GML West Marches Campaign Journal · Game Master's Laboratory

Tristan Fishel

Mar 26 (edited) • Campaign Chronicles

GML West Marches Campaign Journal

Last night was our first session of our open table Blades in the Dark game! Thanks to

@James Willetts

@Richard Mills

and

@Beth Bachuss

for taking the plunge and pulling off some daring heists!

I’ll update this each week with an overview and quick summary of the session, the prep, the post-game accounting, and some insight into the proactive process, to hopefully make the motions of running a proactive game a little more open and approachable.

This week, we kicked off by choosing some pregenerated characters (to my great disappointment, no one picked “Jon’ah the Pungent”) and learning a few basics of the system. Then we got right into the action! I haven’t had the chance to make a poll and decide crew type (look out for that tomorrow!) so I chose cult to get us started and the group decided they wanted to steal the shiny ancient obelisk described on their crew sheet. In Blades, every crew type has a bunch of Claims—valuable turf, places, or objects currently held by other factions. Since we’re just starting, I substituted the claims sheet for goals to get the ball rolling quickly. I’ll talk more about my plans to make this a bit more proactive in my post-game section.

The heist was good fun! The players decided that the Church of Ecstasy probably had the obelisk, and that it was being brought to their large temple by the Gondoliers. Meanwhile, the Keepers of the Flame infiltrate the church for cultish purposes…

Highlights include James’ leech unleashing an unknown horror from a prison to wreak havoc and destruction, Richard’s whisper unleashing an indoor hailstorm to spook off some guards and loot the organ loft, and Beth’s lurk pretending to be a wealthy donor and strongman the delivery men into moving the obelisk for her. We opening and closed with critical successes, so things were mostly in a pretty safe position thanks to great rolls and clever plans!

Downtime included pissing off the yet-unnamed rival gang, who have vowed revenge and will return at a later time. Also some training and some inventing of dangerous anti-ghost substances.

Post game accounting I’ll need to do: set up the crew is priority number one! My plan is to open a poll for the crew type, but add a custom claims sheet generated by goals that I’ll field from the same form, and just supplement any empty space with premade claims or that I’ll grab from Session -1. I’ll also start up some faction clocks (and probably keep them in this post? We’ll see!)

Reflections and places to work on: I had a fun time running! I’m a bit rusty on my blades rules and pacing, and I think I may change up my approach to the Controlled position. I also would like to find a way to speed up or make downtime asynchronous! It’s a cool system, but it takes a bit of time to learn (there’s lots of options and they all have slightly different rules) and since this game will have new players rotating in and out a lot of the time, there’s less opportunity to master that subsystem, which makes it a bit tricky. I’ll give it some thought and see how next session goes.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you can sign up for next week’s session here: 4/1 Game: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/70A0B44AFA723A2FB6-63029032-blades

Thanks for playing and reading everyone! Can’t wait for next week. Also attaching pictures what of the little hellion was doing when she kept interrupting :)

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