My picks for innovative, adventurous Forged in the Dark projects.
Transhuman space bastards on the fringe of a haunted galaxy, spending eternity doing war crimes in the name of profit aboard ancient living vessels. Some of my favorite playbooks ever written.
Post-post-apocalyptic science-fantasy with a real heart and a surplus of brilliant design ideas, especially around Downtime and with the addition of the Community. My favorite FitD game - I expect to run my third campaign of it eventually.
Max takes the great bones of Blades and uses them for a compelling generational narrative about the Skovlanders, the Imperial invasion that broke them, and the legacies left behind to those Skovs in “Duskwall” today. Exceptional work.
My preferred FitD mecha option, with light-weight mechanics where you need them - and all the fat trimmed. Really fun options for non-pilot PCs in this one, too! A genius Harm rework is hiding in this one!
Brilliant and concise, CBR+PNK cuts down sleek cyberpunk heists - "one last job" - into a remarkably tight one-shot package. Particular love goes out to how it reduces how swingy Resistance rolls can feel.
Calum (of A NOCTURNE fame) has done it again, dialing up the pressure-cooker of despair to give us a nightmare of dirty chrome with tidy FitD mechanics. The playbooks are great as always, but special love goes out to the Crews and how they make several of Blades' more complex mechanics into modular options. Great fun!
A juicy grab bag of setting developments and modular, revised mechanics for your Blades in the Dark game, from the man himself. I'm not entirely sold on every bit of it yet, but the beauty of it is that I don't have to be! I'm in love with these diceless Downtime activities and the more Apocalypse World-inspired questions for Gathering Information.
Takes some great clues from World of Dungeons to distill what matters about Blades in the Dark into a microgame format. You truly don't need more than this - a brilliant exercise in minimum-viable game.
An inspired little add-on that replaces Downtime activities with a number of vignettes, each designed to flesh out the characters or the city they inhabit. Despite the name, we used this to great effect in a hacked-together cyberpunk game; it's great stuff.
Elegant, straightforward, and with thorough examples of play for multiple genres - if you're playing FitD, you want Clockwork.
There's not nearly enough aids for FitD GMs to understand how to run exciting, dynamic opponents in the ruleset, and Hunters totally delivers. Well worth reading and adapting for anything else you use on the same mechanical core!
Destiny-inspired strangeness that captures the feel of a mysterious solar system and an addictive video game loop. Pushes the boundaries of FitD design space further than anything else with unique playbooks.
Delivers a mountain of evocative flavor with a relatively short pagecount and some of the flat-out coolest playbooks, exploring novel parts of the cyberpunk genre. More people need to check this out.
Unfinished works can still be awesome; here, The Esper and (especially!) The Squid are among the most exciting FitD playbooks I've ever seen.
