Blades in the Dark... 2e?
Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts by John Harper is a new expansion for Blades in the Dark. It’s not marketed as a second edition of Blades; instead they call it
a treasure trove of lore, setting material, and alternative mechanics I’ve developed over the years for use in Blades campaigns.
Honestly I didn’t pay the lore and setting material much attention. I’ve never run or played a game in Doskvol, and that’s unlikely to change in the immediate future. But the “alternative mechanics”? I’m as excited about these as I have been by any RPG I’ve read in about a year and a half.
If you haven’t read or played Blades, I don’t think you’ll find much interesting here. If you have: everything that snagged in my Blades campaign looks to be fixed here. I strongly recommend check it out. There’s some small jank that I assume will get fixed (the PDF chapter bookmarks don’t work, at least in my reader; there’s a couple TODOs for links and such, things like that), but it’s well worth the price.
Harm
First up: all level one harm is now temporary[1]. Now the GM can hand out low-level harms without kicking players over to the (often punishing) healing system. Harms still stack up and escalate as in the base game, but you have “infinite” level 1 harm slots. Level 1 harms are only upgraded once you receive the same harm twice. Getting “bruised” when you have “tired” just adds “bruised”, but getting “tired” a second time might upgrade your level 1 “tired” to a level 2 “exhausted”.
Also, there aren’t fixed penalties for harm anymore. Instead there’s a system where the GM can invoke harm, FATE-style, to introduce a consequence or complication. Players get XP if they accept or can spend stress to push through their pain. I like this because it’s less punishing, and I forgot to apply Harm penalties so often in Blades.
As far as I can tell, the old level 3 harm state (“you must spend stress to act at all”) is removed entirely. Removing it is great, because “you can’t play” is a pretty bad failure state for an RPG.
Trauma
The updates to trauma seem fairly minor; players can explicitly invoke trauma for consequences and XP instead of having an end-of-session XP trigger for it.
Equipment
There are now only two Load levels: Discreet and Conspicuous. It wasn’t always clear how to distinguish “light”, “normal”, and “heavy” load; I think “are you discreet or conspicuous?” is a much clearer choice. There’s also some additional rules tweaks and clarifications around heavy items, picking up new things on the score, and encumberance.
Downtime
The new downtime system is diceless, to remove the possibility of turns with poor rolls. This isn’t really something that ever bothered me as a GM or player, but the impetus makes sense to me.
The (complicated) Entanglements table is removed in favor of a list the GM chooses from when your Heat is high enough. I kinda like rolling Entanglements, so I may keep the old system instead.
Indulging your Vice now costs 1 coin and always clears your Stress. If you had more than 6, you overindulge. It also doesn’t cost a downtime activity (unless you roll the overindulgence which takes away an activity).
Healing now grants Tier+1 ticks to the healing clock. Level 0 crews will still have a long way to go to grind through injuries. However, there are new rules for hiring a physician or going to a hospital (which clears all injuries). I’m still not entirely sold on the healing clock, but removing the healing roll and adding a “wipe the slate clean” option goes a long way to fixing my problems with Blades’ healing.
Training is now how you spend XP rather than another way to gain it. That’s neat, I don’t feel strongly about it.
There’s now a side hustle downtime activity which generates 1 Coin or advances a long-term project. Previously Train was the sort of default, “I have no better ideas” option. Working a side job is more thematically and mechanically appropriate.
Action Threat Roll
The game’s core mechanic has been reframed from how Actions are resolved to how Threats are resolved. Scoundrels are assumed to succeed, but negative consequences may come to pass. “Position” has been reworked; “effect” remains but is not emphasized. Instead the GM lays out the threat, the player rolls, and then the result works much the same as in base Blades. A 6 avoids the threat, a 4/5 reduces it, and a 1-3 is the full threat.
If there’s more than one relevant threat, the player gets a bonus die per extra threat. Then they assign dice from their pool to each threat as they wish. This is sort of like a Devil’s Bargain in base Blades, but it’s even more like Otherkind Dice. I love that, because Otherkind Dice usually requires specific crafted experiences. The Threat Roll gives us a more improvisational approach to that mechanical framework.
“Controlled” situations now don’t call for a roll at all, because there’s no Threat. Awesome. “Desperate” situations treat a 4/5 the same as 1-3: full consequence. The only way to avoid a consequence in a Desperate situation is to roll a 6.
The game does mention that “failure” is an acceptable threat in some situations. It’s not that the scoundrels always succeed, but that we start with the assumption they do and only introduce failure if appropriate.
Push Yourself and Resistance
Pushing yourself before a roll to get more dice is cut entirely. Instead it’s been unified with the Resistance roll. After a roll is made, you can Push Yourself for more effect or to reduce a consequence level by one (a 1-3 becomes a 4/5; a 4/5 becomes a 6). You pick the appropriate Attribute (Insight, Prowess, Resolve) and roll its pool. Then you take stress like a normal Blades roll:
| Result | Stress |
|---|---|
| 1-3 | 3 |
| 4/5 | 2 |
| 6 | 1 |
| Crit | 0 |
No more “6 minus the highest die”, which was always a little clunky and made it easy to both avoid stress entirely or take a huge chunk of it.
Takeaways
None of these changes are drastic. Some are pretty similar to ideas floating around the Forged in the Dark sphere already. Taken together, though, I feel like this is a major streamlining of Blades towards its core ethos. Players take on the role of competent scoundrels in risky, dangerous situations and consequences ensue. I’m really excited to try them!
Also… I’m very curious to see how this impacts other games playing in the post-Apocalypse-World pond. The Threat Roll is sort of folding the already Blades-inspired 2400 back into storygame land. I hope to see creative designers take these tweaks and make all sorts of new Forged in the Dark games with them.
This is a common feature of houserules and hacks; it was maybe even suggested in the base game? ↩︎