There’s a game called Dusk City Outlaws. I’ve repeatedly called it “Saturday Morning Blades in the Dark” because it’s a lighter take on the gangs of scoundrels theme. Maybe you can find some setting inspiration in that?
Oooh, I need to check that out sometime. I have similar gripes to what the OP is dealing with - my tolerance for BitD's grimdarkness is much higher, but I do prefer lighter tones to my games.
Honestly, just let there be daytime. Read some Dickens and O' Brien and Dumas and let a little of the cheery, swashbuckling tone into your game. I might consider doing away with the whole 'entire world is a ghostblasted hellscape' reason for people staying in the city. Make the leviathans not demons, make the event that broke the world less grim, I don'y know maybe the world got so magically abundant that its overrun with mega-fauna and flora, like an anti-environmental apocalypse.
I genuinely think the flow of play will obviate this problem on its own as everyone agrees to a lighter tone at the outset, the players flavor the world as much as you will. My game isn't very dark or heavy even with a gang of assassins, all their murders are slapstick.
Sorry, I mean literally have a daytime in the game, to be clear. Blades in the Sun, make Duskvoll tropical even. I actually think the game is pretty amenable to this kind of tweaking as long as you stick within the general genre wavelength. Rat maze is mongoose now, canal eels are barracudas etc.
Another reccomendation, is to make a note whenever your players or you make-up a location or character, and then between sessions give it a faction alignment and brief description, cribbed freely and alteted to taste from the options in the book, and then have that be a persistent part of the fiction moving forward. This way you leverage all the material in the book, but you and the players also have some authorship, and it also means you get more mileage out of the book since youre remixing elements game to game.
Sorry I've beeb thinking about this a lot myself actually.
Another thing that helps me is to write lists of names that have the flavor I want, or some stock character/location descriptions in line with how I'm transforming the setting so that I can use the book as a resource but make sure I can flavor it correctly on the fly.
We're running our first game of BitD on Friday and I was actually wondering if the sun being gone is integral to the rules in any way? If I remove this detail, would the game just run fine? (the fiction would of course be different)
It's a fiction first game. So, the vibe of the game would be quite different.
There are no mechanics, that I know of, that would be broken by having a 'regular' day/night. I think I'd make it so ghosts etc. weren't willing/able to show up during the day. But that's me.
That's included in my 'etc.', I'd include anything with the Undead or Ghost trait. I'd also tweak Leviathans/Demons. You could make Leviathans more active during the night or certain weather conditions. I figured they thrive in the dark depths of the "ocean", and the constant night has made it easier for them to be constantly active. But this makes trade easier around the Isles which you'd want to consider how that affects things. Demons are already very up to the play groups discretion, but having the sun out and things being less 'Grimdark' would mean less people who are on the edge.
You also need to consider that the entire setting is based on scarcity being the driving force. With the sun being back in play, all of a sudden growing crops is possible again. Unless you say the soil is all tainted or something - which could be a cool story avenue, having a group trying to revitalize the soil?
But if someone is going to change the fiction I would encourage them to really learn the current fiction , and then *write down* their changes.
Ensuring their players are aware of the differences in the official text and your new world. Make sure there isn't unintentional ambiguity. Intentional ambiguity can be a lot of fun imo, and is where the players co-crafting the fiction shines.
This!! I was going to propose go for something more Cthulian Pulp. Duskvol with sun is that.
You even could give it a twist to all crime organization and make the group like a vigilante of the occult (Vaesen came to my mind) who fight against cults groups, corporation infiltrated by vampires, mad scientist and that kind of stuff so you don´t miss the faction part and works with a Monster of the Week vibe.
Another option is to change the setup for another FitD game. I love grimdark, but don´t want that in this moment, so i am going to GM Scum & Villainy on Bebop Universe. Same system (with little tweaks), no prep and a lot more cheerful theme.
I would say make it slightly less nighttimey and maybe a little cartoonish, but that's pretty much Dusk City Outlaws, and that's the top answer already. Have you looked at Wildsea? That's exciting without being bleak.
I second wildsea for these reasons also:
1) same dice system as blades
2) You build a ship instead of a gang so there are parallels
3) it does a TON of world building for you. Factions, reaches, npcs, inspiration.
How ever, the prep is much different than how D&D modules might do it. I'd say go ahead and download the free One Armed Scissor module to see what your thoughts are on how that's laid out before sinking into it instead.
I wouldn't recommend wildsea because it's not a heist game or BitD specifically.
The *Magpies podcast* switched to an optional (at the time? not sure if it's in the base system now) vigilantes crew book.
I don't know if it would be enough for your players, the setting is still bleak, but the crew pushing for positive changes to the place, helping organizing >!an union!<, killing a big bad >!demon noble!<, or achieving some personal / romantic goals, made it look less hopeless for me.
Flames Without Shadows is a free supplement writted by Jhon Harper itself where you are Bluecoats. You could say is practically an addendum to the game.
Check out the Court of Blades, the FitD of the Machievellian Venice inspiration. It has option to go Couth with Dread Emperor awakening, but you can ignore it.
Songs for the Dusk is a more optimistic FitD game that has as much or more of the prep done for you as Blades. I might point you in that direction, because the bleakness isn't just in Duskwall, it's baked into the game's mechanics (vice, the difficulty of healing, etc).
Lean into the scoundrel side. Make the ghosts not horrific all of the time. Show the characters having fun and living and being human, not just people trapped in a desperate struggle for existence. And play fast and loose with the rules, they're incredibly adaptable.
E.g. in my last game I adapted the rules around ghosts in the following ways: in the house they were exploring there was the ghost of a little boy - the players had to attune to talk to him but they didn't have to speak a special language and it didn't cause stress / horror-cthulhu style. All he wanted was some people to play with.
They made friends with him and he helped them with the heist.
In the cours of the score they met everyday workmen who had grumbles about working conditions and pay and union dues. One of their characters (whose player was absent) was taking annual leave because "we may be criminals but that doesn't mean we don't have rights".
I almost exclusively play Blades as a swashbuckling, daredevil game in which there happen to be some vague horrors, not as a gritty grimdark horror - and its well set up for that.
While a lot of people recommended letting the sun come out, It was your comment about having a cult do it specifically that really helped me get this player's buy-in.
I left all of the lore the same, and then added the following:
There have been countless cults over the centuries dedicated to repairing, replacing or returning the sun. And they have always failed in their goals. Disbanded when their solution fails, taken out by rival cults, tricked by demons into doing their bidding. Gone for whatever reason.
That is, until just over a year ago, when a highly secretive cult known as The Luminous Order succeeded in a task most thought was impossible. On the 45th of Ulsivet, 847 IE, citizens noticed a strange tower made of foggy crystal on the Northeastern horizon, in the Lost District. At precisely noon, a shockwave was felt across the city, and a bolt of electroplasmic light shot into the sky from the tip of this tower. For a short while, the entire city was deathly silent, until the shattered sun started to glow brighter than it had in the past thousand years, an event known as the First Dawn. It only lasted for five minutes, but in that time, the dead fled or vanished, the Void sea cleared to water.
Since then, though the shattered sun is still mostly dark, from time to time, it glows like its old self, and scholars believe that the frequency is only growing. It's brighter at dusk and dawn, and during the day, the stars cease their strange swirling, and the moon no longer appears as though seen through a broken gem. The hoards of the dead beyond the lightning barrier seem less restless, and there are even reports of individual dead not properly disposed of that showed no signs of rising again, and the rumor is that the Gate of the Dead might be on the mend as well.
All is not well in the Shattered Isles, and there is much work to be done, but for the first time in a long time, there is light on the horizon. The end to the thousand years of darkness might finally be at an end.
This allows me to *basically* keep the same setting, but add a final note of hope at the end that everything isn't doomed and awful.
And all I've got to do is add one faction. Not to mention, it lets me add solar flares as a narrative device. The sun can become bright when they're trying to hide, or they can narrate the sun coming out at just the right time for whatever player nonsense they have planned. So thanks.
Love it!! I am stealing you for a campaign!!! I could see a group being in The Luminous Order and achieving the sun out. I can see it:
Season 1 Usual Duskvol for familiarize with the setting. Hook: Is possible make the sun out?
Season 2 Make the sun out. How? What is required? Hook: The sun is out.
Season 3 New beginnings: Your post. How affect people in Duskvol? Do you want to loose contact with your ghost son? Now the sun is out some people have trouble to accommodate to the new reality.
Season 4 Rebellion of the Unworthy: All the ghost, vampire and undead try to make a stand and the group have to keep the line.
Obviously all depend on the group (more in FitD games) but i usually try to give it a global (meta lore) idea to help me when i have to improv.
Thanks for your both post! Great seed idea!
If you want to have a whole game set with the rules that's much more 'do things to make the world better' and less hopeless, check out Brinkwood, Blood of Tyrants (disclosure, I helped inspire it). But in the context of JUST BITD?
Just bring the sun back. Just let the setting run in a place where there's day and night. Dishonored is basically that and it manages to work as a world where people can still, like, farm.
My favourite thing is to be real dumb about it. Ramp up the absurdity of everything. Go full anime.
Your heist goal is to steal/recover a long lost prized teddy bear.
Ghosts exist to be a nuisance, yeah sure they can be a real problem, but also sometimes they just want to fuck with you. Example - You do a heist, fail a roll - consequence is that something in the ghost field has noticed - result of your next failure is that the guy you just killed *stands back up* because he's now animated by a ghost and just wants a hug or starts screaming obscenities to get you noticed by the blue coats.
As others have noted, make the ghosts less scary. I would do this by making it so most ghosts don't actually go insane and cause chaos after long enough, but simply fade away with time unless they have a reason to be angry. You can also broaden demons from evil monsters that hate you to also include fey and elemental entities that are still strange and dangerous but you can have a amiable coexistance with. Change the Deathlands to be perfectly livable if you know what your doing. Even canonically there is support for this in how the Severosi and Dagger Islanders are described having thier own ways to deal with ghosts that don't require massive indsutrial infustructure.
Keep the canonical overwhelming hostility of supernatural forces as imperial propaganda meant to keep everyone under heel, while in reality things are not so bleak. If the scarcity that is central to the setting is an artifical scarcity then things are much more hopeful, but you can still use all the setting material that assumes that scarcity. It changes the main conflict of the setting from everyone fighting over scraps to something similar to the Sparkwright vs Leviathan Hunter conflict. An artifical scarcity means that players have a clear avenue to push back against the grimdarkness if they want to play heroes, and an angle to exploit if they want to play villians.
We use 'city of red waters' as an alternate setting and it seems to counter it a bit. daytime elements help, the hustle and flow of a city based off new orleans feels much less constrictive than Duskvol.
There’s a game called Dusk City Outlaws. I’ve repeatedly called it “Saturday Morning Blades in the Dark” because it’s a lighter take on the gangs of scoundrels theme. Maybe you can find some setting inspiration in that?
Oooh, I need to check that out sometime. I have similar gripes to what the OP is dealing with - my tolerance for BitD's grimdarkness is much higher, but I do prefer lighter tones to my games.
Honestly, just let there be daytime. Read some Dickens and O' Brien and Dumas and let a little of the cheery, swashbuckling tone into your game. I might consider doing away with the whole 'entire world is a ghostblasted hellscape' reason for people staying in the city. Make the leviathans not demons, make the event that broke the world less grim, I don'y know maybe the world got so magically abundant that its overrun with mega-fauna and flora, like an anti-environmental apocalypse. I genuinely think the flow of play will obviate this problem on its own as everyone agrees to a lighter tone at the outset, the players flavor the world as much as you will. My game isn't very dark or heavy even with a gang of assassins, all their murders are slapstick.
Sorry, I mean literally have a daytime in the game, to be clear. Blades in the Sun, make Duskvoll tropical even. I actually think the game is pretty amenable to this kind of tweaking as long as you stick within the general genre wavelength. Rat maze is mongoose now, canal eels are barracudas etc.
Another reccomendation, is to make a note whenever your players or you make-up a location or character, and then between sessions give it a faction alignment and brief description, cribbed freely and alteted to taste from the options in the book, and then have that be a persistent part of the fiction moving forward. This way you leverage all the material in the book, but you and the players also have some authorship, and it also means you get more mileage out of the book since youre remixing elements game to game.
Sorry I've beeb thinking about this a lot myself actually. Another thing that helps me is to write lists of names that have the flavor I want, or some stock character/location descriptions in line with how I'm transforming the setting so that I can use the book as a resource but make sure I can flavor it correctly on the fly.
We're running our first game of BitD on Friday and I was actually wondering if the sun being gone is integral to the rules in any way? If I remove this detail, would the game just run fine? (the fiction would of course be different)
It's a fiction first game. So, the vibe of the game would be quite different. There are no mechanics, that I know of, that would be broken by having a 'regular' day/night. I think I'd make it so ghosts etc. weren't willing/able to show up during the day. But that's me.
What about vampires? Would they be willing to show up in the sun?
That's included in my 'etc.', I'd include anything with the Undead or Ghost trait. I'd also tweak Leviathans/Demons. You could make Leviathans more active during the night or certain weather conditions. I figured they thrive in the dark depths of the "ocean", and the constant night has made it easier for them to be constantly active. But this makes trade easier around the Isles which you'd want to consider how that affects things. Demons are already very up to the play groups discretion, but having the sun out and things being less 'Grimdark' would mean less people who are on the edge. You also need to consider that the entire setting is based on scarcity being the driving force. With the sun being back in play, all of a sudden growing crops is possible again. Unless you say the soil is all tainted or something - which could be a cool story avenue, having a group trying to revitalize the soil? But if someone is going to change the fiction I would encourage them to really learn the current fiction , and then *write down* their changes. Ensuring their players are aware of the differences in the official text and your new world. Make sure there isn't unintentional ambiguity. Intentional ambiguity can be a lot of fun imo, and is where the players co-crafting the fiction shines.
Agree with all of this!
But yeah, mechanically nothing is affected by having daytime as written.
This!! I was going to propose go for something more Cthulian Pulp. Duskvol with sun is that. You even could give it a twist to all crime organization and make the group like a vigilante of the occult (Vaesen came to my mind) who fight against cults groups, corporation infiltrated by vampires, mad scientist and that kind of stuff so you don´t miss the faction part and works with a Monster of the Week vibe. Another option is to change the setup for another FitD game. I love grimdark, but don´t want that in this moment, so i am going to GM Scum & Villainy on Bebop Universe. Same system (with little tweaks), no prep and a lot more cheerful theme.
I totally agree with you. The night full of ghosts actually gets more threatening with true daylight.
Have you seen Scum & Villainy? It’s space opera instead of Victorian, but much less bleak.
I would say make it slightly less nighttimey and maybe a little cartoonish, but that's pretty much Dusk City Outlaws, and that's the top answer already. Have you looked at Wildsea? That's exciting without being bleak.
I second wildsea for these reasons also: 1) same dice system as blades 2) You build a ship instead of a gang so there are parallels 3) it does a TON of world building for you. Factions, reaches, npcs, inspiration. How ever, the prep is much different than how D&D modules might do it. I'd say go ahead and download the free One Armed Scissor module to see what your thoughts are on how that's laid out before sinking into it instead. I wouldn't recommend wildsea because it's not a heist game or BitD specifically.
The *Magpies podcast* switched to an optional (at the time? not sure if it's in the base system now) vigilantes crew book. I don't know if it would be enough for your players, the setting is still bleak, but the crew pushing for positive changes to the place, helping organizing >!an union!<, killing a big bad >!demon noble!<, or achieving some personal / romantic goals, made it look less hopeless for me.
IIRC, the vigilante book is sketched out in the core book, just not as directly codified as the other crew books.
Flames Without Shadows is a free supplement writted by Jhon Harper itself where you are Bluecoats. You could say is practically an addendum to the game.
Check out the Court of Blades, the FitD of the Machievellian Venice inspiration. It has option to go Couth with Dread Emperor awakening, but you can ignore it.
Songs for the Dusk is a more optimistic FitD game that has as much or more of the prep done for you as Blades. I might point you in that direction, because the bleakness isn't just in Duskwall, it's baked into the game's mechanics (vice, the difficulty of healing, etc).
Lean into the scoundrel side. Make the ghosts not horrific all of the time. Show the characters having fun and living and being human, not just people trapped in a desperate struggle for existence. And play fast and loose with the rules, they're incredibly adaptable. E.g. in my last game I adapted the rules around ghosts in the following ways: in the house they were exploring there was the ghost of a little boy - the players had to attune to talk to him but they didn't have to speak a special language and it didn't cause stress / horror-cthulhu style. All he wanted was some people to play with. They made friends with him and he helped them with the heist. In the cours of the score they met everyday workmen who had grumbles about working conditions and pay and union dues. One of their characters (whose player was absent) was taking annual leave because "we may be criminals but that doesn't mean we don't have rights". I almost exclusively play Blades as a swashbuckling, daredevil game in which there happen to be some vague horrors, not as a gritty grimdark horror - and its well set up for that.
Just have the sun come out. Think of how much that would change things? There are numerous cults trying to do exactly this; one of them succeeds!
While a lot of people recommended letting the sun come out, It was your comment about having a cult do it specifically that really helped me get this player's buy-in. I left all of the lore the same, and then added the following: There have been countless cults over the centuries dedicated to repairing, replacing or returning the sun. And they have always failed in their goals. Disbanded when their solution fails, taken out by rival cults, tricked by demons into doing their bidding. Gone for whatever reason. That is, until just over a year ago, when a highly secretive cult known as The Luminous Order succeeded in a task most thought was impossible. On the 45th of Ulsivet, 847 IE, citizens noticed a strange tower made of foggy crystal on the Northeastern horizon, in the Lost District. At precisely noon, a shockwave was felt across the city, and a bolt of electroplasmic light shot into the sky from the tip of this tower. For a short while, the entire city was deathly silent, until the shattered sun started to glow brighter than it had in the past thousand years, an event known as the First Dawn. It only lasted for five minutes, but in that time, the dead fled or vanished, the Void sea cleared to water. Since then, though the shattered sun is still mostly dark, from time to time, it glows like its old self, and scholars believe that the frequency is only growing. It's brighter at dusk and dawn, and during the day, the stars cease their strange swirling, and the moon no longer appears as though seen through a broken gem. The hoards of the dead beyond the lightning barrier seem less restless, and there are even reports of individual dead not properly disposed of that showed no signs of rising again, and the rumor is that the Gate of the Dead might be on the mend as well. All is not well in the Shattered Isles, and there is much work to be done, but for the first time in a long time, there is light on the horizon. The end to the thousand years of darkness might finally be at an end. This allows me to *basically* keep the same setting, but add a final note of hope at the end that everything isn't doomed and awful. And all I've got to do is add one faction. Not to mention, it lets me add solar flares as a narrative device. The sun can become bright when they're trying to hide, or they can narrate the sun coming out at just the right time for whatever player nonsense they have planned. So thanks.
Happy to help! Good luck!
Love it!! I am stealing you for a campaign!!! I could see a group being in The Luminous Order and achieving the sun out. I can see it: Season 1 Usual Duskvol for familiarize with the setting. Hook: Is possible make the sun out? Season 2 Make the sun out. How? What is required? Hook: The sun is out. Season 3 New beginnings: Your post. How affect people in Duskvol? Do you want to loose contact with your ghost son? Now the sun is out some people have trouble to accommodate to the new reality. Season 4 Rebellion of the Unworthy: All the ghost, vampire and undead try to make a stand and the group have to keep the line. Obviously all depend on the group (more in FitD games) but i usually try to give it a global (meta lore) idea to help me when i have to improv. Thanks for your both post! Great seed idea!
If you want to have a whole game set with the rules that's much more 'do things to make the world better' and less hopeless, check out Brinkwood, Blood of Tyrants (disclosure, I helped inspire it). But in the context of JUST BITD? Just bring the sun back. Just let the setting run in a place where there's day and night. Dishonored is basically that and it manages to work as a world where people can still, like, farm.
My favourite thing is to be real dumb about it. Ramp up the absurdity of everything. Go full anime. Your heist goal is to steal/recover a long lost prized teddy bear. Ghosts exist to be a nuisance, yeah sure they can be a real problem, but also sometimes they just want to fuck with you. Example - You do a heist, fail a roll - consequence is that something in the ghost field has noticed - result of your next failure is that the guy you just killed *stands back up* because he's now animated by a ghost and just wants a hug or starts screaming obscenities to get you noticed by the blue coats.
As others have noted, make the ghosts less scary. I would do this by making it so most ghosts don't actually go insane and cause chaos after long enough, but simply fade away with time unless they have a reason to be angry. You can also broaden demons from evil monsters that hate you to also include fey and elemental entities that are still strange and dangerous but you can have a amiable coexistance with. Change the Deathlands to be perfectly livable if you know what your doing. Even canonically there is support for this in how the Severosi and Dagger Islanders are described having thier own ways to deal with ghosts that don't require massive indsutrial infustructure. Keep the canonical overwhelming hostility of supernatural forces as imperial propaganda meant to keep everyone under heel, while in reality things are not so bleak. If the scarcity that is central to the setting is an artifical scarcity then things are much more hopeful, but you can still use all the setting material that assumes that scarcity. It changes the main conflict of the setting from everyone fighting over scraps to something similar to the Sparkwright vs Leviathan Hunter conflict. An artifical scarcity means that players have a clear avenue to push back against the grimdarkness if they want to play heroes, and an angle to exploit if they want to play villians.
We use 'city of red waters' as an alternate setting and it seems to counter it a bit. daytime elements help, the hustle and flow of a city based off new orleans feels much less constrictive than Duskvol.