We wrapped up our tenth and final session of Band of Blades this week, bringing our campaign to a close. The Legion arrived at Skydagger Keep for their final showdown with the endless hordes of the Cinder King. We were, perhaps, more excited for the campaign to be over than we were to see how it all turned out.
It was long, it was difficult, and it left us with a lot of feelings. Here’s my recap.
To Review!
Band of Blades is the third Forged in the Dark game out of Evil Hat and the second from Off Guard Games, following their first FitD game Scum and Villainy. I’ve run lots of Scum and a bit of Blades, and those two games are fairly similar to each other in terms of system and table-feel. Band changes the formula.
When we started the campaign, I thought the biggest change would be in how the distinctive FitD style job/downtime play modes were split up. In Blades and Scum, downtime is a phase the gang/crew goes through to manage the fallout from the job they just performed: how much money did you make, how much heat did you generate with the authorities, and so on. And then each character gets to perform a downtime activity. Ideally and practically, downtime is a big part of where the embodiment and fiction-making part of the game takes place. And the job is where the system engagement, the real down-in-the-weeds bit of play, happens.
Band of Blades is different. Each player creates not only “their” character – a specialist, which is a conventional FitD style playbook – but also takes on a “Legion role,” an abstract meta-character responsible for a piece of the Legion’s downtime. The characters have little descriptive tags but they don’t even have names. Rather, when the Legion is between missions, the Commander decides what their next mission will be and where they’ll go next, the Marshal manages squads of NPCs and assembles the Engagement roll for the mission, and the Quartermaster manages the Legion’s various economies and downtime actions. If you have a fourth player, they can either be a Loremaster (tracking deaths and managing the “camp phase” of the session) or a Spymaster (sending NPC spies around to scrape together small advantages for the Legion). In our game, we went with a Loremaster.
I confess that when we started, I was intrigued and skeptical about this arrangement. The game also requires that, for any given mission, only two (or sometimes three) specialists will attend a mission, and everyone else will play rookies. My players have not loved weak character monogamy in prior games like Legacy, but for whatever reason this approach was fine. I think it’s because eventually everyone did get a chance to play their main again. On the other hand, there was practically never embodiment type roleplay coming out of those nameless Legion roles.
By the end of the campaign, though, what turned out to be the most different from baseline Blades was the system itself.
Under the Hood
Band of Blades introduces a twist on “Tier,” which is basically “levels” in Blades/Scum. Rather than Tiers, enemies are measured in terms of Scale (literally, how physically big the opposition is) and Threat (how dangerous it is). Doesn’t seem like a big deal, right?
It ended up being so consequential to gameplay that I created a laminated cheat sheet to help manage it. And the FitD platform transformed from “quick and easy” to an interminable grind every roll. When you’re just comparing Tier, it’s very quick and easy for the GM to settle on a position and an effect. But scale and threat quadrupled the handling time of every roll.
Some of this, I’m sure, is on me. My motivation for creating the P/E cheatsheet started after reading the example of play in Band. Because the example is written, right? It can be extremely thorough. But for me, the only way to achieve that platonic play ideal was to hook into the level of detail laid out in the rules itself.
For fun, I’d always try to eyeball where I thought position and effect would end up if I just made the call. It certainly would have been faster! But I was wrong every time. I mean I never got the damned thing right. My takeaway from writing and using the cheat sheet is that the great strength of Forged in the Dark, as a design and play platform, is that it provides a vocabulary to negotiate play details that traditional roleplayers care about. It turns out that when you’re reminded to think about all the details of the fiction, though, the roleplaying conversation ends up being very long.
In actual play, the only player who consistently grasped all their options was me. As a result, I felt compelled to remind the players of all their options on each and every roll. Did I create an environment of learned helplessness in the players by holding their hand so much? Maybe! But the stakes of every roll in Band of Blades is so high, so consequential, that I felt like they really needed every option at their fingertips.
One player remembered how to use flashbacks. One regularly swapped position for effect. One was good about managing their Stress economy so they could push. Everyone was mostly good about seeking out Devil’s Bargains – which, good grief, is exhausting 20 times a session.
By the end of our ten sessions, I feel like I’ve mastered Band and, by extension, the FitD platform’s killer apps (the position/effect conversation, clocks, downtime). I also feel completely exhausted by the whole thing.
I’m not sure what the reward was, in the end.
Shared Pain As Bonding
My players are no strangers to the phenomenon of bonding around shared experience, particularly when there’s pain and discomfort involved. I mean, god, not actual pain folks. But I do mean the hard work and discomfort and disagreements that come along with some play experiences. Sometimes we need to work for our fun, and sometimes that work is hard.
When we debriefed at the end of our campaign, everyone agreed that the main thing they felt about Band of Blades was exhaustion. Some of that is thematic: war is hell, you’re always on the edge of disaster. Some of that is mechanical: each roll we make is gonna take a lot of steps to resolve, and then I’m likely gonna hit you with some consequences, and then you’re likely gonna have to weight which consequences you can live with. That all sounds fine on paper, right?
The other main thing they felt about playing Band was there was very little room, or call, for embodying their roles. That’s a whole combination of things: the faceless Legion roles, the lack of session-to-session character monogamy, the episodic mission + campaign structure, the “STFU and do the job now” vibe of being on mission, and missions frequently facing zombies, monsters and other obstacles that aren’t engage-able.
You can always shoehorn roleplaying into anything, even board games. But if your game doesn’t mandate that roleplaying happen? It might just be too much work. I know folks are going to disagree with me about this, and that’s fine. In our case, the game itself was so much work that there just wasn’t much bandwidth left over.
On our Slack I mentioned that Band is high on engagement and low on embodiment. Naturally that kind of statement is catnip for the rhetoric warriors out there, and I don’t feel like getting tied around that particular axle. But let’s just say that there are many opportunities to be engaged with the procedures of the game – managing economies, working out rolls, negotiating fictional position – and very few opportunities to embody the characters in a way that’s visible at the table.
When we had missions with fully formed NPCs involved, though, the players were more than eager to embody their characters. We had one mission where the Legion recruited a retired warrior-poet who was hiding out from the war. Lots of good roleplaying, a great combination of heartfelt speeches and angry threats, the works. We had another mission where the Legion had to beg for supplies from military leaders hiding out in the last fortress. Also plenty of good embodiment. In retrospect, I think I could have created more opportunities for characters to bounce against NPCs. I offered one mission every session that involved talking to NPCs, but frequently those missions just weren’t as necessary as the ones where they needed to sneak around, or ambush, or whatever other bits of competency porn they needed to convey.
That Endgame, Though
Band of Blades has a tight map-driven campaign structure and a clear endgame. After the Legion has survived its fallback from the front lines to Skydagger Keep, scrounging whatever it can along the way, the final battle plays out. The endgame is a little different than a regular session, with five obstacles to overcome simultaneously while the Cinder King closes on the Keep.
Because we’d all played the game longer than I think anyone really wanted to, we were good and ready to blow through the endgame after wrapping up our last location. I ran them through a shortened version of High Pass (the last stop on the map before the Keep) and then a shortened version of the Endgame.
The Endgame’s instructions are that we play each of the five vignettes as a “single obstacle.” I wasn’t sure if that meant one roll for each, or if the obstacles were just like missions (making Skydagger Keep in fact longer than a regular mission, which is supposed to have three-ish obstacles). The vignettes are colorful and interesting. For our Legion, they simply could not do them all. They didn’t have enough specialists nor enough squads to spread around.
Thankfully, the basic system of the game lets you resolve situations of basically any size with a single roll. Good reminder that Forged in the Dark games are mostly smoke and mirrors, less a toolbox game and more a box of paints and brushes. Wow that’s a lot of metaphors. What I mean is: there are no hard and fast rules about how to use any of the rules. Clocks exist to create extended tension, which is fun but also completely up to the GM to decide just how much tension they want. Regular Action rolls exist to resolve actions, which are never really defined anywhere. Any given sub-6 result in any position can come with as few or as many consequences as the GM wants. Resistance rolls can resist some or all or none of a consequence, all up to the GM.
I get the appeal of this. In every session I think we had a combination of rolls, obstacles and resistances that were reasonable to everyone playing. It was nice while facilitating to have those tools at hand to paint every scene. You know that thing I said above about how FitD providing a vocabulary for the roleplaying discussion? I think the point of the FitD discussion is that it makes your table establish its norms. It’s almost the exact opposite of PbtA games, which tell you what to care about via moves that are triggered in the fiction whether you want them to or not (there is no “roll the dice or say yes” in PbtA). And it’s related to, but separate from, the Burning Wheel transaction as well, which requires everyone know what’s at stake before versus tests but ratchets up the uncertainty by offering separate sub-games for when you want to zoom in.
The Endgame of Band of Blades brought this into focus for me. The instructions are one page long! And each obstacle is written with about as much detail as any of the “special missions” available at the map locations. Two of the obstacles came with specific clock sizes, one came with some strongly implied scale and threat values, but mostly? Up to me to figure out how to model. And since I wanted to wrap the game up in one night, I wanted to model the obstacles at the intersection of fair and expedient.
The GAME OVER screen for Band of Blades looks like this: you build a die pool for a final Fortune roll, and then you roll, and then you tally your final score. Our Legion rolled across the Skydagger Keep finish line on its rims, so the lengthy list of die-giving achievements? Pointless. They ended up rolling two dice and taking the lower roll. I let the Commander make that roll, which gave them a middling outcome for the Legion. When we added up their score, they ended up with 55, which is on the low end.
I still don’t know how I feel about the end. I know we’re happy to have gotten through it, and I know everyone’s ready for a good long break from FitD games.
The Bottom Line
If you’ve been following my write-ups about our campaign, you probably are already playing or plan on playing Band of Blades. Cool cool. If you came across this wall of text for the first time, let me share my final thoughts in a convenient bullet list:
- Band of Blades is a worthy addition to the very young FitD platform. It does interesting things with the model without challenging the model too much.
- It is the slowest and most difficult of the Blades-derived/-hacked games I’ve read.
- Like all the Blades in the Dark descendants, the GM needs to do a lot of lifting to ensure there’s still roleplaying happening. Enough other players I’ve spoken with feel the same way so I categorically reject the inevitable “play better” messages the Blades fans out there are going to hit me with.
- Make sure to take real time with the “back at camp” element of the game. If that’s on the Lorekeeper, make sure they’re taking time to tell stories of the Legion, and actually framing camp scenes like they’re supposed to. We got wrapped up with playing efficiently within our 3-ish hours each session that we skipped these elements, to the game’s detriment.
- Consider letting missions take longer than one evening. If you can tolerate 20 sessions of play, do that. Spend time in camp. Ask provocative questions en route to a mission. The game is so mechanically dense that we found it very easy to forget to talk to each other.
- Include more human beings. It’s very easy to fall back on mindless zombie hordes. This game did not motivate my players to embody their characters in the face of the hordes.
- When picking the Broken bosses chasing the Legion, if you pick Render, do not pick Render’s ability that starts the Commander’s clock with three ticks. I mean it works! It’s smart design. The Legion absolutely feels more time pressure right away. This also meant our Legion never stayed in a location long enough to build relationships, or engage in long-term projects (which I think is where a lot of the Quartermaster’s fun is). And if you keep it in your back pocket to spring on the Legion as a Broken advance? I can’t imagine how shitty it would feel to drop that on them mid-campaign.
- Always, always ask about rookies when they first show up, or they will end up faceless stat stacks.
- The urge to complete patterns is very powerful! If you like the feeling of actually finishing a campaign, Band of Blades will pull you through the rough parts where, in an otherwise open-ended game, you might just call it quits. We didn’t, and maybe we should have, but knowing it’s coming to an end is compelling.
(Apologies to the ghost of David Foster Wallace for the title.)
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Wow! This has not been my experience at all. I’ve had many people ask when the expansions are coming out so we can play more, in fact. Having run two full campaigns I’m pretty stoked to be going back for my third soon, with a different group. With a smidge of time since you wrote this I have to wonder if it’s a case of the wrong game at the wrong time.
That’s fantastic to hear! I’m so glad you’ve gotten so much play out of it.
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com
This Article was mentioned on indiegamereadingclub.com
Hey, I recently purchased BoB and am currently preparing to run it. The decision came about because some of my players were bugging me to try a FitD and I saw the Black Company influence from a mile away and just had to try this game. Your article did a good job of describing the problems in your campaign and how they came up, and I hope I’ll be able to nip some of those issues in the bud. Friends of mine who have played BitD have said many of the same things about the rigid structure and preset actions killing opportunities for roleplay, but I’ve seen livestreamed campaigns where roleplay flourished, so I know it can be done. I’ll definitely make my characters provide a name and a portrait for the campaign roles, and maybe have them roll up and describe a few rookies in advance between sessions, maybe tease them in the camp scenes so they are established characters before they even go on mission.
I thought it’d be a nice break from our most recent encyclopedic monstrosity to take a look at four surprisingly compact, recent-ish releases. I haven’t played any of these! These are strictly reviews, not critiques.
Rebel Crown
Available at Itch.io
At a perfect-bound 63 pages, Rebel Crown by Michael Dunn-O’Conner and Eric Swanson is the most compact iteration of a Forged in the Dark style game I’ve ever seen. Formally this was part of ZineQuest 2, even. And what a very nice “zine” they created.
Rebel Crown is even more in the boardgame/rpg liminal space than Band of Blades: you go into the game with the very explicit goal of getting a claimant to the crown on the throne, by any means necessary. The victory conditions to achieve this are explicit and mechanical. The pathway to make it happen, same.
I think, having powered through Band of Blades, I’d have a much better grasp of how to let a game like this breathe. It’s got all the standard FitD trappings: you go on missions to achieve specific goals, you have downtime between those missions, you’re constantly aimed at improving your domain (turf) by. Six regions make up the default setting, each with a slew of interlocking factions and situations (as well as an expansion, Serpent & Oak, that provides two shorter versions of the game), But there’s an explicit endgame in view, too.
Didn’t think you could do a FitD as a pamphlet but I think they did. Much of the compactness comes down to no discussion at all of the six playbooks and other reference documents. It’s a bold move! Hopefully those docs are complete enough that you don’t really need it. I could see future blog posts fleshing them out a bit down the line.
Arcana Academy
Available at Itch.io
I picked up a misprinted hardcopy of this cute PbtA game by Jordan Palmer and boy am I glad I did. Arcana Academy is Hogwarts with the VIN plate removed, featuring students exploring mysteries at magic school. It has a “for kids/families!” vibe to it but, other than the fact that you play children, it’s pretty clear you could stretch the game to handle something more adult, like The Magicians.
Arcana Academy achieves its 80ish-page size by stripping PbtA way, way back. There are no playbooks, for example: Instead, you have three Traits that give you +1 to rolls when you invoke them, and spells (duh) that are like super-Traits that evolve over time but otherwise just position the fiction according to their description: If the spell lets you talk to animals, then that’s what it does (and you’ll get a +1 to manipulate them, just like if it was a Trait). It’s very straightforward and flexible.
To me the more interesting bit of Arcana Academy is its robust system for social relationships to evolve under stress. Your connections can either deepen or fade away, and much of the game is spent on spending Sway to get characters to do things. It’s very social-intensive play, but you’re also only allowed three connections.
Play orbits around mysteries, and there are good guidelines for creating those. The mystery provides all the impetus for characters doing things (although I suspect lots of drama can be had just by dealing with your rivals and friendships), and provides structure to 6- missed rolls. It comes with a default setting, Warwick Academy, in case you don’t want to go through the trouble.
Little Monster Detectives
PDF available at DriveThruRPG (affiliate link)
I backed this for my daughter and her friends. In Little Monster Detectives by Patricia de Blas and Alvaro Corcin, the eponymous detectives — who can be the players, not necessarily invented characters — have to either chase off or help the monsters in their literal home or outside. The GM role is the “senior detective” and you actually play along in their investigation, while also facilitating stuff.
The rulebook, which is full-color, glossy, and absolutely gorgeous, comes in at about 100 pages. It’s mostly laid out like an old-timey newspaper with little notes taped to the pages, coffee-stain rings, all that. It’s quite nice to look at, and my nine-year-old devoured it in a sitting.
The game itself has a clever little “curve on a single die” thing going on: if you’re scared or injured, you take the lowest of three d6es, and if you’ve got an appropriate tool you take the highest, otherwise you take the middle. A 1 is always a miss and a 6 is an epic success, otherwise you’re rolling against a 2/4/6 target number. How have I not seen this dice rolling trick elsewhere? It’s great.
The killer app of the game is the array of props for the kids. Every character gets their own “field notebook” they then mark up with their achievements, or stickers handed out by the senior detective after the investigation. There’s little tokens, a “senior detective screen,” just…lots of bits and bobs.
Their DriveThru page indicates the game was designed with therapeutic goals in mind, that is, kids who are afraid of monsters in their house. Mine isn’t, but she’s going through a “scary/eerie” phase right now so we’ll be playing toward that. I’m not sure the elaborately produced English-language edition is available from Spanish publisher Nosolorol yet.
Cobwebs
Available at Itch.io
Cobwebs is a compact little boxed set from Adam Vass of World Champ Game Company. It’s solidly in storygame territory: three players rotate between three game-function roles to construct an ever-more-implausible story of a conspiracy surrounding a missing person. The rulebook is a tight, small 68 pages (the whole box is like 6” on a side), but the game’s interesting texture is in the nice props: a big cloth map that serves as a drop table for die rolls, a fancy little turn tracking token, tiny chrome skulls that track “threat,” and the rulebook itself, which, honest, it’s nice and grungy and very zine-y.
Cobwebs’ gameplay eyeballs like other games in this category: lots of prompts to put your apophenia to work making sense of random-ish inputs. One interesting bit is that the three players are expected to advocate for their own theories throughout play, pushing and pulling and compromising. I do like the invitation to make the conspiracy wild, too: there are several premade setups to play through, and they range from Ringu-style j-horror to a stuffy manor mystery to time-travel loops. The disappearance angle, in every case, is just the excuse to start exploring and building out the conspiracy that led to it.
The theatrics of the presentation make Cobwebs a totally worthy con game. I’m looking forward to bringing it along for the next time we get to play with strangers in rooms.
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Now that Blades in the Dark is several years old, we’re starting to see new games push the Forged in the Dark (FitD) envelope, not only in terms of the “scrappy heroes with a shared enterprise” premise but the underlying transaction of play. Off Guard Games’ Band of Blades was the first major departure from the model. Genesis of Legend/Jason Pitre‘s Sig: City of Blades (SCoB) is probably the farthest-out hack/adaptation yet. Certainly the farthest-out I’ve personally played.
I just wrapped up a six session run at SCoB with some lovely folks online. Here’s what we found.
Sig: City of Blades
Available in PDF via Drivethrurpg.com
TL;DR if your time is short
If you love D&D’s Planescape, or the idea of madcap fantasy-gaming trope mashups, this is an earnest love letter that delivers that experienceThe rules have a lot of problems, a combination of matching the model to the premise, and pushing the design in so many new directionsIf you already know FitD games and are not doctrinaire about your rules, you can get a lot of fun out of this. But if you want rules that work out of the box, you’re in for a rough time
I used Miro to run Sig online. New-to-me technique was to import PDFs into the workspace and run it all in one place: no Character Keepers, no online dice rollers. I liked everything about it except for clocks getting relegated to a corner. At a live table, making/marking clocks is central to the stagecraft.
So… “Planar Fantasy?”
Confession: I knew nothing about Planescape when I started digging into Sig: City of Blades. D&D is a blind spot for me after the early ‘90s, but I’ve seen lots of art and read stuff from folks who still love the Planescape setting and aesthetics. And I was charmed by Jason Pitre’s previous game in this setting, Sig: Manual of the Primes, built on his Sparks engine.
First session or so, someone tossed out the phrase “planar fantasy” and all my players nodded like they knew what that meant. I can’t find a firm definition online. But my take, after debriefing with a Planescape superfan who signed up, is that it’s a combination of high-fantasy mashup and mundane city/real life. So: the cops are armed lizard men who love donuts. There’s a gigantic, terrifying dragon who’s an accountant in the city’s biggest firm. The gods (“Powers” in Sig) rely on the power of worship and will serve you cease and desist orders if you interfere with that.
So that’s Sig. It’s inspired by Planescape’s Sigil, a city floating in “planar space” with literal physical tethers to three planes of existence. There are elemental planes, ideological planes, and conceptual planes. There are also portals in Sig that take you to any fantasy world you could dream up, so it’s a fun premise for dipping into different settings at a whim.
In SCoB, Sig is a generation into semi-functional anarchy, ruled by a network of Factions in the absence of the Silent Regent. I’m told by Planescape fans that she maps to a character called the “Lady of Pain.” I’d imagine the absence of the Lady of Pain’s benevolent dictatorship is Sig’s greatest departure.
The premise of SCoB is that the characters are a Crew of freebooters, who serve as the outreach/ activist/ adventuring arm of a Faction. But also the Faction’s leadership, allegedly, but that’s less obvious in the text. They’re scrappy up and comers but the Crews and Factions are described in, shall we say, aspirational language.
This doesn’t have to be a contradiction. Probably because of playing lots of Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy, it was a fight to reconcile ourselves to this idea. We started by clarifying that Factions aren’t the same as city functions. So, like, there will always be a vast bureaucracy running Sig but the Paper Guard, a Faction, are currently in control of it. Should the Paper Guard be taken out in the course of the faction war at the heart of the game, the city bureaucracy will endure.
Our players took the Order of Ashen Keys, described as “mercenary warcasters” in service to the Sage Collegium. Basically they’re a magical militia working for very aggressive librarians. They’re also in charge of the Faction that runs the city’s libraries. In our game, they went to war straight away with the Dustkeepers, who run the city’s museums. Basically a magical nerd fight.
Epic battle between librarians and docents
It’s fine, it works, but it took work to get out of the Blades mode of “scrappy up and comers” in a living city where factions are functions: the Bluecoats are the cops of Duskvol and will always be the cops, for example.
A breakdown of Sig’s essential city functions would have helped. There’s an elaborate map of Sig composed of 48 Claims. The whole game is about seizing those Claims, but there are never more or less of them. A Faction’s Tier is limited to the Claims they hold, so if you’re Tier 2 and both your Claims are taken, you’re no longer a Faction. In any case, the map strongly implies the city’s functions, but it took some homework on my part to figure out what all’s actually happening.
I still have no idea how the setting “works” as a realistic setting. The game doesn’t care, either, and that’s fine. It’s an “urban fantasy mashup” aesthetic, and its themes drive more toward conflicts between communities and power-hungry factions than pursuing one’s ambitions within a hostile sandbox setting (like Blades and Scum).
The Rules: Ambitious, Broken, Redeemable
We played six sessions, and every session featured a goodly stretch of talk about how to make the rules work.
Some of this is due to the ambition of changing both the default holding environment, and a lot of changes to the FitD model of play. Some of those changes are super interesting, while others left us wondering what motivated the changes beyond novelty.
The best and most interesting change to baseline FitD is in character creation. Rather than set playbooks, there are ten each cultures, lineages, and devotions. Every character has one of each, which grants stat ranks as well as possible abilities. This is all done for tabletop play via this extremely clever character PDF with invisible layers for each choice. Set your chosen culture, lineage and devotion layers to “visible” and bang, a bespoke character sheet. Very cool.
To be sure, SCoB innovates typical FitD in lots of other ways. Player-facing stuff that jumped out at me, for those of you who already know Blades in the Dark or something similar:
Loadout impacts the engagement roll: if you go light, you grant another die to that roll. I like the push-your-luck tradeoff. The downside is that your Crew’s equipment list features a tag system that isn’t explained in the text, and at least in our game the choices were frequently interchangeable. Loadout didn’t feel like an especially hard choice.There is no longer a “position/effect” element to actions. Effect level aggregates from a list of stuff like Tier difference, “controlled position” (a GM call), suitable/quality equipment, and how many 6es you rolled.Consequence level — minor, moderate, major — is a function of your current Stress, which accumulates in the usual ways (giving yourself dice, helping someone, resistance rolls). The rule, formally, is that the next level of consequence becomes available to the GM to inflict. That worked okay, but it just meant an ever-growing list to check against, and the GM having to take responsibility for the amount of pain inflicted. I kind of hate having to shoulder that responsibility. I tended to look at the lower end of the scale when things weren’t crucial, and the upper end of the scale when things were at their most tense.Devil’s Bargains are Planar Bargains in Sig, and allow you to reroll all your dice in return for taking a consequence. That didn’t work great for us, given how effect level is calculated. We drifted this a bit with “reroll any dice you want.” Also, rather than pulling from a set of smaller consequences like conventional Devil’s Bargains, consequences on offer for a Planar Bargain scale with the character’s Stress (like all consequences). Obviously you don’t want to make a consequence too steep if you want players to take it, but these Bargains did feel more punitive.There’s a Harm track that mirrors the Stress track, with effect level reduction being the penalty for running the track to “wounded” and then also 2 Stress to do anything when you’re “incapacitated.” When it’s filled, the character is eliminated.Factions accumulate Infamy rather than Heat, which is earned in similar ways to OG Heat (quiet to messy to catastrophic), but also when you seize a Claim. This landed weird for us, given you can definitely seize Claims very quietly. More to the point, the Faction needs Infamy to level up, either gaining a new ability or leveling up their Tier. I feel like the actual noise generated needed to be one source of Infamy, and Claim seizing needed to be separate from that. But that’s intuitive, based on watching the characters do two Missions with an eye toward deliberately generating tons of Infamy so they could quickly claw their way to Tier 2.Character advancement comes from missed (3-) rolls, Dungeon World style, on both action and resistance rolls. Each of a character’s three starting choices — lineage, culture, devotion — also come with a built-in Drive. In theory you can earn XP off your Drive when it “causes trouble,” but given the tight economies of the Mission phase, that just meant nobody bothered with their Drive XP except during downtime and non-mission roleplay. I drifted this to include “when your Drive sends the action in an interesting new direction,” and that brought Drives back into play during Missions. You can also mark XP for developing or ruining a relationship. There’s no guidance as to what that looks like. I’d guess developing a relationship could be a personal project clock during downtime, and ruining would be obvious in the fiction. Every character starts with two Relationships with NPCs keyed to their gang, resulting in good triangles right out of the gate.
On the GM side, the changes were more profound:
Every mission is strictly about seizing a Claim in Sig. The city map has precisely 48 Claims, so it’s a zero-sum game. And a faction’s Tier is limited to the number of Claims they hold, so to claw your way up you need to drag someone down. It’s an ugly crab bucket, uglier than even Blades.Missions have three clocks: Politics, Profit, and Peril. The Politics clock is chosen by the players during their mission planning, 4, 6 or 8 segments. If they complete the clock, they get 1, 2 or 3 dice to roll after the mission to seize the Claim. It struck me as kind of a marshmallow test for the players: they could totally do 4-segment missions, face far less wear and tear (mostly only addressable during the downtime phase), if they’re willing to accept 50/50 odds each time. The faster downtime cycle seems like it’d be a better bet, but my players were impatient and went for 6 and then 8 Politics segments. The players also choose the size of the Profit clock, which will earn them 4, 6 or 8 Coin if they complete the clock by the end of the mission. And if they don’t complete the clock, they still get 1, 2 or 3 Coin. Yes, that means calling for an 8-clock and then giving up on it still gets you nearly as much Coin as busting your ass to fill that 4-Clock. And when you’re ticking a Profit clock you’re probably not ticking the Politics clock: Profit is stuff you’re doing that’s going to earn you Coin: robbery, extorting or blackmailing folks, all that.The Peril clock replaces the conventional engagement roll. The GM rolls fortune dice, one plus one more for each freebooter with a “light” loadout (smart!). You get a 4, 6 or 8 segment clock representing a major tilt in the action. You still set up other clocks the normal way in the game both for things you’re trying to accomplish as well as looming dangers, but the Peril clock is supposed to represent a big shift in the mission’s focus. It didn’t really work out, but it’s the compromise for giving up “position” in the transaction. The regions of the city containing the Claims don’t have any of the material you might expect from first-gen FitD games: no fortune die ranking of safety/wealth/crime/occult, no sample “notables.” Very broadly the city is broken into four social classes — rich and powerful, merchant class, working class (the tethers to the planes kind of standing in for harbors), and the poor underclass. Other than that, all you’ve got to go by is the Tier rating of the Faction that holds the Claim you’re going after. I didn’t have a lot to go on other than a bit of color text from the book, but that also meant there was room to improvise without messing with canonical setting stuff.The Planar Bargain thing is supposed to be tied to the three tethers (themes) hooked into Sig, but lordy was that hard. I’d let the players cook up some kind of thematic color explaining how their reroll was justified via Stone (strength and size), Shadow (imagination and craft) or Order (patterns and bureaucracy). This might be a practice thing. I wanted this to generate a few more interesting hooks for play but we couldn’t get there.There’s an explicit “Drama Phase,” that is, unstructured non-mission roleplaying time. It’s a small thing but it addresses a common FitD critique that there’s not enough room for roleplaying to breathe. The text also says you don’t have to be super strict about progressing between phases. We put that to use on several occasions, moving between downtime options (healing, personal project clocks, indulging in vices to reduce stress) and drama play. Honestly, I could even see bouncing between Drama and Mission, if everyone’s clear when they’re actively pursuing Mission clocks. It’s good, it’s an easy small change, and I could see using it in other FitD games. Mechanically, the only difference between Drama and Mission phases is that you can’t make resistance rolls during Drama play.
Rules Problems: The Premise
In actual play, we ran into trouble for one of two reasons: reconciling the rules to the premise, or interpreting text that pointed to earlier versions of rules.
On the first one, reconciling the rules to the premise, we had a hard time with the aspirational language of the Crew chosen by the players versus the Tier system representing scrappy up-and-comers. When I asked Pitre about this, he explained that the Crew are also considered the leadership of the Faction. Honestly that doesn’t make sense either, and undercuts the freebooter vibe laid out in the text itself. There’s just a lot of ambiguity in the text, as written, about the difference between a faction and a crew of freebooters working for that faction, and whether they’re actually in charge.
Sounds like they’re a scrappy crew working for a Faction, yeah?
The Infamy rules were also tough for us to wrap our heads around. As I mentioned above, seizing a Claim gets you Infamy under the “epic and terrifying” category. But what if you were “smooth and quiet” while you seized the Claim? This is why I thought we should earn Infamy for both how they handled the mission, and what they accomplished. “Epic and terrifying” also includes eliminating an important individual. I do like that Infamy provokes a marshmallow test for the Freebooters, because they also risk less fallout from taking a lot of Infamy at once: you gain 6 fallout results minus the highest die, and you roll as many dice as empty Infamy slots. So you really do want to hit hard and early, rather than letting the clock fill up slowly and exposing yourself to many more rolls.
Just like every other FitD game I’ve played, these various tools exist to let the GM calibrate tempo and tension. Clock creation, in particular, is still good tech. But it’s also all smoke and mirrors, and it only matters as long as the players agree it matters. There’s a real table benefit to smoke and mirrors, though: I wanted to speed up advancement for both the characters and the gang, so I threw down far fewer and smaller clocks than I would have in other FitD games. You could say SCoB just makes it more obvious that there’s not really much objective mechanical tension behind its systems.
Rules Problems: The Text
The other issue, when the text points to what I can only guess is earlier rules ideas, is harder to work with without being very charitable in your reading and interpretation.
The Claim roll, for example, is written like you’re nibbling away at a Claim. So you’d take a smaller Politics clock if you wanted only a small nibble, and a larger for a big chomp. But in actual play, the Claim roll at the end of the mission is all-or-nothing. The rule works fine but the text describes something quite different.
The three mission clocks, Politics, Profit and Peril, also feel like they started with one rules draft and ended up in another. In all cases, clocks advance based on effect but also on fiction. The GM watching the fiction to advance clocks is far more important in SCoB than it reads to me in Blades in the Dark. The importance of fictional clock advancement became apparent when I ran across the rules about how one progresses the mission clocks. Specifically, a simple (non-Clock) roll only ever adds one tick to a mission clock, regardless of effect level. To get more effect at once, you need to start a sub-clock for some bit of the Politics or Profit mission. In actual play it felt like inventing work for the purpose of the work, not in service to the fiction.
There’s other stuff like that throughout the text. Pitre, to his credit, has released errata addressing what we ran into. Hopefully the print edition will incorporate as much of this as possible too.
The Play: Freewheeling, Improvisational, Strange
The best part of Sig, for me, is that it’s filled with provocative gaps. Very few “facts” but lots of hooks to grab onto. Character abilities, for example, are frequently open to interesting interpretations, which might make you crazy if you want tight rules text. Take this ability, from the devotion to Magdak, the will of the city of Sig itself:
So…is that descriptive or prescriptive? Does “establish” mean “GM tells me” or does that mean “I tell the GM?” We went with the latter, and it was marvelous and weird. Super wide-open Sherlock-y connection-making with an occult touch, inviting the player to surprise me with how things are connected. Marvelous.
Everyone took the fantasy + mundane mashup thing and ran with it, which was great fun. The flashback mechanism, which remains untouched from Blades, is especially well matched for this kind of play too: “I broke in before the mission and placed stun sigils everywhere” fits just as well as “I gossiped with the dragon accountant’s secretary at the bar.”
My method for maximizing my fantasy palette was to open up fantasynamegenerators.com to its “fantasy races” tab, and then generate a few names to grab as necessary. Given there aren’t meaningfully deep cultures at play in Sig, I could open my brain up to free association and let the listed races prompt the fiction.
This whole style — and I assume “planar fantasy” in general — needs early and eager player buy-in. I don’t think it’d sit well with the folks who want deep, consistent cultural development underpinning the city’s workings, or a more serious style. It’s mood-board play, which normally I’m not into, but Sig: City of Blades helped me accomplish a fun time with that style.
We played the game for several sessions, so the game can work. But we needed to be flexible and charitable about reading the text, and frequently apply previous FitD experience. If you know how a typical Blades in the Dark job’s tempo should feel, it’s pretty easy to map back over to Sig’s clocks and Stress countdown. SCoB’s novel takes on old systems resulted in a less-different play experience than I expected. Mostly things just felt a bit looser and easier for the characters, and then suddenly much worse as Stress imposed spiraling consequences that demanded resistance, and therefore more Stress.
Last Thoughts
You know what Sig/Sigil reminded me most of, once I started really digging in? Invisible Sun of all things. I mean it makes perfect sense if you know Monte Cook was responsible for both Invisible Sun and a huge swath of Planescape, especially Faction War, the final book of the Planescape setting. Both settings feature a sprawling surreal city filled with incomprehensible strangeness, ruled by Factions with inscrutable plans and methods. It’s a free association exercise underpinned by an aesthetic that welcomes mash-ups and contradictions. Themes of living in a strange city in a blend of strange cultures, everyone having arrived in the city from elsewhere (I’m not sure anyone is “from” Sig so much as having arrived from another plane or prime world), and an occult thread running through everything and subject to occasional upheavals (the Path of Suns in Invisible Sun, the tethered planes in Sig).
Sig: City of Blades is in an interesting design space between PbtA style games that provide no/little setting other than what the players come up with in Session 0, and FitD style games with extensively developed setting materials ready to push back against the players. It feels lore-intensive — planes and primes and tethers and powers and factions — but when you get there, there’s no there there. The game offers tons of affordances to grab onto and improvise around, but the players need to know the affordances exist. It feels like a sandbox environment with the promise of interesting exploration, but the players find they’re responsible for their own discoveries.
As a love letter to Planescape, I think the game succeeds. As an evolution of the FitD framework, I think it’s ambitious but decidedly mixed. Hopefully future FitD-inspired designs will keep pushing the envelope.
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I’ve been playing Band of Blades for nearly a year now, and I LOVE it.
But I keep coming back to this review. My experience is/was completely different, yet I totally get how this could have happened, and I am asking myself if it could have happened to me. Not with the same group. But with another? Perhaps, since Band of Blades relies not only on the GM, but on everyone.
The best tip I can give, is to split mission and campaign phase. One week, we have a mission, the next week, we have the related campaign phase. Yes, this is why we are still playing this campaign after almost a year. But this is why we have a lot of role play in our campaign as well.
Best decision we made for our campaign.
But of course, it only works, if players step forward and say: “I want scene XY with character A and C to show whatever.”
This is a big one, perhaps the pivot of our entire campaign. Enjoy! If you’ve just run into this one somehow, this is an edited…
I haven’t played BoB yet, but I’m prepping a campaign for it. From that point of view, this was very interesting to read, and a bit of a different take than all the praising comments I have read earlier. And then few notes and thoughts.
Paul, you wrote: “The Endgame’s instructions are that we play each of the five vignettes as a “single obstacle.” I wasn’t sure if that meant one roll for each, or if the obstacles were just like missions (making Skydagger Keep in fact longer than a regular mission, which is supposed to have three-ish obstacles).”
I didn’t find the word vignette from the book, so I presume you mean the end game missions (5 + the last wave). The book states from those that: “Most of these play out as a series of short, one-obstacle missions.” So for me, that says that those are handled with a single action roll each (except the final wave). Also, of course I might have have interpreted that incorrectly, as I sometimes have a bad habit of reading rules as a devil’s advocate or ruleslawyer, and that may afefct my perception. Anyway, I think that PbtA / FitD games are usually quite user friendly for interpretations (although certain interpretations may significantly affect difficulty). I wouldn’t judge a group which would play each obstacle as separate mission. Or even one that would group all them together for one roll.
Anyway, with six obstacles, Skydagger Keep seems to be intented as largest mission in campaign. The final wave being a fortune roll kind of feels good, as otherwise it might be really tedious and long mission. But here of course YMMV, and I can see that many would rather play it out normally. And if time allows, it I can see the fun in it, burning throught the rookies and soldiers and trying to keep ones favourite specialist alive.
You gave me some good tips and thoughts, so thank you!