections and some new text throughout. Plus a whole new section on magic:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XSEZLXVzLMndDcjH_urz8TeaCFu6CoRO

In particular I made a note in the “Learning to Crawl” section that you don’t need to use a navigation roll every time the players want to get from one part of the dungeon to another. Sometimes you’ll focus the action on a few rooms that are in close proximity. You only need to use a navigation roll when the players don’t know exactly where something is, but they have a pretty good idea, and they want to try and find it.

I made some minor changes to the playbooks. Most notably the Warden’s Songbird move got cleaned up a little to bring it into line with how I’ve actually used it at the table.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1sjC0qz1WqTtAmulmRXtijFwhsYUXJyYO

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LOVE the clocks-as-tree idea.

Also can’t wait to read the sorcery section slowly. Looks great!

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