Review: "Court of Blades" puts a unique flair on the Forged in the Dark formula
Court intrigue and undying love help this flavorful game be more than a fresh coat of paint
Political and faction intrigues are some of my favorite aspects of TTRPGs, both as a player and a GM. It is ripe fodder for unique and interesting stories, and the ways that players can interact with factions means that no two groups will ever play through the same setting the same way. Any game that encourages this well is something I look forward to.
When I first read through Court of Blades by Shawn & Navi Drake, I was intrigued. I had heard it was a fun take on the Forged in the Dark (FitD) formula, and it seemed to be living up to that expectation. I then got to it’s faction play discussions, and I knew it would become a game I needed to play. Let’s get into what this book entails.
Ilrien, the Esultare, and the World of Court of Blades
Court of Blades takes place in the city of Ilrien, the most prosperous of the Principalities since the fall of the Dread Empire. This coastal city has become the hub of the wider world, a centerpiece of magic, technology, art, and romance.
The Esultare are the six Houses Major, the most powerful families in the Principalities, and at the top sits the First Prince. The Houses have their own standing amongst themselves, and every citizen of Ilrien knows where each House stands amongst the rest.
The setting is a place of politics, nobility, and romance. Duels for honor, whispers in a nobleman’s ears, a moonlit stroll through the garden after a masquerade ball are all a common occurrence. Think The Three Musketeers meets Game of Thrones or The Godfather. The players will play as part of Coterie for one of the Houses Major, doing what they can to raise their House’s standing amongst the Esultare. Will they rise to the task, or see their House fall to ruin.
Overall, I found the setting incredibly intriguing and realized. This kind of story is something right up my alley, and there is a lot of possibility for storytelling and intrigue within this world to engage any group of players who are interested in this type of story.
Forged in the Dark with a twist
Base Mechanics
At a basic level, this game will be very familiar for anyone familiar with the Forged in the Dark formula. The core mechanic of the game is a d6 dice pool with varying outcomes. When it’s time to take an Action, you determine what action you want to use to accomplish it; you could wreck a door, or consort with allies, or maneuver through a crowd.
You then discuss with the GM your position and your effect. Position determines your fictional positioning; the situation is controlled, risky, or desperate, and these determine the severity of the consequences for failure. Effect determines what you can expect on success; your success may be limited, standard, or great.
To roll, first you review your Action Rating, which determines how many dice you roll for that action. Similar to other FitD titles, you have an opportunity to accept a twist in exchange for an extra die, known here as “the Lady’s Favor;” the example in the book is that, no matter the outcome of your roll to woo the Prince as a distraction, you will fall madly in love with him. Once you have your dice pool settled, you roll, and note the highest die value shown. A 6 is a success, a 4 or 5 is a success at a cost, and a 1 to 3 is a failure.1
Stress returns from other FitD titles, a resource you can utilize to negate the other consequences of your actions. If you take on too much stress, though, you run the risk of creating a scandal, and too many scandals will make you unfit to serve your House.
When tasked with an objective from your House, your party will go on an Errand in order to attempt to accomplish the goal; these errands can be anything, from going to fight some ruffians to trade negotiations with another House. For those who have played Blades in the Dark, the Errand is this game’s answer to Scores, and function the same; a roll is made at the outset of the errand, and a better result there sets your starting position for the Errand.
Overall, for the base mechanics, I found that they were quite fitting for the type of story the game was encouraging you to tell. Position & Effect as a system always leads to every action taken being interesting while helping move the story forward in one way or another. In the sessions I have played, dice rolls always felt meaningful, and the ability to raise the stakes at any moment really helped drive the drama that this type of story really demands.
I do wonder though whether the Errand mechanic is fully needed. In Blades in the Dark, the Score made a lot of sense as a separate event, as it was the core of play; here, I don’t think Errands really have the same type of feeling that benefits from being separated out as it’s own activity. Really, it mostly feels like they exist to be an easy marker of time progression within some of the Faction mechanics, which we’ll discuss below. They’re fine, but I wonder if they could have been replaced or eschewed entirely.
The Characters & Coterie
For character creation, it primarily comes down to choosing one of a handful of Playbooks:
The Bravo, a quick-witted swordsman
The Hawk, a menacing bounty hunter
The Eye, a cunning infiltrator
The Couth, a lucky up-and-comer
The Knack, a powerful magic-user
The Key, a social mastermind
Each one comes with a particular set of abilities and pre-determined starting Action Ratings. Again, those familiar with Blades in the Dark will recognize the parallels, but I think enough flavor has been put in them to at least create a different feeling in these familiar archetypes. Your character will have some form of indulgence, some activity they partake in to relieve stress that may cause them more trouble.
The Coterie replaces the Crew, and the first step is deciding which of the six Houses Major you will become part of:
House Al-Mari, the fearsome mercenaries
House Bastien, champions of the people
House Battalia, the stalwart defenders
House Corvetto, the oldest, mysterious House
House Elanda, the influential merchants
House Lovell, the intriguing socialites
Each House comes with a particular set of abilities to choose from and their own advantages and disadvantages. Upon choosing a House, the players decide what their House’s Strengths are; each House has one Strength predetermined, and the players choose a second one. These Strengths are used to determine what a House has access to on a moment’s notice, and can likely immediately be leveraged by the party. For example, House Battalia starts with the Force strength, meaning they can easily muster up swordsmen in a moment; the players may choose Transport as a secondary strength, which means that House Battalia is able to move unimpeded throughout the city, perhaps due to the respect they have earned.
You then choose your House’s sphere of influence, which is a chunk of the city that is under their control; do they tend to the royal gardens, or care for the grand market, or are they caretakers of the poorer districts?
Overall, I found that character & coterie/House creation let’s the players slot themselves neatly into the world while also having a significant degree on the worldbuilding. One criticism one could levy is that, since the Players can color the Houses Major in any way they wish, it means that, as factions, they become underdeveloped, which will be discussed more in the Faction section below.
Essentially, the game does not want to commit to any House having specific NPCs or personal agendas, leaving those things to the GM and Players to work towards. While on the one hand, this could lead to a great deal of creativity, it also means that the most important factions in the game are left as blank slates, and potentially a great deal of work will need to be put in to fill in the blanks. Some GMs may enjoy this, but that does mean this is not a quick pick-up-and-play even for those familiar with FitD games.
Factions, Politics, and the Great Game
The way the game has mechanized the faction play, in universe “the Great Game,” is probably one of the more compelling bits for anyone looking to pick this game up, as it is crucially important for the pattern of play expected by the game.
At the start of the game, play begins with the players’ chosen House being the Sixth House, bottom wrung of the Houses Major. The GM determines the placement of the other five Houses. The goal of play is to have the players House fight there way up the rankings and becoming First House, gaining an incredible amount of influence over the city and taking the title of First Prince.
How is this done? For the players side, their House (the GM) will present them with a number of objectives they would like to see addressed during the current social season, and the coterie chooses one to be their primary objective and one to be an optional secondary objective. At the end of the season, you determine whether you completed these goals, as well as take stock of other actions you may have taken, then roll a pool of d6 to determine how far your House Advancement tracker (a 12-tick clock) advances. A social season ends after the coterie completes three Errands.
For the NPC Houses, the GM assigns each one a goal at the start of the season, such as acquiring a new resource or hurting one of the other Houses. At the end of the season, a dice pool is rolled, which determines whether they advance their goal’s clock. Once they complete their goal, they advance their clock by 1. A new goal is assigned at the start of each season, and a House can only have 4 goals at once; thus, each House gets a year to complete their goals. If they fail to accomplish their goal in that timeframe, they lose a tick on their House Advancement clock.
The player characters can uncover the plots and goals of the other Houses during their downtime, and can interact with them over the course of the year, hindering or helping them achieve some aims. Instead of their own House’s objectives, they may choose to first stop another House from success.
Overall, I found this to be a fun and engaging twist on the standard rules for factions found in Blades in the Dark, which mostly amounted to “roll to see if they progress when it feels interesting.” This system means that the players always have something to do, whether it be furthering their own House or hindering one of the others; there is never a lull in the action. And while I criticize the methodology of errands, I will say their use as a ticking clock that clearly delineates a world that moves around the players really helps drive home the importance of every player action; time doesn’t wait for you, and if you choose one course of action, you will lock out another.
A criticism may be that this system has the potential to put a good chunk of work on the GM, who has to manage all the other factions and advance their clocks when appropriate. If someone is the type of GM who prefers to put in minimal prep before the session, I don’t think this system will reward your efforts. You need to be working in between sessions to advance clocks and keep in your head opportunities for clocks to potentially move based on the players’ actions. This wasn’t an issue for me personally (I live for this type of prep), but I thought I should point it out.
Romance & Paramours
The game includes a set of mechanics for romance, particular between a PC and their NPC paramour, “the singular object of the PC’s affection.” Through this mechanic, your relationship generates “heat,” a measure of your passion for one another. You may expend heat to gain particular benefits depending on who your paramour is, such as helping relationships with other factions or acquiring assets to use. When you acquire a paramour, you can indulge in them instead of one of your other indulgences in order to clear stress; if you overindulge (or ever run out of heat), you roll a “romantic entanglement,” some consequence for involving your paramour in your life.
Personally, when I ran Court of Blades, my players felt uncomfortable using this system; they didn’t want to have romance be a major factor in their roleplay and weren’t sure how to feel about mechanizing these things. Luckily, the game accounts for this: these rules are explicitly entirely optional, and nothing will change if you don’t include these rules.
I am mostly ambivalent towards mechanizing romance in TTRPGs; it can be an interesting source of roleplay, and mechanics can help reward that type of roleplay with some other benefit. On the other hand, explicit rewards for romancing an NPC makes the relationship feel… transactional in some capacity, which isn’t the greatest thing in the world. This mechanic isn’t a major selling point for me, and luckily it’s optional nature means you can avoid it if you want; I just wanted to draw attention to it, as “romance” is an active draw and trope for the type of story the game is purporting to support.
Also, you can only have one paramour at a time; you’re mechanically dissuaded from polyamorous relationships! I understand why, from both a mechanic standpoint and a trope standpoint, it’s just a small gripe for me personally.
Conclusion
Court of Blades is a fun and flavorful twist on the Forged in the Dark formula. The setting as presented provides enough material for a play group to get started while adding their own spins on the world, so that no two Court of Blades campaigns will be the same. The mechanics taken from Blades in the Dark work here to help provide a source of drama in play that a setting like this demands, though I do wish some more work had gone into some of the differentiations. Errands, for example, feel like an unnecessary holdover that could have been potentially made more interesting.
The faction system and dynamics in this game are really why you should consider picking this up. The level of depth and direction it provides can be a boon to any play group seeking to interact with those types of stories. If these systems and the setting are enough to draw you in, then I highly recommend this game to you. If you want a low-prep game ready right out of the box, though, I would probably pass; so much of the faction system requires prep and out-of-session time that it’s probably not for everyone.
What do you think? Have you played Court of Blades? Let me know your thoughts! Do you want to hear about other games I like? Be sure to subscribe for more reviews, as well as coming ramblings about my own game design process and more! Thanks for reading!
Multiple 6s is a critical success.