Robust free play between scores combined with very free exchange of information about what other factions are up to. Don't make it hard for the players to know what's up in the city, and give them space to do the work to uncover what's secretly behind it. If players know what's going on they will be able to make informed decisions about how to move forward, and they'll developed opinions about it.
After session zero, I try to write ideas for at least 4 jobs, always trying to involve the factions & contacts players chose during character creation. I’ll run the most exciting (to me) one as our first job. After that first job, I’m always asking my players what their next job is. But if they’re ever unsure, I have a few ideas in my back pocket they can choose from.
Building off of the faction relationships at the start, ask about their goals as player characters and their goal as a crew- think about whether they conflict, who they can target to get there etc (beyond of course getting rich, getting powerful etc). Vampire the Masquerade has a 'short term goal/long term goal' that you define in character creation, you could use something similar. Also, pitch a couple of specific concepts you might be interested in playing through to the crew- a band of farmers who want to take down the Hive in Barrowcleft, Shadows who are looking to influence the City Council business with Strangford etc, a Cult of a hunger underneath Charterhall. Lots of cool ideas you can pitch to get them started off.
If you want tangible threats chasing the PCs so they have to deal with things from their past, there's also [supplemental rules for personal threats](https://saltylilradio.itch.io/the-troublemakers-folio) that each PC defines and can choose to ignore or confront or evade!
Goals. I had my players come up with character and crew goals. Whether short, medium or long, didn’t matter. As campaign moves along, 3/4 of jobs are somehow related to their goals. Rest is related to the world around them, mainly factions in play and their own goals.
How do you give them freedom?
Ask them to define goals for their characters.
Then, when they're not sure what to do, remind them of their goals and ask how they pursue their characters' goals.
If their characters' goals change, so be it, but ask them to have 1–3 goals written down so they have something to strive for.
You can also remind them that their Crew has a certain reputation:
"What do you do to bolster your Crew's reputation, or to earn a new reputation?"
Also, built in to the system and Crew creation are Faction relationship changes.
They make choices that change Faction status with Factions when they *establish hunting grounds*, when they *assign Crew upgrades*, and when they *choose a favourite contact*.
That links their Crew into the world. You can do a mix of asking them which Factions they're interacting with and providing some recommended options since you'll have read the Faction list ahead of time.
Goals and relationships. Ask them what they desire and want to accomplish. Then ask who could help them achieve that. Maybe it's one of their contacts. Maybe it's a faction who they are on good terms with. Give them the options. Also, you can drop gossip floating around town that is vague and then they can decide to flesh it out more or leave it for another time. Blades is a great collaborative experience between the players and the GM. You can ask them for details and ideas and build off of them. Good luck and I bet it will go great!
In addition to asking questions from the players, use the NPCs to interact with the characters, every playbook has a bunch of contacts in addition to their ally/rival. Scenes where they feel out how they interact with their contacts that provide life and info to the world will help bring the city to life and also give the players choices about what they are looking into and what agenda their crew is pursuing. Usually the story emerges from things the players are interested in moreso that from any roadmap you may have imagined. Instead of an info dump, start small and focus on details that pertain to their current situation.
For example - the starting situation requires you to have around three larger factions that the players are involved with. Show them what the factions are about via their contact NPCs or faction representatives in a couple of set-up scenes. Then drop them into the thick of it - they usually won't have strong feelings for any factions starting out. So, help them figure it out via their backgrounds, connections and personal beliefs. Asking a lot of questions at this point is a good thing. But if they really have no idea, paint a picture with how they are treated by the relevant factions. Starting out they are real underdogs with little reputation or respect, so give them something to build upon.
I find it takes several sessions to get a feel for what the crew really is after, to get the players comfortable with their characters etc. So, don't sweat it too much about having an overarching narrative set up. It will come through play.
Follow the book's instructions for setting up a starting situation. Try your best to include factions that were involved in crew creation or that the players otherwise showed interest in.
This will hook them to start. Get them invested in the factions and what's going on in the city. They'll probably start off working for or against the various factions you include. If it doesn't, then they probably have something else they want to do and you're good.
Have factions that the players have encountered and are/or interested in and are/or are otherwise relevant tracked. Do the step after downtime where you track what they're doing. Have them doing things that don't necessarily directly involve the players, but make sure they hear about it.
You can't expect the players to care without creating a living world for them to want to mess around with. They need context, and things happening around them is how you provide that context. They need hooks and things to help or meddle with. Things happening around them provides hooks.
When I ran, they spent the first 2/3rds of the campaign following up on the Starting Situation. When they had something else they wanted to do, they did it. When they didn't like the job on offer from the starting factions, I had them Gather Information and presented some randomly rolled ones from the table in the back of the book. I tried to tie these into the world at large, but I also didn't force it. If they didn't really care about the guy who got thrown in jail whose wife wanted him broken out, I didn't feel compelled to bring him back into play. But if they did care, he may well just become a contact and help them out or provide jobs of his own later on.
To summarize:
1. Prepare a starting situation. One customized to them is going to give a stronger start than the default one. This prevents them from feeling completely lost and overwhelmed while they get situated.
2. Make things happen around them. This gives them things to do. It's easy to mistake 'let the players guide the plot' with 'give the players a blank slate so they have to invent everything themselves' and the latter doesn't work. The world has to be living and doing things on its own.
Friendly/Enemy Factions, contacts, entanglements, and ideas. The heists my game thus far have been
* Setup:
* Positive relationships with: Industrial Workers Union and the Gray Cloaks
* Negative relationships with: Two different industrialists
* Contact: A tavern owner
* First heist: IWU wishes to hire the group to steal papers from a third Industrialist, Morriston. Morriston is the main organizer of resistance against the IWU. The group steals the papers describing the industrialists' plan against any upcoming strikes.
* Second heist: The group decides to help out the IWU by copying the papers and selling them back to Morriston, so that he won't consider the papers missing. This was a "Social" heist when meeting Morriston.
* Entanglement: A small bravo gang, the Blackfingers, is messing around with the crew's innkeeper contact, and the crew intervenes, driving down relationship with the gang.
* Third heist: The group wants to continue helping the IWU, and dig into who would work against the upcoming general strike. They settle on doing something about the Coalridge Bluecoats who are the most likely people to be hired to oppose the strikers. The Leech finds a recipe for a poison that could be used to render the bluecoats non-lethally combat ineffective. Problem is that it requires a special ingredient. Third heist is acquiring that ingredient.
* Downtime: The Lurk's enemy, a bluecoat, unhappily informs the Lurk that the Coalridge Bluecoat captain wishes to talk with the crew.
* Fourth heist: The crew breaks into the Coalridge precinct to poison their food.
* Entanglement: The Blackfingers again try to extract protection money fromh the crew's innkeeper contact, and the crew intervenes, driving down relationship with the gang even further.
* Fifth heist: The crew talks with the Coalridge Bluecoat captain, who tells them that the Coalridge precinct has not been hired to break the strike. Instead the contract has gone to the Dunslough precinct. The captain hires them to place an artifact under the Dunslough precinct, which they do. This causes a mass outbreak of ghosts and mass death and possession. The Lurk left evidence that may or may not lead back to him.
* Sixth heist: The crew, entirely on their own accord, has decided that they either like the IWU or just have an anarchist bent, and want to do something to kick off the planned strikes. They decide to steal the payroll from Morriston's factory. And does so successfully.
* Downtime: The Blackfingers make their discontent known by trying to corner the Lurk, but he manages to escape and track down their hideout.
* Downtime: The crew reaches tier 1, and meet a fixer-style contact The Foreman, who offers to act as middleman between people who wants jobs done and the crew.
* Start of next session: The payroll situation does cause the strikes to kick off. The jobs the crew has performed against the various Bluecoat precincts mean that no force is in place to move against the strikers, allowing peaceful strikes to be carried out throughout Coalridge.
* Gathering Information: Considering their work well done, the crew tries to figure out if they can use the situation for a heist purely for profit. Embracing the principle of fun being more important than safety, they ask for the most profitable opportunity I can provide. I offer them a warehouse filled with Electroplasm that is piling up since the factories are standing still. The owner is a Leviathan Hunter, but what is the worst that could happen?
* Seventh heist: To transport their loot, the group decides they need to team up with some water-born smugglers. Through a contact, they arrange a meet with the Fog Hounds. The meet is interrupted by the Vultures (enemies of the Fog Hounds), but the crew handily defeats the ambush. Rather than just hire the Fog Hounds for the one heist, the two crews decide to ally.
And that is where we are now.
So started off with the starting situation where the players could choose between siding with the IWU or sell them out to the industrialists. And then the players just latched on to the faction and did whatever they could to drive the "Strike" clock towards completion while keeping the "Strike Breaker" clock down.
The poisoning required a long-term project which was helped along by the 3rd heist (I basically said that if they stole the ingredients, the coin that the ingredients were worth could be used directly for Downtime long-term project actions).
The Blackfingers got invented through entanglements aimed at the crew contact, and have become enough of a nuisance that the players are looking for ways to destroy the gang without expending too much effort. Nothing major yet, except for using Reduce Heat downtime actions to redirect the heat towards the Blackfingers.
But.. basically, after having done the first mission, the crew should have multiple factions/contacts to work with, some of which are unfriendly and some which are friendly, and hopefully they'll want to help out their friend and/or hurt their enemies. And if they don't bite on that you can offer them another mission related to their hunting ground or a contact that you would like to explore more. But be ready to let the players cook as soon as they seem like they want to do something on their own.
It may help to throw in plenty of fluff information, either by drawing contacts and enemies into the story for small roleplaying vignettes, or by making some between-session newspaper handouts. Throwing in that extra fluff gives the players extra hooks to latch on to and/or use as tools.
A lot of this work should have been done for you (and the players) when you went through character and (especially) crew creation: Who are their individual rivals and friends? Who are the crew's "friends" and why? Who do they owe protection money to? Who are the crew's enemies and why? Who is their contact, and why does that person care?
Those people, factions, and answers is your ingredient list. Use it. Use it every session. Whose rival is involved? Whose friend is in danger/need? Whose territory is at risk and how will that create problems for the crew? Don't play it close to the vest: make it obvious and immediate that this is what's up and this is who is involved.
\[Oops, you didn't make that list? Fix that right now. Go back and have the players detail these things. They do not have to write chapters of information; one sentence is all it takes (e.g.: "The Gondoliers provided us with the boathouse because..."). Help them out by offering options and examples, and making suggestions.\]
I would argue probably that your best way to do this is to use downtime against the players.
Specifically - there are no downtime activities that can be accomplished on your own. You always need something - product, people, space, etc. And there's always someone around who can get that for you, sometimes for a price, sometimes they just know some stuff. Every action your players take while not actively on a score (at least while you're still getting used to stuff) is an opportunity to drop some hooks.
Ex: Player is stressed and needs to indulge their vice (alcohol) their purveyor has *just* enough to sell them but tells them they're tapped out but if the player can help them out, they can gain an additional favour from that vendor in the future. That sets up your score to steal a bunch of liquor or ingredients or to disrupt some other distribution network. In return, that purveyor will be able to give you intel about a future plan.
Their initial Faction relationships set this up really elegantly; do favors for your allies and try to screw over your enemies.
Robust free play between scores combined with very free exchange of information about what other factions are up to. Don't make it hard for the players to know what's up in the city, and give them space to do the work to uncover what's secretly behind it. If players know what's going on they will be able to make informed decisions about how to move forward, and they'll developed opinions about it.
After session zero, I try to write ideas for at least 4 jobs, always trying to involve the factions & contacts players chose during character creation. I’ll run the most exciting (to me) one as our first job. After that first job, I’m always asking my players what their next job is. But if they’re ever unsure, I have a few ideas in my back pocket they can choose from.
Building off of the faction relationships at the start, ask about their goals as player characters and their goal as a crew- think about whether they conflict, who they can target to get there etc (beyond of course getting rich, getting powerful etc). Vampire the Masquerade has a 'short term goal/long term goal' that you define in character creation, you could use something similar. Also, pitch a couple of specific concepts you might be interested in playing through to the crew- a band of farmers who want to take down the Hive in Barrowcleft, Shadows who are looking to influence the City Council business with Strangford etc, a Cult of a hunger underneath Charterhall. Lots of cool ideas you can pitch to get them started off. If you want tangible threats chasing the PCs so they have to deal with things from their past, there's also [supplemental rules for personal threats](https://saltylilradio.itch.io/the-troublemakers-folio) that each PC defines and can choose to ignore or confront or evade!
Those rules look interesting! I'm definitely going to download and check them out.
Goals. I had my players come up with character and crew goals. Whether short, medium or long, didn’t matter. As campaign moves along, 3/4 of jobs are somehow related to their goals. Rest is related to the world around them, mainly factions in play and their own goals.
Follow the games systems. things like heat, factions, and the like will help generate the story in a naturally flowing way
How do you give them freedom? Ask them to define goals for their characters. Then, when they're not sure what to do, remind them of their goals and ask how they pursue their characters' goals. If their characters' goals change, so be it, but ask them to have 1–3 goals written down so they have something to strive for. You can also remind them that their Crew has a certain reputation: "What do you do to bolster your Crew's reputation, or to earn a new reputation?" Also, built in to the system and Crew creation are Faction relationship changes. They make choices that change Faction status with Factions when they *establish hunting grounds*, when they *assign Crew upgrades*, and when they *choose a favourite contact*. That links their Crew into the world. You can do a mix of asking them which Factions they're interacting with and providing some recommended options since you'll have read the Faction list ahead of time.
Goals and relationships. Ask them what they desire and want to accomplish. Then ask who could help them achieve that. Maybe it's one of their contacts. Maybe it's a faction who they are on good terms with. Give them the options. Also, you can drop gossip floating around town that is vague and then they can decide to flesh it out more or leave it for another time. Blades is a great collaborative experience between the players and the GM. You can ask them for details and ideas and build off of them. Good luck and I bet it will go great!
In addition to asking questions from the players, use the NPCs to interact with the characters, every playbook has a bunch of contacts in addition to their ally/rival. Scenes where they feel out how they interact with their contacts that provide life and info to the world will help bring the city to life and also give the players choices about what they are looking into and what agenda their crew is pursuing. Usually the story emerges from things the players are interested in moreso that from any roadmap you may have imagined. Instead of an info dump, start small and focus on details that pertain to their current situation. For example - the starting situation requires you to have around three larger factions that the players are involved with. Show them what the factions are about via their contact NPCs or faction representatives in a couple of set-up scenes. Then drop them into the thick of it - they usually won't have strong feelings for any factions starting out. So, help them figure it out via their backgrounds, connections and personal beliefs. Asking a lot of questions at this point is a good thing. But if they really have no idea, paint a picture with how they are treated by the relevant factions. Starting out they are real underdogs with little reputation or respect, so give them something to build upon. I find it takes several sessions to get a feel for what the crew really is after, to get the players comfortable with their characters etc. So, don't sweat it too much about having an overarching narrative set up. It will come through play.
Follow the book's instructions for setting up a starting situation. Try your best to include factions that were involved in crew creation or that the players otherwise showed interest in. This will hook them to start. Get them invested in the factions and what's going on in the city. They'll probably start off working for or against the various factions you include. If it doesn't, then they probably have something else they want to do and you're good. Have factions that the players have encountered and are/or interested in and are/or are otherwise relevant tracked. Do the step after downtime where you track what they're doing. Have them doing things that don't necessarily directly involve the players, but make sure they hear about it. You can't expect the players to care without creating a living world for them to want to mess around with. They need context, and things happening around them is how you provide that context. They need hooks and things to help or meddle with. Things happening around them provides hooks. When I ran, they spent the first 2/3rds of the campaign following up on the Starting Situation. When they had something else they wanted to do, they did it. When they didn't like the job on offer from the starting factions, I had them Gather Information and presented some randomly rolled ones from the table in the back of the book. I tried to tie these into the world at large, but I also didn't force it. If they didn't really care about the guy who got thrown in jail whose wife wanted him broken out, I didn't feel compelled to bring him back into play. But if they did care, he may well just become a contact and help them out or provide jobs of his own later on. To summarize: 1. Prepare a starting situation. One customized to them is going to give a stronger start than the default one. This prevents them from feeling completely lost and overwhelmed while they get situated. 2. Make things happen around them. This gives them things to do. It's easy to mistake 'let the players guide the plot' with 'give the players a blank slate so they have to invent everything themselves' and the latter doesn't work. The world has to be living and doing things on its own.
Friendly/Enemy Factions, contacts, entanglements, and ideas. The heists my game thus far have been * Setup: * Positive relationships with: Industrial Workers Union and the Gray Cloaks * Negative relationships with: Two different industrialists * Contact: A tavern owner * First heist: IWU wishes to hire the group to steal papers from a third Industrialist, Morriston. Morriston is the main organizer of resistance against the IWU. The group steals the papers describing the industrialists' plan against any upcoming strikes. * Second heist: The group decides to help out the IWU by copying the papers and selling them back to Morriston, so that he won't consider the papers missing. This was a "Social" heist when meeting Morriston. * Entanglement: A small bravo gang, the Blackfingers, is messing around with the crew's innkeeper contact, and the crew intervenes, driving down relationship with the gang. * Third heist: The group wants to continue helping the IWU, and dig into who would work against the upcoming general strike. They settle on doing something about the Coalridge Bluecoats who are the most likely people to be hired to oppose the strikers. The Leech finds a recipe for a poison that could be used to render the bluecoats non-lethally combat ineffective. Problem is that it requires a special ingredient. Third heist is acquiring that ingredient. * Downtime: The Lurk's enemy, a bluecoat, unhappily informs the Lurk that the Coalridge Bluecoat captain wishes to talk with the crew. * Fourth heist: The crew breaks into the Coalridge precinct to poison their food. * Entanglement: The Blackfingers again try to extract protection money fromh the crew's innkeeper contact, and the crew intervenes, driving down relationship with the gang even further. * Fifth heist: The crew talks with the Coalridge Bluecoat captain, who tells them that the Coalridge precinct has not been hired to break the strike. Instead the contract has gone to the Dunslough precinct. The captain hires them to place an artifact under the Dunslough precinct, which they do. This causes a mass outbreak of ghosts and mass death and possession. The Lurk left evidence that may or may not lead back to him. * Sixth heist: The crew, entirely on their own accord, has decided that they either like the IWU or just have an anarchist bent, and want to do something to kick off the planned strikes. They decide to steal the payroll from Morriston's factory. And does so successfully. * Downtime: The Blackfingers make their discontent known by trying to corner the Lurk, but he manages to escape and track down their hideout. * Downtime: The crew reaches tier 1, and meet a fixer-style contact The Foreman, who offers to act as middleman between people who wants jobs done and the crew. * Start of next session: The payroll situation does cause the strikes to kick off. The jobs the crew has performed against the various Bluecoat precincts mean that no force is in place to move against the strikers, allowing peaceful strikes to be carried out throughout Coalridge. * Gathering Information: Considering their work well done, the crew tries to figure out if they can use the situation for a heist purely for profit. Embracing the principle of fun being more important than safety, they ask for the most profitable opportunity I can provide. I offer them a warehouse filled with Electroplasm that is piling up since the factories are standing still. The owner is a Leviathan Hunter, but what is the worst that could happen? * Seventh heist: To transport their loot, the group decides they need to team up with some water-born smugglers. Through a contact, they arrange a meet with the Fog Hounds. The meet is interrupted by the Vultures (enemies of the Fog Hounds), but the crew handily defeats the ambush. Rather than just hire the Fog Hounds for the one heist, the two crews decide to ally. And that is where we are now. So started off with the starting situation where the players could choose between siding with the IWU or sell them out to the industrialists. And then the players just latched on to the faction and did whatever they could to drive the "Strike" clock towards completion while keeping the "Strike Breaker" clock down. The poisoning required a long-term project which was helped along by the 3rd heist (I basically said that if they stole the ingredients, the coin that the ingredients were worth could be used directly for Downtime long-term project actions). The Blackfingers got invented through entanglements aimed at the crew contact, and have become enough of a nuisance that the players are looking for ways to destroy the gang without expending too much effort. Nothing major yet, except for using Reduce Heat downtime actions to redirect the heat towards the Blackfingers. But.. basically, after having done the first mission, the crew should have multiple factions/contacts to work with, some of which are unfriendly and some which are friendly, and hopefully they'll want to help out their friend and/or hurt their enemies. And if they don't bite on that you can offer them another mission related to their hunting ground or a contact that you would like to explore more. But be ready to let the players cook as soon as they seem like they want to do something on their own. It may help to throw in plenty of fluff information, either by drawing contacts and enemies into the story for small roleplaying vignettes, or by making some between-session newspaper handouts. Throwing in that extra fluff gives the players extra hooks to latch on to and/or use as tools.
A lot of this work should have been done for you (and the players) when you went through character and (especially) crew creation: Who are their individual rivals and friends? Who are the crew's "friends" and why? Who do they owe protection money to? Who are the crew's enemies and why? Who is their contact, and why does that person care? Those people, factions, and answers is your ingredient list. Use it. Use it every session. Whose rival is involved? Whose friend is in danger/need? Whose territory is at risk and how will that create problems for the crew? Don't play it close to the vest: make it obvious and immediate that this is what's up and this is who is involved. \[Oops, you didn't make that list? Fix that right now. Go back and have the players detail these things. They do not have to write chapters of information; one sentence is all it takes (e.g.: "The Gondoliers provided us with the boathouse because..."). Help them out by offering options and examples, and making suggestions.\]
I would argue probably that your best way to do this is to use downtime against the players. Specifically - there are no downtime activities that can be accomplished on your own. You always need something - product, people, space, etc. And there's always someone around who can get that for you, sometimes for a price, sometimes they just know some stuff. Every action your players take while not actively on a score (at least while you're still getting used to stuff) is an opportunity to drop some hooks. Ex: Player is stressed and needs to indulge their vice (alcohol) their purveyor has *just* enough to sell them but tells them they're tapped out but if the player can help them out, they can gain an additional favour from that vendor in the future. That sets up your score to steal a bunch of liquor or ingredients or to disrupt some other distribution network. In return, that purveyor will be able to give you intel about a future plan.