Another RPG Bundle - Blades / Forged in the Dark

[ffutures]

Another bundle, this time VERY nasty fantasy setting which starts with the apocalypse and gets worse from there, repeated from 2020.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Blades2022

This revived December 2020 Blades in the Dark Bundle offer once again presents Blades in the Dark from One Seven Design Studio, along with many Forged in the Dark standalone spinoff games based on the Forged System Reference Document. Strongly funded in a March 2015 Kickstarter campaign, Blades is one of the most acclaimed and influential RPGs of the past decade. Blades designer John Harper (Agon, Lady Blackbird) fine-tunes the Apocalypse Engine system, adding rules for progress clocks, stress, and Devil's Bargains that ensure fast play and suspenseful choices.

Harper introduced elements of the Blades in the Dark setting in his free four-page RPG Ghost Lines (2012). When a wizard broke the Gates of Death in a cataclysm eight centuries ago, the Sun died, the world shattered, and legions of vengeful ghosts assaulted the living. The Immortal Emperor united the surviving enclaves, connecting them with electro-railroad ghost lines. On the foggy north coast of Akoros, the industrial city of Doskvol (AKA Duskwall) survived by encircling the city with lightning towers that keep the deathlands at bay. To power these crackling barriers, hunters in titanic metal ships venture onto the Void Sea to extract electroplasmic blood from demonic leviathans.

So: You're in a haunted night-shrouded Victorian-era city trapped inside a wall of lightning powered by demon blood. Now what? In this broken world you play broken people. Your crew of daring scoundrels pulls heists and settles scores to rise through the underworld hierarchy. It's a pressure-cooker, where every move you make reveals a new enemy. There are heists, chases, escapes, dangerous bargains, bloody skirmishes, deceptions, betrayals, victories, and deaths. Play to find out if your fledgling crew can rise to power despite rival gangs, powerful noble families, vengeful ghosts, the Bluecoats of the City Watch, and the siren song of your own vices.

As Ben Riggs explained in his June 2018 Geek & Sundry review, "This is the engine that makes Blades an addicting, captivating, and deeply engaging game. Players are encouraged to take risks and get criminally crazy with their character while committing serious felonies, and spend Stress to have a better chance of succeeding in, say, straight-up lying in the face of a vampire. That Stress has to be blown off by engaging in your Vice. It's almost inevitable characters are going to get 9 stress and a Trauma. But Traumas, instead of putting your character at a disadvantage and making them less fun to play, actually represent a chance to get more experience by properly roleplaying a crook who might be the best cutpurse in Duskwall, but is thoroughly broken inside."

Better still, Blades is a dream to run for the gamemaster. You ask the players leading questions ("What security features do you see?"), then build on their answers, distributing the narrative to everyone. World-building is improvisational, taking off from quicklists of Doskvol factions characterized in terse bullet points. And planning a heist, often a drag in other games, is fast and easy: Choose a detail, decide a starting position, and go, explaining all the preparation on the fly through flashbacks. The fun in Blades is distilled and pure.

"For a game published just last year," Riggs wrote in 2018, "Blades has had a stunning influence on the RPG hobby as a whole. To see one game spawn so many others in such a short period of time, one might have to go back to the bell-bottomed days of 1974 to look at the way the very first edition of Dungeons & Dragons birthed games like Tunnels & Trolls and Empire of the Petal Throne. And given that influence, Blades may be more than just a great game. It may be a glimpse into the future of our hobby."

This comprehensive revival once again gives you everything you need for a complete campaign in Doskvol – or the Weird West, a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a cyberpunk dystopia, or the fringes of space. We provide each title complete in .PDF. Like all Bundle of Holding titles, these ebooks have NO DRM (Digital Restrictions Management), and our customers are entitled to move them freely among all their devices. (By publisher request, the DriveThruRPG versions of some of these files are inobtrusively watermarked.)

Ten percent of each purchase (after gateway fees) goes to this revived Blades in the Dark revival's designated charity, the Diana Jones Award Emerging Designer Program. Each year, the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, amplifies the voices of up-and-coming game designers by featuring them during an expenses-paid visit to Gen Con. The global Emerging Designer Program focuses on creators from marginalized communities.

The total retail value of the titles in this revived offer is US$121. Customers who pay just US$12.95 get all four titles in this revival's Core Collection (retail value $44) as DRM-free ebooks, including the complete Blades in the Dark core rulebook (retail price $20), along with the Duskwall Heist Deck (retail $12), the incredibly detailed Doskvol Street Maps (retail $8), and the Alone in the Dark Solo Rules (retail $4) that let you use the Blades rulebook for your own solitary heists.

Those who pay more than the threshold (average) price, which is set at $24.95 to start, also get this revival's entire Settings Collection with five more standalone games and Forged in the Dark hacks worth an additional $77, including Band of Blades (retail $20), Scum and Villainy (retail $20), Hack the Planet (retail price $20), A Fistful of Darkness (retail $12), and Glow in the Dark (retail $5).

 

Blades/Forged in the Dark resources

• The Blades in the Dark website, its free downloads page, its long list of fan creations, and the Forged in the Dark license
• The Reddit Blades subreddit and its list of all Forged in the Dark games
• A sophisticated post-Actual Play analysis: "Band of Blades and Recompiling Code" (Paul Beakley, Indie Game Reading Club)
• In 2017-18 on his blog The Walking Mind, Rob Donoghue of Evil Hat Productions analyzed Blades to a depth few recent RPGs have enjoyed (or endured). The Walking Mind Blades category lists nearly two dozen lengthy posts, newest-to-oldest; start with his introductory May 2017 post.

This is another popular system that has some very nice cooperative elements while still giving players plenty of things to hit etc. It's not really what I want to play at present, but if you're in the mood for grimdark it's well worth a look.