I’m still grinding away at Coneycatchers, which yanks Blades out of Duskvol, shakes off all the ghosts and lightning guns, and drops in into London in 1600. I have a tiny bit more to write and then it is off for a copy edit.
Who else is Forging in the Dark?
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I wrote Glow in the Dark: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/223216/Glow-in-the-Dark
My favorite roll is a handful of d6, and my favorite “dice math” is taking the highest value. I like the actual physical mechanics of FitD games. Like the above posts, I enjoy the interplay between position and effect but I also appreciate that the game degrades elegantly. You CAN just roll the dice and assume risky/standard.
The default mechanics have a gradual but inevitable built in shift that doesn’t get a lot of discussion (at least not that I’ve seen). You’ll see crews grow from Fiasco-style clusterfucks full of scraped-by partial successes into Leverage heists where they can resist nearly every consequence. That change from lucky underdogs into competence porn can be jarring, but you can plan for it if you know it’s coming (and that point seems to be about when people are routinely rolling 3-4 dice on resistance rolls).
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Glow in the Dark
Adam is modest, but Glow in the Dark was, I’m almost positive, the first FitD release (even predating the “Forged in the Dark” concept)!
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Scum & Villainy early access predates it, but Stras literally worked on the core game, so he had a bit of a head start.
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I’m working on a cyberpunk FitD game called (tentatively) Neon Black.
It involves megacorporations, alien artificial intelligences, and the 'Net.
In BitD you play a crew who is always out-matched, always looking to get paid, and the game rewards ingenuity and being a scrappy underdog who takes risks, so it feels like a perfect fit for cyberpunk.
I’m currently working on v 4.0 after just finishing up another round of testing. I was about 75% finished version 3.0 before I realized it was a bit of a dead end and I decided to start again. Very happy with that decision, and I think I’m getting close to having all the new mechanisms and tweaks I want in place. I recently started playing Scum & Villainy, and that helped me realize that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to create a good FitD game.
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I’m stealing liberally from Blades in the Dark and Apocalypse World for our last and our next few releases. I don’t feel they are close enough to either to use “powered by” or “forged by” without misguiding buyers, but they are obviously enormous sources of mechanical ideas.
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It’s not something I’m actively working on, but I’ve been kicking around the idea of using FitD to hack my own version of Blades specifically focused on fantasy wizards doing crimes/hijinks. I love the idea of using loadouts as a way of managing spell components (“If you want to summon the Lord Beneath the Waves you’ll need to check off that you brought some sulfurous coral, so I guess you left your iron golem powder at home”) and adjusting the relative power of the spell using risk/effect levels. I feel like there are a lot of tools there to let players run wild with their imaginations (and isn’t that what magic is about?) while still establishing a fiction that makes sense internally.
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We’re really off to the races with Forged in the Dark games, I think the official Forged websites has a looong list of hacks both released and in development.
Personally, I’m trying to finish up Echoes in the Dark, a conspiracy-themed urban fantasy hack. I’m also kicking around ideas for a “Robin Hood vs. Vampires”-themed hack.
Major strengths of the system imo include the strong meta-game components and how unified most of the ruleset is.
Weaknesses I hope other designers look out for are a lack of really solid difficulty scaling ( I recommend checking out Band of Blades for ideas on how to do it “better” than the original Blades in the Dark) as well as somewhat difficult-to-grok prep and campaign design.
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One of the things I’m trying to articulate in my own game is suggestions for effective prep without being overly prescriptive. I am a big fan of faction turns between sessions to generate news, rumors, and secrets so that my games start off with clear opportunities for jobs and also meaningful complications that fit into the larger context.
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Overly prescriptive in the sense of telling the players what they have to do next or overly prescriptive in the sense of telling the GM how to prep things? In the former case, I’m 100% with you, and I think the “generating opportunities” approach of Blades works well. In the latter, I think Blades falls down a bit. You can find generators for scores, news stories, etc all over the net in large part because these things are kind of hard to come up with and the base game doesn’t give a whole lot of guidance on how to do it.
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Agreed completely. I would pay good money for a bunch of blueprints with guard patrols, stuff worth stealing, and people of interest. Having to sort out the layout for a bluecoat station on the fly is rough stuff.
Edit: damn I should just use fitd to make metal gear solid 5 into the game I wish it was huh?
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Your hack was the first one I saw, and I loved it! It was one of the things that poked me into writing, and not just drawing!
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Hello Gauntlet Forums, it’s nice to finally be here!
“Blades” really lit me up design wise, it has a structure that lends really well to playing with how those sitting around a table physically interact with their game.
was my first attempt, I’m here procrastinating against my second, a tight little game about cyberpunk EMTs, and beginning early tests of a third about families building a village in a Ghibli-esque rural world.
Nice to meet all of you!
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Then my job here is done! I’m glad I could help, however indirectly!
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Typhoon Atolls is amazing, I remember seeing it on G+ and marveling at how fantastic the art and graphic design was of those sheets.
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I am so excited for Crash Cart! If you ever need a play tester or an extra writer or anything, please let me know! Us cyberpunk hackers need to stick together. 
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After decades of rpg hibernate Blades first brought me back and then a game of Shadows of Brimstone let me write A Fistful of Darkness a Weird West hack FotD. It was - and is - a wild ride. Current State is Beta, download here. Playtesters more than welcome!
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I’ve written a one shot melancholy horror game called Quietus (quietus.co.uk) that uses a very stripped down version of FitD. It’s mainly based around the stress mechanics but also retools flashbacks to fill in the characters’ tragic backstories. It’s coming to Kickstarter this June.
After that, I have notes for a couple of more large scale FitD games: A Song of Blades and Darkness where you play as a noble house in a Game of Thronesesque world and claims are areas you conquer; and The Conspiracy of Cthulhu where the claim map is a conspiracy cork board and missions are investigations, and stress sanity (or some other less problematic term but you know what I mean).
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You should 100% make a MGS hack.
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Ready Playtester 1! (i.e, count me in for playtesting!)