This week I got the opportunity to take a look at another project on Kickstarter, Blades in the Dark, an RPG where the players take the roles of a team of thieves and scoundrels, looking to make their crew the most powerful. All of this takes place in the port-city of Duskwall, a fantasy industrialized city (think printing presses and early electric devices) where spirit essences and demon blood are highly valuable commodities.
It’s a unique world, rich with competitive crews and nuanced lore, all of which is held together by a deceptively simple system. While quick to learn, the system has enough nuance to allow for even the most intricate of capers, and that’s what this game is all about. While there are mechanics for social interactions and battles, the game is designed around “operations,” jobs intended to either raise your crew’s reputation or lower a competitor’s. This gives the game a unique action-and-adventure feel where players can lose themselves in the adrenaline of a mission then pull back and make big-picture tactical decisions about the future of the crew.
In every aspect of this game, it feels tailor-made. If you’re interested in a dark and gritty world of thieves, spies, and the occult, this is your kind of game. Having beaten their goal by so much that I can’t find an adequately colorful way to put it, Blades in the Dark comes with piles of additional content including a novel, addition faction, full-detail maps, and way, way more.
Act quickly: the Kickstarter has less than a day remaining, and can be found here.
So…”The Gentleman Bastards RPG”? Please say yes.
That’s definitely a fair way to put it. One direction that a “Blades in the Dark” game could possibly go.