My Brief Stint as a Criminal Mastermind
Content Warning: brief description of violence against children.
Just over two months ago, on a typical Monday night, at roughly 10 PM, in the speakeasy underneath Archive Coffee and Bar in Salem, Oregon, amidst reclaimed pipe shelving units lined with empty whiskey bottles and the warm glow of oil lamps, the spirit of Kotar was bound to the body of a young Iruvian boy.
The boy was one of the few remaining descendants of the spirit– an enigmatic sorcerer from before the Cataclysm - and therefore one of the few bodies equipped to accept ritual binding of a spirit to a host. With this ritual complete, Lord Penderyn finally has the ally he needs to defeat his long-time political rival, Rafello, the demon leader of the Circle of Flame’s 7 council members, giving him control of major access points for information within Doskvol.
Now, if you know nothing about the world of Blades in the Dark - John Harper's incredible game about scoundrels surviving in a haunted, industrial city by running criminal exploits – you are not alone in your ignorance; the players gathered around the table had no idea to expect this development. In fact, they weren't even looking to investigate the issue. As they waited in a sitting room of Lord Penderyn's manor for the master of the house to retire from the grisly experiment they could hear occurring upstairs, it was the curiosity of the newest member of the a crew, a pit fighter with no connection to any of these events, that finally lead to the trap door in the attic being opened. The whirring of generators powered by spectres, the boy strapped to the table, the grizzly tools and instruments on trays surrounding the heinous act; the players looked in shock as I described to them the cries of the young boy their characters had smuggled in to the city 7 sessions earlier.
How could this have happened? With direct involvement in the boy's fate on more than one occasion, how could the players have missed the signs of his doom, or, even worse, ignored them? Settling into a tense tambor of speech, I expounded on the grim fate brought upon this child by a man with only his own political aspirations in mind; I watched as realization tightened their faces, months of plot lines coming to fruition in the steadiness of their breathing and the stillness of their movements.
Now, before I get much farther, let me articulate something:
~I'm a big believer in putting all the fiction on the table in a game~
The fundamental uniqueness of RPGs as a medium of art should not be tied up in the cleverness of the facilitator; we are not LARPing one of Plato's dialogues, the Game Master as Socrates deftly setting aside the best blows of their fellow elocutors and rebutting with the resounding wit of a story they had created without the players in the first place. The medium functions on a measure of collaboration, and at its base, that collaboration should start with the Game Master presenting their players with what is happening or will happen, and allowing the players room to organically respond before setting costs, limitations, and consequences to their actions. To this end, a Game Master does well to place all the clues of the narratives happening off-screen in front of the players for easy access, ensuring that the challenge of the game is not finding these clues but instead in their interpretation.
It is this spirit of game play that I set out to explore with Blades. At first, it was just an excuse to run a really interesting system in a fun - if a bit edgy - setting that would make for great sessions at my bi- monthly meet-up. Built around isolated scores run by a crew of smugglers in the supernatural, victorian-era city of Doskval, the game would act as a reprieve from the consistent stream of one-off scenarios for the 5th edition of the “the world's greatest role playing game” run by the table coordinators to that point (including myself).
At the initial gathering to create the crew of characters, however, I got greedy; I saw all of the narrative connections that were forming - all the networking with fictional factions and the scouting of unreal landscapes that make the game the sprawling masterpiece it is - and I felt that there could be more.
~There could be a bigger story.~
The base idea was simple: because the game assumes that the player characters are united as a crew, with every decision in game, with ever score run and coin snagged, with every knife slipped through ribs of the civilians and every bomb that ripped through buildings of the city, the macro-narrative would change. Allies would be put in danger, rival gangs would seek recompense for misdeeds or unsettled scores, and the movers and shakers would take notice of - and action about - the player characters' involvement in politics and agendas. I had grand visions of the crew – to be named at their first official gathering as Le Ghouls – growing in size as more and more players in and around the real life meet-up heard about the exploits of the gang’s members; of seeing new faces join the ranks of criminals, as this small gang attracted interested young bloods to be jumped in for their cut of the spoils that come with crime.
This presented our first challenge: how to manage a large number of players interested in the game. My local table caps at 5, making a large pool of interested players difficult if more than the maximum number of people wanted a seat per week; if the idea was to accommodate a growing player base, I would have to ensure that new players got time at the table, and that we were seeing returning characters on a fairly even basis, allowing for everyone to have a fair shot at observing and influencing the ongoing narrative.
At the time, the solution I came up with seemed elegant: institute a precedence and recency system – adapted from the model of student congressional debate – to keep track of how many times any given player had sat at the table, and how recently. In practice, preferring table bids from players who played less often than others meant that new characters would be introduced much like a television show: some “episodes” we would follow whole new storylines made personal by the character's motives. These angles, by virtue of affiliation with Le Ghouls, would impact the parts of the setting the crew interacted with, and when players with higher precedence sat at the table again those storylines would weave with others for more linking narrative beats, ensuring fresh relationships and motivations were being developed as members of a growing gang learned to meet and cooperate with one another.
This scheme proved a double-edge sword in practice; complicating the process was the uncertainty of never knowing who would be sitting at my table every other week. It added a challenge to the game: if I used my time to catch up players who were gone, how could I communicate this changing fictional landscape when players were not guaranteed a return spot at a table with limited seating?
~My answer: let the players do it~
I created a whole secret channel on our local meet-up's Discord server to be used for communication between players; during sessions, I named the player characters not present who knew the information current characters needed to follow up on plot threads; I encouraged the writing of quick session summaries to be passed between players, justifying characters knowing important information they were not there to catch first hand. I wanted it to feel like the gang was always meeting up in their lair off-screen, swapping secrets that they learned on their scores to keep them ahead of the game. New opportunities for more lucrative scores would be made, and the plots and schemes of the crew's foes would be made plain, allowing for decisive action to be taken. With enough momentum from every faction's involvement, I could tie the players in knots as they raced to acquire more and more power and relevance in a city unforgiving of ambition from those so low on the social ladder. It would be a grand statement about just what this world valued, and an even grander gaming experience for it. I proselytized to anyone who would listen about the ingenious way that this idea would get the players involved, incentivizing them to communicate between event dates, establishing a community – or, more accurate to my unconscious desire, a fan base – around this game. I was inundated with the merits of this score that I was running on my players.
~It was not until too late that I saw this for the cleverness that it was.~
In practice, the Discord channel wasn't used, session notes were not swapped, knowledgeable players were not consulted. The level of commitment I was asking for from players was a lot when considering a game system and setting they were only just becoming familiar with at an event space where players dropped in expecting simple-to-play, simple-to-understand games. At first, my response was simple resentment; I was frustrated that no one wanted to take the extra steps needed to completely interact with the game. With my sprawling city politics, faction agendas, and spider webs of plot threads that shook with each fly that touched a strand, I was not collaborating with my players' expectations; I was looking for a way to flex my cleverness and have the players' hard work reveal it, a trait I damn in other Dungeon Masters. Just over half-way through my plan of a 10 session first season, I felt that this game had already seen its potential wasted by an overeager Game Master more interested in his reputation than in mitigating the confusing meta-narrative of an already detail-rich fictional environment. With this in mind, I set out to end my grand experiment with a bang: the complete resolution of every major plot thread the characters had ignored.
~The amazing thing of all of this? It all worked out in the end.~
When I posted the sign up board for the final session of the season for this Blades campaign, I was surprised that the players determined by my precedence and recency for the table were a varied lot in their number of in-game appearances. Several members had only played in the first few sessions, one in the middle sessions, one throughout the entire season, and the last having made a singular appearance in a session almost completely inconsequential to the rest of the campaign. Before the game, the players introduced or re-acquainted themselves, and immediately began preparing themselves for the onslaught I had only hinted at in the promo posts and Discord drops by swapping any and all information they had concerning what would likely happen. I was taken aback as they described with glee the many heists and beatdowns they had been apart of, and languished as they heard of brawls and riots they had missed. There was an electricity in the air as they game started, with every player ready to find out what was going to happen to their beloved game of thieves and criminals.
The answer? I destroyed it. I took from them their lair -a barge floating in the canals under the city -, now a smoldering pile of ash from the firebombs of a rival gang; I took their protection afforded them by a more powerful gang for their ambivalence to personal requests from its leader; and I took their pride, as they sunk away to find somewhere quiet to lay low. It was a satisfying way to end a season of a grim game centered on the consequences of living as a criminal.
~And yet, something wasn't right... or, rather, wrong.~
I think, by the players hands, the game somehow turned out okay; I loved watching the characters develop in their spotlight moments. The major plot points moved in such dynamic ways based on character actions in scores, leaving intricately woven connections between every part of the city. In the end, a story was told, and a good enough story that I am apprehensive to step away from it.
Walking away from the game was tough. As we left the bar, observing everyone swap their favorite moments of the game through the months, catching up on life events and just generally being friendly reminded me just what the games run at Nerd Night every other Monday actually accomplishes: a group of people meeting and getting to know each other better by casual comments about what's been happening in their lives between game sessions and the decisions made at table in equal measures. They not only reveled in the fiction, but also celebrated the people the had an opportunity to share it with; in short, they were a community - not a fan base - and I could not have felt happier about how this had come to end.
~Now, I must ask myself: What's next?~
My biggest concern moving forward is how I intend to internalize these lessons in future gaming endeavors. To this end, I want to follow a very similar model of gameplay – a large pool of players, a system of selection around table bids that prioritizes new players first but recognizes returning characters on fairly equitable basis, and an ongoing narrative impacted by the choices made by characters in the fiction. The major change that needs to occur is how information is exchanged between people about what has been happening at table. I have a few ideas on how to do this, which I hope to express when I call the next personal gathering of Nerd Night players to determine what next I run. I also hope to be more transparent about the preparations and procedures I use to bring games to the table, a habit I hope this inaugural post will help establish.
Ultimately, I think event spaces like Nerd Night can be amazing opportunities not just to get people gaming, but also to showcase the many incredible things these games can do as art without limiting play experience to a sanctioned adventure module or one shot written by a Dungeon Master. I've been committed to using my table to explore these opportunities, and I encourage you to share your play experience with me, here or at a future Nerd Night.
