Blades in the Dark

Gig work at the end of history

Respect the Premise

Blades in the Dark is a game of urban fantasy skullduggery with design, writing, layout, and art by John Harper with consulting design by Stras Acimovic, editing by Sean Nittner, additional work by Vandel J. Arden, Duamn Figueroa, Dylan Green, and Andrew Shields and published by Evil Hat. It was released in January of 2017. The game has codified its engine and inspired a number of additional games under the “Forged in the Dark” structure.

Blades in the Dark takes place in Doskvol, an industrialized city walled on all sides to protect its citizens from wild supernatural phenomenon. Phenomena that often sneaks right in. Blades’ urban fantasy styles as an electro/dieselpunk affair with enforcers wielding lightning hooks to snatch ghosts and occultists using whale blood as fuel. It’s an evocative premise. One so layered with spirits and demons and automatons that it can drown out the greasy thievery that the systems revolve about.

Blades’ gameplay has two acts; the score and downtime. During the score players send their filthy little bandits out on missions to acquire wealth through unscrupulous means. During downtime they deal with the fallout; heal injuries, mollify rival gangs, fend off supernatural dangers, and begin the cycle again.

Blades’ presents a variety of scoundrels and roustabouts and the gang types they can start. Effort is made with the playbooks and skills to muddy the roles, to its benefit and detriment. Is there a significant enough distinction between the Cutter, a violent killer, and the Hound, ana ambush hunter? What do assassin gangs do that makes them explicitly unique from Bravos, who do “loud” crimes? Most of the time, this isn’t that big an issue. The vibes of each playbook and gang provides theming where mechanical roles end.

What’s more frustrating is Doskvol’s supernatural elements. The setting is steeped in ghosts and ghoulies. The establishment of a hostile, ruined world outside the walls of the city is such an overwhelming thing to consider and yet it is explicitly established only to excuse why the thieves don’t skip town when the heat gets too bad. Moreso, not every playbook or gang deals with the supernatural. Most playbooks have maybe one ability that relates to the supernatural, and even then only relating to ghosts. Meanwhile, Whispers display a level of supernatural integration with the setting that it feels like a required playbook.

According to the Rules

Blades in the Dark is made up of many clever, interlocking systems. Blades eschews the typical plan-purchase-execute cycle of thievery for a more narrative approach. The engagement roll and quantum loadout system abstracts away the tedium of looking at blueprints, arguing eventualities, and general analysis paralysis present in planning-focus games like Shadowrun. The in media-res style approach to scores gets players right to the most engaging part of crime. The stress system, which acts as a resource expended to gain advantages and avoid fallout, gives a much better feel for crime. Instead of reacting to random bouts of damage, players are tangling with an ever-dwindling resource. Scores are dances with risk, seeing how much danger you can brave instead of merely reacting to it.

In opposition to the slick and high-octane score phase, Blades’ downtime systems are a lot of bookkeeping and stress points. Upon completion of a score, regardless of success and failure, players are assaulted with multiple waves of pain. Heat is generated based on how “loud” your crime spree was; the higher it gets the more threat of police retaliation, imprisonment, and other setbacks. The players also face “entanglements”; semi-random fallout for their score, based on their heat rating, that ranges from police questioning to gang retaliation to demonic curses.

Players get downtime to deal with these problems. Two downtime actions (more if they spend some money) can be used on healing, reducing heat, placating antagonistic gangs, reducing stress, or advancing gang and personal projects. There is simply too much that needs to be done. Stress, being a universally applied resource, is key to recover. But if a character received any wounds during the score, that eats up time that could be used elsewhere. And wounds can take anywhere from one to three or more downtime actions to completely clear. Reducing heat is equally important, making sure your heat doesn’t “pop” keeps the fuzz away and also reduces the danger of entanglements. Only if you have all of these issues covered can you spend your precious free time creating new recipes or even gaining bonus XP towards improving skills (And these can take five or more actions each). It is dangerously easy to fall into the hole; get too much heat and you might trigger an engagement that makes an enemy gang escalate to war, which reduces the number of downtime actions *by half*, making it even harder to stop fighting. God forbid you’re also dealing with an injury or two (which reduces your recovery actions even further).

We Experience Games as Art

Blades in the Dark is stressful, but I’m not sure it’s a stress I enjoy feeling. Things go smooth as long as things go smoothly. Bad rolls can escalate and build upon each other to push your gang into a pit. Injuries and stress and war and everything else that happens in the normal process of doing scores eat into your free time until you’re spending all your time undoing the fallout of your last score. Engagements can chain into kidnappings or demon curses and suddenly you’re doing scores to fix the stuff that broke from the *last* score. It’s a sinking feeling. It’s like a debt trap. It’s gig work at the end of history.

What I found most frustrating about my time with Blades was its unbalanced coverage of crime and underworld themes. Excessive care is taken to create a web of gangs vying for dominance. It is explicitly stated that in order to gain turf and renown in the city you must take it from another gang. And yet the police are almost totally abstracted into invisibility. They show up if your heat gets too high, but otherwise there isn’t enough to create cops and robber stories. No obsessive detectives to play cat and mouse with. No corrupt police chiefs to take down or bribe. The setting is similarly bereft of rich and sniveling aristos, politicians, and gentry to target. In the abstraction of scores it feels like too much has been lost. Scores have too much fallout to craft a narrative; it’s too easy forget about the haughty noble whose family jewels you lifted because your fence has been kidnapped by a rival gang or a ghost of your victims is haunting or even one of your members is simply arrested.

I love Doskvol’s oily underworld. I’m had great fun playing a Whisper, an ex-sailor using naval superstition to craft charms and totems and kicking back ghosts with swears. But this kind of neck-deep play with the setting seems much harder for someone playing any of the mundane playbooks. Blades’ setting has overgrown its systems so much it’s possible to forget the game is supposed to be Industrial Revolution Ocean’s Eleven. I would love a little less pressure, a little more reward for boldness. As it stands my extended stay in this world can feel less like a master thief and more like an Uber driver sneaking fries.