Blades Against Darkness

Forged in the Dark
81

The zine format is making me really happy, yes, please.

1 Like
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Hey - I tried the “resistance pool” a few times and it worked really well. I call the pool Adrenaline (since that is the name of the hack). Like your pool, it is used for both resistance, special abilities, push, etc.

I replaced trauma with “Shadow.” The characters have ONE shadow - the personality trait that they are attempting to keep suppressed. For example, someone might have Rage as a shadow – if it is invoked, they become violent, brutal and unpredictable.

Here is the resistance rule:
To Resist a player spends 1 - 3 Adrenaline. For each spent Adrenaline, the player rolls 1D. On a 1-3 the resist is successful, but the character marks a temporary Shadow. On a 4-5 the resist is successful. On a 6, the resist is successful and the character recovers the Adrenaline spent to resist. A critical success results in a character regaining 1 Adrenaline (to a maximum of 10).

During downtime, a character must address their shadow in order to clear temporary shadow and regain spent Adrenaline. This provides an opportunity for a slice of life scene as their shadow causes problems.

1 Like
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The bottom third of the third page of the Super Turbo doc is cut off.

Really love the work you are doing!

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I’m not entirely sure I have have the heart to really pick this up again, but I also apparently can’t really put it down. So, here’s a new gussied up version of Blades Against Darkness Turbo:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mofIH_dXk483_2zmyf8t5kK2GTAtQ-Af/view?usp=sharing

  • Traditional Heritages and Classes: This isn’t something I’d put in a complete version of the game, but as a bit of fun I whipped up the original classes and heritages. Hopefully might let you play the game in a setting that’s less deliberately weird.

  • Updated Resistance Rolls: This is a much kinder version of my resistance rolls that doesn’t include the ability to fail. More than that, on a 6+ you can actually turn their move back on them. This should be driven by the fiction though. Turning an attacker’s move back on them is obvious, but a rolling boulder might be harder. Don’t feel pressured to make it work in every instance. The cheaper cost will be enough of a reward.

  • Simplified Harm with XP triggers: Harm now applies to each Trait and its associated Actions rather than being unique fictional ailments. As a GM I have trouble tracking player harm when doing the calculus for position, effect, and dice. So I wanted to bribe my players to do it for me! To that end Harm also offers XP when players describe how their harm stops them from doing something in the fiction.

  • Everything’s on cards: Classes, Heritages, and Ideals (TSoY’s Keys) are all on cards, so your character is a constellation of these things. Mix and match them as you see fit to make any number of cool characters.

Been playing some Worlds Without Number RAW recently; dungeon turns, marching order, reaction rolls and the whole damn thing. This got me thinking about how I’d approach some of these ideas. Next up I’ll adapt my current dungeon crawling procedure and share it with y’all.

Does this mean I’m picking up this project again…? I honestly don’t know. I wanted to bash this together for fun and this is certainly the prettiest version of this game I’ve ever made. If I don’t ever finish this thing it will be one of my greatest regrets, but then again I’m exhausted by the prospect of climbing this mountain again.

I’m hopefully calling this version a “reboot” and if I go forward with this I may change my approach. The weird western version of this game is near and dear to my heart, but the baggage it carries is just so hard to escape I really don’t feel qualified to do it justice or make a game that handles the subject matter tastefully. Instead I might adapt things over to the more Bloodborne/Darkest Dungeon/Castlevania flavored “House of Usher” setting I whipped up for Halloween once, long ago (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p5dFGIZ3y4elqWS4Oi4e3HS_J1BowXjy/view?usp=sharing).

Let me know what you think! Especially, let me know if you try it out and have questions.

7 Likes
85

Here’s a rework of the “Weird West” setting’s playbooks to match the current tools along with some more Ideals.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12x5AqYNcLx0Dx2iwI9ovVMQF93oUHqg7/view?usp=sharing

Had to murder some darlings to get them to fit on cards… But I’m pleased with the results.

2 Likes
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Hello, I just wanted to know if the game is still being made and, if not, someone has the final edition released? Thanks, just loved the ideia and arts of the game that I saw.

2 Likes
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Currently, I’ve handed off active development of this game to @grogcore. Though, at the same time I’m actually playing in a game and having a blast. I’ve been developing a little content for our game and I’ve been dabbling with the idea of actively working on the game again.

Right now I’m working on two other smaller projects and enjoying playing this game again, trying to fall back in love with it. I think giving up on this would be one of my great regrets, but I also feel woefully under-qualified to tell this story about colonialism and swords and sorcery.

I need to finish these smaller projects and then I can think about what it would mean to try and take this one up again.

3 Likes
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Hi folks,

Would someone be able to do a quick summary of where we can find the materials for the latest playable version of the game? It would be very much appreciated. Sounds like a great game, so it would be fun to try it. Thanks

2 Likes
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All extant files are found here:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ICnrW5qsS5TvI9EumU9eBC1cWfiZgG41?usp=sharing

4 Likes
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Thank you, much appreciated