Powers (FiD)
Powers turn Blades in the Dark-style games into power fantasy.
Introducing Powers
Rather than the fantastical being rare and poorly understood, adding powers to your gives characters entirely new abilities they can use. Introducing these into a game changes the game world, making it more fantastical. Powers consist of two elements - a playbook, and forms.
Power Playbooks
Playbooks are the frames for acquiring powers. The playbooks are the power traditions of your world, roles such as wizard, sorcerer, saint, mutant, or technophile. Each playbook gives you access to certain powers, which are chosen in the same manner as special abilities. This is in addition to all the normal features of a playbook.
Finally, each tradition gives you a trauma condition, chosen from a list of conditions available to that playbook. This means you can't survive as much new trauma as characters who have not meddled with the powers. The actual trauma condition generally affects how you use powers, imposing conditions you must fulfil.
You cannot pick special abilities from a power playbook unless you start with that playbook. It is possible to incorporate a power playbook into your character's pool of available abilities by selecting this as a special ability. Doing so gives you access to the special abilities and items of the power playbook, but also forces you to select a trauma condition. You can even gain access to multiple power playbooks this way, giving you a wider range of powers at the price of more trauma conditions and thus more restrictions on the use of all of your powers.
Powers
Powers are what actually gives you exceptional abilities. A power playbook doesn't give you any abilities unless you select a power from that playbook's special abilities. Once you select a power, you gain abilities appropriate to the power. So if you select the electricity pool, you can shoot lightning, power electric engines, cause shortcuts, summon electric creatures, and so forth. In many cases, powers work as equipment does, empowering your normal actions. You use your normal actions to activate powers, but there is often an associated cost. There is a standard list of effects that most powers have. These effects vary in appearance and detail depending on the exact power you use, but the general effect is the same.
| Action | Free | Equipment | Willpower | Trauma |
| Attune | 4 | 2 | — | xx |