Greetings, Scoundrel
"You're in a haunted Victorian-era city trapped inside a wall of lightning powered by demon blood."
Blades in the Dark is a Genre Blending fiction-first Tabletop RPG designed by John Harper and published by one.seven design in early 2017, following a successful Kickstarter campaign back in 2015. In Blades, you play a gang of scoundrels eking out a living in the Vice City of Duskwall and trying to rise to the top of the criminal food chain by any means necessary.
Duskwall (or Doskvol, if that's your preference) is the primary setting of the game: a haunted, industrial port city on the northern shores of the mighty Akorosi Empire, formed by the survivors of the grand cataclysm that shattered the old world 850 years ago. No one knows what happened exactly, but the Sun went out, the ocean turned ink-black, and the old continents were torn asunder into a handful of Shattered Isles — most of which were then overrun by ravenous ghosts, as the spirits of the deceased stopped passing into the afterlife. The remnants of humanity built an industrial civilization over the ruins of old, eventually learning to keep the ghosts away from their cities with enormous lightning barriers powered by the blood of the eldritch leviathans from the Void Sea. Duskwall is one of these cities, and most of the blood harvested by leviathan hunters passes through here on its way to the rest of the Empire. As one may expect, the city has too much money, too much corruption, and too little law for its own good — in other words, it's just perfect for a band of ambitious scoundrels set to carve out their own little slice of hell.
Blades is simultaneously a Prequel and a Spiritual Successor to Harper's own free Powered by the Apocalypse mini-RPG Ghost Lines
(2013), which was set in the same world, but a few decades laternote , and put its players in the magnetic shoes of "line bulls" (Rail Jacks in Blades) protecting the electro-rail lines holding together the Imperium (Akorosi Empire) from ghosts and other rogue spirits.
The game has won the 2015 Golden Geek RPG of the Year and the 2016 Indie RPG Awards' Game of the Year titles. It was also nominated for the Best Game and Product of the Year at the Ennies 2018, but lost out to Zweihänder and only took Best Website. Said website contains, among other things, an SRD for implementing original Blades hacks in other settings under the Forged in the Dark license.
On September 1, 2021, a Live-Action TV series based on the game was announced to be produced by Warp Films (known for This Is England and its spinoff TV series).
The game and its setting contain examples of following tropes:
- Abandoned Area: The Lost District is a formerly-wealthy area of Duskwall that was abandoned to the ghosts of the Deathlands when the current lighting wall was erected around the city (the builders presumably didn't have the resources to extend the wall to cover the district). There is also the Old North Port, which was abandoned long before even that, due to relocation of the main port to the North Hook Channel, and was therefore never protected by the lighting barrier and is currently used as a haven by smugglers.
- Alien Sea: Immediately following the cataclysm, all of the oceans have turned ink-black with occasional hints of star patterns somehow shining through from the depths (nobody yet understands how and what it means).
- Alliance Meter: Your crew has ratings indicating their relationship with every other noteworthy faction in Duskwall, from fellow petty gangs to the Imperial Military stationed in the city. Doing scores almost inevitably sours your relationship with one or more of them, but if you're smart about it, it may also improve your standing with others.
- Always Night: As a result of the cataclysm, the sun almost went out, appearing as a tiny ember in the sky only briefly at dawn and dusk and leaving the rest of the day mostly dark. Interestingly, the moon still shines as brightly as before the cataclysm.
- An Arm and a Leg: This is a suggested in-fiction expression of bodily harm rolling over into level 4 due to the character not having any free boxes to record lower-level harm in. While suffering level 4 harm directly is always fatal, in this case, death can be replaced with a "catastrophic, permanent consequence", such as loss of a limb, if that suits the current fiction of the game.
- Assassination Attempt: The official Broken Spire playset supplement by Sean Nittner puts the players in the role of would-be revolutionaries, conspiring to assassinate the immortal Emperor. Given his personal power and his importance to the wider world, this is not going to be easy. Even if they succeed, his absence is going to have consequences for what's left of humanity.
- The Bad Guys Are Cops: In a city like Duskwall, the police force amount to what is essentially a state-sanctioned gang running a city-wide protection racket. They are deliberately underfunded, but allowed to raise revenue by ticketing and eminent domain seizures for certain kinds of crime, occasionally supplemented with "charitable donations" from the city's most wealthy residents. This tends to ensure that the police protect the interests of the rich, and the rich look the other way if they extract a little extra revenue from the "bad" parts of town. It also tends to make corruption on the force endemic, with most of the illegitimate gangs giving them kickbacks to avoid being the focus of their institutional attention.
- Bioluminescence Is Cool: Certain kinds of plants and animals (mostly sea life, occasionally birds, mammals are usually incompatible) can be infused with ectoplasm which causes them to glow brightly. Among the rich of the city, elaborate gardens and aquariums are populated with these radiant beings as a kind of post-calamity artistic display. It also has a practical function, as the constant glow of this "radiant energy" can be substituted for sunlight in the growing of crops, allowing private estates to grow fruit and vegetables which used to be common and are now exclusively luxuries. On the other hand, eating anything infused in this way is a really bad idea.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: The forgotten gods may solicit the worship of humans, but their priorities and values are not those of mortals.
- Cap: At character creation, your Action ratings cannot go above 2. Afterwards, you can upgrade them to 3 with regular leveling, but the ultimate 4th level is only unlocked by a very costly Mastery upgrade for the entire crew.
- Cataclysm Backstory: About 850 years ago, the old world was shattered by an unspecified cataclysm that made it impossible for spirits of the deceased to pass on to the afterlife, creating a staggering number of ghosts. It had also caused continent-shattering earthquakes across Akoros, turned the ocean water into black ink, released colossal leviathans into the seas, and, most importantly, almost extinguished the sun, plunging the world into a permanent darkness.
- The City Narrows: Crow's Foot is universally acknowledged to be the most criminal district of Duskwall, between continuous gang wars and the Bluecoats generally preferring to act like the baddest gang around than actually to maintain the law. Still, even nobles and the rich frequent the place (with bodyguards, natch) because of how easy it is to procure illegal substances and weapons there.
- City of Canals: Duskwall stands on the delta of Dosk River and so is crisscrossed by canals both natural and artificial, to the point where you can reach more places by boat than by carriage. The Gondolier Guild is a major power player in the city, and the Whitecrown island creates a natural haven for ships in the North Hook Channel, making Duskwall a perfect sea port, much like Venice's famous
Lagoon. Word of God is that the city is basically a hybrid of Venice, Victorian London, and Prague. - Competence Porn: The gamebook explicitly instructs players to play out their characters as daring, bold, ambitious, and ready to take big chances to live a bigger life, while literally telling the Game Master, "Don't make the PCs look incompetent", and instead to explain their failures with overwhelming odds stacked against them.
- Combat, Diplomacy, Stealth: The game explicitly supports all three types of play, in both its crew types and its playbooks. The Bravos crew, the Cutter, and the Hound represent the combat-heavy play; the Hawkers and, to a lesser extent, the Cult crews, the Slide, and the Spider cover the diplomacy side; while the Assassins, the Shadows, the Smugglers, and the Lurk playbook are largely about stealth. It also avoids Useless Useful Non-Combat Abilities because, mechanically, all action checks work the same way, so the usefulness of each rating depends mainly on the type of the campaign a group is playing, rather than on the system itself.
- Constructed World: The rulebook puts extreme focus on Duskwall, but technically, it is just one city of the Akoros nation, situated on the eponymous island, one of the few Shattered Isles left floating in the ink-black oceans after the cataclysm. "Shattered Isles" seems to be the overall (out-of-universe) name of the setting.
- Corrupt Church: The Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh is the closest the Akoros Empire has to a state religion, although it's pretty much an open secret that it's basically just an Ancient Conspiracy that is too big to jail.
- Crapsack World: In spades, but unlike some similar settings, Blades in the Dark doesn't constantly beat players over the head with its awfulness. Good people exist in-setting, and so do decent communities; Barrowcleft and Charhollow in particular are noted as poor but honest boroughs where folks try to look out for each other. This isn't to say the bad doesn't overwhelmingly outweigh the good — poverty is rampant, corruption is endemic, and even the most fortunate are living a post-apocalyptic Cosmic Horror story — but there are enough flickers of decency to make players actually care when bad things happen to good people, even when players are the bad things.
- Critical Existence Failure: Averted. Taking enough level 1 harm reduces the effects of your rolls, level 2 additionally reduces the size of your dice pools, and at level 3, you cannot act normally at all without help or taking Stress. Level 4 is fatal.
- Critical Hit: If you roll two or more sixes on any roll, you usually get especially beneficial effects.
- Cult: Forgotten Gods cults are a common faction type, as well as a playable crew type.
- Dare to Be Badass: Part of the book's advice to players is to be willing to be ambitious, daring, and take risks with their characters. It points out that they are scoundrels, operating outside the law, and if they wanted to play it safe they would be working within the system in some workhouse or other menial servitude the system beats the lower classes down into. A common piece of advice for Blades players is "Play your character like you'd drive a stolen car on fire: take a look at the flames in the rear view mirror, then push the pedal to the metal."
- Deader than Dead: If a body is destroyed with electroplasm before three days pass and its ghost detaches, the ghost should be destroyed along with it. That said, the book offers story hooks wherein ghosts might somehow survive the process, such as membership in an eldritch cult. One sample long-term project even involves working out just how an old enemy could have come back despite her electroplasmic destruction.
- Deal with the Devil: The Devil's Bargain mechanic allows this trope to happen both literally and metaphorically: the players can get a free die on any roll if they accept an additional long-term complication that will result from their action regardless of its immediate outcome. This complication can range from a literal deal with a devil ("devil" being the setting's term for any powerful supernatural nasty) to something mundane, like owing a favor to a rival mobster or just Collateral Damage.
- Death as Game Mechanic: The death of your player character is one of the legitimate ways to play the special Ghost playbook, allowing the character to come back as a tormented, incorporeal version of their old selves. Playing as a Ghost, in turn, unlocks two other special playbooks, the Hull and the Vampire.
- Devious Daggers: The very title of the game references this trope, by invoking the imagery of being mugged at knife point during the night (also, "blade" was originally the in-universe term for violent criminals in general and for Player Characters in particular, but it was phased out in favor of "scoundrel" everywhere but in the title during development). Even the cover of the rulebook depicts a hoodlum threatening the viewer with a pair of daggers. Lastly, all Scoundrels' equipment options include the deliberately vaguely-defined "A blade or two" as the default close-quarters weapon.
- Dirty Cop: The law enforcement in Duskwall is almost entirely funded by the sufferance of the city's upper classes, which means that those with enough money or connections can practically dictate policy for them and rarely face the law's punishment. Contrarily, those lower down in the Bluecoat's ranks either have to bow to their superior's political pressure to keep their jobs, or need to supplement their modest income via... other means. As a result the Bluecoats are institutionally corruptible, and in some parts of Duskwall are little better than the street gangs they are nominally there to police, only with official sanction.
- Do Not Go Gentle: The society of Duskwall is not a fair place, and this theme is reinforced by the game mechanics: characters will get hurt and thwarted, repeatedly. However, the "best practices" for players encourages them to roll with those punches, use the mechanics available to them to mitigate those punches, then regroup, get their second wind, and punch right back, never giving up even when the chips are down.
- Do Well, But Not Perfect: Generally speaking, you want to complete Scores generating as little Heat as possible... except that if you keep a job quiet so that nobody knows about it — a level of exposure that adds zero Heat to your total before accounting for complicating factors like hostile turf and high-profile targets — you don't get any Rep (needed to level up your gang), either — because you were so good, nobody even realized it was you. (The "No Traces" special move mitigates this somewhat, in keeping with the Assassins crewbook's emphasis on mitigating Heat; some clients will raise your reputation because there were no signs of foul play.)
- Easy Exp: Player characters receive end-of-session XP for having activated up to three "XP triggers" listed in their respective playbooks. Two of them usually require memorable role-playing moments, but the very first one basically says "Have you done the one thing that is your playbook's main shtick, anyway, today? Good, then mark one XP. Did you do it more than once? Great, mark two."
- Ectoplasm: Ectoplasm is electrically charged and more properly known as "electroplasm". It is found in both people and in the blood of sea-dwelling leviathans who are actually giant demons. The industrialized post-apocalyptic empire uses it as a power source, not unlike the fantasy whale oil from Dishonored.
- Electromagnetic Ghosts: Exaggerated (or taken to the logical conclusion), in that all ghosts are electromagnetic phenomena, by the virtue of ectoplasm (or rather "electroplasm") always carrying electric charge in this setting, which its residents have learned to exploit in order to launch an industrial revolution.
- Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: One form the "Obligation" vice can take is devotion to family.
- Extranormal Institute: The Sparkwright Tower, looming over the Charterhall University, is more or less the cradle of the Akorosi leviathan blood-powered industrial revolution, since it was here in Duskwall that the first-ever experimental lightning barrier had been constructed when the Immortal Emperor's protective magic began to wane. Remnants of this original barrier can still be seen as the Charter Wall surrounding the administrative center of the city, just a few blocks away from the Tower.
- Fantastic Drug: The game contains a slew of fictional drugs that are more-or-less based on real ones, like "bloodneedle" (cocaine), "dream smoke" (opium), and "black lotus" (heroin), as well as a few original ones, like "spark" (the setting's weird black seawater mixed with raw electroplasm) and "quicksilver" (mystical mercury that gives a bonus to Attune action at the cost of level 2 harm).
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Done in very broad strokes, so that characters can choose a background while coming up with the fine details of their own specific culture: Akoros is Western and Eastern Europe; Skovlan is Scandinavia and the northern parts of the British Islesnote ; Iruvia is a mix of old Persia, Egypt, and India; the Dagger Isles are something like the Carribean or Southeast Asia, being tropical archipelagoes known for their pirates; and Severos is something like the Eurasian Steppe or Great Plains with its horse nomads. Tycheros is the odd nation out, as it's mostly defined by being very alien to the rest of the world, and its inhabitants all have otherworldly demonic tells such as black shark eyes or feathers instead of hair.
- Flashback: The Flashback mechanic is a cornerstone of the Score gameplay: at any time, but particularly when the party faces insurmountable odds, one of the players can take Stress to "reveal" how their character had prepared for just such an occasion, retroactively introducing a way to overcome the current obstacle.
- Flat-Earth Atheist: Doskvol Academy is heavily patronized by the Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh, and if the in-fiction excerpts from Professor Schifrell Alcoria's lectures are anything to go by, the party line of the Church and therefore of the Academy is that intelligent demons don't exist and ghosts aren't actually the spirits of the deceased, just person-shaped plasm. Judging by the rest of the book, it seems that very few Duskers actually believe any of that, but such claims are useful for the Church to justify destroying ghosts with fewer distressing implications, and to throw common people off the scent of Church officials trying to become demons themselves.
- Fictional Document: The rulebook includes a couple of in-universe documents, such as the erratic missive from a retired leviathan hunter on page 160 or the academic article "Energy of Duskwall", which provide stylized explanations of the game world's more magical aspects.
- Gaslamp Fantasy: The game is set in the world where the industrial revolution is powered by the blood of giant deep-sea demons and ghosts are kept away from the cities by giant lightning towers. However, the fact that Technology Marches On In-Universe means that Duskvol is no longer gaslit, but has electric lights, driving the lamplighters into unemployment (and therefore forming the Lampblack street gang).
- Genre Blending: The game facilitates The Crime Job thriller narratives in a setting blending Victorian Gothic Horror with Gaslamp Fantasy and post-apocalyptic cues. The mechanics, meanwhile, combine narrative role-playing in the vein of Apocalypse World with criminal empire-building of Saints Row.
- Getaway Driver: Surprisingly, there is no player or cohort category that explicitly covers this criminal archetype, but then again, arranging a getaway cab or boat at the end of a score is just the matter of a single flashback.
- Gigantic Moon: The moon in the skies had once appeared about the size of Earth's moon, before the cataclysm, but has been steadily growing in size ever since. Nobody quite understands what it means, and most don't even want to think about it.
- Golem: The Hulls are artificial magic-powered bodies inhabited by a deceased spirit. Most of them are employed by the rich as bodyguards, but there is also a playbook for you to play as one.
- Gothic Horror: The classic genre is one of the major inspirations for the game's setting: a haunted Victorian-era city where it's Always Night, ghosts, vampires, and demons roam free, and technological progress often causes more harm than good.
- Great Offscreen War: The Unity War, which broke out about 40 years before present when Skovlan rebelled against the Immortal Emperor in a bid for independence and ended in its defeat 2 years ago. A lot of Skovlander refugees ended up in Duskwall, feeding the social tensions in the city.
- The Great Wall: The lightning towers surrounding all major cities, including Duskwall, keep the ravenous ghosts of the Deathlands from running them over.
- Green Rocks: The electroplasm (sublimated life energy that can somehow be used to produce electricity) powers both the technology and the magic in the setting.
- Hellhole Prison: The Ironhook Prison can easily inflict much trauma upon the inmates, especially if they aren't protected by their gang's reputation, and the less well-off are additionally put to Prisoner's Work at the Dunvil Labor Camp. Higher-status inmates, however, do enjoy an almost Luxury Prison Suite and some are even rumored to run criminal operations out of Ironhook.
- Illegal Gambling Den: There is a bunch of illegal gambling dens scattered throughout Duskwall. In gameplay terms, these locations have two purposes: for Scoundrels with a Gambling vice, they can serve as places to reduce stress (a gameplay mechanic), while for some types of crews, they are available as claims that generate coin after every score.
- Immortal Ruler: The Immortal Emperor of Akoros is a Benevolent Mage Ruler who has been alive for 900 years since the Cataclysm and shows no signs of abdicating. None of his subjects seem to worship him for it, however, and his state religion appears to venerate the general concept of a healthy, living human body instead.
- Impartial Purpose-Driven Faction: The Spirit Wardens exist solely to seek out and to destroy ghosts, as well as the bodies of the recently deceased before their respective spirits can materialize as new ghosts. They wear masks to hide their identities so that they'll be harder to influence.
- Inconsistent Spelling: "Duskwall" and "Doskvol" are used interchangeably in-universe, based on preference and background. The former is more colloquial — a corruption of the older name, said to date back to the original Skovic: do'skov'ol, literally "the Skov's coal mine". The rulebook itself varies, with chapters covering gameplay rules generally preferring the former spelling, while setting description mainly uses the latter. The Languages passage notes that it's common for any sufficiently old city to collect many names down the ages.
- Industrial Ghetto: The district of Coalridge is where most factory production is concentrated in Duskwall, including an ancient, but still running coal mine, and is infamous for poor working and living conditions. As a result, it is a cesspit of abusive foremen and desperate workers, always on the brink of a violent clash.
- Injured Self-Drag: Taking harm of the highest order (level 3 a.k.a. "severe"), such as having one leg shattered, typically incapacitates a player character, so that they, though still conscious, are incapable of doing anything useful on their own except slowly and painfully crawling to safety. Gameplay-wise, level 3 harm bars the corresponding player from using action rolls (the core mechanic of the game) unless another character helps theirs or they spend stress points for each action attempted.
- In Medias Res: The Cut To The Action technique is used to get the Player Party directly into the thick of The Caper or some other Score, bypassing most of the contingency planning that precedes such events in traditional RPGs.
- Kraken and Leviathan: The otherworldly leviathans roam the oceans to the north of Duskwall and are being hunted by the Imperial fleets for their blood, rich in the electroplasm that powers the entire setting.
- Lawman Gone Bad: A possible character background, and the entire Grey Cloaks gang is made up of former Bluecoats. Of course, the Bluecoats being what they are, that might be more of a lateral move than anything.
- Limited Loadout: Played with. On character creation, you have access to all items listed on your playbook, and you don't even have to commit yourself to specific items when embarking on a score. Instead, you only have to choose the magnitude of your loadout at the start of the score, and can retroactively declare that your character carries any of their items at any point on a Score — up to the specified loadout limit.
- MacGuffin: Spirit essence and leviathan blood are ubiquitous items to be smuggling, stealing or otherwise involving in underworld schemes, since it's the fuel for the setting's magic and Steampunk.
- Magitek: "Spark-craft", early industrial era-styled devices powered by electroplasm that are capable of effects that would be difficult or impossible with more mundane technology, are very common in the setting.
- Malevolent Masked Men: The Spirit Wardens hide their identities behind face-obscuring bronze masks (not unlike those of their Dishonored prototypes, the Overseers), and while they are not actively evil, them showing up during a score is fundamentally very bad news for any scoundrels (especially if they carry illegal arcane stuff).
- Might as Well Not Be in Prison at All: The elite inmates at Ironhook Prison can run their operations unmolested from inside the fortress.
- Misery Builds Character: Integrated as a game mechanic. One of the ways player characters earn XP is by struggling with issues stemming from their vices or traumas. The book mentions specifically that players are not obliged to play their traumas as serious issues that interfere with gameplay, but doing so will allow the traumatized character to level up more quickly.
- Mob War: When your Alliance Meter with another faction drops to −3, you are considered at war with them, putting additional pressure on your crew until the conflict is resolved one way or another.
- Murder Into Malevolence: "Specters" are a category of ghost that most commonly results from the dying person being wronged somehow, but especially if they are violently murdered. All specters are inherently evil, seeking to harm and drain the living, with especial hatred towards those they see responsible for their misfortune.
- Nay-Theist: The Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh hates all things spiritual, including forgotten gods, ghosts, and the human soul, to the point that zealous members sometimes volunteer to be hollowed. Given the state of the world, it's actually kind of understandable. Unfortunately, their reverence for soullessness has lead them to secretly aspire to demonhood.
- Neighbourhood-Friendly Gangsters: The Lampblacks position themselves as this in the Crow's Foot district, contrasting the elitist Red Sashes.
- Non-Combat EXP: Almost all XP in the game: the rules for combat XP are essentially the same as for non-combat XP, and since combat is only one way of tackling the Scores, you can rake up a lot of advances without ever getting shot at. In particular, you gain attribute XP for any action from a Desperate position (regardless of what you do and whether you succeed: just risking severe consequences is enough), and at the end of the session for a) performing your playbook-specific activities, b) role-playing your background, and c) role-playing your vice and/or traumas.
- No-Sell: The resistance rolls allow player-controlled scoundrels to no-sell (or to mitigate, in case of harm) any negative consequence they incur as a result of botched action rolls and/or earlier risky decisions. The only things you cannot weasel out of with a resistance roll are a Devil's Bargain (which you instead avoid by simply rejecting the GM's offer) and Police Brutality (because the cops will just keep beating you).
- The Numbered Things: The Six Towers is a district of Duskwall named after the grand mansions that the city's six most prominent noble families had once built there. Even though only one of the original Towers still stands today, the district name has stuck.
- Opium Den: The Vice/Drug Den is available as a claim for every crew type except the Bravos.
- Our Demons Are Different: Demons are the embodiments of dark desires, and may have been the first beings to come into existence, tied directly to elemental forces. They are completely corporeal — rather than having a soul, their blood is infused with electroplasmic essence, making them immortal. Although they can act like people, ultimately all demons are consumed by whatever desire they embody, and care for nothing outside that desire. Oh, and the leviathans on whose blood Akoros depends are very, very big demons.
- Our Ghosts Are Different: Because the deceased spirits in this setting haven't been able to pass on to the afterlife for over eight centuries, it is a pretty safe bet that the ghosts outnumber the living by now. Ghosts are basically the electroplasm of a living person that detaches itself from their corpse three days after their death to continue existing as undead (unless the body is destroyed by the Spirit Wardens before that). Some ghosts just mindlessly continue on their daily routines, some yearn for revenge, some begin possessing the living, and there are rumors of a few benevolent ghosts. There is even a playbook that allows you to play a ghost, in case your original character croaks.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Vampires in the setting are immortal undead, who are basically ghosts permanently possessing a dead body and constantly needing life force of others to sustain themselves. This also means that most (if not all) vampires are no longer inhabiting their original human body. The upsides of being a vampire in the setting easily outweigh the downsides, and thousands of people chose to become vampires after the cataclysm, living in the open, until the Empire and the Spirit Wardens cracked down on them and hunted the vampires into near-extinction. There is a playbook that allows you to play a vampire, though.
- Our Zombies Are Different: The hollows are magically reanimated bodies that lack a soul, and are therefore docile and not terribly intelligent. Their primary purpose is serving as mindless Undead Laborers or as vessels for spirits wishing to become vampires.
- Phlebotinum-Induced Steampunk: The industrial revolution was kicked off by the discovery that the blood of the demonic leviathans roaming the Void Sea can be used to produce electric power. By the time the game takes place, its setting is roughly in the Victorian age, with most technology powered by electricity extracted from leviathan blood (although some older tech also uses steam power).
- Physical, Mystical, Technological: Thanks to its strict Single Phlebotinum Limit, everything in the setting is powered by electroplasm, but there are different in-universe approaches to using it: spectrology, rituals, and arcane enchantments take a more mystical stance, while alchemy, spark-craft and plain-old industrial engineering champion the scientific approach. The seven available playbooks break down (almost) neatly into three equal groups: Lurks and, particularly, Whispers have mostly magic/arcane powers; Hounds and Leeches rely heavily on tech; and Cutters and Slides are largely all about the physical (whether violence or personal charisma). (Spiders sit comfortably in the middle of the net, without any truly superhuman abilities except foresight and management skills.)
- Police Brutality: If the Bluecoats catch you when your crew's Wanted Meter is at 0 (i.e. there is literally nothing they can pin on you), they'll just beat you to near death (inflict level 3 harm — level 4 being fatal), and you are not allowed a Resistance roll against it because they keep going until you are injured.
- Precautionary Corpse Disposal: Everyone comes back as a ghost 1-3 days after death. Since the mere presence of a ghost has nasty supernatural effects on the living, every human corpse has to be dissolved in boiling electroplasm within that time to prevent the ghost from leaving it. The Order of Spirit Wardens provides this public service in Duskwall and has magical means of detecting any new dead bodies within the city walls, therefore players are discouraged from killing NPCs, as getting the Wardens involved always raises their Wanted Meter faster.
- Prison Changes People: This is a gameplay mechanic: when a Player Character is arrested and thrown into Ironhook, their player must make an "incarceration roll" that determines how bad their time behind bars has been. On a bad roll, the character automatically receives a Trauma, which usually has major impact on future role-play, as well as being completely incurable under the regular rules.
- Procedural Generation: The book has tables for randomly generating entire city parts, missions, NPCs, and even simple word on the street from a couple dice rolls. The official usage instruction of these tables simply says "Roll some dice and use the results and these tables however you see fit."
- The Queenpin: Notable mafia queens include Lyssa, a disgraced noble who took over the leadership of the Crows gang by murdering her old boss; Mylera Klev, a master swordswoman who runs the Red Sashes martial arts academy as a front for one of the largest drug rings in town; and Djera Maha, an Iruvian honey trader who is also secretly the leader of one of the two largest crime syndicates of Duskwall.
- Red Light District: Silkshore, specifically, the part of it known as "the Ease", is Duskwall's prime location known for its brothels, vice dens, and generally places catering to any fantasy and pleasure imaginable. The oldest and most respected brothel of the city is even rather unsubtly named The Red Lamp.
- Resting Recovery: Healing harm can only occur during downtime between Scores and is treated as a long-term project, meaning that players have to roll for how well it goes and have to spend Coin if it's not going fast enough.
- Role-Playing Endgame: The system forces the Scoundrels into retirement after they accrue four Traumas. After retiring, they become regular NPCs, although their quality of life depends largely on how much coin they have managed to hoard during their criminal days.
- Romanticism vs. Enlightenment: Appropriate to its Gothic inspiration, Doskvol is in constant tension between rationalism and mysticism. The setting being what it is, the line between the two is often blurry, as demonstrated by the oft-mentioned anti-ghost force fields powered by demon blood that do conform to scientific principles in-universe. Even the name "electroplasm" merges a scientific concept (electricity) with an occult one (ectoplasm).
- Saintly Church: A charity called the Weeping Lady is described as a "pseudo-religion" whose officals bear titles like "Father" and "Mother", and venerates the first Governor General of Duskwall, Lady Devera, said to be a champion of the poor. One of the sample characters belonging to the faction is explicitly described as kind and patient. Another is found as a potential purveyor of the "Weird" vice, but that doesn't necessarily imply something sinister.
- Single Phlebotinum Limit: Every single fantastic element of the setting, from trains, industrial machinery, and alchemy to vampires, demons, and ghosts, is powered by electroplasm in one form or another.
- Skill Scores and Perks: Played with. The "perks" are the special abilities and crew upgrades, which are much more similar to the "moves" found in games Powered by the Apocalypse than to traditional perks, while the skill scores are replaced by Action Ratings. The key difference between traditional skills and Action Ratings is that in traditional RPGs, the Game Master decides which skill score to roll for in a given situation, while in Blades, it's players who choose the Action Rating they roll for, and the GM merely arbitrates the level of the chosen approach's risk ("position") and reward ("effect level").
- Stat Grinding: Kind of. Each Attribute has its own XP track, which fills up by rolling for one of the Actions under that Attribute from a Desperate position. You can also get Attribute XP in other ways, but this is the main one.
- Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist: The Inspectors are famous for their incorruptibility. This means they're likely to be a big headache for your crew as unlike the rest of Duskwall's criminal justice system, they can't just be bought off.
- The Syndicate: The Unseen are a secretive criminal enterprise with a finger in pretty much every pie in Duskwall, and one of only two Tier IV underworld factions in the city (the other being the Hive, a MegaCorp with a lot of shady businesses on the side).
- Taking the Bullet: The system explicitly supports this kind of action. As long as your character is in position to take the harm intended for another scoundrel, you don't even have to roll for it (although you may want to roll to mitigate it).
- Taking the Heat: This is pretty much the only way to reduce the crew's Wanted level. You can throw a crew member who's hit their final Trauma level to the wolves, or you can have the crew's Spider check into their Luxury Prison Suite for a few weeks' vacation.
- Terminally Dependent Society: If the leviathan blood supplies run out, the lightning barriers will fail. If the lightning towers fail, all Imperial cities will be overrun by ghosts and the Akorosi Empire will simply end. There are numerous hints throughout the book that this has already started to happen, with leviathan hunter expeditions yielding less and less blood every year. There are also indications, however, that natives of Severos and Tycheros have already adapted to life outside the barriers, so even if the Empire falls, humanity will carry on.
- Tesla Tech Timeline: Most obviously with the lightning towers guarding Duskvol from the Deathlands surrounding it, but there are other inventions starting to creep into the Gaslamp Fantasy, such as the standardization of electric lighting replacing gaslamps (driving the now unemployed Lampblacks to become a street gang with lamp lighting rendered obsolete), and the invention of Hulls, robotic machines operated by transferred human souls.
- Theme Song: "Furnace Room Lullaby" by Neko Case, according to the author.
- There Are No Therapists: Once you get a Trauma level, it's permanent: there is literally nothing you can do to get rid of it (short of dying and coming back as a vengeful ghost), and once you have four (five with certain upgrades) Trauma levels, the character must retire from active play, being too broken psychologically to carry out criminal activities. Justified by Duskwall being a Victoria-era city where even basic anatomy is treated as a mysterious and occult art, and the concept of psychotherapy simply doesn't exist yet. The book does off-handedly suggest a way to cure Trauma, via the inventing and long term projects rules to make a "soul surgery" device that rips the inner pain out of your mind. Not exactly therapy, sure...
- Three-Stat System: The basic stats are Insight, Prowess, and Resolve, roughly corresponding to intellectual, physical, and social capacities of a Player Character. In an interesting twist, these basic stats are never used for active Actions (instead, their subordinate Action ratings are taken), but only for reaction rolls to resist negative effects.
- Tier System: Every faction in the game is ranked on an exponential Tier scale ranging from 0 to 5 (or to 6, if you count the Imperial Military outlier), with each next Tier being about twice as numerous and sporting equipment twice as good as the last. The same exponential logic applies to the so-called "Magnitude" — a background mechanic designed to help GMs assess the costs of a magical effect or of an invention, based on the scale and nature of its effects.
- Treacherous Quest Giver: A Defied Trope. The rules for the payoff specifically tell the GM not to screw with players at the payoff and say "your client is planning to kill you and doesn't have the money to pay anyway." While a staple of the source material, it screws with the reward mechanisms built into the game, and it's just not fun for the players.
- Unholy Ground: Not so much the ground, as the world itself that keeps the ghosts trapped and slowly going mad after their physical bodies perish. If it weren't for the Spirit Wardens, the world would have long been overrun by ghosts.
- Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Blades in the Dark is likely the first game on record to mechanize this trope. Although the player characters are assumed to plan their scores extensively, the players don't specify anything ahead of time, except the score's objective, the attack point, and their respective maximum loadouts. This way, the latter can retroactively introduce contingencies into the former's "plans" that had never been mentioned before, and thus have much better chances of success than if the players had planned their scores in detail.
- Urban Ruins: Parts of old Doskvol have been left out when the modern lightning barrier has been constructed, including the Old North Port (now a popular smuggler hub) and the Lost District, a formerly wealthy quarter whose populace had been wiped out by a plague and whose many riches now lie abandoned to the Death Lands.
- Useless Useful Stealth: Averted. Unlike almost every other RPG, where a single whiffed roll from the party's least stealthy character blows the entire group's cover, Blades frames group sneaking as a group action, where everyone rolls, but only the highest result is counted, and the group leader takes stress for every failed roll. Moreover, the Lurk's "Expertise" ability caps the stress they take from any such attempt to 1, making stealthy approaches feasible for any crew without completely negating the risk.
- Vengeful Ghost: Spectres are a type of ghosts that have been twisted by their deaths and are driven by the desire to take vengeance upon the living by consuming their life energy. Many start off with a specific target, but once the target dies, transfer their hatred upon all of the living.
- Vice City: Duskwall is a cramped city living off its leviathan blood exports, and the only people who seem to truly uphold the imperial law in it are the Inspectors, who are foreigners and thus don't have any local ties.
- Wanted Meter: Your crew has a Heat score, which determines how much notoriety it garnered in the underworld — and, subsequently, how close an eye the Bluecoats keep on you. When the Heat maxes out, you go up a Wanted level, which has pretty serious consequences to any member who gets arrested.
- Weird Moon: It glows brightly despite the extinguishing of the sun, and seems to be growing slightly larger (or coming slightly closer) with every passing year.
- Who You Gonna Call?: The Spirit Wardens are the foremost organization that deals with supernatural threats, but fascinatingly enough another such group is the Gondoliers faction. The Gondoliers have been dealing with the ghosts of people whose bodies were dumped in the canals since long before the Immortal Emperor organized the Spirit Wardens, and most Duskwallers actually prefer to go to the Gondoliers with "weird problems" as they're more approachable and less ruthless than the Spirit Wardens.
- With Us or Against Us: The Lampblacks and Red Sashes don't take "no" for an answer when hiring muscle in their bids to take over Crow's Foot.
- A Wizard Did It: To quote the last page of the book: "This was once a storybook fantasy world of magic and wonders, which was destroyed and an industrial civilization was built on top of the ruins. Don't expect scientific realism here."
- Work Hard, Play Hard: The way higher attributes lead to more stress cleared when characters indulge their vices seems to imply this. Since higher attributes mean the character is better at managing a crisis, but more stress being cleared means a higher risk of overindulgence.
- Wrong Side of the Tracks:
- Or rather, "of the canals", since most districts in Doskvol are separated by waterways. Specifically, the central canal that separates the obscenely wealthy and secure district of Brightstone and the relatively-wealthy Charterhall from the gang-controlled Crow's Foot, rough sailor town of the Docks, perpetually poverty-stricken Charhollow, and the proletarian Coalridge. All four of these districts (plus the penal colony of Dunslough) are definitely viewed as the wrong side of the tracks by the more fashionable citizens. Barrowcleft, on the other hand, manages to keep a very good reputation, despite being just as poor a neighborhood.
- Another example with actual railway lines does exist, between Coalridge and Nightmarket. Originally, Coalridge was THE railway hub for all of Duskvol, especially as it carried out coal from the Coalridge Mine. While it still has some rail traffic (especially with heavy equipment and raw materials courtesy of the Ironworks), the decline in use of coal in favor of electroplasmic power, coupled with the Gaddoc Rail Station opening in Nightmarket causing the transcontinental cargo trains to stop there, means that many of Coalridge’s rails have stopped operating, leaving abandoned rail cars to rust right on the tracks, and it’s remaining inhabitants to be indentured miners and steelworkers. By contrast, Nightmarket is a prosperous commercial trading hub due to Gaddoc Station, on par with Barrowcleft in the ability to acquire assets.
