Hi

I like the Blade sys­tem and approach and I want to use it out­side sword and sor­cery. I’m think­ing of an 18^th cen­tury hor­ror game set in lon­don.
I can cre­ate a suit­able tal­ent table which will pro­duce less heroic char­ac­ters and have some good ideas about pas­sions and assets.

Has any­one thought of a san­ity mechanic for blade or how flint­lock pis­tols and mus­kets would work?


Thanks Paul

Well, even though the Blade rules only cover tech­nol­ogy to about the Thirty Years’ War I actu­ally don’t see a prob­lem con­cern­ing the firearms, at least not for the 18^th cen­tury. Breech-​loading guns, vastly improv­ing reload­ing times, were to my knowl­edge only start­ing to become com­mon in the first half of the 19^th cen­tury, as was rifling of the bar­rels, improv­ing accu­racy espe­cially over longer ranges. And even though pre-​measured paper cart­tridges for muz­zle load­ers were in use in the 18^th cen­tury, those were no real car­tridges in the mod­erns sense and did not speed up reload­ing times so much as to put the rate of fire of firearms into an entirely dif­fer­ent league than older mis­sile weapons. I think you can just use the weapon stats from p346.

You would how­ever have to draw up stats for the smallsword, which would be the most com­mon seri­ous weapon encoun­tered in a fight­ing man’s hands in 18^th cen­tury Lon­don.

Fright mechan­ics did of course not have any place in a game about Sword & Sor­cery heroes, but a few ideas to con­sider for your game:

For a game of hor­ror I sug­gest spread­ing san­ity and fear mechan­ics out among sev­eral Attrib­utes, so as to pre­vent play­ers from beef­ing up on one to become com­pletely unfaze­able. SY might gov­ern how much some­body can take, being some kind of reser­voir of san­ity that gets chipped away over time; san­ity might ini­tially equal SY. TY might be con­sid­ered one’s capac­ity to keep it together – a TY Check might be used to see whether any san­ity is eroded in the face of deeply unset­tling rev­e­la­tions or espe­cially grue­some events. Mere fright might be dealt with by DG, which cov­ers brav­ery and pluck. While a failed DG Check should prob­a­bly not erode san­ity, it might result in a PC being unable to go on, or to at least suf­fer from increased TNs (until an imme­di­ately life-​threatening situation’s rush of adren­a­line clears his sys­tem for at least the time to be able to deal with the threat by means of either fight of or flight).

Isn’t a small sword some­what between a side sword and a rapier? That might be a good place to start.

Less heroic heroes in a time, place and genre where armor was a bit on the rare side? This will be fun

San­ity might also work in the form of “neg­a­tive” Pas­sions, to adjust sit­u­a­tions where the insan­ity has the “best” effect. Eldritch hor­ror could make you a bro­ken man, or “just” very awk­ward in any kind of social situation.

Hmm.. build­ing on Doresh’s reply, have a look at the Curse mechanic which my intu­ition tells me might be a start­ing point.- prob­a­bly the ‘spe­cific doom’ variant.