u/atamajakki

A Pound of Flesh flipping Mothership from a game about dying alone in space to dying on a dystopian space station with a population of millions is what made me finally fall for the game that's now my current favorite. Vaults of Vaarn hosts its own faction-heavy urban sandbox, Gnomon, and one of the coolest things about the imminent new edition is that all that material has become core. I'm fiending for The Tiger Princess of Treacherous Tripura and Junk City, upcoming books that I hope will finally sell me on OSE and Mausritter, respectively.

So with that in mind... what am I missing? What are the coolest cities around and the best procedures you've seen for urban adventures? If it's got a wealth of downtime-related stuff, all the better.

Full details at the link, but in brief: the project is being pushed back to 2027 after conversations with customers and players, with a crowdfunder for a supplement to another game Magpie puts out moving up to late October in its place. They now say Masks 2e will have a public Quickstart playtest in September of this year instead, in the hopes of gathering feedback before crowdfunding.

In both Mothership's A Pound of Flesh supplement and Vaults of Vaarn's second zine, city settings are presented where (among many other unrelated details!) legal disputes are handled in gladiatorial arenas, frequently with one or both sides represented by hired mercenary champions.

When this commonality came up, Leo Hunt (Vaarn's creator) mentioned to me that he'd never read APOF, instead crediting his inspiration to the a playable Background from Troika!: the Yongardy Lawyer, battle-ready barristers and solicitors who resolve court cases with lethal combat.

My question to you all: does this idea come up anywhere else? Is there some ur-text here other than the historical precedents of gladiators, legalized dueling, and the general (to my understanding, Germanic/Western European) concept of a trial by combat, either in TTRPGs or elsewhere in genre fiction and media?

EDIT: IF YOUR GLADIATORS ARE NOT ALSO ACTING AS LEGAL REPRESENTATION, THEY'RE NOT WHAT THIS THREAD IS ABOUT!

To celebrate backers getting their hands on the final PDF yesterday, I've gone ahead and published the next entry in my Piecing Together the Shattered Isles series! This one's about the many connections Blades '68 has back to the lore of the original game, its many supplements, and even other non-Blades games that John Harper made before it.

I hope you enjoy! What's your favorite part of the new setting?

Howdy, folks! I've been a big fan of Mothership since the 0e days, and figured I'd actually start collecting my recommendations in one place instead of just constantly repeating myself in replies on various websites. If you're not sure where to start, need an adventure to drop into your campaign, or want the next two years of play planned out for you, I've got tips on what to buy for each!

Notably absent from this post: my Prospero's Dream-adjacent recommendations, as we're still in the early days of Mothership Month 2025's deluge of support for the best space station in TTRPGs. There's a ton of good stuff out there... but I want a more comprehensive view of that sub-scene before I cover it!

My Piecing Together the Shattered Isles series has been a lovely excuse to collect scattered bits of Blades lore, and this third installment is about properly laying out all of the tangential Factions and plot hooks surrounding the default Starting Situation.

Sure, we all know that a coup within the Crows has left them too weak to stop the Lampblacks and the Red Sashes from fighting over street turf... but what about how it intersects with labor tensions at the Docks, the intensifying Iruvian cold war, and the highest-Tier criminal Faction in the city? Read on to learn more!

I'd made a thread last year asking if anyone knew what was up with Cartel, the PbtA game Magpie crowdfunded back in 2018, and backers finally got some news today. Unfortunately, it's the bad news we'd all expected for a while. A few excerpts below (emphasis NOT my own, it's in the original text):

>I’ve got some tough news to deliver today. I am officially canceling the remaining Cartel stretch goals, namely Amigos y Enemigos and Sin Fronteras. We will still be releasing the CD of narcocorridos (Corridos de Durango)—read below for more—but that will be the last release for the Cartel Kickstarter.

>Over the past few years, I’ve been slowly chipping away at the remaining work needed to release these stretch goal materials. I was able to collaborate with some amazing creators on them…but there’s still so much to be done—editing, graphic design, etc—and the financial headwinds have only gotten worse with the tariffs, the war in Iran, etc. [...] At some point, I have to admit that these remaining pieces are no longer viable on any reasonable timeline. And more importantly, you all deserve to have a definitive resolution instead of an open-ended project that never actually finishes.

>For everyone who supported the now canceled books—either through a pledge level or via add-ons—I would very much like to make this right for you. While all the money for this project has long been spent bringing it to life, we are offering the following options for every backer affected by the cancellation of the physical books: 100% refund, delivered via Paypal (or other electronic method) or 150% refund, delivered via credit to the Magpie Games webstore.

>If you backed at a level that included either of these supplements in print—or added one/both of them to your pledge at any level—please fill out this form to claim your refund/credit[...]

>This is the final update for the Cartel Kickstarter. From this point forward, we consider this project to be closed—we won’t be updating it, and we won’t respond to comments. If you need something that’s not addressed by the above, please email us at info@magpiegames.com.

The last update before this had been all the way back in October 2024, and that was after no updates in 2023 at all, so this isn't terribly shocking... but backers *did* previously receive several playbooks from Amigos y Enemigos and a playtest playset for Sin Fronteras' Berlin spinoff, which seem like they'll now never see a public release.

At least the story's over now, I suppose. Woof. My condolences to all my fellow backers; the whole reason I backed this initially was for the Aztlan playset in Sin Fronteras that we never saw any previews for.

I'd made a thread last year asking if anyone knew what was up with Cartel, the PbtA game Magpie crowdfunded back in 2018, and backers finally got some news today. Unfortunately, it's the bad news we'd all expected for a while. A few excerpts below (emphasis NOT my own, it's in the original text):

>I’ve got some tough news to deliver today. I am officially canceling the remaining Cartel stretch goals, namely Amigos y Enemigos and Sin Fronteras. We will still be releasing the CD of narcocorridos (Corridos de Durango)—read below for more—but that will be the last release for the Cartel Kickstarter.

>Over the past few years, I’ve been slowly chipping away at the remaining work needed to release these stretch goal materials. I was able to collaborate with some amazing creators on them…but there’s still so much to be done—editing, graphic design, etc—and the financial headwinds have only gotten worse with the tariffs, the war in Iran, etc. [...] At some point, I have to admit that these remaining pieces are no longer viable on any reasonable timeline. And more importantly, you all deserve to have a definitive resolution instead of an open-ended project that never actually finishes.

>For everyone who supported the now canceled books—either through a pledge level or via add-ons—I would very much like to make this right for you. While all the money for this project has long been spent bringing it to life, we are offering the following options for every backer affected by the cancellation of the physical books: 100% refund, delivered via Paypal (or other electronic method) or 150% refund, delivered via credit to the Magpie Games webstore.

>If you backed at a level that included either of these supplements in print—or added one/both of them to your pledge at any level—please fill out this form to claim your refund/credit[...]

>This is the final update for the Cartel Kickstarter. From this point forward, we consider this project to be closed—we won’t be updating it, and we won’t respond to comments. If you need something that’s not addressed by the above, please email us at info@magpiegames.com.

The last update before this had been all the way back in October 2024, and that was after no updates in 2023 at all, so this isn't terribly shocking... but backers *did* previously receive several playbooks from Amigos y Enemigos and a playtest playset for Sin Fronteras' Berlin spinoff, which seem like they'll now never see a public release.

At least the story's over now, I suppose. Woof. My condolences to all my fellow backers; the whole reason I backed this initially was for the Aztlan playset in Sin Fronteras that we never saw any previews for.

Hi there! I just read Rebel Crown for the first time, and found myself really impressed by it.

Fascinating, the maps for each of the Eagle, Oak, and Serpent campaigns fit together into one landmass... but I don't see that fully-assembled map anywhere official. Before I fuss with an image editor for a while, has anyone done this work for me already?

I feel like every single campaign I read about online involves the player Crew initially taking the Lampblacks' side. It probably doesn't help that none of the Red Sashes' allied Factions have their own write-ups in the core rulebook (though the Faction Deck and Deep Cuts alleviate this), and the Vigilantes expansion even adds the Bloodletters from John Harper's AP as an additional anti-Red Sashes Faction!

Has anyone here ever run or played a game where the party took the Iruvian side here?

Howdy y'all!

I've seen quite a few threads here talking about the rules updates and changes in Deep Cuts, but almost none about the wealth of other material in the book: new higher-tech items, new Factions, and a whole campaign framework around "the Other World" to optionally use.

Have your scoundrels crossed paths with Rowan House, rode a plasmocycle, or solved the mystery of where Strangers come from? I want to hear about it!

I had an interesting conversation with some friends recently about the direction Blades in the Dark's non-core material has skewed in the nine years since release, and figured it might spark some fun chatter here as well.

Blades is, at its core, a game about scoundrels pulling off daring crimes in the name of growing their gang, paying for their vices, and hopefully funding an eventual retirement. While the Imperium's government, military, and police are all sources of oppressive pressure, the city is full of bastards of all stripes, so the player Crew being selfish isn't terribly jarring.

But the supplemental Vigilantes Crew takes a different approach, and Broken Spire outright gives you the tools to assassinate the Immortal Emperor. Blades '68 has both Militants and Utopians among their list of Crews, with a dedicated Radical playbook available for characters; recent videos from Evil Hat have said that the Dagger Isles book has been refocused to really center anti-colonial rebellion against the Imperium in that part of the setting. In the third-party scene, you've got works like Steelweaver's Rebellion and The Unity of Skovlan taking aim at Doskvol's dystopian status quo.

Thus, my question to you all - how much of your BitD play has been about trying to tear down unjust authorities, rather than just trying to climb the ladder yourselves?