I started with my crew hired to go spy on something the fog hounds were smuggling into the docks by an unknown patron. it turned out to be a person getting shadowed into the city to meet with a member of the city council and then they could go try to figure out who the person was or why they had to meet in secret. They eventually got pulled into taking sides in an political battle with the city council but one they had very limited information on. Different councilors were outsourcing jobs to various gangs in different parts of the city so they got to meet a bunch of different factions that way.
I just started a new game last Friday, my first try running BitD, and new to all my players as well.
They’re a crew of Hawkers in Crow’s Foot dealing in spirit essences out of an apothecary shop, on the spike shaped island on the west side. I’m starting with the War in Crow’s Foot, but really just created characters and set the scene so far. It’ll all kick off this Friday.
We initially set aside the Hawkers sheet, but some of the players wanted to be smugglers trading in corpses and extracting and selling their essences. This really seemed too complex and dangerous to me. Too many problems to solve all at once.how to key away the Deathseeker Crows and Wardens? Where do the corpses come from? Where and how do they extract the ghosts from the corpses, and refine the spirit of essences? Who are their customers. Way too much in one go. So I suggested they pick on one aspect of it to focus on, and selling refined spirit essences fit the bill.
So one F the PCs has an apothecaries as an ally, who they decided minds the shop. Another us a Whisper who checks and handles the essences. A third is a disgraced academic, who knows which researchers and decadent students are interested in essences. It all seems to fit together nicely. They’ve not yet finalised crew relationships yet.
So the next issue is how to kick things off. Maybe the crew is transporting a new load of merchandise to the shop. I think I’ll start with some street scenes and vignettes in Crows Foot on the way. They witnesses some lampblacks strong-arming a street vendor for protection. Some Red Sashes harass and chase off some Skovlander street performers. Describe the hustle and bustle and build to a confrontation.
My first game (still ongoing) began in a war between the Gondoliers and the Dimmer Sisters. The Spirit Wardens were quietly supporting the Sisters in the hopes of annihilating the Gondoliers, gaining popular support, and leveraging that support into additional funding and influence (and if the Sisters lost, well, that’s another dangerous mystical force off the street). The Eely-Feelies (a group of Shadows with a reputation for violence & daring) ran stealth ops for the Gondoliers while also getting lucrative jobs from a contact in the nobility. I think I should have done more to build more urgency into the situation from the beginning, but the war is about to come to a head (the Sisters just struck the Gondoliers headquarters and kidnapped Griggs to get arcane information), and the slow start let us ease into the system (none of us have really played RPGs before).
I feel like I got the hang of the starting situation with my second game (I play with writers, and goddamn Session 0 is so fun I could be convinced to play it as a stand-alone). My players ran Strangford & Coalburn, Ltd., a transportation company that was a front for their smuggling operation Bleater & Grabber Unlimited. They used to be crewmembers on the Fog Hound, and they’d become targets of the Fog Hound’s “eliminate competitors” clock once they quit to start their own shop. Bleater & Grabber Unlimited ran missions on the ‘one for the heart, one for the pocketbook model,’ smuggling revolutionary graphic novels to a new union of ironworkers in Coalridge for Ulf Ironborn one evening, then sneaking a cursed artifact into the basement of the Red Sashes’ Temple of the Falling Star for the Billhooks the next.
In that second game, I discovered it’s really helpful to have one or two Tier 1 factions that the Crew can go toe-to-toe with from the get-go (the Fog Hounds, the Night Queen’s cult in the Nightmarket, a veteran editor for the Ink Rakes). I feel like this lets the Crewmembers start throwing their weight around right away, without their agency being hampered by worrying about potential catastrophes (like, say, running an op against the Spirit Wardens in Session 2)?
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First game I ran is very specific to the crew, who were smugglers with Ghost Passage, but this could be adapted to just about any crew that has ghost contact abilities
A Bluecoat Captain from where ever your crew is based approaches the crew. RP happens based on crew sensibilities, but the score is framed like this:
“There’s a flop house in a rough part of [Wherever]. I’ve heard tell they’re having trouble with some poltergeists. Go take care of the ghosts; prove to the manager, Nyryx, that all’s well and I’m sure she’ll pay you well. Report back to me and I’ll pay you 4 coin, too. Now I know you’re good with the veil, so here’s [1 coin per crew member, negotiable up to 2 each] more coin not to talk to the ghosts you’re taking care of, alright?”
I have yet to meet a crew who don’t talk to the poltergeists, who are three prostitutes: one killed accidentally by a Bluecoat, the other two to cover up the first. They’ll share hidden treasures and accrued Bluecoat secrets in exchange for a safe hiding place and revenge.
Unfortunately for the crew, Nyryx has already commissioned [Someone interesting to your crew, I chose the Dimmer Sisters] to take care of the poltergeists, and they arrive just after your crew.
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I took an unusual approach. My understanding of starting situations is that they exist to help players identify opportunities to score. I flipped things on their head by asking players to provide score opportunities (via online surveys).
Here are the links to the surveys I distributed, if you want to see:
For each player, I prepared a couple of professional score opportunities, a claim opportunity, and one “personal” score connected to their friendly contact.
In the process, I used these to flesh out various dispositions for different NPCs and groups. (The evolving situation now is one where the Ministry of Preservation is at loggerheads with the Iruvian Consulate, and various occult actors are trying to obtain ancient artifacts, all of which originated with the players’ suggestions.)
This required more prep work but, ideally, helped ensure the players’ investment.
I’m beginning with a new starting situation tomorrow! My crew of Shadows are smart but untested Students at the university in Charterhouse, who chose Six Towers for their hideout and Brightstone for their hunting grounds - so I wanted my situation to involve a little of all three.
The Sparkwrights and the Circle of Flame are dug deep into a vicious squabble over the arcane object trade: they both want the goods for experimentation (in their own way) The Church of Ectasy meanwhile is using the spurts of scandal and violence to turn high society further away from spirits and occult activities while playing the two sides off each other.
I wanted to give my crew access to some lower tier gangs too, which is difficult in the richer areas of town, so I’ve made the Billhooks associates of the Sparkwrights - dealing the Spark and other waste products of their experiments. The Circle of Flame have an iron grip on the Dimmer Sisters and the Wraiths through threats and extortion - but neither of these crews are happy to be under the thumb and would prefer their freedom, if not revenge.
Writing all this out now, it seems terribly convoluted and over-prepped. I guess I’ll see how it plays out. It’s great to have these plans, but I think leaving them fluid and changing as the play changes is pretty important.
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In my first campaign we did the War in Crow’s Foot. The crew quickly decided the Red Sashes were a better alley and assassinated Bazo inside his office. Pickett tried to reorganize the Lampblacks but was crushed by Mylera after a few sessions. In other other campaigns, Crow’s Foot still happens in the background and the players are open to pursue or ignore it if they want.
What I aim for is to focus on the initial hostile factions the players pick for themselves: the one hurt by the starting upgrade, enemies to their contact, and those encroaching on their territory or hunting grounds. Maybe they are only a small faction with an alliance towards greater threats and potential partners.
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How I’ve managed the starting situations over the course of a few campaigns and quite a number of one-shots is that I keep them all in the same continuity. Blades crews have never left anything clean and peaceful in my experience so its a good way to keep the fiction moving.
However I do also alter the starting situations to fit the crew type. For example, if the last crew was a cult and most of their greater fictional weight was in fighting other cults and opposing the Spirit Wardens, then it might not present incredibly opportunities to a crew of Bravos. So I typically put a small time gap between campaigns and just ask what logically follows from the fiction. In that case:
- The Spirit Wardens ramp up their patrols, therefore the Bluecoats feel like they are being rousted from their own territory
- The Bluecoats start doing their own cracking down to keep themselves feeling important, therefore a lot of the <Tier 3 gangs are feeling the squeeze, therefore they struggle to get the power needed safely oppose the Bluecoats (through money, blackmail or direct conflict) so they all begin forming tenuous alliances and going to war for additional money or territory.
For writing this out I would select specific gangs which are involved and give them some more secrets and goals to progress with, but its a good place to start for the beginning of a campaign.
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I’m starting a new campaign next week for my modern hack (Adrenaline). I’ll be starting them in the middle of the action - a car chase directly after the score. I plan on peppering the action with questions. Who hired you? What is in the trunk? Who sold you out and why? What were you up against?
Once the chase is resolved, we will do a bit of setting building around the responses to the questions.
You could do the same with a carriage chase.
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My first game as a blades GM started in january and the group of assassins as a whole based their backstory on a wronged and now outcast leviathan hunter crew (not nobles). These poor souls were tossed aside as pawns in the coverup of the malpractice of a captain’s cowardice blaming their crew for the loss of a ship. There is now a conspiracy board of those who avoid their fate and a kind of multiquest journey to redeem their names and punish those involved, which ties heavily into the leviathan hunter conflict also built into the book’s set up around the leviathan hunters (the MoP, Military & Hunters fighting for control and the holy grail that is that “map of new supply”)
We did have the faction war in the game as a starting point and it’s funny the butterfly effect of the PC’s on a clock driven event like that. One assassination on their part tipped the ticks in the favour of the crows and red sashes calling a truce and the Lampblacks getting pretty much wiped off the board whilst they were off murdizing some noble. I ended up highlighting the outcome in a newspaper handout after the clocks ticked their last for the Lampblacks.
I really like the opening setup since it lays out the stakes and gives a good start to the “faction game” level of the world, although that said i’m struggling a few faction turns in as motivations and goals are something i’ve struggled with when making new clocks to fill. I do wonder if it was intentional but feel like there are a few starting positions hidden in the opening setup of the book but the gang war is the most precient in the book, playtests?
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Just started GMing my first Blades campaign using the War in Crows Foot setting. The Crew of as yet unnamed Shadows are angling to become information brokers and claw their way out of Crow’s Foot and the War seemed the perfect place to start. They’ve started off pretty friendly with the Red Sashes, even having their secret Lair be hidden inside a Bathhouse operating as a front business for the Red Sashes and have naturally sided with them against the Lampblacks.
Interestingly though despite having taken an initial job from The Crow’s to track down the base of operations of the Rorick Loyalists, they diverted in the information gathering stage and through a process of insanely good rolls ended up tracking down Rorick’s ghost, capturing it, and then selling it to the Loyalists (for only 4 coin mind). Then going back to the Crows and giving the location of a Loyalist safehouse now rigged with explosives and getting their coin for that job too. The assault on the safehouse by Lyssa’s men resulting in the deaths of several of her most loyal soldiers has now levelled the playing field in that side of the war. With the Loyalists in possession of Rorick’s ghost we shall see how things go.
The War in Crow’s Foot has been a great setting to start the campaign with several factions and plenty of intrigue to build from.
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We created the starting situation for our crew of shadows by combining our choices for enemies and friends, during crew creation. We used some of the “biggest” and most impactful clocks to create our stating situation, some from the special edition, to create that feeling of small fish in a big pond. They are spies, exiles from Iruvia recruited by the mysterious house anixis to contribute to the sabotage of the sparkwrights’ new energy project to replace the lightning barriers - which for all intents and purposes is highly inspired by the manhattan project (but more ghostly).
Rolan Volaris, our partner in crime, runs the Veil, our turf. The place is known for their connections to both leviathan hunters (who get special treatment in the club) and the Hive (who rolan shares a dark past with). Our ward boss is the mysterious “broker”, who we as players decided is a Reconciled, but of which the characters are unaware.
All of this combined puts them one foot in the criminal world and one foot in the “legitimate” world of cloak & dagger politics - they are being pulled into all the drama surrounding the Hive and the drug-running gangs of Crow’s foot, The City council being quietly taken over by the Ministry, this new technology being invented, all combining into the Big Clock At the Top: when will the Imperium go to war with Iruvia, and what will that look like?
I ended up making a little thing for the sake of an overview, following the loose procedure for situations:
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That sounds awesome and loving the double cross by the players! Its great to read about them buying into e world around them…that said very brave to get on Lyssa’s bad side! I love how almost every game of blades I see rhoic’s ghost is always out there somewhere
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I had a whole thing planned out if they stuck with Lyssa of her paying them to discreetly track down and dispose of Rorick’s ghost but of course they decided to go their own way and that’s why I love this game!
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My first game begins tonight. The players decided their crew have Gaddoc Rail Station as their hunting grounds, they’re going to boost valuable items and artifacts, as well as indulging in a little smuggling. The first job will be a heist which puts them between a couple of local factions (I’m thinking Dimmer Sisters and Deathland Scavengers). But their lair is in Crow’s Foot, so the second session will kick off with the starting situation from the book. It’ll give them a choice of which threads they wish to tug at at any given time, but if they totally ignore one of the two situations it’ll not end up going well for them. I want to keep them juggling plates to survive.
I’ve been running like @ebrunsell does in media res to try to cut to the action ASAP. I’ll do this while ticking the faction game / asking questions. We got a space themed one right now that has a pet for the crew so I’ve been cutting to the moment the rescue of the pet goes wrong and asking what went wrong and who.
That’s a fun enough little scenario for everyone to get going and then I’ll immediately hope them into freeplay and also sort of explain that the game is sandbox which means the more we play the more the story comes out, setting the expectation that we’re playing a little fast and loose at first. Then go into Q&A about some of the other factions / backstory before letting them loose in freeplay.