Let's look at Swindle

Ironsworn meets Blades in the Dark

I was browsing the ol’ Reddit, when I happened upon an interesting project by fellow SubStacker, Jade Ravens called The Swindle. Instead of trying to describe what it is, here’s the creator’s own pitch:

The Swindle is a solo roleplaying game of roguish adventure, daring heists, risky gambits, ill-gotten gains, and dramatic consequences.

You are a streetwise scoundrel making your way in the criminal underworld of a haunted industrial city. Your livelihood depends on the misfortune of others. Using an array of skills, tools, and methods, you will rob the wealthy of their riches, the corrupt of their secrets, and the powerful of their hubris. To the genteel you are a wretch, to the constabulary a brigand, to the citizen a renegade — but only The Swindle can say what you will become...

This article will contain my initial thoughts about the game in it’s current state.

Now, full disclosure at this point: while I’m intimately familiar with Ironsworn and it’s flavors, I’ve never played Blades in the Dark, so that might be something to keep in mind if you’re continuing to read on.

---

Rules

If you subscribe to Jade Ravens substack, you’ll get the possibility to download a stripped version of the rules called the Quickstart, along with a character sheet, moves reference and the Heist cards.

The rulebook is 34 pages long, with the last 14 pages containing various Oracles to help you come up with characters, complications, plot twists etc. It’s a bit weirdly laid out, starting with character creation (or ‘swindler’ as it’s called) where you’re supposed to assign points to various skills. On the next page, you’re introduced to Heists, and how to build them. Only after two pages of that, you get an explanation of the various Actions and Attributes. I’m sure this will be fixed before the final release, though, so no big deal.

The Heist cards are designed with printing in mind, containing cardbacks. They are divided into three variants, Approach, Aspect, and Domain. These work like the Delve cards from the Ironsworn expansion with the same name, with the addition of Approach, which is basically how you’re planning on executing your heist - will you use deception and try to sweet talk the guards into let you in, or will you go guns blazing? Or maybe try to sneak in undetected through a window?

As a burglar, you’re prone to have various tools at your disposal when committing your crimes. Given that this is narrative driven and dice decides the outcomes, you’ll often be in a situation where you would need some tool or other that you didn’t think of beforehand. The Swindle resolves the issue by having you choosing your Loadout before you set out to swindle - you can go Light, Normal or Heavy, and depending on which you choose, you get assigned a “maximum carrying capacity”. Then, when you’re out actually doing the Heist, whenever you need something, you check that you have that and mark that on your character sheet as Load. A Heavy Armor takes two Load, while Climbing gear takes one, for example. Light gets 3 Load, Normal 5 and Heavy 6 Load. They also get what’s called Supply slots. These are smaller items like caltrops, disguise kits or extra ammo. The lighter you start, the more extra momentum you get when you start the Heist. I have only done one heist so far, and more Load far outweighs the small bonus momentum you get for going lighter, so I’m expecting this to change in the full release (Light gets +3, Normal +2 and Heavy +1).

Here’s a picture of my Swindler sheet for “Snag”. He went with the Normal Loadout and is proficient in Prowling and Traversing.

Speaking of momentum, it works a little differently than in Ironsworn: after your dice roll, you have a result, let’s say 3. You need to spend double your result in momentum, in this case, 6 momentum. That allows you to reroll your entire dice pool and take the new result. I’m not sure whether you’re allowed to reroll multiple times, or whether a worse result on your reroll let’s you keep the initial result instead - the rulebook doesn’t tell you this.

Dice and dicepools

Dice pools are built in the same way as in BitD and uses only d6’es. You’ll need a few of those to play, most I’ve rolled at one time is 4 but if you’re very lucky, I can see that you could get up to a pool of 6 dice. When rolling, 6 is a success without downsides, 4-5 is a success but with a complication (Weak hit in Ironsworn terms), while a 1-3 is a miss. You choose what action you’re doing and then roll the amount of dice that you have points in that action, so at the most, in the beginning, if you’ve stacked the most allowed points to a single action, you would roll 3d6. Then you keep the highest. If you roll more than 1d6, and get two or more 6’es, that’s a critical hit.

Clocks

The game has clocks that you’ll start and have to track during your campaign. There’s “normal” clocks and then there’s the “Swindle Clock”, arguably the most important of them. It is how you track your progress during your Heist, but how you also track the pressure mounting on you. It’s a pretty cool design where you roll for “Clear a Hurdle” when you think you’ve reached a milestone in your Heist. The dicepool is 1d6 for each unfilled pressure + 1d6 per each filled Progress. This means that the first time you roll for this, you’ll have 0 Pressure and 0 Progress. Max Pressure is 4, so you’ll roll 4d6. Then if you get 2x6, a critical hit, you get to mark two segments of the Progress clock. A single 4-6 lets you mark one segment of the Progress clock, with 6 granting you choice of getting +2 momentum or Find an Opportunity. The max Progress is also 4, but as you fill in the Progress clock segments, it gets harder and harder every time. The first Progress only takes 1 segment to fill in, the second 2, the third takes 3 and fourth takes 4. If you roll any 1’s when you Clear a Hurdle, you fill in one segment of the Pressure clock. If the Pressure reaches 4 at any time, you’re forced to “Settle the Score”. Because pictures are worth a thousand words, here’s a picture from the rulebook that explains the concept:

“Settle the Score” basically means that you roll the amount of d6 as you have progress at that point in time, basically a maximum of 4d6. The Pressure clock is there to encourage you to leave early, basically.

Structure

The game will start with you in media res, and you’ll start by rolling Take a Risk. After resolving that, you’ll figure out what kind of Heist you want to do, then move to Swindle mode to "Hatch a Plan”. This is where you set your goal of the Heist, for example, steal a valuable painting. Then you choose your Heist cards and build the Heist. Then, you “Load Out”, that is, choose how heavily equipped you’re going to enter. After that, you “Cut to the Chase”. This is a unique move that is only rolled once, when the Swindle starts. You assemble a dice pool based on advantages (cunning plan, especially vulnerable target etc) and disadvantages (overly complex plan, dependant on others etc) and roll - this can either give you a flying start on your Heist, or it can put obstacles you need to overcome in your way.

You’ll fill in the Swindle Clock described above, then “Settle the Score”. After this, the game moves on to Downtime. During downtime, you can sell loot, buy new equipment, heal your swindler etc. At the time of writing, I have not yet finished my first Heist, so I can’t speak for this part of the game in depth yet.

---

Closing thoughts

It’s a very interesting and promising project so far. I’ve played a couple of sessions, first where I established the city where my character lives, his backstory etc. and the leadup to his first Heist. The second session had me start the Heist, do some thievery stuff and then run into issues. A big part of the issues were that not all moves are in the Quickstart rules:

As seen here, the combat part of the moves are not included, so I had to try to cobble together my own version on the fly. Should be easy in theory, but turned out to be harder than it sounds.

Overall, I still enjoyed the time I spent with the game, and will definitely keep an eye on it. I have written the story of “Snag” in the same narrated style as Brynn’s story, so if you’d be interested to read it, please check the poll below:

Thanks again to Jade Ravens, I hope you’re okay with me writing this piece, and thanks for coming up with this game, it’s really fun. I know I’ll get it once you get the full version out in the wild.

---