# Scum and Villainy tags: #game/rpg/scum-and-villainy #game/rpg/forged-in-the-dark ![[Scum and Villainy (cover).png|600]] **Scum and Villainy** is the Forged in the Dark game that shrugs off the haunted canals of Doskvol and straps in for the black of space — a spaceship-crew game about daring scoundrels scraping by under the iron-fisted rule of the Galactic Hegemony. Where **[[Blades in the Dark]]** shipped ghosts and gaslight, this one ships blasters, found-family banter, and a crew you get to cast: smugglers and blockade runners, bounty hunters and extractors, or outright rebels — each a capable crew just starting to carve out a name rather than the galaxy's resident punchline. It's **Blades in the Dark** with the gloom filed off and the stakes pitched among the stars. ## Setting The year is **1261 since the founding of the Galactic Hegemonic Alliance**. The Hegemony united the galaxy's warring factions out of the Dark Age that preceded it; near the galactic core sits the seat of the **Hegemon**, who rules alongside the **Grand Council** — a consortium of powerful families, greedy merchant **Guilds** that control whole categories of technology, and the heads of state-sanctioned **Cults**. The **Procyon sector**, though, is too many jumps from the Core to matter to any of those important people. A few well-mapped hyperspace lanes thread its four systems (**Rin**, **Holt**, **Iota**, and **Brekk**), and here the Hegemony's grip loosens to a handful of pirate queens, criminal syndicates, and legitimate corporate interests. The worlds are peppered with the ruins of the **Ur** — the ancient civilization the establishment prefers to call the Precursors — and mystics claim the flow of the **Galactic Way** lines runs especially strong in the sector. Humans and xenos live and work side by side, united less by loyalty to the Hegemony and more by common interest against both its rule and the organized criminals who prey on the weak. The players are a spaceship crew, and just how they scrape by is yours to decide — the book offers three distinct crew setups as its core story options: the **Stardancer** (smugglers and blockade runners), the **Cerberus** (bounty hunters and extraction specialists), and the **Firedrake** (rebels, officially labeled criminals, fighting the Hegemony). Pick whichever fits the tale you want to tell. Whatever you choose, the crew starts as a bold, capable bunch — the game casts each player as a daring space-opera adventurer reaching beyond their current safety and means — and the campaign arc is building the enterprise from a ragtag group barely flying in the black to a reputed crew with a name across the sector, by taking risky jobs (legal and not), forging alliances, outsmarting enemies, upgrading the vessel, and staying one step ahead of the Hegemony. The cast of pressure at their backs is rich: the **Ashen Knives** (assassination and gambling), the **Cobalt Syndicate** (a labor union dabbling in a little crime), **House Malklaith** (the noble family that ostensibly owns the sector), the **51st Legion** (Hegemonic military that stands in for law off-planet), the **Guild of Engineers**, the **Janus Syndicate**'s ship-weapons dealing, the zealot **Church of Stellar Flame**, the racing **Echo Wave Riders**, and stranger players like the sentient-Urbot **Conclave 01** and the half-phased **Ghosts**. Media touchstones the game itself leans on: *Guardians of the Galaxy*, *Firefly*/*Serenity*, *Cowboy Bebop*, *Star Wars*, *Blake's 7*, *Outlaw Star*, and *Killjoys*. ## Mechanics The engine is the same **Forged in the Dark** action roll **Blades in the Dark** made famous: build a dice pool equal to an action rating and read the single highest d6. A **6** is a full success; two or more **6s** is a **critical** (extra effect); a **4/5** is a **partial success** — you do the thing, but a consequence lands; a **1–3** is a bad outcome, with complications. Roll zero or negative dice and you take two dice and keep the lowest (no criticals off a zero pool). Around that core sit the tools that keep an evening from devolving into planning paralysis. ### The Action Roll Before a roll, the player states a concrete **goal** and picks the **action rating** that matches what they're doing on-screen — the usual twelve (Attune, Command, Consort, Doctor, Hack, Helm, Rig, Scramble, Scrap, Skulk, Study, Sway). The GM sets the **position** — **controlled**, **risky** (the default), or **desperate** — to say how much this is going to hurt if it goes sideways, and the **effect level** (**limited**, **standard**, or **great**) to say how much the action can actually accomplish. Then the bonus dice pile on: **assistance** from a crewmate (they eat 1 stress), plus a pick of **pushing yourself** (2 stress for +1d or +1 effect) or taking a **Devil's Bargain** (+1d for a cost that lands no matter how the dice come up), plus a **gambit** from the crew's shared tank once you've earned one. The partial-success economy is the whole trick: even fat pools most often spit out a 4/5, which is the game's polite way of insisting that life on the fringe is always going to cost you something. ### Stress, Trauma, and Harm Characters run on a **stress** reserve — the luck-and-grit that lets a scoundrel shrug and say "yes, and I meant to do that." When a consequence lands that you don't like, you **resist** it by rolling an attribute; the result sizes the stress cost (roughly six minus the roll) and downgrades the harm — a level 3 "Punctured Lung" limps down to a level 2 "Chest Wound." Stress is also what you burn to push yourself past your limits, or to drag yourself back up after you've been knocked flat. Push it too far, mark your **last stress box**, and you take on a level of **trauma** — a permanent quirk (Cold, Paranoid, Reckless, the usual suspects) that earns its XP by biting you in the ass. Four traumas and the scoundrel is done as a starfaring outlaw; they retire to something quieter, probably with a long memory. Harm itself is leveled and, like everything else, softened or sidestepped via resistance and armor. ### The Job, Downtime, and Clocks A session is built like an episode of a TV show, and the loop is the Forged-in-the-Dark classic: **free play** (fluid, the crew splitting up and scheming), the **job** (pick a target and a plan, then roll an **engagement** that skips the tedium of preparation and drops you straight into the action, running the operation with **flashbacks** that spend stress to retroactively cover the clever contingency you "definitely" already arranged), and **downtime** (payoff, **HEAT** and entanglements, then the quieter work — Recover, Repair, Indulge Vice, Train, a Long-Term Project). Progress gets tracked on **progress clocks**, those circles divided into 4 to 12 segments that act as the game's scoreboard: one for the alarm slowly rising, one for the getaway you're slowly pulling off. The whole apparatus exists to keep the table pointed at the exciting part and away from the hour of planning that would come before it. ### Character and Crew Creation Character creation is snappy and archetypal. You pick a **playbook** — **Mechanic**, **Muscle**, **Mystic**, **Pilot**, **Scoundrel**, **Speaker**, or **Stitch** — which sets your XP trigger and carries the special items you'll lean on. Then a **heritage** (Imperial, Spacer, Colonist, Manufactured, Wanderer, or Xeno), a **background** (Academic, Labor, Cult, Guilder, Military, Noble, or Syndicate), four **action dots** to hand out, a **friend** and a **rival** drawn from your playbook's web of NPCs, and a **vice** — because a crew of hardened criminals absolutely needs a legal, healthy outlet, and the book offers Faith, Gambling, Luxury, Obligation, Pleasure, Stupor, or Weird. Each job you also pick a **load** (light, normal, heavy), which quietly decides how much of your gear you actually bothered to bring. The real signature is the **ship as a character**. Choose a vessel — **Stardancer**, **Cerberus**, or **Firedrake**, whatever crew setup you picked — and it gets its own sheet, XP track, playbook abilities, and **ship modules** to bolt on as the weeks go by. Crew work banks **CREd**, stash, upgrades, and reputation, so the ship levels up right alongside the crew and the whole enterprise climbs from a bunch of nobodies to a name the sector has learned to place bets on. ## Editions The core **Scum and Villainy** rulebook was published in **2018** by Evil Hat Productions and Off Guard Games, and it's a single-book game — there's no second edition, and the one volume carries the whole loop from character to campaign. *The core book is in the library.* Alongside it the library also holds the officially released **Player Sheets**, **GM Sheets**, and **Blank System Sheets** — play aids and supplemental handouts rather than editions, useful for anyone who doesn't want to tear the character sheets out of the book. ## References - [Scum and Villainy - Off Guard Games (official site)](https://offguardgames.com/scum-and-villainy/) - [Scum and Villainy - Evil Hat Productions](https://evilhat.com/product/scum-and-villainy/) - [Scum and Villainy - DriveThruRPG (buy the PDF)](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/198681/scum-and-villainy) - [Scum and Villainy (buy) - Off Guard Games on itch.io](https://offguardgames.itch.io/scum-and-villainy) - [Scum and Villainy Review - Storytelling and Gaming](https://angelscitadel.com/2021/02/26/review-scum-and-villainy/) - [Scum and Villainy Review - The Giant Brain](https://giantbrain.co.uk/2019/09/11/scum-villainy-review/)