D&D and Blades in the Dark

[janestarz]

Thanks to Brasak I've joined a group of players doing D&D on Wednesdays. Their new campaign started a month or two ago and I rolled up a halfling fighter (archer) called Gemma Pokeweed. We play on Roll20 and use Discord for the voice chat. Brasak and buddies are all British, and it works out fine with the time difference as well.
But since Dan can't DM every week because of work obligations, Olly suggested on the off weeks we play Blades in the Dark. Although I was hesitant to jump into two campaigns, for fear of mixing up the characters, I pushed those fears aside and joined them for session zero two weeks ago and we had our first real session last night.

In Blades I play Cecilia Woodwright and it's quite a novel setting. We are playing a band of smugglers in a dark, victorian setting where a giant barrier of lightning keeps all the wraiths and ghosts out of the city. I'm the lurk, so a rogue-kind of character. One of the game mechanics is to push your character for effort, to get more dice to make an action into a succes. This causes stress which needs to be alleviated by indulging your vice. Cecilia is a gambler and she especially loves the street hustle gambling games like Find the Lady ^*). She is a quiet and insecure person who feels down on her luck, so she really works hard to make things a success because she always focuses on the negative: "Why do I always lose?!".

Our band of merry criminals consists of a Slide, a Cutter, a Hound, a Spider and me as the Lurk. I've surmised we have one very chatty overconfident wannabe Leader (Wilfred, played by Brasak) and some of the other blokes sound pretty sociopathic. So far we've contemplated abducting someone's children for leverage, picking a fight, sending the street whores in, and setting stuff on fire to create a distraction. Also: preaching to the dockworkers about their sinful ways in a loud voice. None of which was my idea, I was just quietly secreting the cargo into our barge while three of the others were distracting the crew on the other side of the boat we were robbing.
It requires quite an attitude adjustment from D&D, where you are the heroes. In Blades in the Dark we're the criminals. I suppose I will need to get my evil on to make Cecilia even more memorable.

Gemma is a more typical cheerful halfling. Very outgoing and social, so there's little chance I will mix these up. I've created dour, quiet Cecilia to be the opposite of bright and bubbly Gemma.
I'm really having a lot of fun! It's wonderful to be roleplaying again, because my last event was Emphebion 2019, in the time before the plague.

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*) Is Find the Lady a real street game, or do I only know it from Terry Pratchett? I don't know!

Comments

[anemoona.livejournal.com]

Ben benieuwd of jullie allemaal 'evil' kunnen blijven spelen, al zal de setting en verhaallijn ook wel meehelpen. In onze Warhammer campaign zijn we ook begonnen als een dievenbende, maar inmiddels zitten er een aantal bij die hun leven gebeterd hebben (*ping*). Maar dat levert ook wel weer leuk spel op.