Lady Blackbird

Lady Blackbird is the easiest published one-shot I have ever run.

Lady Blackbird is in disguise on the run from an arranged marriage and is fleeing to secret love, the pirate king Uriah Flint. However, she and the crew of The Owl (her hired smuggler skyship) have been captured and are now held in the brig of the Imperial cruiser Hand of Sorrow.

And that’s where we start…

What you get

Lady Blackbird is a one-shot scenario expecting to last 2-3 sessions for (ideally) 4-5 players. It was written by John Harper and you can download it for free here.

The whole adventure is 16 pages long:

• One cover
• Two pages of background (the general background, and the PC’s spaceship)
• Five one-page character sheets (half of which is devoted to the rules)
• One page on running the game
• One page containing extra traits that the PCs can spend experience on
• Six more pages – one for each character and a blank for the GM to use. But I didn’t use these, so Lady Blackbird is really only 10 pages

I ran it online using Facebook Messenger (for video chat) and Google Drive (to hold documents). We rolled real dice and trusted each other.

So definitely not too many words.

Characters

I’ve mentioned before about how important it is to get the characters right in a one-shot game. I believe that 50% of the fun comes from having great characters. And the characters in Lady Blackbird are perfect – all with goals and drives (called ‘keys’) that move the scenario forwards.

• Lady Blackbird wants to find her secret love
• Naomi Bishop is Lady Blackbird’s bodyguard and hates the Empire
• Cyrus Vance is captain of The Owl and is in love with Lady Blackbird
• Kale Arkham is the loyal first mate
• Snargle is the wisecracking goblin sky-pilot

While Lady Blackbird’s main goal of reaching Uriah Flint drives everything along, the other characters are neatly interwoven and react well together.

The scenario

As you may have noticed, there’s not much in the way of a traditional scenario. No complicated dungeon maps, no monster stats, no detailed NPCs. In fact, there’s barely what I would normally think of as a scenario at all – simply a few ideas for obstacles between the brig and finding Uriah Flint.

I was fine with this – I didn’t need complicated deck plans, or city maps or stats for monsters. Although I would have liked some colourful NPCs for the PCs to meet. (I can make them up, but having them there means I don’t have to.)

In terms of flavour, Lady Blackbird feels very diesel punk. (I’ve heard that it’s set in the same universe as Harper’s Blades in the Dark, but I’m not sure.) In terms of inspiration, it feels to me to be in the same spirit as Christopher Wooding’s excellent Tales of the Kitty Jay series. At least, that’s how I’m imagining it.

System

The system is explained on each character sheet, and takes up less than half a side. The section is titled ‘Rules Summary,’ but that’s misleading: these are the entire rules. There are no more.

The system is a dice pool system, with success being 4+. (It doesn’t explicitly state this, but we’re using six-sided dice. It would be weird if it was anything else.)

The system is a great example of rewarding the behaviours you want to see.

• First, experience points are earned by taking actions that further your keys (your goals and objectives)—and double points are earned if doing that takes the character into danger. So they rapidly ramp up, and there’s lots of new things to spend the on.
• Second, you get more dice by having a ‘refreshment scene’ with another character. This promotes in character chat—something I like to see in my games.

The only problem I’ve seen with the system so far is that it’s too easy. Despite setting challenge levels as recommended, during my first session the PCs failed none of the rolls. (They did fail rolls in later sessions, so maybe that was just luck.)

The refreshment scenes are inspired, though. They work well in play—it's a pleasant change to have a mechanic that rewards the players for actually roleplaying.

So how does it play?

Lady Blackbird is easy to run, provided you don’t mind thinking on your feet. The combination of the system and keys makes the characters very proactive, so as a GM you’re reacting to their plans and thinking of obstacles. We start in media res with the PCs locked up in the brig, but the are resourceful enough that it’s not long before they’re out causing havoc.

As I said above, 50% of the fun in roleplaying games comes from having great characters, and Lady Blackbird gets them very right indeed.

I ran it over four 2-hour sessions, using Facebook Messenger for video chat and Google Drive for the documents.

Session 1 Prison Breakout: The PCs escaped the brig, sabotaged the Hand of Sorrow and reached the hangar where The Owl was held.

Session 2 Goodbye Hand of Sorrow, hello Succulent Grub: The PCs dealt with the guards, refuelled The Owl and fled the Hand of Sorrow. They made their way to the Succulent Grub bar in the city of St Judasberg on Haven, where Lady Blackbird believes she can find a route to her lover’s lair in the Remnants.

Session 3 The Fight: Westor Snow (owner of the Succulent Grub) proposes a wager to the PCs: directions to Uriah Heap’s lair in exchange for the The Owl, to be settled with a pit fight between his champion (The Humungus—inspired by Mad Max 2) and the PCs’ champion. Naomi is the champion, and the PCs undertake a madcap scheme to rub a sedative ointment into The Humungus’ skin, boosting Naomi’s chances. It all works, and Naomi beats The Humungus.

Session 4: The Dark Promise. The PCs make their way to the Remnants, which we’ve learned are the remains of an ancient civilisation (their sorcerers reached too far…) and contains a graveyard full of derelict spaceships. The PCs find Uriah Flint’s pirate ship, Dark Promise, and a bounty hunter ambush… The bounty hunters are defeated, the Dark Promise stolen, and our heroes head off into the wild blue with a new career as sky pirates…

I found Lady Blackbird a lot of fun to run. I found my players were coming up with loads of mad ideas I mostly had to respond to. It was a very collaborative experience—much more so than many other games.

Given the very minimal prep I did, it did at times feel like I was walking a tightrope without a safety net. But that’s only in my mind—everyone approached the game in the right spirit and I’m sure that we could have dealt with any problems that might have arisen.

The dice pool system and lack of stats/attributes/hit points worked well. Rather than a blow-by-blow recreation of the PC’s attempt to bluff their way into the pit fighter stable and rub ointment into The Humungus (yes, really), I reduced that down to a single (difficult) roll.

Rolling the dice less often made the dice rolls much more important—and raised the tension. It also meant that we crammed a lot into our two-hour sessions. Instead of chipping away at The Humungus’ hit points over twenty minutes, we resolved the battle in a single dramatic roll of the dice.

Improvements

I wouldn’t do much to improve Lady Blackbird. I’d get rid of (or explain) the blanks at the end of the game as I’m still not sure what they’re for. And I’d like to see a few more NPCs, places and creatures described—yes, I can make them up, but it’s also nice not to have to.

Overall

Of all the published scenarios I’ve run so far, Lady Blackbird has been both the easiest to run (almost no prep required) and also the most fun.