Blades in the Dark Season Finale
For those following my Blades in the Dark games, the other posts on this season can be found here, here, and here.
Background
The season’s dramatic question is can the PCs’ crew of thieves deal with a rival gang, The Wraiths, before they use an esoteric artifact to uncover the PCs’ hidden lair. The last few sessions have dealt with ticking various faction clocks to set up one final heist to put the Wraiths out of the fight for good. Through their scores and background investigation, they discovered The Wraiths were using casino funded by nobility as their personal bank. Knocking off the casino would bring the fury of the nobles down on the crew, but more importantly, also on to the Wraiths who had become intertwined with its operations.
Mechanical set-up
I could feel the group getting pulled in different real-life directions so we decided to set a date for a finale and agreed it would be the casino heist. The sessions between that point and the finale would be addressing four “impossible” obstacles protecting the casino: the physical (and incorporeal) security forces, the surveillance system, the vault itself, and how to move that much Coin to a safe location (the exfiltration). Instead of using the default Risky-Standard as the default position and effect, impossible obstacle would start as Risky-No Effect, so the scoundrels would need to leverage every advantage and take risks in order to succeed.
Due to real-life scheduling, we only managed to get one session in before the finale. The players decided on disrupting the surveillance systems of the casino as that would pay off while dealing with the rest of the obstacles. There was a snag at the end of the score that I ruled would affect the first roll against the surveillance system (just a simple fortune roll to see if the surveillance team noticed the crew’s error). After that, the crew would know how to adjust any changes the surveillance team made.
Before the score, I was planning on giving everyone an extra downtime activity to represent the scores we didn’t have time to run but ultimately decided to skip that for time and instead give everyone a complex flashback for free (essentially a 2 stress bonus).
How it actually went
After some deliberation, they acquired a few different cohorts and spent the Coin to upgrade them to more elite forces (Tier 3 to the crew’s Tier 1!). They discussed just a frontal assault with their hired thugs but decided to stick to their roots and sneak in. A lovely 6 on the engagement roll saw a smooth zipline onto the roof and the Cutter followed it up with a Critical against the lone sentry up top.
Once inside the restricted area, they used the surveillance system to discern the location of the vault and then used their expert disguises to waltz through the high-rollers’ area. The Slide led that group action and carried them through with another 6. At this point, the Spider who had orchestrated a lot of covering chaos faded into the background (as he had to go in real-life), leaving the remaining three scoundrels facing down the security at the vault.
The score was pretty smooth thus far, but even after stacking the dice pool, they botched the attempt to drug the guards into letting them pass, so they had to resort to violence (the Cutter and Leech were pleased…). This started the surveillance progress clock, although it ticked slower as a benefit from their set-up score.
They moved on to the vault and had to deal with the spectral mastiffs that were guarding it and then decided on brute forcing their way into the vault. At this point, I informed them that there was no immediate danger but I would tick the surveillance progress clock for every move they made. They made some more clutch rolls and managed to breach the vault. At this point, the Slide had to go (real life again) so I decided to just call it here. We narratively described how the gang of thugs they hired came in to run interference while they made their way out with the Coin. They had their second hired gang waiting in twenty rickshaws that split the loot across the district until they rejoined at the rail station to ride off into the sunset (well Duskvol’s sunless equivalent). I ruled that they had each earned 10 coin, but directly into their stash as this Coin would be too hot to touch for a long time.
Overall thoughts on the finale and the season
The casino heist itself went great. There was great tension when we needed it and some smooth sailing to break it up. We did a pretty good job of not getting bogged down with deliberations but kept the story moving. I think we spent more time setting the position and effect board than we normally do but I think that’s expected when most of the obstacles started at “No Effect”. The session lasted about 3.5 hours from initial downtime activity to when we called it and while I would have liked to have carried on a bit longer, we had already lost two players and I had real-life calling my name. If I were to do it over again, I think I would have handled the downtime activities via chat a few days before so that we jumped straight in with the engagement roll.
Overall the season painted a intriguing story with the personalities of the scoundrels coming through at points. Our biggest mistake was not establishing the dramatic question right at the beginning. I let them explore the city and factions a bit but if we had started with the casino heist as the ultimate goal of the season, I think it would have played out tighter. I could have kept the “rival faction” a mystery until they gravitated towards one they (dis)liked to still allow them to explore the setting.
I’m hoping that the players all take something from our first Powered by the Apocalypse game. Most of my players leaned into the player-driven fiction which should help me as a GM. The quantum inventory will probably be carried over in some form to whatever our next game is as well. After almost 7 months, however, I am ready to get back to a more traditional TTRPG. The player-driven fiction simplified my prep, but ultimately I need more player discovery in my games. When everything is improv, we all know that there isn’t some grand story waiting to be discovered and feels cheap to me. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed the game and letting the dice create the drama for us, but I’m excited to get back to our roots. This was my second season running BitD so I knew what I was getting into and I doubt this will be my last visit to Duskvol.
Finally, the stress of scheduling came to the forefront during the last two months. One player has essentially ghosted us, another has a newborn, I am moving and the whole global political situation has made spending free-time together harder. We said we would take a break for a month or two, playing one-shots or boardgames but I think we owe it to ourselves to have a serious conversation about how we want the group to continue going forward.
Thanks for following along on my group’s BitD story. If you would like any resources I used to run my games online, I’d be happy to share (I’m quite proud of our Roll20 Landing Page). Just shoot me an email at tonightsSession@gmail.com.