The Road to Skydagger Keep

The Legion is in retreat following a failed battle against the armies of the undead. You are a member of the Legion, your bonds to one another forged in the dark by bone and blood.

But time is running out as more fall to the indomitable forces of the Cinder King. As Legionnaires, you must make it to Skydagger Keep before you’re cut off or overtaken by the undead. Paying horrifying costs, you’ll employ offensives, maneuvers, unwise bargains, and desperate gambits as the ever-ticking clock nears its final hour.

Do you have what it takes to outwit, outrun, and outlast the endless hordes of the undead, or will your band of blades break beneath the Cinder King’s iron fist? Play to find out in Band of Blades, a stand-alone, Forged in the Dark RPG of dark military fantasy.

Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts is a 118-page expansion for the Blades in the Dark roleplaying game — containing a treasure trove of lore, setting material, and alternative mechanics I've developed over the years for use in Blades campaigns.

The first part expands on the setting of the game, including:

• 27 factions, providing new lore and crew opportunities
• Over 100 heritage and background packages to flesh out the characters and the setting even more
• 13 new innovations in technology to reflect ongoing industrial-age advances, including new rare and restricted technology for nefarious Scoundrels to get their hands on

Also included is a new concept I'm calling a "catalyst" — which is a world-shaking event that expands and alters the setting of the game, providing new avenues for intrigue and adventure, as well as opportunities and scores for every crew type.

The second part contains 6 modular rules systems, including:

• More flexible and impactful Harm & Trauma rules
• A modified Advancement system to customize the rate at which characters progress
• Diceless Downtime, with modified Vice, Healing, Crew Development, and other systems, as well as a system for Debt
• A modified Load system that's more tied to the fiction while remaining simple and easy to use
• A new Action system, which overhauls and streamlines the action resolution mechanics to empower players even more and speed up the process of play.

The whole book is packed with tons of lore, gameable details, plug-and-play systems, GM tools, crew opportunities, and new artwork to take your Blades in the Dark games to the next level.

Tragic Magical Girls

Girl by Moonlight is a multi-genre RPG of Magical Girls grappling with destiny: hopes thwarted, defended, redeemed, and betrayed. It explores the heartbreak of denying who you really are, fighting for what you believe in, and the transcendent power of relationships and community. These Magical Girls clutch their tragic struggles tight, seeking to score defiant triumphs against the darkness of an oppressive society.

The game features four distinct playsets: In the Kingdom of Dawn heroic magical girls fight to reclaim a world corrupted by darkness. Mecha pilots battle against the extinction-level threat of the leviathans On a Sea of Stars. Dream travelers seek the truth of a magical conspiracy In a Maze of Dreams. Compromised members of the Memorial Academy spiral around the bounds of their own inevitable doom In Darkest Night. The critically-acclaimed Forged in the Dark system seamlessly pins it all together.

Unwise deals. Blaster fights.
High adventure among the stars.

Scum and Villainy is a Forged in the Dark game about a spaceship crew trying to make ends meet under the iron-fisted rule of the Galactic Hegemony.

Work with the members of your crew to thrive despite powerful criminal syndicates, warring noble families, dangerous aliens, and strange mystics. Explore the ruins of lost civilizations for fun and profit. Can your motley crew hold it together long enough to strike it big and insure your fame across the sector?

A Fistful of Darkness is a Weird West Fantasy hack of Blades in the Dark with heavy emphasis on the fantasy part. It’s not intended to be an accurate history lesson or a simulation of past times. It is designed to be a cinematic game which lets you play all those Weird West tropes towards the end of the world.

Imaging a world with the magic and mystery of the frontier: wide open plains of the Old Wild West in all its beauty and madness, where violence and sacrifice dominate every single day. Now add the Hellstone rush, underground mayhem in mines and brand new sciences & machines. Don’t forget immigration, injustice, vigilante justice, outlaws, gunslingers, slick talkers and setting suns. This all in the face of an impending doom: Demons and the four riders bringing the end of the world as you know it. How do you make it to the top of this powder keg, which side will you take in the impending war and how much will your soul suffer? Let’s play to find out!

The future of humanity was the spitter craft. It took us to distant stars, flung us out into the starry nothing. We formed the Panhuman Diaspora. We thought ourselves an evolved species.

We aren't.

Wars, greed, isolation, suffering; all of these still exist, and we the spitter crew exist for one reason only: to exploit it all. What will we do, out here in the blackness of space, just to turn a profit? Oh, don't worry. No-one's watching. Promise.

A NOCTURNE is a hard sci-fi RPG that casts the players as the crew of an interstellar spitter craft - a vast, weird, scarred old spaceship - and charges them with a simple task: make Profit by any means necessary. Will they be smugglers and thieves? Scavengers? Diplomats? Con artists? Or mere war-criminals, leaving nothing but dust in their wake? Will they let their stress and guilt consume them and their craft, or will they rise above it and retire to some peaceful world, rich as kings? Will they even survive 'til the next inhabited system?

THE DEAD LORDS HAVE ARISEN

A socialist revolution has overthrown the nobles of the Imperial capital of Kyneburgh. The Emperor Titan Kyne died cursing the land and all who deposed him. Now the only coin that is left lies buried with the undead Lords who forged the Empire. Cultists, demons, and undead nobles threaten the city! Delve into the dungeons and crypts beneath Kyneburgh, twice-kill the dead Lords, and secure the People's Revolution!

A SINGLE-PLAYER RPG FORGED IN THE DARK

Using a single player variation of Blades in the Dark players can quickly generate characters with unique skills and items. As you delve you use your creativity and limited resources to overcome dozens of encounters, randomly generated from 9 unique dungeon locations. When your pack is full of broken crowns and coins you return above ground to the Imperial capital for downtime where your character can recover and resupply for their next delve.

Step inside a baroque urban nightmare, the world of a|state.

In The City you’ll fight off threats to your canalside home, trying to make this grim and haunted place safer and better, somehow.

a|state brings a new, hopeful approach to the much-loved Forged in the Dark ruleset. Your ability to Care counts as much as your ability to Fight.

Create Troublemakers such as the deft and deadly Ghostfighter, the caring and curious Lostfinder, the persuasive and passionate Activist, and the striking and stealthy Sneakthief. If they can trust each other they might have a chance.

Defend your corner from selfish authorities, angry gangs and heartless industries, and deal with the spiralling consequences of your own actions as you struggle for a better tomorrow.

Bringing the wine-dark visual vibes of Dark City and The City of Lost Children, a|state delivers Dickensian anti-Thatcher sparks and knives sci fi.

Danny Ocean? Ethan Hunt? Evelyn Salt? Dominic Toretto? They have nothing on you. Style, stealth and speed - you and your crew have it in spades.

Adrenaline is a game about a group of thrill-seeking characters in a close-knit crew who swindle, steal, and shoot their way to infamy and fortune - or die trying. The game takes place in a fictional setting that looks just like our modern world.

Adrenaline provides optional rules for cyber, bio, and pharmaceutical augmentations that allow the game to be played in the modern day or in a near future / cyberpunk setting.

You are a biker gang, riding the open road and fighting to survive the corporate-fueled climate apocalypse. Ride out against rival gangs. Challenge the corporations and their abuses. Make connections with the frontier townsfolk. Customize your bike - or yourself - through steel, grease, and flame!  Asphalt & Trouble is a high-octane Forged in the Dark roleplaying game with a strong theme of grease and rock and roll, with  a detailed wasteland setting.

Beam Saber is a Forged In The Dark game about the pilots of powerful machines in a war that dominates every facet of life. They are trying to do their part, then get out physically and mentally intact. The organizations that perpetuate The War throughout all of known space are too incomprehensibly huge to take down. There is no “winning” The War, there is only surviving it. Hopefully you can help others get out too.

The city of Heliwyr is damned. Decades ago, a mad priest officiated an ancient ritual, awakening a wicked force that branded every inhabitant, corrupting their blood. On nights with a blood moon, the curse awakens, depriving the inhabitants of their minds. Those who decide to follow the path of the priest, voluntarily feeding on the corrupt blood of people, become Apostles: almost immortal creatures, with bestial features, devoid of any humanity.

BLOODSTONE is an action-packed horror tabletop roleplaying game with a dark, gothic feel.
The players are a group of hunters sent to the city of Heliwyr on a blood moon night to hunt down an Apostle attempting to ascend, opening a gateway to the realm of the Ancients. 

The game has a high pace: the Hunt is a race against the clock. 

BLOODSTONE is designed for one-shot games: every time we play, we play different Hunters, who will face new obstacles and challenges every time: the blood moon nights in Heliwyr never end.

Brinkwood: The Blood of Tyrants is a Forged in the Dark tabletop roleplaying game about building a rebellion that will overthrow the blood-soaked vampires that oppress and dominate your world.

Mask up. Spill blood. Drink the Rich.

The world is not as it should be. The rich feed, literally, upon the poor, as blood-sucking vampires who barely bother to conceal their horrific, parasitic nature. The downtrodden peoples of the world struggle under the burdens of rent, payable through the sweat of their labor or the blood of their veins. Evil has triumphed. Many have given in to despair. But all is not lost.

In Brinkwood, you take on the role of renegades, thieves, and rebels struggling for freedom and liberation in a castylpunk world controlled by vampires. Radicalized by tragedy, you have taken up arms and fled into the forests, where you were taken in by unlikely allies - the fae, forgotten creatures of myth - who offered a different path and the means to fight back against your oppressors.

Masks, forged of old wood and older magic, are the final tool left to fight a war long ago lost. If you wear them, they will take their price, etching themselves upon your very soul. But they will also let you spill the blood of the rich and powerful vampires that now rule the land, and from that blood strengthen yourself and your movement.

It's 1994 in the region of the fictional Ontonagon Peninsula known as "Iron Country," a belt of mining towns barely clinging to life. These towns are surrounded on all sides by the Sylvan Wilds, a forest known for old-growth pines and strange happenings. All of Iron Country seems to be teeming with the supernatural, a fact those in power would like to conceal.

You are a hunter, and you’ve promised to keep regular people safe from the horrors in the darkness. You will investigate the strange happenings going on throughout Iron Country, attempting to put the pieces together and stop the monsters before people get hurt. Will you be able to stop the malevolent forces before their power grows too strong to contain? Will you stand strong with your found family and community or will you sacrifice yourself to spare the ones you love? Will you be lost trying to find solace wherever you can?

In CBR+PNK (Cyber plus Punk) you play as a team of RUNNERS—mercs, criminals, activists living on the edge and running in the shadows of a gritty, ultraviolent world.

In each game we play an entire new cast of characters making their LAST RUN.

Copperhead County is a Southern noir game about organized crime and political corruption in a fictional slice of present-day Tennessee. Steal, deal, and pursue the American Dream in a place where whiskey and blood run together.

Copperhead County is Forged in the Dark, based on the beloved engine from Blades in the Dark and inspired by media like Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and The Wire, plus contemporary crime fiction by the likes of Daniel Woodrell, Walter Mosley, Elmore Leonard, and Attica Locke.

Court of Blades takes place in the vibrant, fantasy renaissance city-state of Ilrien, in a world populated by scheming nobles, court magicians, and dashing duelists.

As a noble retainer, you will engage in the polite civil warfare of the great families. You will host lavish balls, and manipulate the courts, uncover the plots of your rivals, protect the city from arcane dangers, manage your own intrigues and personal scandals, leverage your reputations, connections, and so much more.

Inspired by infamous warring families like history's Medicis and Pazzis, Shakespeare's Montagues and Capulets, or Game of Thrones' Starks and Lannisters, in Court of Blades you will take on the role of a talented retainer to a newly risen House of the Esultare in the great city of Ilrien. The Esultare, composed of the six Houses Major, are considered to be the most powerful families in the Principalities. Amongst them they have their own pecking order, and every citizen of Ilrien is aware of every house’s position within that order.

A short form tabletop roleplaying game where you play to find out the fate of a paramedic crew in a near-future Californian coastal metropolis. 3-5 players.

INFLUENCES: 

Blades in the Dark & Lady Blackbird, by John Harper

Scum & Villainy by Stras Acimovic & John Leboeuf-Little

The works of early William Gibson & Bruce Sterling, & their many sprawling, brawling children,

Bringing Out the Dead, both the book by Joe Connelly & the film by Martin Scorcese,

MUSIC:

Opening Credits: "Roller Mobster" by Carpenter Brut

Go on a strange journey into the patchwork world of the daydream in Crescent Moon ☾, a feelings-delving role-playing game of brave children and bold adventures.

Rules for crafting your own whimsical tale full of breathtaking landscapes and unlikely friends await inside. Delve in to uncover stories of daring deeds and fantastical creatures—of calm afternoon naps and of promises whispered under starlight.

Will you find a way to travel out of the daydream?

What dangers will your shadows seed in your path?

How will you grow and change from your journey? 

Take my hand and close your eyes. Let’s find out together.

Exacorps is a tabletop cyberpunk heist game about burning megacorporations to the ground. Set in the near future in a city suspiciously similar to one you have a history with, you will take on the role of a professional working in the shadows to pit the omnipresent megacorps against one another. Job after increasingly dangerous job, you and your team will pick away at corporate agendas and projects, and eventually turn up the data you need to shut them down for good.

Exacorps is designed to be run with little prep, so you can grab a copy, give it a quick read, and jump right into a game! It plays best with a group of 3-5 players, and can be used for both one-shots and campaigns of roughly 10-20 sessions

External Containment Bureau is a game of paranormal investigation and bureaucracy using a lightweight, hackable version of the Forged in the Dark design framework. You play as trained agents of the External Containment Bureau, an organization tasked with the study, identification, and containment of paranormal phenomena. The Bureau authorizes agents to make use of these phenomena to give yourself incredible powers (so long as the proper forms are in order). But take care: using paranormal energies inches you ever closer to joining the ranks of the paranormal yourself. Will you transcend humanity in the line of duty? Play to find out.

If you enjoy media like Control, Fringe, The Magnus Archives, Men in Black, SCP Foundation, or X-Files... you'll love External Containment Bureau!

Minutes to Midnight is a game powered by Blades in the Dark about a crew of spies, trying to disrupt the balance of power in a modern cold war. They will have to stand strong in the face of their vicious opposition and handle a fragile web of untrustworthy informants, devious intrigues and deadly lies.

We play to find out if our agents can thrive in the cutthroat world of espionage. While the public may never know about their impact, their actions shape the political landscape and outcome of conflict. Will the players prevent the outbreak of a global disaster and use their influence to create a better future? Will they attempt to send the opposing bloc into a turmoil and establish a lasting hegemony? Or will their actions lead the world down a path of war and nuclear destruction?

Mountain Home is a Forged in the Dark roleplaying game where the players take on the role of a group of founding dwarves setting out to create a new settlement. Dig deep, engage in politics with your neighbors, and secure your future in a strange new land.

Mountain Home games take place over the tenuous decades of a settlement's early existence in a new and remarkable land. The game cycles through both fast-paced expeditions where the characters set out to take control of fate and the steady dig downward as the settlement expands.

Revolution in a Fantastical Setting

Nasty Brutish and Long is a fantasy RPG about drama, revolution, and class war. It is a game about beliefs, wealth, and relationships. It lets you hit the ground running with a player created setting and starting scenario that gives you a rich and detailed world and compelling characters in the midst of immediate and irrevocable change. Will you side with the status quo, the revolution, or just try to make a profit? 

Rebel Crown is a tabletop roleplaying game of courtly intrigue, obsessive ambition, and perilous conflict. One player takes on the role of the Claimant, former heir to the throne who was betrayed by their family and robbed of their rightful titles. Others play their most stalwart allies: wise chancellor, devoted knight, idealistic noble, vengeful soldier, or opportunistic outlaw. Conflicting duties and ambitions will push them into points of tension, but their commitment to the Claimant’s ascent ties them together.

A GM plays the other inhabitants of the cursed and fractured Empire: nobles, commoners, outlaws, and undead wraiths. The GM presents opportunities, foreshadows consequences, and introduces adversity. They present the challenges that make the player characters’ fight for the throne uncertain and exciting. As a group, you play to find out whether the Claimant can take their throne and what sacrifices must be made along the way.

Runners in the Shadows is a game Forged in the Dark about a group of daring operatives building a criminal enterprise in a fantastical dystopian vision of near-future Earth. There will be dangerous meets, crazy heists, bloody fights, chases, escapes, deceptions, betrayals, successes, and deaths. It's a bit like Blade Runner meets Ocean's Eleven, but there's ghosts and ninjas.

• Playing this is like a TV show set on Earth, but featuring a flexible mixture of escapism and realism - providing a relaxing way to appreciate and confront issues present in the real world, without being subject to its many burdens (such as reprisal from our fellow humans who live in this world with us). Think of the gaming group you will form as your safehouse, so to speak - a place to discuss and confront these dark reflections about ourselves and the world we live in. For me, it's a place where we can say something about a life of criminality and vice, and laugh at (or revel in) the "rewards" and pitfalls of hypocrisy, anger, and greed.
• The Man won, the world is haunted, sure... but What about it is too familiar to our own world? What supernatural things are common there that would we find surprising? There is a rich metaplot to explore if you're into that, but you'll also need to make this fantasy Earth your own. The tone is flexible: switching from "black trenchcoat" to "pink mohawk," and options for everything in-between are covered in the expanded Running the Game & Changing the Game sections.

Play to find out if the fledgling crew can thrive amidst the teeming threats of rival crews, powerful gangs, ruthless agents, corrupt law enforcement, and the sweet allure of the future’s many vices.

Plug in, reload, and breathe deep of the cost of becoming a legend in the shadows.

Sea of Dead Men is a tabletop role-playing game about a crew of pirates making their fortune in the lawless Carrascan Sea. You'll start out as a novice crew, with a ragged ship and a motley gang of sailors, and slowly grow in skill and influence as you navigate a web of rival pirates, occult powers, merchant companies, and military armadas.

Sea of Dead Men is built on the Forged in the Dark engine, bringing the flexibility and excitement of the Blades in the Dark ruleset to the genre of high seas piracy. The game alternates between the characters' daring scores, where they set out to seize plunder and strike against their enemies, and the downtime in between, where they rest, recover, and pursue their own individual goals.

In the small town of Hillview, teenage hoverboarders sneak into other dimensions to explore, film tricks, go viral, and get away from the problems at home. It’s dangerous. It’s stupid. It’s got parent groups in a panic. And it’s the coolest thing ever.

This is Slugblaster. A table-top rpg about teenagehood, giant bugs, circuit-bent rayguns, and trying to be cool.

Once, we lived at the peak of an era of unbridled human Radiance. Then, everything came crashing down. The cataclysm tore down our cities, broke our machines, and rearranged the very continents beneath our feet. The societies of old Earth are gone. This is an unfamiliar world, littered with the wreckage of what came before and shaped by a strange new physics that feels almost like magic.

The land is littered with ancient machines running haywire, new and extraordinary forms of life, and autocrats big and small vying for power. But for once we have a chance here: a chance, for once, to build something good, something better than all the human flaws and ancient tyrannies of the world we lost. And this is how we do it.

In this Forged in the Dark tabletop RPG, you'll assemble a crew of brave and compassionate adventurers who explore this strange new world, find out how to help people among the teeming threats that dot its landscape, and figure out what it looks like to build a better future.

Take What You Want And Give Nothing Back!

The oceans become battlefields when pirates make war on the world.  Discover the horror and mystery of the Brethren Coasts in this explosive Forged in the Dark roleplaying game. Track and raid pirate ships on the high seas. Fight to free your people from colonial empires.  Join the Inquisition in their Shadow War, or sell your soul for magical power.  Now is the time to rise and raid!

The Age of Blood and Gold uses a modified version of the Forged in the Dark system to add structure to the resolution mechanics while keeping the action fast and simple.  Almost every challenge can be resolved in a single roll of the dice.  If you liked Blades in the Dark or 7th Sea but thought the mechanics lacked rigor, this is the game for you.

Within the multiverse are a few places of great power called Vergences. They are ruled by families bred for the ability to open portals between worlds.

You play a member of one of these empowered bloodlines. Your birthright gives you the capacity to travel across infinite dimensions and manipulate reality.

But you’ll need to deal with conflicts involving your own powerful and manipulative family, secret conspiracies, mystical enemies, moldering gods, terrifying monsters, ancient artifacts, and existential threats with the potential to affect all the worlds of the Umbra. And possibly your annoying little sister…