# Runners in the Shadows *Created:* 2026-09-12, *Modified:* 2026-10-09 ![[Runners in the Shadows (cover).jpg|400]] **Runners in the Shadows** is the Forged-in-the-Dark answer to a question nobody thought to ask politely: *what if Shadowrun were actually playable?* Mark Cleveland's free, full-length conversion strips out the famously baroque dice tower and bolts the **[[Forged in the Dark]]** action roll onto a world where magic, ghosts, and cyberspace share the same neon skyline — and then, in a touch that puts most cyberpunk to shame, sets the whole thing in a near-future **Kingston, Jamaica** rather than a generic sprawl. It's a love letter to fantasy-cyberpunk that keeps the heist-and-faction chassis of **[[Blades in the Dark]]** while trading the Victorian-industrial gloom for chrome, spells, and reggae. ## Setting The game sits roughly fifty years ahead, on a near-future Earth mashed together from the futures William Gibson imagined in the 1980s and the ones modern fringe-futurists promise: renewable energy, quantum computers, self-driving vehicles, and an economy built on information — dystopian, overpopulated, run by powerful corporations, and split by vast inequality of wealth and opportunity. Ubiquitous access to a worldwide network called **cyberspace** connects it; a wide gap in class still divides it. And on top of all that technology, the supernatural has come clawing back. The breaking of a many-thousand-year cycle roused the great dragons from their ancient sleep, left ghosts lingering in the material world, and revealed the lost islands of **Aztlan** and **Atlantis**; the Fog of Mortal lifted, and the awakened wield magic alongside the wired and the machined. You play **a crew of runners** — independent operatives, mercenaries, hackers, and magic-users — selling their muscle, their wires, and their spells to the highest bidder while rival crews, powerful gangs, ruthless corporate agents, and corrupt law enforcement press in from every side. The campaign arc is the runner's eternal climb: from poor independents scraping for work to a serious, feared organization with turf and claims of its own. ## Mechanics ### The Run The core is the **Forged in the Dark** action roll: a d6 pool equal to your action rating, keep the highest die — **6** is a full success, **4/5** a partial with a consequence, **1–3** a failure, and a matching pair or more of sixes a critical. Position and effect are set before the roll, and the loop runs the familiar rhythm: **free play**, then a **run** kicked off by an **engagement roll** that skips the planning and drops you into the action with **flashbacks** to cover the clever contingencies, then **downtime** for payoff, heat, and long-term projects. Runners make **fortune rolls** for uncertain outcomes, and wounds are tracked on **healing clocks**. ### Renamed Dials Like most FitD hacks, it renames the furniture. **Stress** is called **edge**; the group is a **crew**; and advancement runs on **karma triggers** for both character and crew. The two magical/technical pipelines get their due — awakened characters sling magic while others ride the **matrix**/cyberspace — and the playbooks split the party into the expected spreads: shooters, spell-slingers, hackers, riggers. It's Blades with the grimdark filed down into a leaner, meaner *Shadowrun* without the page count. ## Editions - **Runners in the Shadows** — a free Forged in the Dark conversion by Mark Cleveland, distributed as a continually-revised working text rather than a fixed edition. *In the library* (the full book plus its play sheets). ## References - [Runners in the Shadows — itch.io](https://markcleveland.itch.io/runners-in-the-shadows) - [Runners in the Shadows — RPGGeek](https://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/293060/runners-shadows) - [Sell Me On/Off Runners in the Shadows — RPG.net Forum](https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/sell-me-on-off-runners-in-the-shadows.915408/)