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Blades Of Xenthra Playtest

A high fantasy TTRPG hack of blades in the dark (Playtesting Phase) · By Excelsis

Feedback goes here! Sticky

A topic by Excelsis created May 22, 2020 Views: 313 Replies: 6
Viewing posts 1 to 3
Developer

post any feedback or your experiences with this game in this thread!

(+1)

Wow! Blades of Xenthra was exactly what I was looking for. I love Dungeon World, but there are so many things with the base book and classes that I wanted to change (specially magic!). And the more I thought about what I would like to change in it, more it looked like blades in the dark. And here it is! A fantasy rpg with the Blades system and a open magic system. Amazing! I will test it and return for feedback. Thank you so much for making this incredible rpg!

Developer

Thank you so much for your interest! I had many of the same thoughts as yourself when playtesting Xenthra,  and during my experience with Blades in the Dark I often felt like there was a high fantasy Blades niche that needed filling. Internal playtesting is still in the works and I'm hoping to add some artwork to the playbooks in due time. I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on the game!

(+1)

So nice to hear it! I will definitely test Xenthra soon. 

I had an idea after I saw a video today on YouTube about familiars. I thought "you know, finding and magically binding a familiar to you could be a downtime activity". And then I thought that a lot of things could be done in the downtime activities for a fantasy rpg. Of course, blades in the dark system already has this covered; you could say it's a long term project. But maybe the list of downtime activities could be expanded, with special actions for every class.

And others could be added also, like drinking and celebrating in a tavern after a dungeon crawl. 

Just sharing with you some ideas that got me excited :) if you ever want to reach out to me, I have Instagram, reddit and twitter:

Insta: @thiago.petru

Reddit: u/thpetru

Twitter: @thiago_petru

Developer

Hey! Sorry for the late reply, my career has kept me busy. ^^

That's a very clever suggestion for downtime activity. Class-based expanded downtime options would go a long way towards strengthening class identity, and I've sometimes had players desire more structure or solid options for fantastical downtime. A joint activity that all players can take part in and benefit from could make for a fun crew ability, (Like a tavern crawl)

It's very kind of you to offer your art skills! I like your style and I think I will commission some art from you at some point if you have time. As soon as I am less busy with work I will start spending more time on art. 

(+1)

also, if you need art for the playbooks, I'm a freelance illustrator just starting out, it would be amazing to work In a project like this!

This is incredible work, I have been working on a similar hack but it turned into an entirely different game system.
I'd like to ask if there was any playtesting done with the system. On paper it looks solid but I am not sure how fantasy tropes would work using a structured BiTD score mechanic with downtime and so on.