Listen to this episode here.
In Blades in the Dark, you play as criminals in Doskvol a haunted city where the ghosts are such a problem that they built giant lightning barriers around the whole city to keep them out. That sentence alone already makes me want to get the game to the table, and we haven’t even gotten to the rules of Blades in the Dark yet.
That’s the conversation I wanted to take a crack at today: rules are important, they can radically shape play, but the fiction a game brings is just as important. Doskvol’s lightning barriers mean you can’t just run away into the wilderness after you’ve committed some crimes, and that’s just as important for ratcheting up the tension and consequences of your campaign as the mechanic of devil’s bargains...
Further Reading
Blades in the Dark by John Harper
Mythic Bastionland by Chris McDowall
Apocalypse World 3e/Burned Over by Meguey & Vincent Baker
Wanderhome by Jay Dragon
Vincent Baker on How Apocalypse World Is Structured (like an onion)
In Praise of Legwork by Sam Sorensen
1d20 Diegetic Rules, 1d20 Hypo-Diegetic Rules by Sam Sorensen
The Rule Book: The Building Blocks of Games by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola
Socials
Nova on Bluesky. Nova’s blog, Playful Void.
The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com
Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer.
Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!
Credits
Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.
This episode was edited by Em Acosta.
Transcript
Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop mechanic and cage it within a tight, fenced off area. My name is Sam Dunnewold and my co-host today is Nova, aka Idle Cartulary. Nova is back! She's an RPG critic and a blogger with at least one foot firmly in the Elf game at OSR adjacent worlds. A few of her posts from last year are up for the blogs this year. Check out the blogs. The DIY Fan Awards show for the RPG blogosphere and Nova is someone I talk to a lot about games and how they work. I like our conversations, and because Nova's got a foot in both the OSR world and the story games world, I thought she'd be a good fit for today's episode. Today we are talking about Blades in the Dark and DOS volts. Lightning barriers in Blades in the Dark. You play as criminals in Doskvol haunted city, where ghosts are such a problem that they built giant electric fences like huge, humongous lightning barriers around the whole city to keep all the ghosts out.
Sam: And these barriers are powered by demon blood as hunted by titanic whaling ships seeking leviathans. Isn't that sick as hell? There's already so much in just those first few sentences to get me started playing at the table with Blades in the Dark. This show in particular, spends a lot of time talking about rules, and rules are super important. They can radically shape what you do at the table, but the fiction a game brings is just as important, even when it's completely disconnected from the rules. Doskvols. Lightning barriers mean you can't just run away into the wilderness after you've committed some crimes, and that's just as important for ratcheting up the tension and consequences of being criminals and your campaign as the mechanics of like, devil's bargains or dice pools or whatever else. Blades in the Dark is using. Thanks to everyone who supports Dice Explorer on Patreon. You're now paying for me to hire a fan favorite co-host Em Acosta to edit the show sometimes, and that really just means so much to me and it really helps me make more of the show.
Sam: So thank you so much for supporting the show on Patreon. And here today is Nova with those wolves lighting barriers from Blades in the Dark. Nova, welcome back to Dice Exploder.
Nova: Thank you very much for having me.
Sam: What are we talking about today? We're talking about Blades in the Dark.
Nova:Yeah, we're talking about Blades in the Dark. We're talking specifically about the lightning barrier. Just to recap, dustbowl is a city in a world full of murderous ghosts, and there is a giant lightning barrier that is erected around the city to keep these ghosts out. That lightning barrier is powered by the blood of magical psychic whales. And so there are whaling ships that go out to collect their blood. And this powers the lightning barrier. And the fictional impact of this lightning barrier is that you as player characters, never leave dustbowl. However, that is entirely an an in fiction rule there. Theoretically you could break down the lightning barrier or exit the lightning barrier. That is something we'll talk about.
Sam: Yeah. Great.
Sam: So the thing that we're talking about today is the lightning barriers. Is this a mechanic? I want to get to that question also. But to start with, I want to talk about the difference between I've been reading the rule book by Markus Mottola and Jocko Penrose, which is.
Nova:Yeah, that's an exceptional book, isn't it?
Sam: Yeah, it's really interesting. And like the basic thesis, it's all about rules in games. And the basic thesis is there's five different kinds of rules, and they are formal rules which are like what you think of when you think of game rules. Right? It's like Pascoe and Monopoly collect $200, right? There's internal rules, which are rules you set for yourself. So, like, maybe you're playing with your kid and you're like, okay, well, I'm gonna, like, handicap myself without telling them so that it's a fair game, right? Yeah. Social rules, which are like, what's a good social rule example?
Nova:Think of social rules as like gamesmanship or Like sportsmanship.
Sam: Yeah yeah, yeah. Don't don't like, cuss your friends out. Right? Like.
Nova:Exactly.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. External regulation. Which is like, you know, referees making calls, which is it's different. It's, you know, interested in, like the enforcement of these various rules and then material rules which are like laws of physics. Right. And RPGs, I think, interact with this structure of rules really interestingly because there's there's also like levels of where does the rule exist in the fiction in a role playing game, you've got formal rules really clearly, right. Like we have in place in the dark, we've got the position and effect conversation, we've got the idea of the action role, yada yada, yada, all that stuff.
Nova:And that's really what we've more traditionally like discussed on Dice Exploiter.
Sam: Yeah, well we'll get to that in a second. But but then you also have there's this other article that I'll link to from Sam Sorensen talking about diegetic and hypo diegetic rules. So diegetic rules are stuff like when someone dies in the world of Blades in the Dark, their ghost leaves their body and like, slowly goes crazy and starts eating people, right?
Nova:Yeah.
Nova:So this is the physics of the role playing game role.
Sam: 100%. Whereas the hypo diegetic rules are things like, okay, well, if you if you hide someone's body in your basement and the cops find out they're going to come arrest you. And so it's like laws created by people in the fiction, right?
Nova:Yeah. Ones that you can choose to follow or you can choose not to follow as player characters.
Sam: And the existence of these lightning barriers falls somewhere between those diegetic rules and hyper diegetic rules, I feel like.
Nova:So I would I would say that if they were a hyper diegetic rule, it would be more of a context of I remember there was this movie, I can't remember the name of the movie. There was a movie where it was set in a village with a wall and no one was to leave the village. And that was kind of like the premise between this movie. it was a Night Shyamalan movie.
Sam: Called The Village.
Nova: The village. There you go. I think that if Dusk Fell had a wall like that and it was taboo to leave the village, that would put it solidly in hyper diegetic rules.
Nova: But because, that you physically are prevented from leaving this lightning barrier. And we'll probably get into this at a different stage. But like, in The Book of Blades in the Dark, I am pretty certain there are no ways to get outside in the book included in the Book of Blades in the Dark, and obviously this is a role playing game, but but you're kind of trapped, and that's the intent.
Sam: Yeah, there exist the Death Lands, scavengers who are like people, often like conscripts who are like sent out into the death lands, beyond the lightning barriers to Ghostbuster their way to like something salvageable to bring back home. You know, that kind of stuff.
Nova: And the Whalers, obviously.
Sam: Obviously. Yeah. All of this is to say, like one bunch of theory to just throw out there, just to say, like, this isn't a rule where you're rolling dice, right? Like, this is a piece of the fiction. And like, I think kind of the thesis, the reason I wanted to do this episode in the first place is to talk about how much more important, in a lot of ways, that kind of quote unquote rule or mechanic is to role playing games relative to just like rolling dice and skill checks and all that kind of garbage.
Sam: Right?
Nova: Yeah. Like, I kind of feel like the term that I kind of feel like I don't love the diegetic versus hyper diegetic kind of academic terms, particularly because I feel they kind of obfuscate what it's doing for us and really what this is kind of like, it's good worldbuilding. It's kind of very fruitful world building of fruitful fiction for our role playing games that have lots of implications for how we play in a way that our our actual kind of dice rolling mechanics and things like that have lots of implications for how we play.
Sam: Absolutely. So I want to start with just the conversation of like, why am I calling this a mechanic? Because like when I started Dice Exploder, right away, I was having this conversation being like, everything's a mechanic. You know, it's still a meme in the Dice Exploder discord to say cover art is a mechanic, right? And I really liked this framing because it it opened up a conversation that I felt like wasn't being had enough. And I still think in a lot of ways isn't being had enough, which is like to get into the like system matters versus system doesn't matter debate.
Sam: Right? It's like the thing that felt important to me about that conversation was everything matters to your game. Like which dice you are ruling does matter, but also like what is the art look like on the cover? Changes people's perceptions as they are sitting down at the table to play the game. And like those vibes are then going to get incorporated into their role playing. And all of that matters when you sit down to play a game.
Nova: Yeah, I think that's a really good way of putting it. So like, yeah, system does matter, but it is one ingredient in like a pretty complex recipe that includes your fiction, the style of your writing, your art, your layout, your cover, all of these other things that are probably equal contributors to like what matters as the system or the kind of various particular, the way you roll the dice and the kind of the thing that you do when this happens.
Sam: Yeah. And but I recognize I think you maybe feel this way from having had conversations with you that like when I say that, when I say cover art is also a mechanic, I'm like doing a flattening, right? Like I am saying, everything is system.
Sam: And that makes it then harder to have the conversation that like we want to have today about like, okay, cool. But let's talk about the ways in which the fiction that you are coming to the table with does matter.
Nova: Yes. Yeah. I do think it flattens things out. And that is useful for some purposes. It's useful to kind of draw attention to things that aren't. This is a 2D system, like you think of the way that powered by the apocalypse games kind of entered into the common vernacular are effectively this is a 2D six game in the same way that back in the 2000 d20 games became a thing. And like if you you read anything by Vincent or McGee, they don't feel like the 2D six, is really an important or core part of what makes Apocalypse World tick. So like in that flattening is helpful for the purposes of drawing attention to a lot of things, but also it takes a very different skill to kind of think about the probabilities involved in implementing, you know, a powered by the apocalypse dice mechanic into your game.
Nova: Sure. Then it takes to put together like to, art design a product or to design a meaningful fiction or whatever.
Sam: Yeah. Like, I would argue that, rolling two d6 instead of d20 has overall had a not big impact on the way people play games. Like if Apocalypse World used a d20, like the game would look a little different, but also like the conversations around design would be pretty similar right now. Whereas the two words psychic maelstrom fucking blew things up, you know?
Nova: Yes, exactly. Yeah. And just like the potential in that fiction. Yeah, makes a huge difference. And like, like, I know for me was the first game that I read after primarily being in a traditional games. Like I picked up Apocalypse World in the year after it was released, and things like the psychic maelstrom blew my mind. Things like moves blew my mind. That was stuff that was completely different in terms of the fiction, inviting you to expand on the world and providing some hard barriers and some invitations that I'd never seen before.
Sam: Yeah. So let's get into the details here with like, lightning barriers specifically. And what, like this piece of fiction is doing for your table when you sit down to play Blades in the Dark. The first thing that it does is it's just like, fucking cool, right? Like, I feel like we kind of covered this in the introduction, but like, when I give you the pitch. Yeah, yeah. It's a haunted city infested with ghosts, with a lightning fence to keep them all out. That's powered by demon blood. You're just like, yeah, that fucking rules. Let's do that. Yeah. but then I step down from that, like, the big reason this exists, I think. And is that like dustbowl? As a city is designed to be a city to do crime in. Right. Like the same way that like the it's always nighttime because the sun has been exploded. That exists because like you can do crimes at night more. Right. And that's fine. And in the same way, like the lightning barriers exist to keep you in the city, to make it so you can't just go run away from your crimes and like, pop over to the next city over, or pop out into the like some farmhouse and like lay low.
Sam: You have to sit with the consequences of what you're doing, or you have to go outside and get eaten by ghosts. Right? Like, that's that's what the lightning barriers are for. Fundamentally.
Nova: Yes. So it basically turns the city of dusk well into a pressure cooker. and so in a lot of ways, very easy to look at. Blaze in the dark as a game about crime and about doing heists. And that's a reasonable take on the game. But I think that actually it's more of a game about being trapped with the consequences of your actions. It's about the butterfly effect of your actions and how that happens. When you're in a small echo chamber you can't step outside of. Do you think that the fact that it's kind of mis analyzed, in my opinion, or at least the emphasis lands on it's a heist game? underestimates how much of it is about that kind of trapped in a toxic space. You look at, like, a lot of the mechanics that surround the basic mechanic. They're they're all about your harm.
Nova: How you're suffering, what the consequences of actions, who you're angering, who you've pissed off.
Sam: Going to jail. Heat.
Nova: Exactly right. So, so, like, all of those things are about the consequences of your actions and and interpreting how they impact you. So I feel like Blades in the Dark is more about that than the heist. The heists are just the catalyst. And like to be clear, it's really fun.
Sam: And they're the pitch, right? Like, this is why people talk about them is because, like, you don't tell people like you wanna come in and live with the consequences of your actions, kid.
Nova: Yes, exactly.
Sam: But, yeah. So, so, like, the lightning barrier exists in support of all of that, I think. Like, and also because it's fucking cool.
Nova: And that's why we kind of want to talk about it as like a mechanic. Right? Because I cannot think of a better way to handle this setup. Yeah. Doing it in a more traditionally mechanical way.
Nova: Right. Like like I think that the best solution in a role playing game context is using the fiction to do this is the lightning barrier or something similar. And that's why kind of like is a mechanic. I'm, you know, doing air quotes here because because there's no other way to do this. And so sometimes in your game design you're going to be faced with challenges where your solution must be fiction.
Sam: Yeah. I've actually an example here from a game that I'm kickstarting later this year. I'm making this game called Band-Aids and bullet holes. It's like a John Wick simulator. And the way I had the game set up was like, someone decides they're John Wick now, and they, like, come into a bar and they say, who in the bar they want something from? And then someone else picks up John Wick's target. And so now you're playing as the bartender, and I'm playing as John Wick, and I come to you and I'm like, who killed my dog? Give me their address.
Sam: And like, all that is working great. That's barely rules, right? People just kind of intuitively get that when you tell them they're doing John Wick. But you can like formalize the procedures for like setting up that thing. And the problem I was running into was then Nova, who has picked up the bartender, sort of intuitively understands, well, I can't just give John Wick the address because that's not how these movies work, right? Like, I have to be like, well, no, you have to beat it out of me. You have to ask me for something in return. And so I tried so many ways to, like, make people do this, right. Like I tried saying like, hey, the rule is you must ask for something in return. That's the mechanic. And people wanted to follow the rule but just didn't know how to. They couldn't figure out, like, what am I supposed to offer in return? It's just you need a certain level of improv skill in order to come up with something.
Sam: Finally, what I did was I was like, okay, it's John Wick. There's some sort of like, mysterious council that, like, sets all the, like, laws of the Assassins Guild and so forth. So one of those laws is just, you know, helping each other kill each other. So now when I show up as John Wick and I'm like, who killed my dog? And what is their address? You're like, well, I can't help you because then the council come kick my ass. And then I'm like, well, I'll kick your ass right now. And we've got a fucking scene going by. By creating the law in the fiction, you completely solve the problem.
Nova: If there's some necessary kind of improvisation fodder that that you need as a player, as a referee, whatever, to kind of springboard off and kind of what you're talking about there is that by making this rule a fictional construct, you're giving people something to springboard off because we're expected to improvise the fiction in role playing games, largely.
Nova: We're not, as expected, to improvise mechanical things. And so there you're setting an in-game rule, like a hypo diegetic rule to use the terms you are using before to use that springboard, springboard and like Doskvol in general, including the lightning barrier. If you haven't read the Blades in the Dark book is, I would say, one third like 30%. The rules and the other 60% of the book is tables of things. You might encounter events. There's a huge percentage of this book that is just lists of factions and the things they want, and the people in them. There are lists of locations, there are institutions and how they interact with each other. Most of Blades in the Dark. And I think what makes it unique and special is actually all of those narrative peaks. the same. The same guy who wrote about who kind of, I think coined the words hypo diegetic. Sam Sorensen also wrote about this as something called legwork. Most of Blades in the Dark as a book is dustbowl legwork, and that legwork is that improvisational fodder that you can springboard off to take the next step and to ensure what the impact of your actions will be, or how this person will respond to you.
Nova: And it's a really excellent model, in my opinion, for how to build legwork in a way that is really impactful for play.
Sam: Yeah, well, I think it's important to like, check in on the In Praise of Legwork is Sam Sorensen's original piece on this, and I find what you're saying especially interesting because my recollection of that piece is that he shits on Blades in the Dark in it for not doing enough legwork that, like a lot of the same people who are, like, really loving legwork and like most championing legwork are also like, what are you doing with this fucking, like, flashback stuff in Blades in the Dark? What are you doing with this ability to like, oh, we know the lightning barriers exist, but like, okay, how do they work? Exactly? Like, they want all that legwork, like, dialed all the way down where I find blades to be at this, like, really perfect spot for me personally of, like, having done all this legwork that I can then riff on, but then I can pick up that stuff and fill in the gaps.
Sam: You know, I can really, like, run with it on my own or like, turn over the table, okay? We're like facing down a lightning barrier and you're trying to blow it up. How do you think it works? Like what? What do we want to do with it here? You know, there's clearly a matter of taste in like, how much legwork is the right amount of legwork to bring to the table?
Nova: I think there's also a matter of taste or preference in terms of what legwork means. And I think that is to do with how you improvise a scene. so I think the example that Sam focuses on in that article, in Praise of Legwork, is City State of the Invincible Overlord, which I believe is a Judges Guild module from the 80s. And a lot of the legwork. There is stat blocks for every character treasure in every room where all the traps are. Those are the things. And a lot of that legwork that Sam refers to in the original article and praises is mechanical legwork, which I haven't played with Sam, but that gives me the strong impression that he wants to go from scratch with every character and invent their goals and their relationships.
Nova: But he doesn't want to have to wing the mechanics ever. Whereas from my perspective, I prefer the legwork in Duval because I do not have much trouble winging the mechanics. Right? Like, even like if we're playing Blades in the Dark proper, I think the system is really well set up for me to be able to improvise. basically any action that would be governed by the mechanics.
Sam: NPCs don't even have stats in Blades in the Dark, right?
Nova: Yes, precisely. and I'm familiar enough with D&D alikes that, you know, I can I can improvise, hit dice and AC and all those kind of things. and so I don't feel I need the support there, but I do have more trouble off the cuff coming up with a set of relationships that feels meaningful or is deeper. and that's what I want out of my legwork. And I think that is a, a divergence in kind of preference for what you like improvising and what you find intuitive to improvise. That is probably something that is worth acknowledging and recognizing that you really have to decide, well, I suppose you could design for both audiences.
Nova: That would be a lot of work. But but like, you probably need to think about what your audience is. Who's going to be refereeing this, who's going to be playing this when it comes to what kind of legwork you want to do?
Sam: Yeah, I want to I want to take that thought, and I want to come back to the like purposes of lightning barriers we were talking about earlier. We kind of got this like twofold purpose. And one is the like almost mechanical purpose of like keeping people in dust. Well, I think that's really interesting. I think like a lesson you can take as a designer from this episode and from Blades in the Dark is like fictional solutions to problems probably go over really well, but the other I want to spend more time talking about the other purpose of just like being really fucking cool when I'm sitting down to play a game. This is like especially true with modules, right? For adventure modules or any kind of this, this fiction in any kind of game, not just in sort of traditional like NSR style modules, but even in story games, like what I'm really looking for when I sit down to the table to play is cool as shit ideas I would not have been able to come up with on my own at home, or that would have taken me forever to come up with on my own.
Sam: Right? Some sort of cool thing to start from that I can riff on, whether that's in prep or at the table. And like, dusk is like full of this shit, right? But like Psychic Maelstrom, those two words are like a classic example of this. Right? And I was talking in my interview with the bakers about Apocalypse World third edition, how much I really love Hard Zones, this new addition that they've had to the game where they're basically like this hard zone is the frozen tundra. So we know it's like a frozen wastes and there's like ten locations that are each just one sentence long of like sword town, like an abandoned mining town, like above, like mines that who knows what.
Nova: Like, yeah, the little kind of legwork capsules in a way.
Sam: Totally. Exactly. and the other big example of this I think that has really gotten into people's heads recently is Mythic Bastionland, which is just entirely this shit. 72 myths that you could encounter in this Arthurian world, or 72 knights or sages that you might like run across.
Sam: Another great example, I think, is Wanderhome. Wanderhome is just almost entirely like lists of locations and character traits that you might pull from when you sit down to play. And all of these examples that I'm giving all saw games that contain rules and unique rules that are really like situated to highlight their particular games, like the system associated with these. The rules system does matter to the play of these games, but I really want to just underline how much weight hard zones and myths and lightning barriers are doing when you sit down at the table.
Nova: Yeah, I think that, like people who know me know that I have a deep interest in kind of D&D likes in the OSR. So for me, I naturally have an inclination to just adoring games where so much weight is put on the diegetic and I guess hyper diegetic components like Mythic Bastionland. And I think Mythic Bastionland is a really great example of. I don't think Mythic Bastionland is an OSR game. I think that obviously it has roots there.
Nova: Chris McDowell authored this game. It's based on Into the odd, which is very explicitly based on kind of zero edition of D&D. However, I don't think it is. It just has that inspiration, that kind of broader narrative world inspiration, where that kind of is the focus and the rules chunk. Like, I guess technically the first 25 pages, but if I look at the ten pages, the last ten page, 20 pages, I would say realistically.
Sam: yeah. So and there's more examples of play at the back and stuff to help explain the rules further. But like so much of the book is the kind of stuff that we're talking Correct.
Nova: Right. And that's why I have such a deep interest in modules. Because from my perspective. That is here has some narrative. you know, relatively divorced from the context of the mechanics. What does this mean as kind of a game design thesis?
Sam: Yeah, that's making me think about, another kind of component of this that I think you especially saw when John released deep cuts for Blades in the Dark of the lightning.
Sam: Barriers are not particularly like modular two Blades in the Dark, although you're seeing now in blade 68. Tim has brought in something else, a big bubble to kind of like serve the same purpose, but feel different. But like in Wanderhome in Mythic Bastionland, even in blades with it's like huge lists of factions and so forth. And it's districts like even if the districts are always there, you're given a lot of options for what to do with your home table. Right. There's a lot of different fiction you can plug in or unplug from the game. If you don't want the spirit audience to be a big presence in your version of Dust Bowl because you just find them boring, you can just have them not around, you know? Or like there are many other factions that don't feel as essential to the running of the city that, like, might just not exist in your game because like, who fucking cares? You know, but I think that is a really healthy approach to how to think about the fiction that like Mythic Bastionland, Wanderhome, Blades in the Dark, all of these games that are bringing huge swaths of modular fiction to the table you can plug and play with.
Sam: But that's also true. I brought up deep cuts because that's so obviously also true with mechanics. In Blades in the Dark. John published this whole book of like, hey, here's a different way to do the action role. And like, if I came in and I wanted to run Blades in the Dark with a d20 instead of a dice pool like the game would feel, different system does matter. Right? But also like that's modular. I could swap that in or out and still have something that felt very blades because I was still using heat and lightning barriers and all this other stuff.
Nova: Yeah, I think that is probably the important thing. Like, this would still be blades if I subbed in five E as kind of a mechanical system with dice rolls on a d20, etc. however, I don't think it would be blades without the lighting barrier. I don't think it would be blades without heat and turf and things like that. and so I think that like when it comes to hacking blades, like there are, you know, a lot of quite prominent Blades in the Dark.
Nova: Hacks, scum and villainy. Band of blades, beam saber. I think that the bits of blades that are essential to blades aren't the procedure of like, downtime. And they aren't the dice pool mechanic. They're actually the heat and the turf and the lightning barrier and all the legwork. And so like, I think there are some mechanics that if you remove them from blades, it would no longer be the game.
Sam: I think turf is a particularly interesting one to look at. Maybe I should even do a whole episode on this, but like that one's interesting because it is so strongly mechanical and fictional simultaneously. Like the lightning barriers, there's not a rule about the lightning barriers and position and effect. There's not like a fictional rules for orchestrating your conversation about the fiction, but it's very abstract. Whereas like turf is grid on your character sheet. Right. That you can move from thing to thing. And also when you move from thing to think that means something in the fiction at the same time. Right now I.
Nova: Grid is the map of dustbowl.
Sam: Yeah. Or at least your little your turf. Right? Like it is. It's your thing. And the thing I was going to say about turf is if you pulled out just the mechanical portion of it, I think you would maybe still have blades, right? Like, I have never played with, like like my groups when I play Blades in the Dark have essentially ignored the turf map, even as they are going around and collecting turf fictionally.
Nova: Yes, I think that turf is a visual expression on the character sheet. It's not on the character sheet, right? It's actually on the crew sheet. Yeah, I'd have to double check that. But I think that, you know what? And none of my planning for this episode did I consider talking about the crew sheet as a part of this. But that is also a very fascinating and unique part of blades. I think that in terms of blades and the lightning, Barry is very relevant to this. Blade's is actually a very visual spatial.
Nova: I don't know if that's the right word. It takes place in a concrete world where spatial relationships matter.
Sam: Yeah.
Nova: Who you're next to matters.
Sam: It's a crowded city. And like, that's really important to the feeling because that gets back to the, like, whole conversation about consequences we were talking about earlier.
Nova: Exactly. And so that's why turf is important. That's why you can essentially play it without using that turf map, because you get a good sense. when I play Blades in the Dark, I play with Tinder, these Dust Bowl maps, which are effectively a street by street, block by block mapping of the entire Dust Bowl. You get like a huge map that you can lay on the table. When I use these, I played online and they were like the, the, the main screen everyone was looking at. You could be like, I'm on the corner of this street, in that street. And I felt and my players felt that that really enhanced the experience, because you are kind of thinking on the level of block by block, really when you're thinking about turf.
Nova: And I think that's probably something that that is also understated about blades is how important the space of Dust Bowl is, in the same way that in a dungeon crawl the rooms are important in Dust Bowl, the the blocks and the districts are and their relationship with each other is really important.
Sam: Yeah. It's interesting, I have I've never run blades with those maps from Tim, but I have always had the instinct that I would not like them because I like, I feel like the benefit that you would get from using those maps and correct me if I'm wrong is is partly, you know, okay, I'm looking at this and I see that the place we're trying to rob is right next to like a meatpacking plant. Okay, cool. Maybe we can use the meatpacking plant as part of the robbery, and, like, that's cool. As our as we're, like, negotiating what the fiction of this heist is going to look like. Whereas when you don't have the maps, then you leave that space open and you can, like, make it up and fill it in on the fly.
Sam: Right? Like suddenly it's like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if a meatpacking plant was next to this place so we could do XYZ? But also, wouldn't it be cool if an orphanage was next to the place? Like, you can kind of like do that negotiation? And again, I think that's that comes back to the matter of taste, right? At what scale do you want your legwork to be existing at?
Nova: Exactly. And for me, it's just like it's more just an expression of those relationships that already exists in the text. And so that helps people kind of remember and reference them in a way that having the book on your table, like next to you on the table, doesn't do so much.
Sam: Yeah. And the equivalent for me when I was playing, it was just putting the like the more zoomed out full map of the city on the table that everyone is looking at, right? And then suddenly it's like, yeah, yeah, okay, cool. We can see we're in this district, and the next district over is what we're butting up against more than the next block over.
Sam: And you can just. This is the thing about all this, like, modular fiction is it's like, great to have all of this legwork so you can decide for your table and taste what to use and like, that's what makes blades so fucking magical since God at all.
Nova: I know 100%. Can I tell like a story about when I ran? The two times I've run blades, I've run two campaigns. The first campaign, it was the first time I had run blades. I had it in my library for years at that point and hadn't had an opportunity. It was also during the pandemic I was playing online and I got so into the fiction. I had clocks for almost all of the of the factions. I just went overboard on this campaign, super high prep, and a lot of that was like, entirely me and entirely the space I was, you know, at at that time that a lot of us were in at that time. But the second time I ran Blaydes, I just picked up the book and I just picked up the book and I ran it and they went.
Nova: I still had the maps printed out on the table. this was in person, and, and I just, I just ticked off. I started off clocks when they encountered something, I'd be like, oh, yeah, that's probably a good place to introduce the, the spirit wardens or whatever. And then I then I would go and add them in. Right. And that worked extremely well as well. Now this game is designed such that it puts me in mind of the bakers. Powered by the apocalypse onion that you can peel back layers on. So just to recap that basically Vincent Baker, in a series of essays around Powered by Apocalypse games, talks about how an apocalypse world is designed such that you can play with all of the rules, but they are designed such that if you can't handle all of them, you can remove one layer and then another layer, and then another layer.
Sam: His term is that the game degrades gracefully.
Nova: Yes, precisely. And I think that in a similar way, plays in the dark can degrade gracefully to kind of accommodate people who want to spend a lot of time really thinking about and developing their prep out, but also it holds together really well.
Nova: If you're just picking up the book and completely weighing in, and I think that's that, that part of that is because of that modular nature of all of this fiction.
Sam: Well, that also gets into a big part of my experience with running blades a bunch of times was something I recognized in your story of like, gradually developing my own cannon for me, running blades. Right? Like the first time I sat down to run blades, I did like all this prep of like trying to I read the book like several times or trying to internalize everything that's going on there. I'm like highlighting which pieces am I going to be really excited to bring to the table? I'm like, what are my players bringing to the table? You know, you get all set up and like, I'm nervous, you know. And then at the first six sessions of play or whatever, I'm like getting used to it and remembering things and some things are falling away. I tried this out. I don't care about it anymore.
Sam: Or like the book says, that everyone eats eels and mushrooms, but actually it's like important that we're eating potatoes in this scene for some stupid reason. So like, now there's potatoes in my dust bowl and shit like that, and like, then the next time I run blades like a second campaign, I just bring over all the shit that I decided last time. It's way easier, you know? Like I'm bringing over the NPCs. I decided last time I'm bringing over the player characters as NPCs. Like, I'm drawing on this deep well of canon that I have built on top of blades and that that really, I think, mirrors the experience of mechanically like tailoring the game to my taste and my table's taste too, right? Like when we discover, oh yeah, we don't actually like turf. Makes more sense to us as a purely fictional concept rather than a mechanical concept. I'm also like bringing my sense of just kind of like hand waving or handling fictionally how to do turf to the next table.
Sam: And I think people are doing that all the time in every game that they play. Like Dungeons and Dragons is like built on this, everyone's house ruling it. This is why people are house ruling stuff is to like tailor everything to your taste. Like if the game itself is a a toolbox, you're figuring out like which of those tools matter to you and like bringing that forward to the next thing that you're doing. And I think, that's all a cool process. That's a great process. That's a process that adds a designer, at least as a designer of long term campaign games. You should be designing for people to do with your game and like you should be doing that with the fiction as much as you are doing it with the mechanics. That's the thing I keep underlining in this episode is how much I love taking that legwork and then building on it, like building my own shit on top of it.
Nova: Yes, and I think that that's that's actually a really interesting I don't know if it's an intentional impact of these narrative seeds that John Hopper plants in Blades of Dark, but you get this interesting phenomenon where because every Dusk Ball has a Lord Scurlock, but Lord Scurlock gets like three mentions, I think, in the book.
Nova: Right? he's not a major character. but he is. spoilers for a ten year old game. like, he is like a vampire that appears to, like, potentially, you know, run some kind of Illuminati, in the city is that different campaigns and different tables have different scallops and and have different all of these characters because, you know, some of the allies in your on your character sheets will show up in other people's campaigns as slightly different characters. And there's this really interesting community experience there where you have these characters in common and that's really like, you know, we all have lightning barriers. We all have, Leviathans and, and, and that communal experience of these characters, because blades is so kind of locked down and tight, becomes really like something to rally around as a community in a really fun way.
Sam: Yeah, it's something I've been talking with, my friend Lynn Khadijah a bunch about this recently of like, how overunder was really successful because it was like a self-created fandom. Right? Like, it was a fiction.
Sam: The fiction itself was the fan fanfiction. Kind of like it was like this, this thing that created a fandom around it because it had all those like knobs that like a fandom wants to attach onto. And I think that's like a really compelling way of thinking about the exact dynamic you were talking about. And like what this kind of I mean, even something just like the list of names in Apocalypse World, every apocalypse world is really different. But like a lot of apocalypse worlds have a groan, you know? And that groan is going to be a different guy. But like, there's still a vibe that like, they all have, like this fingerprint from the designer on them in a kind of a shared way. That's really fun. So we've been going for a while, kind of like wrap us up here. I want to I mean, I just said this seconds ago, but like my my thesis here, the underlining that I wanted to do here was like, you should do this kind of shit in your home game, right? Like, you should give me like, a bunch of, like, cool fiction that I can, like, take up a pick up and run with and, like, build my own fan, like, be a fan of, like, build my own cannon on top of.
Sam: And that the last thing I kind of want to underline with that is like, that can look really different and does look really different in different games, right? Like to use the mythic Bastion Island example. The myths feel so different from the faction list and bullets in the dark, even though they're serving this kind of similar purpose that we've been talking about. Right. Like the myths and Mythic Bastionland. Like, are they real? Like, is that true? Like they feel more like rumors. You know, they don't necessarily feel locked in. And they are so brief. There's so little to them. There's so much space to kind of fill in whatever you're going to do with them. And in blades, like, there is still space to do that. We talked about that with the maps, right? Like we talk about the plug and play ability or like even just one faction description is going to have like here three NPCs at like two words about each of them. You know, there's plenty of space there to flesh out who those people are.
Sam: But blade still feels locked in. Like dialed in. In a way, that Mythic Bastionland feels open ended. over at a big picture to me. And so I just want to emphasize there's a lot of different ways to do this thing.
Nova: And I think that that's kind of this is one way that, like, I don't feel like anyone spends enough time thinking about how you're kind of mechanical choices, and your narrative choices reflect the themes in your game. You know, you're talking about how Doskvols kind of about being stuck in a toxic environment. Mythic Bastionland is not about being stuck. It's about venturing out and exploring. And so the fact that it is that the myths, which are kind of like the kind of core unit of play, consist of like a line of poetry, I think it's one day, six omens, 2 or 3 characters, and like a random table with like 6 to 12 items on it, that kind of varies depending on the nature of the myth and the fact that they're kind of vague and open ended lends itself to the myth.
Nova: Part of the myth. It's supposed to be vague. It's supposed to be up for interpretation. It's supposed to be kind of fairy tale like and follow fairy tale logic, as in the same way that a dust bowl is supposed to feel like you're trapped with people that don't necessarily have it in for you, but certainly care more about their own survival than about anyone else's.
Sam: It makes me think about, you know, I'm a screenwriter now, and one of the big pieces of of writing advice that I've been internalizing over the past couple of years has been like just asking the question, what do you want people to feel when they walk out of the movie? And like, how do you write to that feeling? And I don't think thinking about the end of the experience is necessarily the right thing to do with game design, but that that question of like, what do you want people to feel while they're playing your game? During the experience of playing, it feels so helpful and so essential. And, you should think about that.
Sam: And then you should put it in the fiction of your world to not just in the rules that you use to get there.
Nova: Yeah, precisely. And like, I'm sure that there are many, many examples of this kind of fruitful fiction, this kind of diegetic or hyper diegetic rules, as you could call them. But like, you can also kind of I think you're going to have an entire episode on Triangle Agency soon. however, like Triangle Agency is like a really great example of pushing this concept to the absolute limit where the entire book is is hyper diegetic in world rules, and in many ways, the entire ruleset expects you to break those rules.
Sam: Yeah.
Nova: and so kind of like, yeah, you can kind of like I think the important thing here is looking at our themes and how this narrative, this fiction that we're putting in place, reflects the themes of being a knight in an Arthurian myth, or being a criminal with no prospects, desperate to their head above water, or, you know, you were trapped in a corporate monstrosity and you have to show up day to day even though you hate your job.
Nova: The fiction is often a really important way of expressing those themes. As much as the mechanics are.
Sam: We could leave it there. But I want to do one last example in Wanderhome. Like the the feeling of of exploration in that game. So much comes from the way that you are taking these discrete pieces of diagnosis, like the different kinds of locations, and smashing them together into something that feels like discovery in blades. There's always like the crows or the gang next door, whereas in Wanderhome you're taking a university and a hamlet and you're smashing them together and being like, what's a University Hamlet? Let's discover it. And that's the feeling that game wants you to have, Right. That's it. We did it. I mean, that's that's the episode, though. Nova! Thanks so much for being back on Dice Exploder!
Nova: It's an absolute pleasure.
Sam: Thanks again to Nova: for being here. You can read more of her on her blog, Playful Void, and you can follow her on Bluesky at Idle Cartulary.
Sam: Thanks to everyone who supports today's Exploder on Patreon! As always, you can find me on Bluesky at Dice Exploder and you can find my games at itch.io. My game Bandaids and Bullet Holes is coming to Kickstarter this may go follow that project there. Now there's links in the show notes for that too. Our logo was designed by spore. Our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Right and our ad music is Lily pads by my Boy Travis Tessmer. This episode was edited by Em Acosta. Em's the best. Thank you, Em! and thanks to you for listening. I'll see you next time.