Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Blades in the Dark Solo Part One

Blades in the Dark (Evil Hat Productions)
Designed and written by John Harper

Purchase Blades here
Purchase Alone in the Dark here

Read Part Two Here

Blades in the Dark was a huge game. I backed it on Kickstarter. But that was when I “fell out of love” with the hobby because of some very toxic personalities I had encountered. There was so much social media drama at the time that soured what made these games fun for me. Blades is also a very dense text at the start. There are no accusations of these being rules-lite, though once you get a flow of how it plays, it feels straightforward. I remember reading one of the Kickstarter drafts and not having the bandwidth to parse it all. Since then, Blades has helped birth a whole new subgenre of game, Forged in the Dark. When I started playing solo games, I noticed how many FiTD titles there were and decided I should probably see if Blades could be played solo. And it could.

The premise of Blades is that the players are all part of a criminal organization. The book’s setting is that of Doskvol, with a level of technology you might see from the late 19th century. A catastrophe has occurred so that the sun no longer comes out, and the spirits of the dead linger all around. The players will choose an archetype playbook and collectively pick a crew playbook to guide their campaign’s storytelling. They might want to be assassins, smugglers, or purveyors of contraband.

The mechanics, inspired by the Powered by the Apocalypse games, are centered around dice pools. Players have skills and attributes with varying levels based on their playbook. When an action is taken, the number of dots in one of these skills/attributes is rolled, and only the highest is counted. A six is a success, a 5-4 is a success with a cost, and a 3-1 is a failure. Successes can propel your Score towards success, but failures provide experience points that can help with advancement. Added to this are Position and Effect. Position comes in three tiers: Controlled, Risky, and Desperate. The gamemaster will provide the Position, and the players will determine what they want to roll with. 

Effect is how much progress is made by the action you attempt. This is tracked via clocks. Blades loves its progress clocks and encourages you always to have a few going. For the unfamiliar, progress clocks are just a circle divided anywhere from fourths, sixths, or eighths. There is a clock for the score the crew is attempting, but there can be clocks for just about anything. The proximity of guards in a building. The discovery of damage to the property while you are in it. Your local district boss who wants his cut of your coin. A police inspector’s investigation of the crew. These clocks create lots of points of tension and help make the world feel alive with things happening in the background.

Play happens through three stages: Free Play, The Score, and Downtime. Free Play will focus on each character having scenes, interacting with the world, and gathering information on potential new scores. Lots of opportunities for clocks here. Once a Score is decided upon, an engagement roll sets up how good or bad things are looking at the characters’ start. During the Score, players can employ flashbacks to explain how they set something up in advance or learned about a specific detail of the location. Once the Score is successful (or even if you flee without what you wanted), the game enters Downtime. You get your Payoff, mark the Heat you’ve accrued, and roll for Entanglements that arise. This sets you up for the next bit of Free Play. Blades can be a lot to digest initially, but it makes sense once you start playing it.

I used Parts Per Million’s Alone in the Dark rules for my Blades game. They did a good job, but I made some little tweaks to make the game flow better as a solo experience. I also wanted to tweak the setting in a way that didn’t change anything mechanically. For some reason, I really felt like playing my story in a Blade Runner-esque future, nothing super hi-tech but a grimy, dirty future. 

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My crew playbook was Shadows – thieves, spies, and saboteurs. In looking over the heritage descriptions, I liked the Skolvan. During the 36-year Unity War, their part of the world was the focus of much of the conflict. Many Sklovan refugees have made their way to Doskvol after their communities were destroyed. That sounded like an interesting group of outsiders to play. 

They are Alyad Alhadia – The Quiet Hand. Their leader, and my character, is Omar Darwish, aka Twelves (because he’s always got his eye on the clock), using the Spider playbook. The Spider is described as “a devious mastermind.” The Quiet Hand comprises four Sklovan refugees resettled in Doskvol, which brings with it all the typical tension you might expect. To make themselves “legitimate,” Omar has them working out of the back of a specerijen, a spice store in the Nightmarket district. The residents of Doskvol know little about the Skolvans at the end of the day, but they do know their food has a unique flavor not found in the local cuisine. This also allows Omar to have access to shipping routes, which is critical to the true purpose of The Quiet Hand.

During the Unity War, numerous Akorosi (the nation Doskovl belongs to) soldiers and even entire units stole important artifacts and objects from Sklovan homes and holy sites. Omar’s grandmother was a village elder whose entire collection of relics was taken, and that inspired him to form a crew to steal these artifacts and ship them home. 

The rest of Omar’s crew are:

• Nahid, aka Moon (The Whisper) – fair complexion, plump, her left hand was maimed during the bombing of Shafawi. She wears the traditional religious clothing of Iijabat, the majority religion in Sklova. Nahid is a great team player and very enthusiastic about helping recover the relics. She brought many of her own spiritual texts with her on the trip across the ocean but has amassed even more from the esoteric bookshops of Doskvol. Nahid has delved into summoning, which has led her to become cursed by the demon Arkeveron. This spiny, clawed nightmare is associated with war and, in myths, is said to mainly go after refugees of conflicts. For now, Nahid has him contained but does want to purge him back to the pits he crawled out of. I set a clock for that ritual, which I’ll tick off as she makes meaningful progress towards it.

• Hafez aka Silver (The Hound) – stylish, old, a scar marks his left eye. A streak of silver decorates his otherwise dark black hair. Of all the crew, Hafez projects the largest personality. It is odd for a Hound, a sharpshooter who likes to work from his rooftop perch to take out the enemy. He’s a very insightful man, but incredibly vain. When he’s not working, he loves to spend his coin on clothing & meals at the best restaurants in Doskvol. Hafez is happy to steal back the relics, but his real motivation is to find the man who killed his father during the Unity War. They lived in the coastal village of Sadaqahl. In the first year of the war, the Akorosi troops showed up. Hafez was just fifteen at the time and watched from his hiding place as a soldier made his father fish for him at gunpoint, then cleaned & cooked the fish and served it to him, only to have his father shot in the back of the head. Hafez became obsessed with Akorosi arms and, working with a crew, would raid shipments taken to soldiers on the frontlines. Decades of practice have brought him to this point. Now, he prowls Doskvol, searching for that soldier so he can avenge his father.

• Selima, aka Frog (The Cutter) – rough, stout, muscular, short-cropped hair, and the youngest of the crew. Also the tallest. Selima always seems melancholy and becomes intensely defiant when anyone outside her close circle of friends pushes back on her. Selima was born onto the mean streets of Ghamar, the Sklovan capital ravaged by war. She’s never known her homeland as anything else but a place where packs of wild Akorosi dogs roamed the streets wielding high-powered weapons. This instilled an urgency to become as tough as possible, and she has. Her secret desire is to amass enough coin that she never has to work again, and she has no problems stealing as much as she can to get there. She’s become particularly interested in The Hive, a guild of merchants specializing in contraband. From what she’s seen, they are living the good life, and she wants that. The Quiet Hand is giving her some great experience, but she wonders when the time will come when she will leave to pursue this greater goal. 

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When our story opens, it is the frosty season of Yule in Doskvol. Snow blankets the city of eternal night. Omar has found the crew’s next target, Inspector Benjamin de Winter. De Winter is relatively well-known, mostly among older citizens. He was a hero early on in the Unity Wars, a film having been made about how he led the troops in the Battle of Al Mubaraka. It was remarkable that he sustained no injuries during that massive early assault. Ironically, a week after the city had been taken, de Winter lost his right eye to an IED. He’s since replaced it with a top-of-the-line cybernetic one with all sorts of bells and whistles to aid him in his illustrious career as one of the city’s top inspectors. 

Omar’s focus in this Score is to get back a simple marble statue of a little boy. The statue is known as Mubat in Skolvan history. It depicts the child standing with his hand outstretched to stop some invisible thing approaching him. The story behind this piece is not generally known to the Akorosi. Mubat was a little boy, said to have been eight years old, who lived in Zayala, a village in the heart of Sklova’s grain belt. A century before the Unity Wars, the Akorosi had attempted to colonize the region and had been reasonably successful. 

The story goes that Mubat was approached by a soldier who demanded the boy give him the figs he was eating. Mubat refused, and the soldier knocked him to the ground, attempting to wrest the fruit away. Mubat got back on his feet and told the soldier he would never give him the figs. The boy was arrested. A week later, he was put before a firing squad. When news of this spread, the Great Uprising happened, and the Akorosi were driven out for the time being. Omar cannot stomach this statue being in the possession of someone like de Winter.

Omar has brought the crew to the upscale neighborhood of Brightstone, where de Winter resides. They had to bide their time until the Yule Festival began in Silver Market Square. The specerijen had a mobile stall that could be brought to the Festival and put the crew within walking distance of de Winter brownstone. Omar had a contact inside the house, Jennah, an Iruvian servant. Omar met them when Jennah was shopping in the Nightmarket district, and the conversation eventually came around to the Unity War. Jennah despised it, and their employment, but their contract with him was part of her sentencing for raising bail funds for an anti-Bluecoat activist group in the city. They were more than happy to help with this heist.

As the Yule Festival comes to a close, Omar checks his watch. De Winter should be out of the house for the next three hours, attending the annual solstice performance at the Dosvol Opera House. He quickly sniffs some powder to keep his senses on alert and quietly gestures to Nahid and Selima to help him throw away their trash. They’d served samples of Sklovan winter treats using the store’s spices just so they could have some bags of refuse. The dumpster is in an alley just around the corner from de Winter’s house. Hafiz is positioned on the roof of the building opposite the front of the house. He’s in direct communication with Omar, spying on the interior of the inspector’s house through his scope. Jennah goes about the motions of their daily work.

Their plan is one of Stealth, and their entry point is an unbarred window into de Winter’s basement. However, things go differently than planned at the start. Nahid has said she’s felt ill all day, but it becomes apparent what was happening when she convulses, falls to the ground, and her face partially morphs, revealing the demon Arkeveron is there. Omar takes Command of the situation and speaks to Nahid, beckoning her to fight against the demon’s pull. She can Attune the spirit, taking some stress, and together, they force Arkeveron to back down for now. 

Entering the basement goes smoothly for Omar and Nahid. However, as Selima is crawling through, she accidentally cracks the rage essence vial she carries. Its fast-acting properties come from ingesting it, but skin contact can still result in an out-of-control but slow-release frenzy. A clock is set for this impending moment that could make a mess the crew couldn’t clean up before they leave.

Once in the basement, Omar refers to the blueprints he’s stolen off the webnet and locates where they would be just below the vault where de Winter keeps his spoils. Nahid helps him set up the compact drilling rig, its bolts secured into the ceiling, its mapping laser going through the motions. That’s when he notices something new: a security camera mounted in the corner aimed right at the center of the basement. Jennah hadn’t mentioned this, and a close look reveals it’s something new. He has to get the security room upstairs, disable all cameras, and wipe the hard drive. 

Using his burglary gear, Omar manages to crack the password on the security room door and get inside. Then, it’s a matter of plugging a scrambler into the main computer and frying the cameras and the hard drive. When he returns to the basement, Nahid and Selima oversee the drill. Omar is Exhausted from the night’s events so far but keeps pushing himself, helping the others move the chunks of concrete out of the way when the drill is done.

He gets a boost from Selima and crawls up into the vault. It’s a beautifully decorated room, with many display cases containing the spoils of war for visitors de Winter allows inside to gawk over. Omar finds the statue Mubat and it is locked in a highly secured case. As Omar gets to work with his burglary gear, Hafez radios over the comms. Two Bluecoats have stopped in front of the house…now they are going up the stairs to the door…knocking. Omar holds his breath and makes his cuts into the display glass. He carefully lifts the statue up after overriding the pressure plates. Hafez tells him the Bluecoats went into the atrium and must be speaking with Jennah.

Omar slips out of the hole in the floor and back to the basement. Nahid helps set up a tracewipe, a machine that blasts an area with infrared light that wipes all fingerprints and incinerates all hairs and blood that might be left behind. They hold their breaths as they hear the footsteps of the Bluecoats on the floor above. At one point, the basement door is opened, the light from the hallway cascading down the stairs, the shadowy outline of the officer at the top of them. A beat. The door closes. Omar and his crew breathe. Hafez lets them know the Bluecoats have left.

Omar runs one last scan, and it pings back that the tracewipe worked. All de Winter will have is a hole in the floor of his vault and a missing statue. They clamber out through the basement window and head back to close up their mobile stall, going home to Nightmarket and to receive their payout for this Score.

Next time: Downtime and a new Score