Scum and Villainy Actual Play @ Lair of Secrets

Welcome to the primer for our Scum and Villainy actual play campaign! The campaign ran for six episodes in late winter and early spring 2022. This page provides an overview of the campaign and its characters, an episode list, and links to a variety of Forged in the Dark resources.

Character and Cast Overview

Crew

Our crew specializes in the weird though smuggling pays the bills. We have a penchant for earning (and losing) unwanted attention.

• Dyson “Twitch” Thane (Mechanic)
  • played by Josh
  • Born in the stars, and will likely die in the stars
• J-A66-3R aka “Jagger” (Muscle)
  • played by Kris
  • Humanoid Urbot. Neon green chassis with bright pink, yellow and blue accents. Punches things.
• Ordwell “Starcrasher” Drake (Pilot)
  • played by Ken
  • A former podracer, now pleasure-seeking, daredevil pilot
• Polaris “Karma” Pava (Scoundrel)
  • played by Erin
  • A galaxy-traveling thief with a love of sightseeing
• James “Doc” Watson (Stitch)
  • played by Chris
  • Scion of a well-respected Imperial Family; worked as a professor at Imperial University Medical School

Starship

Our ship is the Stardancer, a fast mover with room for cargo (both legal and illicit), a decked-out medbay, and an equally capable ground rover for those planetary engagements.

Chapters

• S2E10 Scum and Villainy Actual Play, Chapter 1 – The crew is hired to pick up a box floating in the middle of a nebula… but you know it can’t be that easy.
• S2E11 Scum and Villainy Actual Play, Chapter 2 – Our Scum and Villainy campaign returns with The Ghostly Job, as the crew is paid by a very peculiar scientist to track a researcher to her laboratory and learn about her research.
• S2E13 Scum and Villainy Actual Play, Chapter 3 – This chapter sees the crew take on The Racing Job, in which they attempt to smuggle a highly-altered racing ship through the Iota system.
• S2E14 Scum and Villainy Actual Play, Chapter 4 – During “The Cargo Job”, the crew is tasked with recovering “living cargo” from a smuggler’s ship. The goal is to snatch the cargo, which belongs to the ethereal scientists/villains known as the Ghosts, and deliver it to a safe location. The crew’s plan involves pretending to be border patrol agents and confiscating the cargo … but as always, things don’t go exactly according to plan…
• S2E16 Scum and Villainy Actual Play, Chapter 5 – With “The Rescue Job” – Chapter 5 of our Scum and Villainy campaign – the crew must liberate a prisoner with vital information about the Ghosts … and their nefarious plans for the artifacts known as “Emerald Hearts.
• S2E17 Scum and Villainy Actual Play, Chapter 6 – The “Emerald Heart Job” – the concluding chapter of our Scum and Villainy campaign – finds our heroes going up against the Ghosts and their nefarious plans to use the Emerald Heart artifacts to destroy a gate.
• S2E18 Scum and Villainy Campaign Wrap-up & Review – The crew discusses our Scum and Villainy campaign – what we liked, what we didn’t like, and how the game evolved over its six sessions.

Game Resources

Official Websites

• Blades in the Dark – SRD, forums, downloads, add-on/hacks
• Scum & Villainy homepage – Game information, character sheets, errata, actual play sessions, and reviews.

Tools

• Blades in the Dark Cheat Sheet
• Scum & Villainy Reference Sheet
• Blades in the Dark: Clocks
• Blades in the Dark Playbooks (Google Sheets)
• Lair of Secrets: Scum & Villainy Playbooks
  • Scum & Villainy Playbooks (Google Sheets)

Actual Play

• Babies with Knives: Scum and Villainy (Video)
• Actual Play: Scum and Villainy: Stardancer (Video)
• Actual Play: Scum and Villainy: Persphone (Video)
• Theatre of the Mind Players: Scum and Villainy (Video)
• Lowell Francis: Scum & Villainy – Gauntlet TGIT (Video)
• Role-playing Public Radio – Scum and Villainy – The Oddballs (Audio)
• Player.fm: Blades In The Dark Podcasts (Playlist)

Variants

• Reddit: List of all Forged in the Dark-based games – Dozens of Forged in the Dark games and hacks.
• A NOCTURNE – Control an ancient and weird starship as you fly around the galaxy looking for profit by any means necessary.
• Beam Saber – A game about pilots and their massive war machines.
• Copperhead County – A Southern noir crime game
• Hello, World – A utopian SF game set in virtual reality.
• Moth-Light – A science-fiction game set in a world in which humans are hunted by alien “Moths” and must form pacts with one another to survive.
• Wicked Ones – Take on the role of monsters raiding human settlements, then building a dungeon to defend their hoard.
• Dogs in the Bark – Play a pack of stray dogs surviving on the streets of Doskvol.