# Blades '68 *Created:* 2026-09-12, *Modified:* 2026-10-09 ![[Blades '68 (cover).jpg|600]] **Blades '68** is an official supplement for **[[Blades in the Dark]]** by Tim Denee / Old Dog Games, published by Evil Hat — and it is emphatically *not* a standalone game; you need a copy of **Blades in the Dark** to play, which is the hobby's way of selling you the same engine twice. It catapults the haunted industrial city of Doskvol forward a hundred years to **968 AC — the Swinging Sixties** — a retro-futuristic dystopia of cars, phones, airships, early computers, television, and fast food, where the broken sun has been replaced by a psychedelic force-field "Bubble" and a new power source that comes, *Soylent Green*-style, from the disposal of human bodies. Same grime, brighter neon. ## Setting Between the world of **Blades in the Dark** and 968 lies a century of catastrophe — a sequence that ran through **Unity War II** and **Unity War III** and tore the old Imperium apart, leaving Iruvia and Skovlan as world powers in their own right. When the wars ended, **electroplasmic fusion** was invented, and every major city of the Shattered Isles wrapped itself in a **Bubble**, a force field against the eternal dark, with motorways and canals knitting the cities together. Doskvol's own Bubble is tuned by an experimental apparatus the size of a stadium — a machine that bathes the sky in psychedelic colors when it powers up. The future is here, and it's neon-lit, television-shaped, and still full of ghosts. You play **daring chancers** building a criminal enterprise in this high-voltage now: racers, radicals, and shadowy operatives scoring thrills, advancing agendas, and skirting the law in a city that kept all of Blades' factions and added televisions, robots, and the specter of a new kind of power. The book wears its cinematic references proudly — *Soylent Green*, *Bullitt*, *Danger: Diabolik* — and leans into a tone of swinging, paranoid technicolor mayhem. ## Mechanics The core is the same **[[Forged in the Dark]]** action roll — roll a d6 pool equal to your action rating and take the highest die, with **6** a full success, **4/5** a partial with a cost, and **1–3** a failure — plus position and effect and the score/downtime loop. Where **Blades '68** makes its mark is how it swaps out the core dials: - **Keys and Deadlocks** replace trauma. **Keys** are personality traits central to who your character is; lean on a key for experience, or, when stress breaks you, take on a **deadlock** — a trait that now hinders you as a criminal. - **Stacks and Bank** replace coin and stash. - **Harm** gets reworked: it now just factors into **effect** during a score, with harm **complications** rolled afterward, and **armor** reduces all harm but costs 3 load. - **Resistance** lets you resist stepped consequences multiple times rather than once. - It also borrows the **Trouble Engine** and backing-faction rules from **a|state** by Morgan Davie, Jon Hodgson, and Handiwork Games. The gameplay cycle splits into crew business, the trouble engine, and personal business — **Personal Business, Planning Meeting, Called Shots, The Score, Aftermath, Harm Complications, and Unwind** — with new procedures for time skips, wanted levels, prison, and raids. New playbooks (**Hound, Hull, Intellectual, Operative, Paranormalist, Radical, Swinger, Veteran**) and crews (**Dealers, Hit Squad, Militants, Racers, Shadows, Utopians**) slot into a fully re-imagined Doskvol of espionage, heists, and paranormal mind-benders — **Hulls** in particular are robots piloted by a human soul. It's the same scoundrels-and-scores loop, just with better sunglasses. ## Editions - **Blades '68** (2026) — the full supplement for **Blades in the Dark**; a copy of Blades in the Dark is required. *In the library* (v1.0.1, an early release of the campaign's final build). ## References - [Blades '68 — Evil Hat Productions](https://evilhat.com/product/blades-68/) - [Blades '68 — BackerKit campaign](https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/evil-hat/blades-68) - [Blades '68 Preview (free) — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/553040/blades-68-preview) - [Blades '68 turns Blades in the Dark into a groovy spy thriller — Polygon](https://www.polygon.com/news/516709/blades-in-the-dark-sequel-blades-68-tim-denee-release-date-price/)