I’ve spent the last five or six years running Marvel Heroic at our weekly game sessions, which usually meant carting around a buttload of dice and ten years worth of game notes every time we had a session.
When that campaign ended last month, we transitioned to John Harper’s Blades in the Dark–a game about gangs of scoundrels in a pressure-cooker fantasy city where every bit of turf needs to be fought for with a scrap.
The group built themselves around the conceit of being a a cult devoted to an ancient cat goddess, the three core members consisting of an immigrant lawyer dealing in ghost rights, an immigrant academic who is basically Indiana Jones with feline features, and an immigrant locksmith whose turned into the crime-savvy burglar of the crew.
In the space of three sessions they’ve got involved in a gang war, pissed off a local consulate, found themselves embroiled in the affairs of several vengeful ghosts, and attacked people with ghosts, ghost-bombs, spectral honey badgers, and impressionable college students.
I’ll give the system this: it excels at generating hooks from play, and what seems like relatively straightforward system is surprisingly complex when you start playing. I’m really digging the tone–we’re a little more anime action than the default system seems built for, but the slow sense of the characters miring themselves in the muck as they try to do good is definitely seeping in.
The the thing that really pleases me is how lightweight the whole system is. I’ve got a game folder that is on the verge of being sidelined, as I basically need the core rulebook, a handful of dice between sessions, and two notebooks (one for brainstorming, one for tracking things session by session).
I’m very late to the party for this one, but if you’re a gamer with an interest in stories and spec fic, I heartily recommend this one.
