I love blades. I love love love blades.

What I like to do is to postpone crew creation until after the first score. Front load that heist goodness. The main trouble with getting players in the blades mindset is getting them to skip preparation. They can’t prepare if you literally start the game with them hanging on the outside of a building or on top of a moving train.

I also work hard at first to get the players to contribute to the story. Having them come up with devil’s bargains for each other is always a good start. Eventually they’ll start taking more initiative.

For scores, I deliberate under-prepare. I always have a bunch of possible scores prepared, but they are just index cards with a single sentence summary on them and then three (3) obstacles. That’s it. It’s up to the players to figure out how to get it done.

No advice for running it, but feedback from a player: It’s not to everyone’s taste. I never liked how my character was always fucking up, and never felt competent. It was a downward spiral of trauma and tragedy, and I really disliked it. If I want to see fuckups and things getting worse all the time, I can go to work.

So maybe remember to give players some bright spots now and again.

My longest running campaign was Blades (once weekly for over a year). It’s still my favourite system.

The core mechanics are really easy, GM sets the narrative scene and the player says how they respond then builds a dice pool and adjust for difficult actions or ineffective approach (position and effect - how good it will be if you succeed and how bad it will be if you fail).

The game is built to play on the fly with very minimal prep, the scenario in the book is a totally fine place to start and lead into my game. If you run through all the steps of the meta game (updating faction relations and you’ll have a good idea which group now has beef with the players crew and as such likely happenings for your next session.

Get used to skipping the boring bits, blades works best when the PCs are doing crazy stuff and using the flashback mechanics to get into or out of trouble. Do any essential prep the crew wants to do for a job but then skip to the engagement roll and just get started, don’t let them spend ages planning all the little details.

Don’t be scared to throw really challenging scenarios at them (especially after they level up a bit), the PCs have loads of ways to get out of trouble and trauma is beneficial to them initially as it lets them gain more xp. Also death is always a narrative choice so don’t worry about killing them by accident.

The setting is amazing, haunted steampunk Victorian Venice so you can lean into the spooky as much as you want. Remember it’s always dark and life is pretty terrible for everyone who isn’t super rich.

I’m happy to answer questions or bounce ideas with you.

Hope your game goes well.

While I never GMed Blades in the dark I have some forged in the dark XP and GM an old game about thieves a while ago, so I may have some pointer

Mechanics

forged in the dark is IMO at the sweet spot between rule light and rule heavy, while the core rule are simple, the stress mechanic, the position/effect, and the special playbook action adds a certain layer of complexity, do not advertised it as a rule light game it’s not.

Another important thing, ask the player to roll the f… dices. As a GM, I tend to skip roll for “common action” that the player would be able to do no matter what. In Forged in the dark, “everyting is a clock” that you fill with failure/success. So rolling the dice is what make the games move forward (and the whole partial failure means that the dice result matters). In general I keep a large macro clock the plot thicken/alarm level when I’m getting rid of short term idea to materialise time lost letting NPC move in the background

While I am less happy with the downtime phase, it’s a key part of the game, depending on your game style it may evolve to the main game, but I use it as a fancy purchase/XP/Heal phase

Urban Thieve campaign

Remember, as the player are stuck in the city, their action matter, treat it like a political game, they’ll quickly need to find allies

Yeah, getting to grips with lore makes sense, but be aware that Blades has pretty amorphous lore. Stuff like how the spirit world, cults or spirit wardens work, is left extremely open to interpretion so that tables can decide. I think the most important thing is to get a sense of the vibe of the world (as you see it).

Beyond that, preparing some interesting but open ended antagonists/allies is the best call. If you’ve got some memorable characters, with some intresting motivations they can interact with characters, and each other, in intresting ways depending on how things progress. That makes the world feel alive and still responsive to their actions.

No advice, but you might give a listen to The Adventure Zone: Steeplechase. They used Blades in the Dark for that season, and it might give you some inspiration.

My limited experience with playing Blades , along with Scum and Villainy and Runners in the Shadows(?) as a character with a single DM is this. We spent a good chunk of time doing some “collaborative” world building for stuff that the DM either didn’t know, or didn’t like the systems for. It feels like the Blades system leaves a lot to the player or GM imagination, so that was our solution.