Inspiring as always, Luke! This motivates me to keep mashing up the mechanics I like from my favorite RPGs and systems to continue the work on my own creation (the one that's been cooking for almost four years now). Looking forward to you sharing your progress with us.
I've been thinking a lot about the Blades In the Dark "industrial fantasy" aesthetic lately. One of the sources of inspiration it mentions in the book is Peaky Blinders, sets in 1920s Birmingham. Which makes sense if you watch the show because it's a landscape of huge surreal factories and furnaces and iron girders everywhere. It's pretty much Mordor, and is in fact the literal part of the world that Tolkein based Mordor on.
I liked playing Blades In The Dark and found the basic elements of the setting very intuitive but thought the mechanics needed simplifying and wasn't totally on board with every aspect of the world building. So it's cool to see somebody translating it into an OSR system.
I’m from the UK and have been around parts that still have a bit of that ‘vibe’. It tracks more with a gritty rule system in my mind, so going for an NSR/OSR thing ended up being what I wanted! It enables you as a GM to really bring that grounded feel that I found a struggle with BitD’s own rules.
The Blades rules are pretty weird. Why are all the stats things like "attune" and "wreck"? Very hard to remember!
I'm trying to work out a way to run OSR-type adventures in the Call of Cthulhu setting at the moment. Difficult and in some ways a perverse thing to try to do since the core activity of the game is quite different. I've been looking at Blades-like mechanics to handle the investigation and social engineering that ought to be a big focus of the game, but we'll see how it goes.
I ended up writing a bunch of game content set in 1920s England so it's been on my mind a lot lately. I did a whole one when you're in Birmingham and fight the Peaky Blinders. I'm Australian so it's in some ways an exotic setting to me despite being weirdly familiar in other ways.
Feel like the reason "industrial fantasy" always lands weird for me is that it implies a history which a secondary universe doesn't have. Like the Black Country is interesting (and was so in Tolkein's mind) because of the contrast with an idyllic pastoral England that it overgrew and replaced.
Where's that in Duskwall? I thought the whole industrial England vibe was easy to imagine and made for good gameplay, but making it the only city in a post-apocalyptic world I felt limited my options in a way that I didn't really like.
But you have to do it because otherwise you're presented with all these difficult economic questions about what goes on in the rest of the world that you don't have satisfying answers to. A modern industrial economy is much more complex than a medieval economy and is therefore harder to model. Why I ended up setting my game in the real world instead.
For Call of Cthulhu, you can either look at Cthulhu Dark or (my preference) Liminal Horror. For Liminal Horror it’s a modern era setting by default but there’s supplements with 1920s equipment and backgrounds!
Inspiring as always, Luke! This motivates me to keep mashing up the mechanics I like from my favorite RPGs and systems to continue the work on my own creation (the one that's been cooking for almost four years now). Looking forward to you sharing your progress with us.
The mash up is always a good approach!
I've been thinking a lot about the Blades In the Dark "industrial fantasy" aesthetic lately. One of the sources of inspiration it mentions in the book is Peaky Blinders, sets in 1920s Birmingham. Which makes sense if you watch the show because it's a landscape of huge surreal factories and furnaces and iron girders everywhere. It's pretty much Mordor, and is in fact the literal part of the world that Tolkein based Mordor on.
I liked playing Blades In The Dark and found the basic elements of the setting very intuitive but thought the mechanics needed simplifying and wasn't totally on board with every aspect of the world building. So it's cool to see somebody translating it into an OSR system.
I’m from the UK and have been around parts that still have a bit of that ‘vibe’. It tracks more with a gritty rule system in my mind, so going for an NSR/OSR thing ended up being what I wanted! It enables you as a GM to really bring that grounded feel that I found a struggle with BitD’s own rules.
The Blades rules are pretty weird. Why are all the stats things like "attune" and "wreck"? Very hard to remember!
I'm trying to work out a way to run OSR-type adventures in the Call of Cthulhu setting at the moment. Difficult and in some ways a perverse thing to try to do since the core activity of the game is quite different. I've been looking at Blades-like mechanics to handle the investigation and social engineering that ought to be a big focus of the game, but we'll see how it goes.
I ended up writing a bunch of game content set in 1920s England so it's been on my mind a lot lately. I did a whole one when you're in Birmingham and fight the Peaky Blinders. I'm Australian so it's in some ways an exotic setting to me despite being weirdly familiar in other ways.
Feel like the reason "industrial fantasy" always lands weird for me is that it implies a history which a secondary universe doesn't have. Like the Black Country is interesting (and was so in Tolkein's mind) because of the contrast with an idyllic pastoral England that it overgrew and replaced.
Where's that in Duskwall? I thought the whole industrial England vibe was easy to imagine and made for good gameplay, but making it the only city in a post-apocalyptic world I felt limited my options in a way that I didn't really like.
But you have to do it because otherwise you're presented with all these difficult economic questions about what goes on in the rest of the world that you don't have satisfying answers to. A modern industrial economy is much more complex than a medieval economy and is therefore harder to model. Why I ended up setting my game in the real world instead.
For Call of Cthulhu, you can either look at Cthulhu Dark or (my preference) Liminal Horror. For Liminal Horror it’s a modern era setting by default but there’s supplements with 1920s equipment and backgrounds!
I love JP Coovert!
He’s so good!
💯 agree!
I've been thinking about how to do a Scum & Villainy/Monolith mashup lately, this is just the food for thought I needed - thanks!
I'd love to see NSR hacks for other FitD games! Band of Blades would be very cool too!