BLADESWORN

What is Bladesworn?

Bladesworn is an adaptation of Ironsworn that borrows heavily from Blades in the Dark. The changes are:

• Fewer moves: Instead of the wide variety of moves in core Ironsworn, I’m using only three general moves:
  • Face Danger: Covers all the moment-to-moment rolls driven by your attributes.
  • Finish it: Covers all Progress Moves.
  • Suffer: Covers moves that tax resources (Health, Spirit, and Gear)
• Fiction based progress: Using the factors scale, quality, and potency grounds progress in the fiction, enabling you to make progress faster if you have a better fictional position.
• Simpler progress tracks: This optional system makes clocks easier to use and provides a linear difficulty curve. 

Provided are over 10k words addressing how to adapt every move from the core game, how to adapt assets, and a worked example of play. 

Why Play Bladesworn?

Bladesworn allows users to play Ironsworn faster and with less mechanical overhead. Ironsworn is a brilliant system for players who are less comfortable as GMs. The game acts as a massive state machine. Moves trigger moves that trigger moves constantly, providing the player with much of the structure that a GM would typically offer.

But as someone comfortable as both a GM and a player, I found the core game structure stifling. I wanted something that could leverage the tools I’d learned in playing Blades in the Dark, with its emphasis on fictional positioning and resource management.

Who Is This For?

To use these rules, you need an understanding of the basics of Ironsworn along with a character and Assets. This document does not recapitulate how to make a character or roll dice. The contents of Lodestar should be enough to get you through. All of that is said better in the freely available core rules. You do not need to have read or played Blades in the Dark, but you should do so.