Protect The Child is a Blades In The Dark TTRPG about being powerful and ominous beings engaged in childcare.

The current draft is 68 pages, and represents (as of 7/10/24) an early access version of the game. It is clean and readable---although admittedly very maroon---with no illustrations but with a layout that emphasizes legibility and good organization of information.

As a note, the core premise does have some flexibility to it. The child doesn't have to be an infant and you don't have to be high fantasy creatures---you could be aliens or adventurers or criminals. You could use this to run Bad Batch. However, the story is framed (and titled) in such a way that everything orbits around the child.

Safety tools are provided and are comprehensive. There's layers of pre-screening and fallback points to help keep anyone from having a really bad time, which is good because the premise here can easily veer into a ton of wacky child endangerment.

Gameplay follows the usual Forged In The Dark mechanics pretty closely, and worldbuilding tools are included due to the game's inherent lack of a setting. Where most Forged In The Dark games would have a home base, Protect The Child has a child, and it isn't really something you upgrade so much as a narrative football. Your positioning relative to the child in a scene determines how your moves work---and also affects your overall Trust. 

Playbooks here are all strong and nuanced, with a clearly enfranchised area of competence and then the child as an achilles heel. It's interesting to see a system do this---narratively you can't get away from the child, you need to take care of it, but purely rules-wise it menaces you. Honestly this does a good job depicting how children kinda just intrude and force you to confront your own callousness and fears.

There's also a lot of mechanical attention paid to the child's social/emotional growth, and to the phases of childhood. I don't think I've seen a game dig this precisely and this deep into, like, which emotions become present at different ages. It does a really good job of it, too. The child's mechanical development isn't terribly deep (which is fine! It would be kind of dissonant with the rest of the game's tone if this part was more granular), but the child *is* fundamentally a different character from age bracket to age bracket. This is verisimilitude!

In terms of GMing, the game is structured around runs and rests. Basically, it's Blades' missions. A run occurs when there is a problem to proactively address. A rest occurs after the run. This keeps the system focused on things happening while still giving downtime room to breathe. I think this structure is easy to pick up, but if you've already tried and bounced off of Blades, you might bounce off of this for similar reasons.

Quickstarts are provided, and are quite creative and detailed. They stretch the game's premise in unexpected ways, but never outside of the strengths of the system. They're a really good example of how to write adventures for non-traditional ttrpgs.

Overall, I don't think this is an rpg for me (I don't like children), but I do think it's an extremely well made game that will produce wildly memorable sessions for groups that do run it. The child being both the center of the narrative and also player character kryptonite is *really* interesting, and is design tech that could be used in other genres and systems to aggressively centralize a theme or story element. Want a story about a haunting? I think this would work for that.

If you're on the fence about this game, then I want to stress that, despite it being nearly 70 pages, it's a quick read and you can get the essentials in an hour. I'd absolutely recommend picking it up whether you're a GM, designer, or player.

Minor Issues:

-Page 4, "If you have pips in the related stat, you add those", this isn't clear on first read that it means you add dice, not modifier.

-Page 4--5, the headings using cooking metaphors feels a little weird here, with the subject of the game having just been introduced as being about children. I can't think off the top of my head of child-related metaphors for these headings, but it might be worth switching the headings to those instead.