Blades in the Dark is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game by John Harper, crowdfunded on Kickstarter in 2015 and released in final form on January 30, 2017. Its setting, Doskvol, is an industrial city inspired by Victorian London and Gothic fiction, where the sun has died and the dead come back as ghosts and vampires. The campaign’s $7,500 goal was met within a day, and it closed at $179,280 from 3,925 backers.
Players are a crew of criminals pulling “scores” — heists, assassinations, smuggling. Each character has a playbook, and the crew has its own, tracking wealth, reputation and the attention of the law. Actions are resolved with a pool of six-sided dice; characters can take stress to improve a roll or negate the consequences of failure, but too much stress brings trauma and eventually removes the character from play.
The players do not plan a score in advance. The game master drops them in near the start of the job, and any preparation is added through flashbacks. A Creative Commons SRD released in December 2017 spawned the “Forged in the Dark” family of games, with over 300 products carrying the tag on itch.io as of April 2023.