Campaign Retrospective: Comes Now the Godswar

Comes Now the Godswar was an epic campaign that I ran last year in Blades in the Dark. Heavily inspired by the city of Guerdon from the world of Gareth Hanrahan’s Black Iron Legacy, it saw the city of Doskvol play host to refugees fleeing a catastrophic global conflict, and the struggles and complications such an influx of people would cause. 

The players went through a real ‘rags to riches’ arc, starting as refugees having to deal with crises and an incoming deadly winter in an internment camp on some formerly deserted islands (the three unmarked islands off of the coast of Whitecrown Island, which I reworked as the Three Sisters, complete with custom location sheet). By the end of the campaign, they were shot-callers; defending the city alongside their friends and contacts from an approaching army in an epic showdown.

It was a great campaign. One of the best I’ve ever had the privilege of running. A lot of this praise has to go to my players, who each brought skilled and unique life to their characters, not only rolling with the punches, but throwing unique curveballs of their own. In short, much of the success of this campaign (and, in my opinion, the system), is in how collaborative it was - five brains are categorically better than one, after all.

Having said that,  I do think that the system played an important role in how well the campaign worked. I put this down to two things; the structure, and the harm/stress mechanics.

By structure, what I mean is that the distinct phases of play that Blades has - that loop of Score-Downtime-Score - and how they nicely encode distinctly episodic planning. By splitting up play into predictable chunks, it allowed me to focus on pacing in a much more focused manner than I had in the past, and allowed me a much easier time in seeding hooks and generally making the world feel responsive and alive - there was a designated time for the world to react and retaliate. In total, we had about twenty scores; several lasting more than one whole session, and at least one one that wrapped up inside of an hour - the variety was due to the fiction, but also, especially in more high-stakes scores, how fast their resources were depleted. I kept a reasonably close eye on how stressed and harmed the PCs were getting, and it was a really useful metric for the length of the score - so much so that, at the final score, when I gave out a no-questions-asked stress heal - it only served to heighten the tension!

The structured nature of play wasn’t without fault, however. I found it hard to show consequences when the players were guaranteed a relatively uneventful week following their score, and I never felt that Entanglements were a good answer for that - they generally just felt like I was picking on a random PC for the whole gang’s actions. From a player perspective, they reported feeling that the rigidity of the structure didn’t allow the players to have the PCs interact outside of the lens of ‘the job’ - it was hard to justify an RP scene that didn’t fall into the nature of the structure, and it left the PCs feeling more like coworkers rather than friends, even by the end of the game. Some of that is certainly on me as the GM, but I struggled to find holes in the structure to allow that to happen - and it was something I was mindful of and trying to incorporate.

In total, we went through three character deaths, all of which felt impactful and meaningful, one insanity, and several noble sacrifices. In the process, the players’ gang, the Fire Brigade, blew up several watch stations, a museum, two vaults, an empyrean gate, at least two ships, and brought a living god down upon their enemies. Most importantly, they saved a horrifying fishman - at significant personal, social, and economic cost to themselves. No greater heroes could be found in all of the land.

I can’t say that the players and the game deserve all of the credit for the campaign though (as much as that is my reflex!) - I think I made a lot of decisions that pulled everything together and really allowed the rest of the game to sing in the way that it did. In no particular order, they were: keeping a tight grip - not on the plot, but on the concepts; weaving in the lore only where and when needed; making some really nice props and handouts; and running a secondary game to keep momentum going when we didn’t have enough players to all be comfortable running our main game.

When I say prepping concepts not plots, what I mean by that is that I approached each situation with the same core concept:

Systemic Change can only result from Collective Action

This informed everything from the metaplot to individual scores - at no point could a single individual change the narrative in a meaningful way; only teamwork could drive success. This meant that there was a consistent narrative, and a theme that, even subconsicously, helped create a coherant overarching story without me having to obviously seed plotlines; a lot of things just fell out of the concept and its logical next steps.

Blades in the Dark has a really good amount of lore built into its base setting, and throughout the campaign I, of course, built my own additions and modifications to it in service of my story - and something that my players called out was how much they enjoyed how I immersively wove the lore in only when necessary.

Finally, my use of a backup campaign - this was the Voyage of the Thunder Child, a leviathan hunter ship this secondary crew picked up in Lockport as it was being overwhelmed by the Godswar. This too had a core concept I played with and tried to cleave to as much as I could:

The World is Strange and Godsbroken

Each session was designed to 1) stand alone; discrete stories that can be told in a single session (which I didn’t always succeed at), and 2) show how the Godswar affects the world, whether that was directly through the challenge of the session, or indirectly through the seismic aftershocks at the outskirts of the war. In this way, I was able to fundamentally have my cake and eat it too; create a big, expansive, active world, and still tell a deeply personal story about the PCs. I wove characters from one game into the other, and I think that that went quite a way towards embedding both stories in the same continuum in both mine and my players’ eyes.

I want to highlight a standout session in a campaign filled with fantastic moments that I think best show off what I enjoyed about the game. A daring rescue of a noble lady - the PCs had read about her in the newspaper - from a clockwork mansion filled with omnicidal security robots and a homicidal ghost that was possessing the security system. Every week for the first couple months, I had written out the front page of a newspaper (here’s an example), and included a B-plot and advertisements, mostly for flavour, but with the potential for players to follow them if they wanted. And here they did! The score took multiple sessions - you can see my notes on it here as I tried something a bit new and different in my thinking. One PC died, and another went insane - and the others were definitely tested; it was a real challenge for me to juggle the difficulty, and also for me and the players to incorporate new PCs into the action mid-score, but I think it was successful and really satisfying.

It was a score that, for me, made the world feel real; it was a situation that was out in the world that the players actively sought out, and it was able to advance the fiction of several factions that would come up again and again; the Circle of Flame and the Sparkwrights. Although we lost some of the continuity from the beginning - the PC that died was one of the original escapees from the Three Sisters - we emerged with some fun new characters that made it all the way through to the end.

There were so many more sessions that were excellent; and I want to highlight some of them based on the incredible art that one of the players made:

Escaping a bluecoat chase with stolen leviathan-hunter diving gear during an Upstorm (where the rain flows upwards, obviously).

Rescuing their collectively-adopted son from a trap-filled basement (they may or may not have set the traps themselves)

The climax of a boxing tournament (which they’d entered as a distraction to take down a gang leader)

Two of the PCs mourning the death of one of their closest friends (the most impactful PC death I’ve had in any game I’ve run)

And finally, one of the best pieces of art any campaign of mine has ever generated; diving deep beneath the inky-black sea to unleash a god from a forgotten tomb, while a fierce naval battle occurs overhead.

I really enjoyed my time running Blades and the grimy, filthy, crime infested streets of Doskvol. This won’t be the last time I visit. Special thanks to Stefan, Sarah, June, and Hannah for playing this campaign - it would not have been the same with anyone else.