Blades in the Dark post-session thoughts: Gathering Dangerous Information

19 Jan, 2025

Fair warning, this post probably requires some knowledge of the Blades in the Dark mechanics to understand.

We had our first Blades in the Dark (BitD) session of 2025 last week and it was a great start to the year. To give a quick summary of the story so far, the crew is a gang of thieves out of Nightmarket. It took a while for the season to find its direction but a rival gang of thieves (The Wraiths) has emerged as the antagonists for the season. We established The Wraiths are looking for a McGuffin to use against them and the crew can either:

get there first
engage in gang warfare to remove The Wraiths’ ability to wage a war in the first place.

They elected for Option #2.

For this session, they had some contacts at the newspapers and wanted to expose The Wraiths’ operations, so asked about going around and gathering information for this purpose and any other info on potential scores.

Normally, I would probably steer them to making a Long-term Project out of this or exploring during Free-play. In general, both of these options start as consequence-free and present a risk-reward choice if the initial rolls go poorly. We were now about an hour into the session and they hadn’t really converged on an score so I proposed that this become a more active Gathering Info, where danger and daring were expected.

So we made the Engagement Roll and took a short-break for me to organize. I created three areas, each with important info about The Wraiths and an obstacle “guarding” the info. I then had a minor gang member run errands at each of the locations, to act as a road between the nodes. I also explained to the players that they had an 8 segment clock labelled “Gone to Ground” where The Wraiths get spooked and stop all activity, essentially ending the score. There were also three 4-segment clocks for each type of information, which would nominally be filled at the appropriate locations. It was essentially a race to fill up the good clocks before the bad clock.

And the score went great! They navigated the obstacles well, pushing themselves and resisting when needed. And in dramatic fashion, the final roll of the score was a Critical to put it away!

So my thoughts on the score:

I used the Engagement Roll to describe the status of location zero, a minor location without much info. In hindsight, I should have had the Engagement Roll reflect the runner and how easy they were to follow. They ended up rolling a “success with a complication” so I think a hunt would have been a great start to the action.
The Scoundrels had a self-stated goal of trying to minimize their exposure to prevent The Wraiths from figuring out their networks had been infiltrated. I was able to use this in play to bring up interesting choices and it provided an additional complication I could play. (I feel lucky that my players generally keep the fiction first and ask what would make sense in the real-world instead of trying to game the mechanics.)
They visited all three locations in the same night which may not have been the most realistic but I haven’t quite figured out a good way to run a single score over multiple nights. We could end the score and start another one with some restrictions on the Downtime Activities, Entanglements and faction progress rolls, but that’s doesn’t feel right either.

Ultimately, I think this is what makes Blades in the Dark such a beautiful storytelling medium. The ability to ask the question, “Do we think it would be interesting to work out how you would gather this information? OK, let’s play to find out how it goes,” puts the mechanics in our hands to use or discard as we see fit. The game also does a good job of ensuring that none of this feels like a house rule or even an edge case.

I’m interested to hear others’ experiences with choosing to run these mundane or routine tasks with danger and risk.