Blades in the Dark: One Shot Into a Campaign

I ran a one shot of Blades in the Dark, and it's shaping up into a longer game! I'm very excited about it, since it's definitely one of my favorites. The group made some characters, went into the tunnels, and performed some pretty vicious gang fights, and ran away from a big trapped demon and its amped up dog corpse zombie horror things.

They had a great time, so we ran another game! Same characters (but I let them revise some choices they made in character creation now that they had a handle on the system) and we fleshed out the factions and setting a little. This group REALLY was not interested at all in a Session -1; I'll probably make a full post about it another time, but I think in part it's because during the one shot, we'd already set up cool stuff they were anxious to pursue, and because they liked the setting and didn't really wanna touch it. So I ended up skipping most of Session -1, just setting up the main factions and conflicts, and then we played again! In the moment to moment play, especially setting up a heist, they feel much more empowered to collaboratively worldbuild. "What's this piece of turf in the Deathlands?" It's a caged demon, for energy. "Who caged it, and why?" It's uhhh a circus, an old abandoned circus.

Stuff like that was fantastic! We made a little crude map of the area together so it was easy to keep a sense of what was going on, and then we played. Great time, super funny group, and lots of people's first time playing, ever. Next session, we'll set up goals (Blades has a "Claims" system that substitutes for goals in some ways, but I still like to have players make their own) but right now, most of them seem really fixated on fixing their boat. I'll update in the comments as we play---we may skip this week while we celebrate a friend's birthday.

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