Silks

The fog engulfs Doskvol. It swirls around the smokestacks and masts of the great ships in the habour, and rides on the wales of barges and small boats wending the canals; it raps upon the windows of the rich, and creeps under rickety doors in crowded tenements. 


The fog is thickest and coldest in the legal quarter in Charterhall, where it seeps into the draughty offices of scriveners and clerks, enveloping them in an inky gloom. At the sooty heart of the filthy fog is the city’s presiding magistrate. Wrapped in the red silk robes of her office, she inhales and exhales the cloying vapour like a dragon guarding her hoard of bills, acts, statutes, decrees, rejoinders, injunctions and affidavits. All around her, lawyers are mistily engaged in tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, and running their goat-hair wigged heads against walls of words.


The law of the Dusk is crooked. Its arcane rituals and costumery are designed only to cloud that simple truth. Beneath the polite “mi’luds” and “your-honours” of the courtroom, it is as squalid as a brawl in a Crow’s Foot alleyway. 


Your law firm specialises in this dirty fight: digging up scandals, tampering with evidence, threatening witnesses, corrupting juries, and giving razzle-dazzle courtroom performances that could grace any Silkshore stage. The law is just the continuation of war by other means, and you do whatever it takes to win.

Silks is an unofficial, fan-made crewbook for the game Blades in the Dark by John Harper. It lets you play out courtroom dramas in the corrupt legal system of the haunted, crime-infested city of Doskvol, using the game's flashback mechanics to tell compelling stories of legal skullduggery.