Inept Writes Games

Welcome back to my review of Deep Cuts by John Harper - for my overview and introduction, click here . We’ll be going over the first third of the book here, the Setting. The book goes through three broad sections to expand on the setting - though in the way that Blades is, some of these expansions are also woven into the other sections. They fall into three categories; innovations (new technology), factions (expanding the old and introducing some new), and a catalyst; a world-changing event.

Deep Cuts is an expansion and set of alternate rules for Blades in the Dark , released late October 2024 and updated earlier this year, written by Blades author John Harper based on his evolving experiences with the game as it has matured over the past eight years. It contains a mix of setting and systems that expand on or tweak mechanics and lore, fleshing out a few more of the factions (and adding some new ones), new technology, and a lot more. It is a fantastic resource - I’ll say that from the jump - it’s great, not just because of the content, but also the way it's presented as a series of individual tweaks and changes; it’s not an overhaul, it’s a la carte.  The book is laid out clearly and effectively. After each module is a list of all the things in the core rules that would need to change - and, more importantly, how to change them - to fit the ruleset in the module. At the back is an extensive, module-by-module set of designer’s notes, going into a great amount of detail ...

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 uniqu...

A while back, I took part in Foul Play’s Location Jam 2024 , and the way that Foul Play designer Hendrik ten Napel delineates the fictional space in his game is really simple, and nicely tactile - post-it notes. Why is it good? It’s a point-crawl system that works visually; when I look at a Foul Play location, I can imagine scribbling down areas on post-it notes for my group in-person. Unlike manually drawing out a battlemap, precision doesn’t matter; as long as everything is basically in the right places, then it’ll give the correct fictional positioning to my players. Then, something I think is super important - they can interact with the board. They can add their own post-it notes, they can remove them if they’ve obsoleted them; it’s a dynamic way to design a map that combines all the benefits of a point-crawl system with the tactility of physical mapmaking. The major difference between what I’m going to call goosecrawling and point crawling is scale. Point Crawls are commonly use...