Character 12 - Blades In the Dark

 Welcome back, readers, to day twelve of our Character Creation Challenge! Technically, if we were going in order of what I have on my shelf, today should be Band of Blades which is a Forged in the Dark game of Legionnaires on the run from the Cinder King after a battle gone wrong. But instead we're going to skip over to Blades in the Dark, the original Forged in the Dark game because it came first so it should go first. That's just how my brain works. 

Anyway, Blades in the Dark is a game in which you play a group of criminals in a magicalpunk post apocalyptic city full of ghosts, gangs and class struggle. Eight and a half centuries ago, a magical cataclysm destroyed the sun, shattered the moon, caused the stars to fall from the skies, filled the oceans with demonic leviathans and shattered the gates between life and death. The Immortal Emperor demanded that all swear allegiance to him for his protection against the horrors that now stalked the world and now, 850ish years later, you and your crew live in Doskvol, one of the few cities remaining in the Deathlands. 

Life in Doskvol is not easy for anyone and everyone is a member of some gang or another. You play a member of a new crew, just starting off in the criminal underworld. You'll need to make alliances with or work your way past the other gangs in the city, avoid the ghosts that the Spirit Wardens are unable to put down, and deal with the biggest gang of all, the cops. Let's get started, shall we?

Character Creation

Blades in the Dark, like the other Forged in the Dark games I've seen, shows its heritage as a PbtA derivative in that every character starts with a playbook. But before you pick your individual character, you decide what kind of criminal enterprise you'll be running.

Step 0 - The Crew

This is a game of playing a small group of criminals in the city of Doskvol. Because there are different kinds of criminal enterprises, Smugglers do things that Assassins don't for example, there are different kinds of crews. In the BitD corebook, there are six different types of Crew.

• Assassins - Killers for hire. Especially difficult in Doskvol as every death sets off a magical warding bell that alerts the Spirit Wardens, the state sponsored group responsible for keeping too many ghosts from coming into existence within the city. If you're playing a group of killers for hire, what are the lines that your group won't cross? Is everyone fair game?
• Bravos - A group of tough mercenaries and thugs. But is that all that you are? A street gang with no greater aims? Are you brutal thugs, sell swords, or something more?
• Cult - The official religion of the Imperium is the Church of Ecstasy, a group that focuses on the life of the body and abhors the corrupted spirit world. Because yanno, the emperor wrecked that place so might as well make a religion of decadence and the destruction of your soul. But there are older, forgotten gods still in the world. A Cult is the instrument of one of these fallen, mad deities.
• Hawkers - Everybody needs to escape their worries sometime. Since nobody can leave the city, the lightning walls that keep the starving souls of the dead outside the city effectively trap everyone still living inside, they turn to vices for escape. Hawkers provide those vices. Drugs, booze, the magichemical dregs left when refining Leviathan blood, everybody's got something they're after and the Hawkers can provide it for a price.
• Shadows - Thieves and spies. The easiest, in my opinion, of the Crew types. Everybody's seen a heist movie in their life and this is the group to play if you want to run that kinda game.
• Smugglers - Shadows have to sell what they steal, Hawkers have to get their supply, Assassins have to get rid of bodies and everybody needs to move things or people around unseen. That's where the Smugglers come in. If you need something moved from here to there without the authorities or other crews knowing, this is who you turn to.

So of the six, I think we'll pick Cult for our Crew type. We get to decide who our deity is and there's a little list of options in the back of the book or you can just make up your own. Since this is a fantasy setting, anything goes really. You want to play the Cult of a sun god who was driven crazy when the sun was destroyed? Do it. You want to play the Cult of a giant crocodile deity who used to judge souls but now slums it in the sewers of the city? Play it. Regardless of who you pick, your deity is much diminished from their heyday, and probably a bit uh... darker than they used to be. We will be a cult of The Hand of Sorrow, a Serene and Transcendent goddess who wants us to acquire the ghosts of the prophets of the Order. 

Step 1 - Choose a Playbook

Well, with that out of the way we can get on to deciding what type of Cultist we want to play. Like I mentioned before, FitD games start with playbooks. Blades has seven in the corebook to pick from:

• Cutter - These are the hitters. Good at winning fights with violence and intimidation.
• Hound - These are the shooters. Good at tracking things down and long-distance combat.
• Leech - These are the doctors, sorta. Good at alchemy and wrecking things with sabotage.
• Lurk - These are the thieves. Good at sneaking around and breaking into places.
• Slide - These are the grifters. Good at social situations and subterfuge.
• Spider - These are the masterminds. Good at assisting teammates and dealing with other factions.
• Whisper - These are the mages, kinda. Good at dealing with ghosts and other magical stuff.

So depending on what the others in my group wanted to play, I would initially be drawn to either a Slide, a Spider or a Whisper. Because my group is entirely theoretical at this point and I therefore can't mastermind them I'll skip Spider and because I've played a Whisper before I'll go with Slide. Grifters, talkers, social situations. In a Cult. So almost a streetcorner preacher at this point in my mind. 

Step 2 - Choose a Heritage

Doskvol is a melting pot. Full of local Akorosi, wanderers from the Dagger Isles, exotically foreign Iruvians, Severosi wildmen, recently in revolt Skovlanders and possibly demonically descended Tycherosi, there's a lot of social interactions going on in the empire. There's no mechanics involved in your pick here, so just pick what sounds interesting to play. I'm picking Iruvian for my heritage. Their culture is similar to ancient Persia, Egypt or India here on earth.

Step 3 - Choose a Background

Like Heritage, Background has no real mechanical function but it provides some well background for your character. Everybody came from somewhere before they got to who they are today. Maybe you're a Former Bluecoat or a Failed Student. Our cultist is from common Iruvian stock. Their parents moved to Duskvol from Iruvia and started a family. I like the idea of immigrants running an ethnic food restaurant so for our character's background we'll write down Waiter at Family Iruvian Restaurant. From humble beginnings, large things grow.

Step 4 - Assign Four Action Dots

So the way actions work in Blades in the Dark work is pretty simple: You have 12 actions rated 1-4 (tho no higher than 2 at character creation). Each dot in the action is 1d6 you get to roll when you try that action. 1-3 is a failure, 4-5 is a limited success and 6 is a full success, based on your highest die rolled. If you have no dots in a skill, you roll 2d6 and take the lowest roll. Your playbook starts with three dots pre-assigned based on the roll your playbook fills so our Slide already has Consort 1 and Sway 2 filled in and now we get to assign 4 more dots.

It suggests that you assign 1 dot based on your Heritage, 1 based on your Background and 2 based on however you feel but doesn't really give any information on how that works in practice. So we'll wing it! Iruvian parents are all about their kids excelling so we'll put 1 dot in Study. Working in the family restaurant has made our little Slide extra social so we'll put another dot in Consort bringing it up to the maximum starting value of 2. And being a foreign cultist has made them quite good at misdirection and manipulation so we'll put the last two points into Finesse.

Step 5 - Choose a Special Ability

Each playbook has a number of Special Abilities listed. You want your Cutter to be able to punch a ghost? There's a Special Ability for that. Want your Leech to be extra great at making bombs or drugs or poisons? There's multiple Special Abilities for that! Our Slide Cultist, however, is going to be picking Like Looking Into A Mirror which lets us know every time someone is lying to us. Every time. Even the lies told in kindness. 

Step 6 - Choose a Close Friend and a Rival

Every Playbook comes with a list of contacts. You get to pick one which is a special close friend and one that's a (maybe) friendly rival. We'll choose Nyryx the sex worker as our Close Friend and Bryl the drug dealer as our rival. Nyryx comes to our Cult looking for a deeper meaning to her life and Bryl is upset that we're offering an alternative to the drugs he's selling.

Step 7 - Choose your Vice

Right, so one of the mechanics in Blades is Stress. You can spend Stress to gain advantages to rolls, make your outcome better, power Special Abilities and more. But if you get too much Stress you'll start to break a bit and experience Trauma. Too much Trauma and you're too broken to keep playing. As such, it's good to burn off your Stress during down time and you do this by indulging your Vice. There are several categories of Vice listed and looking over them I'm going to go with Luxury. We've already established that our character grew up the poor child of immigrants so to cope with the awful things they do in the name of their god, they treat themselves. Spending big money on the finer things in life brings them to some of the most expensive Vice purveyors in the city.

Step 8 - Record your Name, Alias and Look

Right, so this is the end of the character creation section. We pick a Name for our character, Carro Jeredin; an Alias if they use one, honestly I think Carro just uses his name so I'm not gonna have an Alias; and finally how they look: Carro Jeredin is a handsome, delicate young Iruvian dressed in the finest clothes he can find at second-hand stores. He's just heard the calling of the Hand of Sorrow and has left his family's restaurant, to their disappointment, to follow the call. 

And that's it! Come back tomorrow for Band of Blades and find Carro's character sheet here.