# Bump in the Dark *Created:* 2025-01-25, *Modified:* 2026-10-09 ![[Bump in the Dark (cover).jpg|600]] **Bump in the Dark** is the **[[Forged in the Dark]]** game about monster-hunting, and it's the rare horror hack that makes the hunters ordinary people rather than chosen ones. Jex J. Thomas's game drops a **pact of hunters** into the fading rural region of **Iron Country**, where cryptids, demons, magic, and monsters are all real — and where the "real" monster, the book reminds you, is often the capitalism that keeps the towns hollowed out. Powered by the **[[Blades in the Dark]]** engine with a clear debt to Monster of the Week, it plays like an episode of a monster-of-the-week show: investigate, hunt, and keep the horrors from eating the folk you've sworn to protect. ## Setting Iron Country is a world touched by **the void** — a quiet, recognizable landscape of rural towns and shared social norms that has also, at its edges, been transformed by something vast. An ancient order of ineffable beings guards the **tear in the veil** that separates the mundane world from the inky infinite darkness of the void, and sometimes creatures come through that tear to pursue their own inscrutable ends. The book is unusually thoughtful about whose stories get told here: it insists that Indigenous people live in this world at every level — as townsfolk, hunters, leaders, and politicians — and that the fantastical should be no easier to imagine than a world where social power is distributed more evenly. You play the **hunters**, a **pact** of ordinary people who have chosen to stand against the monsters. It's a horror game of *being* there when the lights flicker, armed with wits, courage, playbook abilities, and a source of solace — the people they protect, and the community they belong to. A session is built like **an episode of a series**: one hunt followed by the downtime where the pact recovers, refreshes, and seeks solace. ## Mechanics The core is the **Forged in the Dark** action roll — a d6 pool equal to your action rating, keep the highest die, with **6** a clean hit, **4/5** a weak hit with a complication, and **1–3** a miss with consequences, and multiple sixes a critical. Hunters' actions are **risky by default**, a fittingly exposed stance for people who hunt monsters with flashlights. Character creation runs through the nine core actions (*Compel, Connect, Hunt, Read, Rig, Scramble, Sneak, Sway,* and *Wreck*), a special ability, connections, and a source of solace; some actions stand in for using magic, which the book lets you decide case by case. Play keeps the monster-of-the-week shape the game wears on its sleeve: the pact gathers clues, preps for the hunt, confronts whatever's come through, and the pressure mounts on a countdown clock until the showdown. Like much of the wide **Forged in the Dark** family, it sits comfortably between **[[Blades in the Dark]]**'s criminal loop and a procedural TV structure — built for one-shots and short, suspenseful series rather than an endless sandbox. ## Editions - **Bump in the Dark** (original) — the initial FitD monster-hunting release. *In the library* (the 0.8.5 player kit). - **Bump in the Dark: Revised Edition** — the current, expanded edition. *In the library* (the Revised Edition books and the v1.01 player kit). ## References - [Bump in the Dark: Revised Edition — itch.io](https://jexjthomas.itch.io/bump-in-the-dark) - [Bump in the Dark: Revised Edition — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/434845/bump-in-the-dark-revised-edition) - [Bump in the Dark: Revised Edition — BackerKit](https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/jex-thomas/bump-in-the-dark-revised-edition)