One of my favourite TTRPGs is releasing an expansion that goes from gothic horror heists to a psychedelic 60s sci-fi dystopia inspired by Deathloop, where the dead feed an oversaturated sky

One of the most popular D&D settings is Spelljammer, a supplement that turns your sword & sorcery to space-faring swashbuckling. While it's certainly a tone shift, it's not an unreasonable one—fantasy adventuring and the idea of a great, unexplored frontier have a lot to do with space. Treasure Planet understood this, as does Pathfinder 2e, which also has Starfinder as another setting.

If you're John Harper, creator of TTRPG darling Blades in the Dark, or Tim Denee, tasked with writing a supplement to said system, you might be wondering how to make a similar statement with a setting overhaul—especially since BoTD's setting is so very specific. In case you're unfamiliar, most BoTD games take place in Duskvol, which is a post-apocalyptic gothic city surrounded by a blood sea and walls of lightning to keep the ghouls and spectres out. Inside that city, you do crimes.

It's a killer system (one that understands that the best part of a TTRPG campaign is never the part where the table spends three hours umming and ahhing over a plan and so cuts that bit out entirely), but it's understandably hard to make a Spelljammer-style setting overhaul for.

So what's a designer to do? Go all Austin Powers, apparently. Launching a Kickstarter campaign this week, "Blades '68" has already gathered $228,360 of its $30,000 goal at the time of writing. In an interview with Polygon, Denee explains his thinking:

"Blades is a post-apocalyptic setting, and it’s quite fragile," he says, also explaining to Polygon that the system is inspired by Arkane's similar shift from the steampunk of Dishonoured to the 60s psychedelia of Deathloop. "The real-world ‘60s [were] kind of colourful, and there’s a certain amount of optimism. I knew I wanted to get there, so I started making foundational decisions around that."

Reading into the core concept, though? This all sounds sick as hell. It's still Duskvol. There's still a blood sea. There are still ghosts hungering outside the gates—but technology is a wonderful thing, and it's smoothed things over tremendously: "In the Swinging Sixties, there's a plasmovision in every home, an autopod in every driveway, and the B.L.U.E. array overhead keeps the supernatural horrors of the deathlands at bay. (Mostly.)."

That B.L.U.E array is an artificial sky (Duskvol is under an eternal night, usually), which Denee explains is "lovely, but a bit too saturated, a bit too psychedelic. There’s a new power source, but it comes from the way they dispose of human bodies. There’s sort of a Soylent Green thing going on as well."

The new playbooks sound awesome, too, per the Kickstarter page: "In Blades '68 you'll take on the role of Radicals, Swingers, Intellectuals and Paranomalists. You'll join forces with hard-bitten fixers, ex-military Veterans, shadowy Operatives, and outcast souls sealed inside a robot body."

It's all very Disco Elysium, with the asterisk that it's slightly before everything went to crap. Or a good peg after things went to crap. Reading through the Kickstarter, I'm left feeling like I've just been introduced to a new flavour I wasn't expecting to like. Blades '68 plans to cap off all of its rewards by August 2026, but backers can get a free (in-progress) PDF of the supplement before publication.

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