Blades in the Dark Tutorial Score: Escape from Charnel Island

This is an old one-shot I wrote for my very first dive into Blades in the Dark. It was the first time I ran a system like this, and the first time my players encountered a game like this, so I wanted a little "tutorial level" where we could all get used to how to pilot the system. That said I am still quite happy with this as an introductory one-shot, and I have shared it with several GMs who have run it to great effect.

The scenario is written to introduce the core concepts of Blades, both the system and the setting, while being confined to an isolated locale with a simple objective: Escape.

Charnel Island Labor Camp

East of Duskwall 
Owned by Lord Strangford

Black rain whips down like oily icicles from between the stars. Dark clouds cling tightly to the lighthouse, which towers jagged and cruel above you. The electric beacon swings beams of light around, seeming to offend the storm clouds. 

The occasional flash of lightning illuminates the silhouettes of the island’s jagged rocks, the stark rectangular buildings with windows too small for a man to crawl through, the cranes and gantries and chemical vats of the refinery, and the figures of workers in prison garb using assorted tools to do battle with wriggling chunks of demonic flesh. Tentacles, tongues, arms, stalks, gills, feet, hooks, saws, hammers, and blood.

The chunks of god-beasts are dragged off the beach into troughs to be cut and bled and crushed.

"Them Levyathans a' tha backbone oh modern society, maggets! Ya should thank me for lettin' you do this vytal work for tha Empire."

You have heard Overseer Danfield's spiel before. He usually runs through it when there's fresh meat in the chain gang, but today it seems to be purely for his own amusement at watching you work in the rain. There's work to be done and you've been short-handed ever since the northern wing of the labor camp went up in flames a week ago.

"Wivout the Plasm ex-tracted from tha blood o' these ack-quatic demons, all con-tryvances o' modern society wud crummle and aur fair ciddy Doskvol wiv em!"

He's right. Leviathan blood is the empire's most reliable source of lightning oil, and without it the land would be very dark indeed. The embers of the sun twinkle on the horizon at dawn and dusk, but aside from that and the moon there is little light but what man has wrought. The world is a dark place.

Day after day (or night after night, it's hard to tell the difference), you go through the motions of slicing open the impossibly huge multiform chunks of beasts that the Leviathan Hunters bring in, draining them of blood into great vats. You have no safety equipment aside from your striped black and white overalls, but the more experienced gutters have taken to fashioning gloves and face covers from scavenged cloth - you know that any direct contact with the blood of a leviathan will take years from your life. It's a hungry, demonic substance.

The blood is then brought into the refinery for processing. Volatile chemicals are infused into the everliving ichor, and the ensuing process makes it glow a powerful electric blue. That process too is hazardous, as any spillage of the catalysts can turn into an immediate conflagration (like what happened a week ago). But once complete, the electroplasm can fuel all of the empire's machines and inventions. It truly is the marvel of the modern age. Maybe if you weren't forced to do the labor in the rain you might find some enjoyment in it.

To the players: Welcome to the world of Blades in the Dark!

The sun was destroyed a thousand years ago, and humanity persists by harvesting ghosts and demon blood to power the lightning towers that keep all the horrors of the underworld from devouring what remains of civilisation. People eat eels and mushrooms if they're lucky, and the only way up in the world is to plant your boot on someone else's face.

It's a Bloody Awful place full of shitty people, and you are some of them!

You are currently all prisoners at a labor camp on Charnel Island, located a few days travel east of North Hook, or Duskwall, or Doskvol, or the Dusk. The city has many names, but it's not important for this story.

You have been here for a few months each. You have all come to know each other during your stay here, and after half the jail blew up a week ago they have bunched all of you into a single cramped cell.

Let's go around and do introductions. Who are you, and what did you do to end up in prison?

To the GM: Read the players the opening narration, and the introduction to the situation. Ask the players how they took over their cell block. Depending on their answer, give them the benefit of one of the top crew abilities (like Silver Tongues for Hawkers if they say they have established themselves as the main source of contraband). This will give them all an extra action dot for them to assign in one of three actions.

The faint haze on the horizon and the bells of morning wake you. The cell is cramped. You feel like you are all packed like eels in a tin can - moist and ill-tempered.

An electrical crackling outside accompanied by heavy metallic steps tells you that the Warden is on its way.

The Warden is Overseer Danfield's pet Hull - an automaton infused with the electrical spirit of a ghost, bound to service by one of the camp's Necromancers.

It stomps over to your cell, and a human guard accompanying it slams her baton against the heavy iron door yelling: "Inmates, step back!" - but there's not really anywhere you can go and she knows it.

The door swings open and the Warden steps inside. The clockwork man whines and moans with fettered soul energy, as it presents a bundle of clothes in its arms.

"NEW CLOTHES clothes clothes..." it echoes, and places the bundle on the floor next to the door, then turns around and starts walking back. The guard promptly closes the door again. 

"Get changed, then drop your old rags down the laundry when you go to your shift," she orders before walking away.

The pile mostly consists of new prison overalls of the exact same design as your current ones. They don't even seem new. However, bundled inside each suit is a small package addressed to each of you by your real names. There is also a single letter with no name on it.

Dear Unfortunates,

You may know that Charnel is not the most foolproof prison ever engineered by our Imperial minds. But the inky expanse of the Void Sea is a greater deterrent than any wall or stretch of hooked wire. Ah, but who am I to tell you this? I am certain you have already considered your position, the ways to extricate yourselves from your cells, how to manipulate the guards, how to make the most of a gutter's hook and a catalyst vat. But without a way off the island, all your wiles will be for naught. 

In a matter of days, a ship flying Skovlan colors will make dock at Charnel, ready to depart for Doskvol at its earliest convenience. I have asked its crew to deliver any stowaways directly to myself, but of course discretion is key. In return for your deliverance, I require only one thing.

It might come as a surprise to you that Overseer Ochram Danfield is a literate man, and indeed that he writes letters by his own hand. Their contents are of no importance to ones such as you, except that I would like for you to acquire his outgoing mail for the week, and bring it with you to Doskvol, to me.

Provided to assist with this business is some of the tools of your trade. I am sure you will find uses for them. I expect you to be resourceful individuals if you wish to earn a more beneficial position in my employ.

// K, Your Benefactor

To the GM: Yes, K is a very verbose individual. When I read this out loud at the table I realized just how wordy the letter is. Feel free to cut it down for size, make a handout and give it to the players, or just replace it with your own message from an NPC of your choice.

Whoever the players' benefactor is, they're powerful. They get contraband onto a private island owned by one of Doskvol's most powerful nobles, and they are able to order around a Skovlander ship as they wish. And they have some design for Doskvol where the players fit into the plan...

To the players: The contents of the packages we can leave a mystery for now. It will actually be up to you to decide what your mysterious benefactor sent you, but the way this game works you can actually decide that on the fly as you need things. 

Blades in the Dark is all about jumping into the action without needing to worry about spending hours meticulously planning things - we can just assume that your characters already did that. In fact, in the middle of the action you can say "Let's do a flashback!" and you can describe how you prepared something earlier.

It's like an Oceans heist movie or a Leverage episode where things seem like they are headed towards a disaster but then suddenly there's a cut to a flashback to reveal how the team planned this all along and all the pieces of the plan are just coming together...

You can perform actions to overcome challenges, and to boost those actions you can do flashbacks, set-ups, assists, pushes, and Deals with the Devil.

The Escape from Charnel Island is going to be what the game calls a 'Score' - a heist, a criminal coup. We can jump straight into it and figure out your preparations in flashbacks - but if you want to ask me questions about the place so that you can make more informed actions, ask away! I might also turn the question around and ask you to decide some truth about this place - after all, you’ve been here for quite some time, and your characters know the place better than I do.

To start the Score, pick a Plan (Assault, Deception, Stealth, etc) and the relevant detail, and we will cut straight to the action with the Engagement Roll.

The Engagement Roll will determine how well you approach the initial steps of the Score and how prepared your opponents are to stop you once shit hits the fan.

Locations

Rocks

Perimeter of the island. Lots of angry eels and foaming waves.

North Wing Cell Blocks

Destroyed in refinery fire. Now abandoned.

North Wing Refinery

Ruined and haunted as fuck. Bubbling with caustic chemicals and infested with wandering ghosts curtailed by electrical circuits.

Lighthouse and Tunnels

Administration, staff quarters. Overseer Danfield's office.

South Wing Cell Blocks

You are here. Vaulted stone construction. Wet. Unpleasant mess hall. Cramped conditions.

Dockside Refinery

You work here. An older part of the refinery close to the small dock, infusing harvested leviathan blood with volatile chemicals. Large tanks, vats, pipes, steam, flickering lights.

Charnel Dock

Small facility for receiving Leviathan Hunters offloading illegal loads of leviathan flesh for processing. Unmanned. Rainy and wave-swept. Swinging electroplasmic lanterns.

Characters

Ochram Danfield, Overseer

“Suttle don naw maggets. Don’ make me get the batton.”

Danfield is an uneducated military man in Lord Strangford's employ. He may have served on one of Strangford's Leviathan Hunters in the past, or entered Strangford's employ after the Unity War. In any case, Danfield is a bully who takes an unearned amount of pride out of managing "his island" and punishing the "maggets" Strangford sends to his private prison - but ultimately he would like nothing more than to earn a position somewhere with prostitutes and a better liquor selection.

The Warden

“HALT! halt... halt...”

The Warden is a hull - a brass-and-steel robot powered by a bound ghost. It was created by Weird Farron and mostly serves to avoid risk of injury to the guards. The island doesn't have any real medical staff so the Warden is sent in to deal directly with prisoners whenever possible. But it's a mostly-mindless automaton that can only handle basic manual tasks and cracking heads.

Weird Farron

“The formula is proprietary!!!”

Farron is a Sparkwright by trade, but lost his standing in the college for dabbling too much in unsafe necromancy and for sharing chemistry secrets with Lord Strangford's organization. Strangford was happy to retain his employment as one of his personal leeches, and put him to work designing and operating an unlicensed electroplasm refinery on Charnel Island. Farron regards the entire island as existing for his work to continue, and thinks that Danfield is a moron.

Jenny Pruitt, Sanders, Crest, and Lobber +6 other guards

“Fine, leave if you want. We’ll bet on how far you get before the waves take you.”

The guards on Charnel are incredibly bored and lazy. They fraternize with the prisoners they like, and they abuse the prisoners they don't like. The guards are well-aware that the island is an illegal operation and don't try to pretend to be enforcing any type of legal system aside from whatever Danfield and Lord Strangford order.

Most of the guards have rotated off duty from a tour as marines in Lord Strangford's Leviathan Hunter fleet, chosen for prison guard duty because they weren't all that great at soldiering.

Captain Salavoe

Leviathan Hunter

Captain Roamund Salavoe is the captain of a Leviathan Hunter in Lord Strangford's personal fleet. Salavoe is salty and weather-bitten, having spent most of the past two decades on the Void Sea. He enjoys a close personal relationship with Lord Strangford and the two have been conspiring for years to build a secret reserve of electroplasm and leviathan blood in anticipation of coming shortages.

Salavoe considers everyone on Charnel Island to be beneath him. Weird Farron is the only one on the island who actually knows what he's doing, and even he is just a means to an end.

Captain Barrow

“Ah fuck that, pirate is such a crude word, don’t you think?”

Barrow used to be a captain in the Free Skovlan Navy during the Unity War, but somehow managed to get out with a Leviathan Hunter vessel, a crew, and a clean record when the war ended. Now she sells her firepower to the highest bidder, participating in Leviathan hunts and privateering activities. She is a ruthless killer, fiercely protective of her crew, and holds a general disdain towards Akorosi Imperials. One day Skovlan will rise again, and on that day Barrow plans on continuing doing whatever she usually does - looting and murdering with a wide grin.

Normally Barrow's ship would not be permitted to dock at Charnel Island but she has declared an emergency, and as Charnel Island is officially an Imperial lighthouse island Overseer Danfield is required to admit the ship while they conduct repairs.

Weaknesses

Haunted as Fuck

The explosion at the northern refinery caused a ghost rift, and the countless prisoners that have died at Charnel are making themselves reminded. Weird Farron has set up an electric fence to keep them to the north side.

Understaffed

Every part of the station is undermanned. There's half a dozen guards to handle more than two dozen prisoners. And the place is days from the city.

The Process

The alchemical process that produces Plasm remains a closely guarded secret and Farron is the only one on the island who knows how to run the refinery. Nothing can be allowed to go wrong with the remaining refinery.

Strengths

The Leviathan Hunters

There are two Leviathan Hunter ships at the Charnel dock. One of them (Barrow) is friendly to the players and their benefactor. The other (Salavoe) is not. Captain Salavoe is being entertained by Overseer Danfield, but if Salavoe signals his ship he can muster a significant force of armed marines.

Potential Clocks

• Alarm (4)
• Ghosts! (4)
• Dockside Refinery Explodes! (6)
• Breaking Captain Salavoe’s Marines (6)

How It Might Go

My players decided that they had taken over the cell block by controlling the flow of contraband (by having good relations with the guards). I gave them the benefit of the Silver Tongues crew ability for the Hawkers crew.

The crew did some sneaking around looking for a way to get into the overseer’s office. Eventually they decided to go for a Deception plot, where the crew’s Slide posed as the commander of one of the recently-docked ships, to get a meeting with the overseer. I ruled that it made sense to have the appropriate uniform delivered as part of the character’s gift from their benefactor, if he marked a box of load for it.

While the Slide distracted Danfield, offering him a bottle of whiskey laced with trance powder, the rest of the crew started on their escape. Unfortunately they were spotted by two of the guards and the crew’s Lurk had to snuff them out before making a break for Captain Barrow’s waiting ship!