10. Making the Game Your Own
What a fascinating section to finish with. I…have said before that I don’t value explicit text from The Author as an assertion of what a text means, but in this case, John says what they believe clearly, and I agree with them entirely.
“This book is a distillation of best practices and useful elements. It’s one leg of the tripod that forms the basis for successful play: The book, your group, and the online community. ”
Blades in the Dark is, for all it’s procedures, for all its formalisation, incredibly loose. I’ve even described it before as vague. But it’s never felt unmoored. As someone who’s written a game that is exclusively a collection of prompts wrapped in procedure (Game of the Year 2024, Decaying Orbit), you would think I wouldn’t be surprised as to how true this is.
But, honestly, I think this is one of the most fundamental parts of the Blades in the Dark DNA - The Game gives you Factions, you give it People. The Game gives you Gangs, you fill them with Thugs. The Game gives you a City, you fill it with Life. The Game gives you Best Practices, but you give it Action.
This reminds me of those old Traveller Planet Generation Tables, or even modern OSR/NSR’s Spark Tables, and I think they’re functional in the same way as video game maps: Chunking and Low-Poly Models.
In video game map tech, a chunk is an area. You load in the chunk the character is engaging with, and probably the adjacent chunks. Anything that’s close to the player get’s lovely rendered in 3D, but anything outside of their immediate field of view (and close) gets turned into this low-poly representation. Stuff that’s far away might not even be loaded in (or may use a perspective trick or 2D asset like a Skybox).
This is the nature of Blades in the Dark’s settings: They’re responsive the where the PC’s “camera” swings. For all it’s talk of Prestige TV, Blades actually has a lot less respect for “truth” and continuity in its world:
“Potential fiction is everything in your head that you haven’t put into play yet. It’s a “cloud” of possible things, organized according to the current situation. [...] As the players take action and face obstacles, you grab elements from the potential fiction cloud and establish them in the ongoing scene. Once established, they can be leveraged by the players. They’re a part of the game. ”
Blades is more like 742 Evergreen Terrace. The Simpson’s famous house shifts and grows to fulfil it’s role in the story, it fits who it needs to fit and its windows look out over what they need to look over. In the same way, Duskvol’s regions grow and shrink.
I remember hearing John talk about, in one of the online “hacking blades” chats, that the maps are specifically regional. They say that a certain location is in the region, but never indicate on the map where it is. The region isn’t zoomed out, it’s low resolution, if that makes sense. Instead of having some map that is theoretically 1:1, where the players can point and say “that house right there, and see, it’s on the canals”, it is instead a list of details, but unanchored in space. It’s not a map, it’s the vibe, it’s the constitution, it’s the Mabo.
Mabo Maps offer a lot of detail in one axis, and a lot of detail in another but do not equate the two. There’s visual geographic and there’s social demographics, but we shan’t tell you how to put the two together. And I don’t think it’s strictly limited to the maps
This is, basically, how Blades approaches all of it’s storytelling: Crews are Tier 3, but not what that means. Weapons are fine, but not what that means. Your cohorts are Zealots, but not what that means. Did you further your reputation, but not what that means. Blades is so good at being so specific, but so undefined, and I truly think that’s part of it’s charm. I also think, to be kind to myself, it’s why Decaying Orbit works (and it does fucking work). Somewhere between Constraints Breed Creativity, and Evocativity Requires Specificity is John Harper’s excellent version of being really specific about that thing “just over there”.
This is why the online community, the third pillar, can exist. Because everyone has a Bazso Baz. Everyone has a Six Towers. Everyone has a Bluecoats. But they’re all so wonderfully different. Everyone is sharing stories, but you never hear the same story twice. This is the kind of world design I love, and honestly what I’ve missed most about not be highly present in the D&D community (that said, there’s a whole other post in the tank about some of D&D’s books doing this better than others, and certainly D&D’s core being weak in this specifically).
I think one of the most glorious things we could do with out Forged in the Dark hacks is to try and capture this very specific choice of what to define, and how much to connect them.
