Written by: James Sadler
Blades In The Dark (sometimes abbreviated to BitD or just Blades) calls for particular vibes. Factions vie for control of the city’s streets and alleyways. Gangs clash on the cobbles. Beleaguered bluecoats crack down on crime. Theft, skullduggery, and desperation are the order of the day. Where better to explore those themes than the city of Doskvol, that sprawling metropolis of midnight Victoriana? How better to give your game a visual edge than by using Czepeku’s hand-illustrated battlemaps and scenes? Well, I’ve riffled through their massive catalogue of over 5,000 maps and picked out the best Czepeku maps to use with Blades in the Dark, John Harper’s perennially popular RPG.
Things to remember:
In the official Blades In The Dark setting, Doskvol exists in perpetual darkness. There is no daylight, and shadows rule the streets. In a stroke of luck, there are nighttime variations of practically every Czepeku battlemap.
Heists and other criminal capers are the game’s focus, and you can steal from the rich or the poor, the innocent or the guilty. Just don’t get caught. That is to say, the splendid and the squalid exist side-by-side in Doskvol, so don’t imagine you’re limited to a grungy, dirty city crawl. You can really mix up the maps you use.
Blades feels quite different from other TTRPGs. The phases of play and levels of abstraction in Blades don’t always fit on a battlemap. Fortunately, Czepeku has another great project, Czepeku Scenes, that provides cinematic backdrops for your games. No matter where in Doskvol you find yourself or what you get up to, you can use the right tool to achieve the perfect atmosphere. I’ll include some scenes at the end of this article to give you the idea!
Victorian Greenhouse: Fluorescent Flair
A game of Blades in the Dark takes place in an endless night, but that’s not to say it must be drab. Sometimes, the dark lets stranger lights shine. Imagine a rooftop greenhouse tended by an eccentric member of Doskvol’s aristocracy. Inestimable value blooms within: virulent poisons, rare medicines, or flowers of transcendent beauty. But where’s the peril? The absence of armed guards might indeed strike the players as strange… until the plants themselves begin to move.
Wizard Vault: Original Night Open
Blade in the Dark’s dice rolls (following the legacy of Apocalypse World’s approach to TTRPGs, described as ‘powered by the apocalypse’) often call for complications to befall the characters. When better to plunge the party deep into trouble than the exact moment they think they’re about to get what they want? At the height of their heist, a complication down in the vaults of a heavily guarded magical bank might mean something particularly dire to derail the players’ carefully laid plans. A silent alarm that calls all the guards in the building? Poison gas that seeps from the mouths of statues and slowly fills the room? Don’t be afraid to really drop them in it.
Steam Factory: Night
Two words: industrial espionage. Soot and smoke choke the senses in this sweltering factory. Does it house blueprints for a prototype weapon that will assure the players’ crew a new foothold over the streets of Doskvol? Perhaps a recent shipment of rare and valuable ore would fetch a pretty penny on the right markets. Or maybe a competitor has set up a new manufacturing endeavour. They plan to flood the market with cheap, shoddy products and escape with the profits, and the players are first in line to set the record straight with a few high-powered explosives.
Sewer Tunnels: Original Night
There is no honour among thieves, as they say. This map could represent the hideout of a rival crew that the players want to infiltrate for some nefarious purpose – stealing loot, discovering secret plans, or simply eliminating the competition. Alternatively, it could stand in for the player characters’ lair should they suffer an intrusion of their own.
Iron Wharf: Night Lights
A centre of commerce, bustling industry, and rampant corruption. Money flows like water through hubs like these. If you know the right place to be, the right palm to grease, that money flows right into your pocket. And if you can’t get in on the wheelings and dealings, there’s always good old-fashioned breaking and entering. Warehouses here tend to be stuffed to the gunwales with goods, some of which are conveniently unrecorded for, uh, tax purposes. But if there’s no actual record of these particular crates, who would notice if they … disappeared?
Slum District: Original Night
This map encapsulates the narrow streets and cramped canals of Doskvol. It’s pretty large, so whether the players are the pursuers or pursued, you could stage a grand chase across its whole span. That would be an exciting way to use a map of this scale. You could get even more value from this map by zooming in. Use small sections of it to represent battlegrounds for street brawls and other urban encounters.
Alchemy Dungeon: Original
Although Blades in the Dark is mainly about criminal activities – larceny, sabotage, the odd murder – the invisible arts of occult practice run below the city’s surface, too. Unhinged cults summon demons and ghosts in this world, the same as any other. Whether the players want to stop this madness outright or bend it to their own purposes, staging the adventure in suitably esoteric surroundings will help the players make the ahem correct decision.
Beached Kraken: Night
This is one of my all-time favourite maps, and I’m stoked that Blades in the Dark gives me an opportunity to use it. Though players spend most of their time inside the lightning-bound towers that defend the limits of Doskvol proper, the setting text describes deep-sea leviathans whose electroplasmic blood powers these same barriers. Imagine if one of these sea monsters became stranded on a nearby shore, its precious blood oozing over the sands and back into inky seas. Wouldn’t it be an absolutely crying shame if no enterprising crews took advantage of all that free money just dribbling onto a ghost-haunted beach?
Medieval Jail: Night
Where does a bad thief end up? In jail. They wind up incarcerated, laden with ignominy, and presumably also with manacles and chains. But where there’s a jail, there’s a breakout waiting to happen. Are the players themselves entrapped, or is there an important NPC languishing inside, waiting for rescue?
Train Station Concourse: Night
Nothing says Victoriana like a train station – the steam whistle’s hollow scream, the ringing of steel-on-steel as locomotives rumble into the terminus. It’s also when travellers are at their most vulnerable. Snatch a wealthy hostage while they alight from their long ride, and a crew of ne'er-do-wells have bagged themselves a healthy ransom. Of course, the other sound you might hear is the piercing trill of the Bluecoats’ whistles as they chase down the offenders before they escape with the prize.
If you want to browse the enormous selection of maps available, you can see them all at czepeku.com/maps. There’s also a search function so you can hone in on urban maps or maps set at night. By becoming a Czepeku subscriber on Patreon, you can get a look in high resolution and behold their full, gorgeous detail.
Bonus Content: Four Czepeku Scenes
If you don’t need the precision of a battlemap but still want the visual atmosphere that they bring to your table, Czepeku Scenes is exactly the thing for you. These cinematic scenes paint the perfect picture to aid your narration. Cathedrals and slums show the gothic splendour and the industrial squalor of Doskvol. Sewers and jails reveal what lies beneath. Like the battlemaps, scene packs are all hand-illustrated, beautifully detailed, and crammed with different variations. And, just like the battlemaps, you can browse the full selection on our website. You can download them in high resolution and even find animated versions on the Czepeku Scenes Patreon.
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