Forged in the Dark (2017)

Blades in the Dark is a heist-themed tabletop roleplaying game system about a crew of daring misfits  on the streets of an industrial fantasy city. Published by Evil Hat Productions in 2017 and designed by John Harper, it introduced the highly influential Forged in the Dark rules engine. BitD revolutionized the heist genre in tabletop gaming by pushing players straight into the act, eliminating the "planning phase". The system it loosely evolved from is Apocalypse World Description In Blades in the Dark, players are part of a criminal organization in Doskvol, a grim Victorian era city. The city is protected by a wall of lightning, to keep any threat on the outside. Players create their characters as either smugglers, thieves, assassins or cultists and explore the criminal underworld, perform dangerous heists, manage gang warfare and grow their criminal organization. The game focuses heavily on narrative momentum and failing forward. Characters are competent but flawed, constantly accumulating stress, trauma, and heat from the law as their gang rises to power. System Overview & Key Features Action Roll (d6 Dice Pool) The core mechanic uses a pool of six-sided dice(d6) based on a character's action rating. The highest die result will determine the outcome of the action. 6 is considered a full success, 4-5 is a partial success with a consequence, and 1-3 is a failure. Rolling multiple full successes is considered a critical success. Position and Effect Before every roll, the Game Master explicitly states the character's Position (Controlled, Risky, or Desperate) and Effect (Limited, Standard, or Great). This transparently communicates the exact stakes and potential fallout of the action before the dice hit the table. Stress and Resistance Characters have a Stress track. Players can spend Stress to give themselves for extra dice when rolling. They can also use it to assist an ally, or fuel their special abilities. Players can also spend Stress when facing any situation or consequence the GM throws at them, this makes the characters very skilled, but forces them to consider when to spend it. The Flashback Mechanic Instead of spending hours planning a heist, the crew simply chooses a target, picks a detail, and jumps right into the action. Later, they can use Stress, to envoke a flashback moment, where they explain how they had already planned for such a situation, or had "solved" it beforehand. Progress Clocks The game uses circular progress tracks called Clocks to visually represent approaching danger or the progress of a complex task. A clock might represent the alert level of the city watch, the structural integrity of a safe vault, or the patience of a rival gang leader. The Crew as a Character The criminal organization the players run has its own character sheet. The organization gains experience, levels up, claims territory, and unlocks special abilities, ensuring that the gang's rise to power is just as mechanically significant as the characters'

Scum and Villainy is a space opera tabletop roleplaying game about a crew of outlaws getting by on a ship under the Galactic Hegemony, written by Stras Acimovic and John LeBoeuf-Little. It is a stand-alone game based on the Blades in the Dark system, using the Forged in the Dark engine, and its setting draws on Star Wars, Firefly and Cowboy Bebop. Evil Hat Productions published the hardcover edition on 2 August 2018, produced in partnership with Off Guard Games, the studio behind the original. The Evil Hat book runs to 368 pages in black and white. A 2018 Gnome Stew review recommended it for players who want narrative play with enough rules to support a story arc. The system is a Forged in the Dark game built on Blades in the Dark, and it is the space version of that heist game. Description Players take on a ship's crew in the Procyon Sector, a region of four star systems with factions grouped as Hegemony, Weirdness and Criminal. Their jobs involve dealing with syndicates, noble families, aliens and mystics, and exploring ruins. The Game Master (GM) runs the jobs and the crew's progress from a struggling outfit to a well-known one. The Way, an energy field, underpins the rules for artifacts. The game asks a table to improvise and to commit to a plan late. Jobs start in the middle of the action through an engagement roll, so a group does not spend a session planning. The ship has its own sheet and upgrades, and the crew's rise through the sector is part of the game. It suits groups who like heists, found-family crews and a space setting without a fixed plot.

Fate Core is a generic tabletop roleplaying game system for character-driven stories in any genre, written by Fred Hicks, Rob Donoghue and Leonard Balsera among others and published by Evil Hat Productions in 2013. It is the fourth edition of Fate, a system that Hicks and Donoghue first released through a Yahoo! group in early 2003 and that Evil Hat published that summer, as a derivative of Fudge. The third edition (2006) powered Spirit of the Century and The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game. Fate Core was funded on Kickstarter, where it raised $433,365 against a $3,000 goal, and it was released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence (CC BY 3.0) and the Open Game License (OGL), so anyone can publish a Fate game without asking permission. The system has won multiple ENnie Awards and Indie RPG Awards. The system directly evolved from Fudge, and it has two published variants in Fate Accelerated Edition and Fate Condensed. Description Players take on competent protagonists defined by a few phrases about who they are, and the Game Master (GM) frames scenes in which those phrases get tested. Fate has no fixed setting, so the group first decides what kind of story it is telling, from pulp adventure to a modern urban fantasy, and builds characters to suit it. The game asks a table to talk about the fiction as much as roll for it. Players must be willing to let their own characters' flaws make trouble for them, in exchange for a resource they will spend later, and the system works best when everyone pitches in ideas. It tends to be less satisfying for groups who want a tactical simulation of weapons and gear.

Shadowrun Sixth World (SR6) is the sixth edition of Shadowrun, a science fantasy tabletop roleplaying game that mixes cyberpunk, urban fantasy and crime fiction in a near-future world where cybernetics, magic and fantasy creatures coexist. Catalyst Game Labs published it in 2019 for the game's 30th anniversary, with Jason Hardy as Shadowrun line developer, and it is set in 2080, about 60 years from the present day. FASA first published Shadowrun in 1989, and the property later passed to WizKids, Fantasy Productions and Catalyst. The edition was announced as easier to learn and play than earlier versions, and the core rulebook is 322 pages, down from 466 in Fifth Edition. The Beginner Box came out in June 2019, with an introduction to the setting, quick-start rules, the Seattle adventure "Battle Royale" and four pregenerated characters. The system directly replaced Shadowrun Fifth Edition (2013), and it keeps that edition's six-sided dice pools while removing limits. Description Players take on shadowrunners, deniable operatives hired by megacorporations to steal data and break into secure sites, and the Game Master (GM) runs missions in the Sixth World, mostly in Seattle. Magic has returned to the world, bringing metahumans such as orks, trolls and elves, and the roles of street samurai, mage, decker and rigger give a team distinct jobs. A character can be built in minutes through a priority table, with 50 Karma to spend. The game asks a table to learn a layered setting, though it is lighter than Fifth Edition. The design goal was a core book of no more than 300 pages, and a reviewer found it well organised but with missing or hard-to-find rules, such as starting Essence, and with scattered gear rules. It suits groups who like planning a heist and a mix of magic and technology, and who are happy to keep a book open.

Green Ronin Publishing brings fantasy roleplaying back to its dark and gritty roots with the Dragon Age RPG. Based on the hugely popular video games, the award-winning Dragon Age RPG brings the excitement of BioWare’s rich fantasy world to the tabletop. Designed by Chris Pramas (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Freeport), Dragon Age features an original game system (the Adventure Game Engine) that’s both easy to learn and exciting to play. The Dragon Age RPG is the perfect portal to tabletop roleplaying. The Adventure Game Engine’s rules run on your wits and a roll of the dice. Dragon Age also features an innovative stunt system that keeps combat and spellcasting tense and exciting. So gather your friends, grab some dice, and get ready to enter a gripping world of heroic challenges and villainous rivals, of brave knights and bloodthirsty darkspawn, of mysterious gods and menacing demons, the world of Dragon Age!

Inkroll is a web platform for playing tabletop RPGs play-by-post: asynchronously, in written posts, on each player's own schedule, with a human gamemaster running the table. It sits between heavyweight real-time VTTs and plain forum software; the writing stays the point, but the platform actually understands characters, dice, secrets, and the GM's role instead of leaving them on the side. It is also, deliberately, a beautiful place to spend a campaign. Inkroll was built by play-by-post players who wanted the game to read as well as it plays: a calm, candlelit page of ink and parchment where posts get the space of a book, quoted speech and images are cleanly styled, and every table can choose the look and post layout that suit its story. The tools stay out of the way until the moment a hand reaches for them, so a session feels like reading and writing a novel with friends, not operating software. Dice are typed straight into a post, like {Perception:1d20+2}, rolled once on the server the moment the post is published, then frozen, with a per-post audit the whole table can see, so a result can never be edited or quietly re-rolled. Players post as their characters, with portraits, versioned character sheets, and quick stat updates (hit points, spell slots, conditions) committed together with the post. GMs get sealed passages delivered to exactly the players they choose, chapters, scene notes with a world map and a per-chapter battle map, and live updates with typing indicators and read markers, so an asynchronous table still feels alive. Long campaigns are first-class citizens: the Chronicle keeps a running recap of every chapter and every character met, and answers questions from the campaign's own posts, so a returning player or a newcomer catches up in minutes. And because a campaign written like a book deserves to become one, a finished game can be exported as a designed, print-ready PDF or EPUB. Games already in progress can be imported from Myth-Weavers or Discord with posts, characters, images, and dice results intact. Ready-made sheets cover D&D Fifth Edition, Pathfinder 2e, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun, Cortex Prime, and Grimwild, plus a system-agnostic option and a builder for custom rulesets with their own dice mechanics. New systems are also gladly added upon request.