Session Writeup: Blades in the Dark - 1

We played our first game session of Blades in the Dark today. It's basically "You are a crew of thieves in a setting that's Dishonored with more nasty supernatural stuff", and today was our first actual heist.

Here's a brief and imperfect recounting of how it went, with undue emphasis on my character's actions because that's how my brain works. Mea culpa.

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We learned from a contact that a shipment of arcane materials confiscated from a cult would be sent through the city canals under guard of six Bluecoats (corrupt cops) and a Spirit Warden (a CIA agent responsible for dealing with occult problems). We decided to steal it en-route.

After debating the plan for a while, we picked a bridge over the canals in a rough part of town from which to orchestrate an "accident" of dropping a crate full of bricks (marked "PIANO") onto the gondola so the goods would sink and we could dredge the canal later to recover them.

What actually happened:

1: We got stopped by the gate guard of a manor house trying to figure out if we were supposed to deliver the "piano" to them. Nail, my dispossessed nobleman fast-talks him while our two bruisers maneuver the crate to the edge of the bridge. My character half-cranks the roll and instead of fast-talking the guy, veers into a spiteful rant about how he can't keep his house livery clean and he stands with a slouch, like some kind of peasant.

2: Our bruisers, Boots and Binkie, get into position anyway, vocally disavow me entirely, and leave the guard to do violence to my old man body while they "accidentally" tip 800 lbs of bricks onto the lead gondola as planned.

3: The gondola is damaged and violently tilts. Bluecoats are hurled everywhere. Our target crate slips into the water, and one of the gondoliers (who tipped us off in the first place and who are ostensibly our allies) has his legs broken by the impact.

4: Boots, our Absolute Unit of a thug dives into the water to "help" "rescue" people. A crowd has gathered. The Spirit Warden is trying to figure out what the hell is going on while Bluecoats flop around in the filthy canal. Another bag of cult trinkets flops into the water.

Boots, swimming. Drawn by his player antlerrr.blogspot.com

5: Beetle, our feral urchin sneakthief party member has, unbeknownst to us this entire time, SCUBA'd her way under the first gondola with an augur and holed the thing. It begins to slowly sink from a dozen punctures.

6: The gate guard is about to beat my old man senseless when our fifth team member, The Barrow Wight (a legless orphan-herder who walks around on stilts like some kind of fucked up Victorian Dr. Caligari) shows up in a stolen Bluecoat uniform and immediately tries to "arrest" me. Nail thanks him for the distraction, shouts to the crowd that he's being ABUSED BY THIS GATEHOUSE RUFFIAN, and draws an over-sized antique fowling pistol from his voluminous coats. He "slips" and fires it into the canal, holing the third boat (containing the Spirit Warden), which ALSO starts to sink. The crates of desired goods start sliding along the tipped deck, directly toward Boots in the water.

The Barrow Wight. He's wearing stilts.

7: The antique fowling pistol smokes and explodes loudly, dazing everyone in the canal and immediately drawing the attention of the entire crowd of day-laborers on the way home from their horrible Eel Cannery jobs.

No longer available for purchase, alas.

8: Boots, being ridiculously strong, grabs the crates in an attempt to "help" put them back in the gondola. He twists, flinging the Bluecoats also gripping the crate into the canal and shatters the crate against the stone walls. It's full of confiscated cult stuff, and there's a reason it's being watched by a Spirit Warden--a tattered, bloodstained dress flies out of the shattered crate and begins buzzing the crowd.

9: Binkie declares that the dress belonged to his murdered aunt, exclaims his undying filial piety, and leaps into the open air to tackle the flying dress while brandishing a traditional ghost-warding amulet in his hand.

10: Binkie is immediately possessed by his dead aunt and is now haphazardly flying around wearing a long Victorian dress.

11: The Spirit Warden finally gets to his feet, realizes something is fucky, and starts whispering to a bewitched knife and drawing a bead on the heads poking out of the water.

12: Beetle darts out of the canal and shoves the Spirit Warden's gondola, dumping him into the water. He drops his witchknife. The feral child is instantly distracted by the shiny object and dives after it.

13: Boots decides to fistfight every single Bluecoat in the water simultaneously, and successfully does so--somehow involving dynamite (!!!) in the brawl without dousing the cigarette clamped in his jaw.

Boots, post-brawl. Drawn by his player antlerrr.blogspot.com

14: The Spirit Warden realizes that things are banjaxed and tries to swim away. Nail uses the attention and eager ear of the crowd drawn by The Barrow Wight to direct the angry crowd into a frenzy. The momentary leader of a riot, he orders them to dump our legless party member into the canal (making for an easy escape), and then goads them into tearing the canal bridge apart and stoning the swimming Spirit Warden to death with hurled bricks. The crowd cheers in proletarian bloodlust, rain stones on the agent, and hoists Nail onto their shoulders and away to glory and the nearest pub.

Our party escapes, nobody has any idea what the hell just happened, and we even managed to recover one of the crates we smashed.

Simple Followers

As I've played 5E D&D but continued to read a lot of OSR stuff, I've noticed that OSR games seem to commonly assume that the party is tooling around with the usual 4-8 PCs but also a large number of followers--paid henchmen willing to pepper enemies with sling stones and bolts, and hirelings brave enough to not drop their torches when the spells start flying.

I don't think I've played a single game of 5E where a player bothered to hire a follower, despite how useful it'd be to have an extra hand for carrying your lanterns and ten foot poles.

I'm not entirely sure where this divide comes from, but I suspect it arises from two major places:

1. Differences in lethality between 5E D&D and old-school games. If you're fragile, you want lots of support; gold is common, but blood is precious. 5E characters are FAR tougher than characters in any OSR game I can think of, so they have less concern over frequent and/or arbitrary death.
2. Combat complexity. 3E, 3.5E, 4E, and Pathfinder all seem to require a lot of mental processing power to parse and resolve a combat round; every additional actor on the battlefield adds more than a flat value to the complexity of combat resolution. Clogging up the field with entities that are less important than the PCs and their deadly foes has a poor return on conceptual investment.

In the interest of simplifying the use of both combat-ready followers ("henchmen") and non-combat followers ("hirelings"), I took a stab at writing some streamlined rules. I was mostly thinking of 5E as I wrote these, but I believe they'd work for something like Dungeon Crawl Classics as well; the more conceptual distance between games like that and what you're using, the less confident I am that they'll parse without additional effort, but I'd love to hear about your experiences should you give them a go.

They probably look a bit like this. Art: Daniel Zrom

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Simple Followers
Playtesting Status: Pure theory. Looking for an opportunity to try it out.

Followers are any mundane NPCs that you've hired to assist you in your adventures, either by fighting your foes with you or providing utilitarian assistance like holding light sources or carrying extra equipment. If the person you've hired to tag along sounds like they deserve more detail than that, they're not a follower--give them a real statblock and play them like a full-blown NPC. Otherwise, keep reading.

You can command a number of followers equal to your Charisma modifier (minimum 1).

Your followers are real people who are physically present in the dungeon and on the battlefield, but they don't take up a space on the battle grid. They don't count as allies if you have any abilities that require an ally to stand adjacent to you or an enemy; they're just not competent enough to present a credible threat.

(Yes, this is specifically so that 5E Rogues aren't automatically able to land sneak attacks without party support.)

Rather, your followers are always near enough to you that an AoE that hits you hits them, but far enough away that they generally don't get in the way of your fighting and movement.

Each follower has 1 hp; if they take any damage, they die.

(Don't waste time worrying if you can heal them. You have more interesting things to think about.)

At the START of your turn, your followers do things:

• Hirelings holding equipment for you keep up the good work.
• Henchmen wielding melee or ranged weapons help you attack your target in combat. 
• The player picks the target for the henchmen. Henchmen won't attack something that would be obviously and immediately lethal to strike, like a golem made out of burning chainsaws. If you're still not sure if they'd go for it, resolve it with a morale check.

Resolve all henchmen attacks at once by rolling a single d6:

• On a 1, your henchmen got in the way more than they did anything useful. Your next attack has disadvantage as you re-position yourself. Bloody peasants.
• On a 2-5, their enthusiastic but untrained blows helped you land a solid hit. The next damage roll from any source made against the target they struck has advantage (roll damage twice and take the better result).
• On a 6, your coterie of turnip farmers managed to land a lucky shot on your foe. The target immediately takes 6 + [the number of followers in your group] physical damage. The player should pick a type of damage that makes sense based on what the followers are wielding.

Graduation
Followers remember their lucky shots, and eventually they get cocky enough to think of themselves as proper warriors. They might even be right.

Keep track of how many times you roll a 6 for your follower attacks--just scribble down some check-marks somewhere on your sheet and label them "Graduation". When you've rolled a total of three 6s (they don't have to be consecutive), one of your followers "graduates" and should be run as a fully-statted NPC. Give them a full name and a proper NPC stat block. Don't give them levels in a PC class, though--even if they're wrestling in the mud for a rusty shiv, the PCs should remain the stars of the show.

Rather than hireling wages per day, graduated followers will start requiring an equal share of the party's treasure. If the party is willing to provide that, they'll stick around. Otherwise, the newly-minted bravo will most likely head off in search of further adventure on his or her own.

If all of your followers die because a Lizard Priest puked acid vomit all over you and yours, erase all your checkmarks--your dudes are smoking paste, and it's time to hire a new batch. RIP.

Follower Morale
These rules probably work best if you're also running a morale mechanic for followers; if that's the case, the PC controlling the followers counts as a leader, so add their Charisma modifier to the morale check made by their followers.

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This subsystem shouldn't take any longer to manage than checking the number of followers you have, rolling a d6, and moving on to your PC's actual turn. If it gets more complicated than that, reconsider how you're using it.

A cheap and easily-replaceable source of advantage on attacks in 5E D&D would be extremely powerful, which is why advantage is only granted to damage rolls. Even if you tweak other aspects of this system, I'd encourage you to leave that one alone if you're playing 5E.

Anyway--thoughts? Gut reactions? I'd love to hear if this sounds like it solves the problem I intended for it to solve, and if it's something you'd use in your own game. Sound off in the comments!

Artist unknown (I can't read the signature)