# A Fistful of Darkness *Created:* 2024-11-20, *Modified:* 2026-11-02 ![[A Fistful of Darkness (cover).jpg]] They found something in a mine near a sleepy hollow called Mudwater, and it turned out to be worth more than gold. **A Fistful of Darkness** is what happens when the Weird West gets the **Forged in the Dark** treatment: a frontier where the dead walk out of the shafts, where Hellstone powers machines and rituals nobody should be running, and where the posse is trying to make a dishonest living while the apocalypse gets its boots on. Stefan Struck's game is a hack of **[[Blades in the Dark]]** — openly so, built on John Harper's engine under a Creative Commons licence — and since December 2024 it has been a complete game rather than a supplement to one. It leans hard into the fantasy end of the Weird West, and says as much: this is a cinematic game of tropes at the end of the world, not a history lesson. ## Setting The town is **Mudwater**, and the trouble started with **Hellstone** — also called **Bloodstone**, which tells you what the locals settled on. Some old-timers say it should have been left in the ground. It wasn't, and now there is a Hellstone rush on: the stuff is worth more than any other resource known to humanity, and since someone worked out how to draw energy from it there is a new generation of machines and weapons on the frontier, powered equally by science and by older rituals. What came up with it is the reason the game is called what it is. The mines at Mudwater are where the **Doom** is coming from — demons, spirits, mutants and undead "soulless killers," hunting in the night and attacking from the skies, and behind them the four **Riders of the Apocalypse** bringing the end of the world as you know it. Players choose whether their posse sides with the **Light** or the **Darkness**, and that choice follows them for the length of the campaign. The touchstones the book names are honest about their sources: *Deadlands* and *Red Dead Redemption*, *Bone Tomahawk* and *Deadwood*, *East of West*, *The Sixth Gun*, *Jonah Hex*. It is the pulp end of the western, where the violence is operatic and the sacrifice is daily. ## Mechanics ### The engine The core is **Blades in the Dark**'s: the **action roll**, the **resistance roll** and the **fortune roll**, with a crew — here a **Posse** — doing **Runs** and dealing with the consequences afterwards. Anyone who has played a Forged in the Dark game will know what to do within a page. What the hack does is bolt a mythology onto that engine, and the bolts are load-bearing. ### Grit and Stigmata The stress track becomes **Grit**. Spending the last point doesn't take a character out cleanly — they suffer a **Stigma**, a permanent personality quirk circled on the sheet, and drop out of the scene, "left for dead" or otherwise, coming back later shaken, with their Grit full and their Vice satisfied. The Stigmata are, in the book's own framing, the measure of a character's growing alienation from humanity and from a world on the brink. At the **fourth Stigma** the character cannot carry on as a daring desperado: they retire, or they go into the Beyond. ### Playbooks, and the ones that leave the tracks Characters are built from playbooks in the Blades manner. The core four are **The Fist**, **The Shot**, **The Law** and **The Gamble** — the muscle, the gunslinger and showman, the enforcer, and the subtle manipulator. Then there are the ones that rewrite the rules for a single character: **The Revenant** trades in **Passion** rather than Grit — the last connection to the world of the living — and swaps a Vice and its Purveyor for a Link to the World of the Living. Lose the last Passion and the character gains **Decay**, losing their humanity one step at a time, which is the whole game in one playbook. ### The rest of the machinery The remaining systems are aimed at the setting rather than the engine: **Hellstone**, **Ablass**, **Mutations**, **Underworld Runs**, and an **End Game** driven by the Riders. **Payout**, **Downtime** and **Entanglements** are modified to feed the Doom and Rider clocks, so the apocalyptic pressure is not a mood the gamemaster has to maintain but a meter the table can see. ## Editions - **A Fistful of Darkness** (2020) — the original 188-page hack, which needed **Blades in the Dark** to play. Superseded, but still shipped in the download. *In the library.* - **Full Game Edition** (2024) — the complete standalone game, 258 pages in the current PDF build (250 in the publisher's listing), with more art and everything needed to play without Blades. *In the library* — held as both the pages build and a two-up spreads build kept for reading and printing, which is a layout rather than an edition. ## Supplements - **The Companion** (2026) — around 150 fully illustrated pages of extra material: new Runs, monsters, spirits and demons, artifacts, locations, factions and people, plus optional rules for one-shots, Silver Bullets, **Flashpoint Runs**, and an alternative campaign ending, *The Fifth Rider*. ## References - [A Fistful of Darkness - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/307391/a-fistful-of-darkness) - [A Fistful of Darkness - itch.io](https://monkeyecho.itch.io/a-fistful-of-darkness) - [The Full Game Edition announcement - itch.io devlog](https://monkeyecho.itch.io/a-fistful-of-darkness/devlog/859072/a-fistful-of-darkness-full-game-edition-is-here) - [A Fistful of Darkness in the Forged in the Dark catalogue](https://bladesinthedark.com/forged-dark)