Exploring Unscenes in Blades in the Dark

I’ve looked previously at the narrative and story structure of the Unscene – here are some reflections of hacking the approach for my personal favourite TTRPG, Blades in the Dark by John Harper.

As with The Between, Unscenes can be used in Blades (and I think usefully in Forged in the Dark games generally) to build out the setting – in this case, the demonblood-lit, rain-slicked, perpetual nighttime sprawl of Duskvol. The Unscene is sufficiently structured to complement the procedural aspects of Blades, while providing glimpses and vignettes into the emotional, supernatural, and societal pressures simmering all across the city.

The Unscene lets gameplay cut away—like a sharp edit in a prestige TV series—to something else happening in the city. These glimpses might echo the themes of the main story: betrayal, ambition, grief, poverty, or the restless dead. They may focus on unnamed citizens, rivals, contacts or allies, or factional moves that will never directly affect the crew… but enrich the world around them nonetheless. As a thematic tone piece. It adds texture to the setting and lets the players engage creatively outside their characters, contributing eerie, poignant, or brutal details.

How to Use an Unscene in Play

Set the Scene: Introduce the Unscene with a short evocative description. Choose a setting somewhere else in the city: a haunted tenement, a backroom ritual, a quiet vigil, a bustling dockside market. The description should evoke the tone of Duskvol—haunted, industrial, desperate, weird.
Engage the Table: It is useful to open with a ‘paint the scene’ style question, or another leading question to give the players permission to create narrative detail. These should not require player characters to be involved, and they don’t have to resolve into a story. Instead, they paint layers of mood and implication.
Connect it: The Unscene might tie thematically to what the crew is facing—a shared emotion, a parallel consequence, or a ghost from the same war. Or it might exist totally outside of their actions, just a part of the great, humming city-machine they live inside.
Cut Back: Once the question is resolved, return to the main action. When there’s a gap in play, cut back to the next question. The transition should feel like a cinematic shift in tone or place—evocative and deliberate.

Why It Works

There’s a certain similarity in the settings of The Between and Blades in the Dark that allows this to port almost directly across the games. Both draw more than a little inspiration from fantasy Victorian London. But moreso, both ttrpgs lean heavily into the idea of the setting as a shared character. The Unscene lets the table give that character a voice. Unscenes in Blades work when they reinforces Blades in the Dark’s themes: life under pressure, the thin line between survival and damnation, the ghosts—literal and figurative—that haunt every street. It slows down the pace to emphasise tone and resonance. And it creates space for the players to create parts of the city’s texture without game-breaking consequences and without relying on action rolls or mechanics.

Example: Unscene in Play

During a score where the crew infiltrates a cult safehouse, the GM intercuts with the following Unscene…

“Feast of Ashes” — Crow’s Foot, midnight.
In a crumbling tenement, chalk-marked with warding glyphs, three aging witches, the Ash Sisters, host a ritual dinner for the forgotten dead. The food is inedible to the living, but something unseen is definitely eating.

Paint the Scene: What strange offerings are laid out on the long, narrow table, and how do we know spirits are consuming them?
Question: One sister recites names from a ledger stained with ink and blood. What name causes her to pause, her hand trembling?
Question: A street orphan sits at the edge of the table. Who is the ghost he came to see?
Question: Outside, the alley fills with crows. What unnatural thing do we witness as they scatter?