Have you played COURT OF BLADES ?

By A Couple of Drakes / Shawn & Navi Drake

Court of Blades takes place in the vibrant, fantasy renaissance city-state of Ilrien, in a world populated by scheming nobles, court magicians, and dashing duelists.

As a noble retainer, you will engage in the polite civil warfare of the great families. You will host lavish balls, and manipulate the courts, uncover the plots of your rivals, protect the city from arcane dangers, manage your own intrigues and personal scandals, leverage your reputations, connections, and so much more.

Moon, an unrequited love

npc in a court of blades game

i drew fanart of the player characters from the court of blades game i’m running!! my players are all wonderful creatives and so fun to have at the table. 🥲🖤🦷👑

Yet another Lyra. I can't stop drawing him and I will not try.

@notasmad 's character, the Silver Blade from our game of Court of Blades, in the shinji evangelion pose

Another list of recommended non D&D TTRPGs

Mostly just a list of stuff that I personally have been having fun with!

5. Pathfinder: Look if you wanna replace dnd, this is probably the easiest way to do it. It is slightly more complex, but pf2e is WAY more beginner friendly than most people expect it to be. The main source of complication is also the system's greatest strength, in that the more in depth character customization lets you fill out your character's abilities in a more compelling way. Have you ever been frustrated because none of d&d's classes fit your character idea that well? Have you ever gotten a major class feature and not used it much because it doesn't fit your idea for your character? Pathfinder may be the system for you!

It does have a few minor issues in the form of design relics from the old edition d&d it was based on, but aside from the spell prep system most of those can be table ruled out or avoided with minor build tweaks.

4. Monster of the Week: This system is great for anyone who feels more intimidated by rules-dense systems. Being a Powered By The Apocalypse game means that if you learn one of these, you learn a bunch of other systems. Monster of the week is also very inexpensive to get into (Basically everything is free aside from the GM rulebook) and has good community support!

The genre is primarily modern Urban Fantasy with a focus on solving mysteries, but the publisher's most recent book, Codex of Worlds, expands the options so you can take those same supernatural horror mysteries into settings based on The Victorian Era, The Renaissance, The Dark Ages and even The Stone Age!

3. Thirsty Sword Lesbians: Look, this is an incredibly flexible system that has a shitload of uses so its hard to describe quickly but at its core this is another PBTA game that has more of a focus on mind games and emotional drama than the actual swordfighting mechanics. Swordfighting is just a backdrop for drama, and magic largely exists as a metaphor for the characters' personality traits, this makes the system incredibly easy to reflavor or tweak. I've seen a game run with a completely mundane fencing club, a homebrew setting based on a theater department and an official module based on a chess tournament. Anywhere people are competing and communicating can be the backdrop for this game. I should also note that despite the name and most of the art, the game is designed to work well with LGBT storytelling in general.

The core mechanics are essentially a rules-lite drama simulator, with the only truly consistent elements being romance and melodrama. The flavor is flexible and the rules have a ton of caveats that say "If you don't think this fits your character, ignore it!" Its primarily a game for people who like to really get into character to make choices and who are willing to shoot themselves in the foot for the sake of being true to that character.

2. Lancer: If rules-lite systems aren't as much your thing and you wanna take a very different approach to your new campaign setting, Lancer may be the game for you! This is a crunchy mecha combat game with a really in depth customization system that lets you make some wild shit. There are a ton of different customization options on top of an iconic series of mech frames that each have unique and iconic abilities!

It's also not as intimidating to get into as most crunchy systems, as its actually pretty hard to make a "bad" build in the game, the devs have been super cool about providing good digital resources like the Comp/Con app and the community is known for being pretty helpful!

Court of Blades: So this one is a bit more of a niche, but it's basically a system reskin of the critically acclaimed Blades in The Dark with some interesting new twists. Players take on the role of a group of nobles and courtiers in a low-magic fantasy setting inspired by Renaissance Italy's feuding noble houses as they attempt to bring their house to the top.

The real appeal of this system to me is how effectively it lets players play a group of scheming rich bastards, with mechanics around currying favor and having people to do things for you. If you've ever tried to run a noble in a different system only to be frustrated at how little the game lets you use your character's wealth and influence, you might like this game! It's a narrative driven game with a very different approach to structuring plots and missions compared to most ttrpgs that creates a much more engaging narrative flow. The player character playbooks can feel a bit linear and restrictive, but if more people play this one that means more homebrew options!

This week's moodboard is a bit of a companion to last week's.

Wren is both Ynes' sister and Ali's ex.

No, it's not complicated at all.

(It's very complicated)

Tomorrow my GM is going to be running me a Court of Blades/Vampire the Masquerade fusion game! 😅🦇 I like Blades in the dark and I'm excited to try similar mechanics with a more ~polite society~ cover

This is exceptionally cool to hear. Navi and I have dickered over the idea of doing a vampire hack of Court of Blades, but I don't think we're the ones to do the genre justice. We're more scary-fairies than blood-drinkers. But it's exciting to hear that you're taking Ilrien to weird new places.

Wish your GM luck, remind them to scheme loud and often, and find yourself some scandal. Let me know how it goes!

End of an Era - Sort of.

We’re done...

After about 2 years of - mostly - weekly sessions, and 14,000+ experience points, we’ve finally finished Book 1 of the Mutant Chronicles Dark Symmetry campaign. 

We did take break part way through so that @thewenglishwarlock could run a fantastic 7th Sea campaign, but other than that, and the occasional one-shot for missing players, it’s been nothing but Mutant Chronicles for 2 years on a Saturday.

I have a poor habit of not keeping track of the start date of major RPG campaigns, despite a real desire to do so, I can’t say for certain, but looking through our Discord server it looks as if 13th June 2020 was the start.

This is the longest single campaign I’ve ever run, beating out the Dark Heresy campaign I initially created this blog to record. 

There’s been highs, and lows, mental scarring, and horrible injuries, and the character’s aren’t fairing too much better. 

I’m taking a break from GMing for a while, whilst one of the players runs a Forged in the Dark hack called Court of Blades. 

It’s going to be a nice change of pace to be playing for an extended period of time, but I know it won’t take too long to get the itch to start running Book 2 of the campaign.

Some NPCs from my Court of Blades campaign!

FOLKS,

I really want to start setting up my Court of Blades game for online play but I'm also crying because I might have to do some minor coding editing for playbooks myself.

i am running a Court of Blades (Forged in the Dark rococo-esque rich people dueling and having affairs simulator) game for some darling friends and wanted to share the "invitation" i made for the spring social season! first session was a big hit <3

A side character from the same game my PC, Lyra, is in! They’re actually pretty harmless. Just have a love for all things dark and spooky!

For this #TTRPGTuesday, I'm talking a little bit about Lady Fiadh Leslie, the character I play in @rollwithitap's Court of Blades arc.

SOMEBODY WRITE RYAN GOSLING SMUT I CANT DO THIS ANY FUCKING MORE