Band of Blades

The Legion is in retreat following a failed battle against the armies of the undead. You are a member of the Legion, your bonds to one another forged in the dark by bone and blood.

In other words, I really, really like Band of Blades. It’s a game that manages to be granular and personal and dramatic, but it also offers a grand sense of scale that’s not necessarily very easy to capture in a pen-and-paper role-playing game.

Johnny Chiodini, Dicebreaker

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Scum and Villainy

Scum and Villainy is a Forged in the Dark game about a spaceship crew trying to make ends meet under the iron-fisted rule of the Galactic Hegemony.

Work with the members of your crew to thrive despite powerful criminal syndicates, warring noble families, dangerous aliens, and strange mystics. Explore the ruins of lost civilizations for fun and profit. Can your motley crew hold it together long enough to strike it big and insure your fame across the sector?

Recent Blog Posts

  • Finding the Excitement
    How do you find inspiration, when the muse isn’t giving it to you out of the blue? Find the things you’re excited about in a design, and work from there. A short article by Stras featuring two games that didn’t start with the core of a mechanical idea and how to work through that to find inspiration and excitement for them.
  • Minimum Viable Playtest
    There’s a strategy we have here at Off Guard Games: Minimum Viable Playtest. Whenever John and I get a game idea, we talk about it for a bit, and see how excited […]
  • Fictional Positioning when Forging in the Dark
    There are two questions I commonly get about Forged in the Dark games:
    • What is the essence of Forged in the Dark? What makes FitD games, FitD games?
    • What do you do first when designing a hack?
    I’ve heard a number of answers to the first (It has phases! Or … it mechanises the crew sheet!)… but I’ve argued against those in my own way—by making hacks for my home table that disprove the theory.