The Lineage of Blades in the Dark

This originally appeared on Cohost in August of 2024


OK! So! This project was certainly something. Was it hard? Not overly. Was it tedious? Absolutely.

I am now free of trying to read books on Scribd, sitting through a 12 second blank page ad (thanks adblocker, I guess) to see a single page. When I don’t know what page will have the acknowledgements or inspirations, that can be Annoying. You see the picture, let’s get to it more with some game notes along the way.

The goal was to try to trace the mechanical inspiration for one of the most popular Indie TTRPGs on the market today, and see how it was influenced by those that came before. What weird niches get turned up and how much blood from the titans of the medium is pumping through these veins.

Couple pieces of housekeeping, before we get deep into it.

• I did not trace book, movie or video game inspiration. This image is enough of a mess as it is, imagine it with 40 more entries.
• I checked a couple repositories I have access to for books, as well as the first 3 page of every google search for the books. I intend to buy some of these books in the future, but for now I had to access and/or download PDFs of them.
• I was only using games that were acknowledged by name. Mentions of names or “common knowledge” or whatever were ignored. Yes, D&D came from something else, but the AD&D and Basic D&D books I looked at didn’t mention like, Chainmail. I did not want to spend a ton of time trying to suss out which games inspired a game based solely off creator name.
• Arrow end means that they were the inspired. Narrow end is from the inspiree. I had things aligned by nearest side, but then realized that it would hide some tail ends of lines among the heads, so I arranged the arrows along similar sides. So if the top side of a game has an arrow visible, all other things on that side should be arrows too.

Just to recap the text box in the image that has the Legend for the plotmap

Red Line: Inspired Blades in the Dark Orange Line: Inspired a BITD inspiration Yellow Line: Inspired an an inspiration for a BITD Inspiration Green Line: Next level. Darker colored lines indicate both games influenced each other. Italics is an End of the Line situation, where it doesn’t reference anything or have an Acknowledgement section Bold is for games I can’t find anything about Green box is a TTRPG Yellow is Warhammer Purple/Pink is board game/card game

Alright. Nothing too shocking about the Red Line stuff. They’re just one step removed from Blades in the Dark, as indicated in the book itself.

Jesus Christ Vincent Baker. Fucking hell dude. Between Apocalypse World, Sundered Lands, Dogs in the Vineyard, and a bunch of other things, he was responsible for a ton of vectors here.

Trollbabe was also surprisingly marked here. Sure, it had a ton of inspirations, but I was surprised by how many things it inspired.

Sorcerer was also a huge inspiration in this project. It’s fingerprints are everywhere.

I was actually surprised to see so many backlinks to Dungeons and Dragons. I connected all editions of D&D together, and still only hit a few. But… there were a lot of thanks to Gygax in some of them, but again, I wasn’t going off credits that way.

Need to become a Atlas Games homer, makers of Ars Magica and Unknown Armies, because they are/were stationed out of Minnesota.

Games I want to go back and read.

• Unknown Armies - Heard great things about this series.
• Sorcerer - This fucker has its fingerprints all over, and it’s made by THE Systems Matter guy.
• Everway - Mid 90s medium crunch like game that uses the four Elements for stats? Interesting.
• Mouseguard - The Better Burning Wheel?
• Dust Devils - Play some poker in this Western game.
• The Pool - It has a core mechanic I’m curious about, and it’s only a few pages long.
• Sagas of the Icelanders - Seemed like an interesting twist of Dungeon World and has some interesting Basic Moves from what I glanced at.
• Bliss Stage - It’s list of touchstones seems really interesting and it seems like it might be an interesting mech game.
• Dying Earth - I am really curious to see how they handle Jack Vance and potentially Vancian magic.

My brain is fried from staring at these little lines and trying to leaf through a bunch of books. Hopefully this is interesting to someone else. If not, oh well, it’s done anyways!

Big shout out to the @tableshapers discord for putting up with my repeated posting about this when it was in progress.