Blades in the Dark – Virtual Launch Page

I managed to bring Blades in the Dark to the virtual table this past weekend. Even though its very much a theater of the mind game, I played around with Roll20 to set up a launch page with a map of Duskvol & landmarks, the cast of characters, and a place to have a visual display of factions as needed.

I also set up a gallery of actor tokens for PC and NPCs. If its a part that I hadn’t already cast, I’m offering the players the opportunity to choose the appearance of their sly friends and rivals. This being Blades, I wanted to make sure that the images taken had a certain aesthetic of darkness or strange to them but I certainly made a few exceptions. For the in person game that I ran a couple of months ago, I had a couple of handouts with a range of faces on them with the same idea. At last count, I had almost 300 profile tokens so there is plenty of room to fill in the blanks as casting continues.

Though very small in the image, I set up a few tokens to identify connections on the Sly Friends & Rivals (it’s a very tiny portrait of the connected PC). Along the left side I’m developing a Faction Approval Rating to show the attitudes of the other gangs towards the PC’s crew. I set up the crews / factions as characters on Roll20 so that they would have an associated icon available and a place to store related information. As a side effect of setting it up that way, as DM I can post in the chat as one of these factions, serving as a quick shorthand and visual cue as to who the post is related to.

For sources I drew from a wide selection, some more on genre than others. A couple I just really liked that actor (Brion James for example) and tried to hunt down an appropriate image for them. Some of the media I searched included …