35. Death - An Illusion of Text

I just want to talk quickly about this tiny paragraph on page 33. It’s four bullet points, and it tells me so much about this game.

John has built a rhythm over the previous 33 pages. That rhythm tends to be fairly wordy, if not explictly verbose. The structure has been resounding, the kind of thing we’ve been discussing since page three or so: First, John asserts a fact, then they explain the framework (usually with evocative examples), then they offer context to why those decisions are important:

“that depends on the effect level of your actions. The GM judges the effect levels using the profiles below. [Great, Standard, or Limited]”

“Potency. Scale. Magnitude. Dominant Factors.”
”I Prowl across the courtyard and vault over the wall, hiding in the shadows […]”

“Effects aren’t simply a matter of a level […]
The reason we assess effect is to set expectations […]”

From Effect p25-27

This rhythm is intentional. It’s designed that way. John is not going to let you misunderstand the things that are at the core of play (setting effect, having goals, entaglements). But, they also want to invite you along the evocative journey. This is not, as someone described RPGs to me once, as “horny cookbooks”. There’s an emotional space between the structures of play and the text that is filled by the fiction. The fiction matters (see my earlier rant about formalistic approaches to Blades). Except, apparently, for now.

The text we get for death is incredibly functional:

There are a couple ways for a PC to die:

* If they suffer level 4 fatal harm and they don’t resist it, they die. Sometimes this is a choice a player wants to make, because they feel like it wouldn’t make sense for the character to survive or it seems right for their character to die here.

* If they need to record harm at level 3 and it’s already filled, they suffer a catastrophic consequence, which might mean sudden death (depending on the circumstances).

Death p33

Die when you tick the die boxes. Die when you suffer a catastrophic consequence (a game-term, not a fiction-term, here). This is rules. This is clause 12.a subsection b-type RPG rules shit. This is a begging for a tiktok where an exasperated DM listens to a player read out subrules until they arrive at some stupid point that makes the game worse for everyone. This isn’t how “fiction-first” gaming rules should flow. And I suspect that’s intentional, Listen, John is a great rulebook writer, we’ve seen that. If he wanted to make death an evocative part of the intertwined fiction of Duskvol he’d do that. He’s make ghosts and spirit wardens and bells and all these things. Death for other people is a rich tapestry in Blades. PC death is approached structurally. If -> consequence, then -> Die. It seems that only really cool and clever people can write evocatively about PC death. The decision to leave PC death as a flat space here is a choice and a well executed one.

Which just leaves me wanting to point out that John has done an amazing job to create a game and a city that feels like such an inevitable grind, but is actually quite kind and gentle to the Player’s Characters, at least when their inevitable death is concerned. I think this is an approach I’d love to see brought to Funnel Type design too, bringing the feeling of an oppressively unsafe environment without actually pushing it any further than the players (and their fiction) wants to take it.

Mark Experience,
Sidney Icarus