Fan Club “Blog” #11: Thoughts on Blades in the Dark - Deep Cuts

The TTRPG scene saw a super interesting, unexpected release this week- Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts! An official, $10 supplement by Blades in the Dark creator John Harper that updates his beloved game of 19th century skullduggery to something like a "version 1.2".

Until today, Blades in the Dark has been a peculiar absence on Quinns Quest. If the channel's mission statement is to heroically flag great TTRPGs besides D&D, surely I should be talking about Blades?

Well, yes, I should be! Forgive me, benefactor, I'm doing it right now!

It's just that Quinns Quest is a project defined by my current interests & home games, while Blades is more like part of my past. Back in 2017 I ran an absolutely banging campaign and published a widely-shared review on Shut Up & Sit Down, helping to push the game to become as influential as it is today. And when a game I champion becomes quite as popular as this a funny thing happens- I start to feel guilty that the game I was shouting about has risen to quite such prominence while plenty of other great games are still unknown and unplayed. So I tend to close my big British mouth.

All the same, my excitement for Blades is still there, the way the coals of a fireplace retain heat long after you've let the fire go out. I found myself really excited to read Deep Cuts, and as I was reading it, I was caught off guard with a whisper from my heart- I wanted this book to make me excited about Blades again. I wanted to feel as passionate about the city of Doskvol and its cunning, eel-eating inhabitants as I did in 2017.

So, what's the verdict? Do I rate this expansion? Did the pages of Deep Cuts to act like so much tinder, and get my fire going again?

Well... yes. Yes, it absolutely did, even though I found this expansion to be a bit of a mixed bag. A mixed book? Whatever.

Let's get into it.



So first off, let me say that this is an ethical-ass way to do a new version of your game!

The TTRPG community often rolls its eyes at publishers doing new editions of games, with some fans of the game (rightly) seeing it as a cash grab from the publisher (who in the publisher's defense do need to make money) or disliking the changes that now feel oddly mandatory.

Instead, Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts offers about 115 pages of stuff for Blades that the book insists you use or ignore as you see fit. For the low price of $10 fans can support John Harper and the game they love, John Harper still gets to publish all of the adjustments he fancies making to his famous criminal baby, and there's even a super interesting handful of pages at the back of Deep Cuts where John explains his thoughts behind each idea. What diplomacy! 🕊️

...although I have just this second realised that newcomers to Blades now have to buy the original Blades rulebook and then buy a $10 supplement that tells you to ignore about 50 of the dense pages of rules that you just read. Which seems godawful. 😂 Oh well.

Anyway, I described this book as a mix of good and bad?

WELL. As I started reading the first thing that happened was that a lot of my goodwill actually started getting chipped away. The first two thirds of Deep Cuts is all worldbuilding stuff to expand the universe & tyrannical city of Doskvol, and I was surprised to find that it hardly moved me at allllll

There's some stuff in here to build out the universe outside the city, and while it's nice to have more information on the subjugated minorities who were painted very thinly in the original book, a lot of it feels like the kind of big-picture politics and warfare that players don't need to know. There's also a new, suggested city-wide threat where the veil between this world and another (unspecified) world is thinning and (unspecified) strangers are showing up, as if what was really missing from Blades in the Dark was something to shake things up. You know, as if the entire base game wasn't a powder keg of petty grievances and devastating injustices in the first place?



I was reading all of this, and I just didn't want it at all. To me, one of the pillars of Blades in the Dark is that, contrary to other RPGs out there, it's not about an external threat coming for your society, it's about just living in a society. It's about your crew controlling one street corner and trying to turn that into ten street corners. And then one of the mechanics that is fundamental to the game is that this power grab is so stressful that you literally must turn to a vice like alcohol, endangering everything you've gained with your drinking until you die or retire.

What the first half of Deep Cuts felt like to me, with its new technologies and continental developments and city-threatening plot hooks, was content to act as life support for the campaigns of players who have been playing Blades since it came out in 2015. And that is for sure not me.

(Side note- there's a funny coincidence in all of this. I read the excellent 2022 fantasy novel The City of Last Chances because it was pitched to me as "Blades in the Dark: The Novel", and that has an unexpected bit of worldbuilding where visitors are crossing over through a veil between worlds. And now here's a Blades expansion that also introduces to Blades visitors crossing over a veil between worlds, except as John Harper writes it, it's a little boring.)

I was also struck by something that... well, it's bad news for Blades in the Dark, but good news for TTRPGs as a whole! 😅 When I was reading all of the new city factions that were mentioned in Blades and are now finally fleshed out in Deep Cuts, I was left thinking to myself:

"Man. The writing in this book is only okay."

That's not something I noticed when I read Blades back in 2017! But today, having spent the last couple of years reading games by The Gauntlet, Mythworks and Rowan Rook & Decard, I was stunned to discover that my standards have crept up in the time since Blades was published.



So, yeah. There's some nice worldbuilding stuff in Deep Cuts that I'd take - I did appreciate that (a) players can now aspire to buy an unfathomably expensive motorcycle and (b) the book implies they are immediately going to drive it into a canal. But a lot of the new, suggested lore you're paying for here I felt I'd ignore.

"Wow," I thought to myself. "Maybe this game isn't as good as I remembered. Maybe I can stop fantasising about running another Blades campaign."

...Then I got to the second half of Deep Cuts, which is a thorough fine-tuning of almost every part of Blades' ruleset. I started reading, and you know what happened?

I was glued to my chair. I sat stock still until I'd finished reading the entire .pdf. Then I went to my flatmate's room, knocked on his door, and said:

"We should play a Blades in the Dark campaign."

I don't know if I'd use absolutely all of the tweaks to Blades' rules in Deep Cuts, but reading the back half of the book was both a warming reminder of why Blades set my heart on fire and also a sequence of startling realisations that John had found yet another pocket where he could tighten it up. The man has been watching this game get playtested to death like an engineer watching a car in a wind tunnel.

I can't get into everything here, but let's make a case study of what could be the single biggest change- with Deep Cuts, when players are doing skill checks, they're no longer rolling to see if they succeed. They're "rolling to avoid threats".

Basically, when the player says "I want to hang from the rope and jimmy open the window" or "I use my rapier to slice the man's coin purse open", you're no longer rolling to see if you can do it, because you can. You're a professional. (And in fact, one of the biggest feelbad moments in my old Blades campaign came from exactly this- a player tried to climb a brick wall, failed the roll, and I narrated that he injured his finger on the way up. That didn't rhyme with his headcanon and I was quite stern about my ruling, so he sulked.)

Deep Cuts now suggests that if there's no threat, players simply succeed. Dice rolls are for when they want to jimmy open the window and there's a risk the guard on the other side will hear them, or when they want to slice open the man's coin purse while dodging the man's shiv. And what's truly marvellous is that if there are multiple threats, two or even three, the GM states them all and the player must use each dice that's a success (or mixed success) to avoid (or kinda avoid) just one of them.

Let me get into the weeds a bit here: First off, having to assign different dice to different threats is a super fun tactical decision players now get to make, that also immerses the scoundrel PCs in scenes where they're sweating bullets over two frightening threats at once. Second, this empowers players and helps everyone love the PCs because it nudges the game towards competency porn (which has always been a part of Blades in the Dark) and away from frustration even though this tweak doesn't actually make the game any easier. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it makes the game play faster because the GM no longer needs to figure out what the failure or mixed success that a player just rolled means, because they only roll when you all KNOW what's at stake.

Trust me when I say that this same delicate expertise has been applied to almost everything in Blades, from Trauma to Load, from Stress to Advancement, from Teamwork to Devil's Bargains. Reading each of these sections was a one-two punch: I remembered how much I loved interacting with the system in the first place, and then I realised John had made it even slicker.

The only area where I personally might want to find some common ground between the original Blades and the new version presented in Deep Cuts is in the grand, zoomed-out drama that powers Blades between the action sequences- namely, the game of "Where is territory and money changing hands? Who did you piss off and was it the cops? Are you gonna get whooped upside the head with some unexpected consequences? And how do each of your PCs spend the weeks where you have to wait and see about said whoopin'?"



In the process of cleaning up this part of the game, Deep Cuts makes this process almost entirely diceless. The management of Coin, Heat, Stress, Reputation and Advancement is now a bit more like a tactical board game. You could also imagine it as a complex series of predictable levers and pulleys: A faction will act against you unless you spend a resource improving your standing by +1. Your vice will clear your stress without consequences, unless you have 6 or more stress.

And I DON'T LIKE IT

Look, I'm going to be ever-so-slightly facetious for a second, but this update is good if you're a BIG DWEEB who wants to treat running a criminal enterprise like it's a fuckin' SPREADSHEET, who wants to rip power from the hands of underworld bosses and expect to know WHAT WILL UPSET THEM. It's good if you're someone who wants to avoid being raided by the cops after only making them look a little bit stupid, or who wants to treat their character's addiction like it's a known quantity

But to me? So much of the joy of TTRPGs is when the story is a nasty, feral little thing that surprises everyone at the table. I want big, curvy twists of fate that make me hesitate as a GM because this plot isn't going where I thought it was. My players can feel that.

And look, if you want a really engaging sort of board game full of factors for you to fuss over? You'll be very happy. But my gut says that if I put this optional ruleset in front of my players, some of them might want it, but some might not, and not only would we encounter friction regarding who's engaged in min-maxing this game and who wants to make a rough plan & see what the dice say, I think the game would get slower because what was previously a dice roll was now a big discussion.

Or maybe it's great! 🙃 I haven't played it. And perhaps the more important conclusion that I should now admit... is that I'd be inclined to at least try even this new Downtime ruleset rather than sticking with what I already know. John Harper's the master of this stuff, after all. Maybe it absolutely hums.

If you've read Deep Cuts, do leave me a comment and let me know what you think. And if you're actually PLAYING Deep Cuts right now, please leave a comment enlightening us all. Where am I wrong? The people need to know.

In the meantime, I'm going to greedily consider whether my 2025 has time for a new Blades campaign without disrupting any of the games I have to play for Quinns Quest.

Can I make it work? Sounds like a Desperate Position to me...

-- Quinns