Mixing game systems (Blades with something else) is great, Great, GREAT! Let me give examples
I think it was @timdenee who posted about playing Ghost Lines with his group. That may be the obvious choice of a different (game-)system using the same background/lore with the chance to re-use NPCs, background, places, etc. There’s an even bigger advantage, which I will decribe a bit later, but first…
We did that lately a game of For the Queen for our Blades in the Dark group (and even got end of session xp out of it for our PCs). I posted a bit of background of our crew of assassins here if your want some details about oru crew.
We started into our BitD campaign with one dark secret we’re still playing to find out: What happend that we fell from grace from our privileged postion at the Leviathan Hunters, what happend to our leader, why did we survive where others had to die?
So, after some scores (and some parallel classic games of FtQ) our awesome GM Matthias proposed that we play FtQ in our BitD game as a big flash back into the past: It was more than great.
First we found out that our boss was not a guy but a lady and that was only the first insight this great game managed to bring to the table. It was unexpected, it was very cool, it was fiction-driven and it was collaborative story telling. It showed us so much - sometimes surprising - details about our version of Doskvol and the Imperial City, our PCs and NPCs, it was sheer mindblowing. Oh, and great fun too btw.
And this my friends is from my pov the major advantage of using a different gaming system inside your BitD universe: A fresh view on the story and the plot lines. When you think that your group’s storytelling is already good or great, give another system a try. It may boost your game and make you smile a lot.
Did you do something similiar in your games? Let me hear about that!
For the Queen is a good candidate, I’ll have to keep that in mind.
I want to create a Doskvol playset for Fiasco, to run a ridiculous Brightstone caper in the background of the more serious main Blades campaign.
Any other ideas for game systems that would work well for Doskvol vignettes?
The Quiet Year could be fun - what about a prequel game of The Quiet Year in the Lost District shortly after it was cut off from Dosvkol proper? Or a game of The Quiet Year in Old North Port shortly after the cataclysm? The events of these games could echo in contemporary Dosvkol.
Once, we played a game of Follow in our Dungeon World universe to highlight a historical event that took place some (hundred) years before our main campaign. That was great fun for one evening and brought good details / story , too.
There’s a playset of Dialect that was inspired by a game of Blades and plays well in Doskvol. I’ve also considered Star Crossed for my group, and very nearly ran a game of Dread for a PC who ended up in prison and was conscripted into scavenging in the Deathlands with several other NPCs who wanted to kill him. Would’ve handed out the NPCs to other players and seen who came back from discovering god knows what demon shit in the deathlands while also wanting each other dead. Still hoping that game materializes…
Yeah, this is very much in the Blades DNA. The game/lore started in classic D&D, then World of Dungeons, then Ghost Lines, then in the development of Blades proper.
I’ve had lots of fun “system voyaging” in other games, too, particularly our epic Pulp Adventure series which migrated across D20, The Shadow of Yesterday, Sorcerer, Spirit of the Century, and Danger Patrol. Good times.
When I was running a game I had a couple ideas along this line. Unfortunately, the campaign fizzled out before either were able to be implemented.
The first one would have been a dinner LARP run using a slightly hacked version of The Blood Must Flow (https://gamesfromthewildwood.itch.io/bloodflow), in which we would be cultists of Our Blood Spilled in Glory gathered at a dinner party, deciding which one of us to sacrifice for the coming year. I would have been playing as one of the crew’s client.
The second plan related to one of the scoundrel’s constant visions of a tower. As a nod to the D&D origins of the game the tower was of proper high fantasy wizards who had sealed themselves in a pocket dimension before the cataclysm, and have spent the last 800 years trying to escape. If the players ever found themselves in said pocket dimension the game would switch to a more traditional fantasy game.