The Game
This game began as my final project as a participant in Collective Action School’s 2023 cohort. It is a tabletop roleplaying game based on the Forged in the Dark system, with a focus on fictional workplace organizing and tools for real-world power mapping.
Solidarity in the Dark is a game about a group of underclass workers finding solidarity and building power to improve their lives in the doomed halls of an industrial-fantasy city-tower. Players will create their own characters and together they will form the core crew of an organization trying to win power back from the oppressive factions that employ them. They play to find out if their fledgling organizers can build an organization that will survive and thrive without succumbing to the machinations of management, burnout, or their own vices.
This is absolutely a work in progress, but if you’re interested in updates or participating in a play test, please let me know!
The Setting
Solidarity in the Dark takes place in the City of Spires, powerhouse of the Eternal Empire; five massive towers rising out of the choking mists that cloak the land for miles around the city’s ancient walls. It’s industrial in its development; think typewriters and printing presses, steampower and simple electric technology, but with a business and corporate sensibility more like our own.
The city is also a fantasy. Outside the towers there are choking mists, the result of industrial and magickal exploitations required to fuel the Empire. It is rumored that there are even deadlier things out there as well, monstrous beasts twisted by the same industrial and magickal runoff that poisons the land. Under the watchful eye of the Church of Eternal Growth, the towers of the Fanged City are always under construction. This is both to satisfy the Church’s doctrine and because the towers are sinking into the earth, slowed and stabilized by magick, but still steadily grinding the lower floors into dust. To stand still in the Sinking Spires is to invite destruction. Because of this, social status and power are very literally represented by the level of the tower on which you live and work.
You are trapped in a sinking tower, scrambling to make enough money to survive before the walls of your home are literally crushed beneath the weight of the city.
Attribution and Licensing
Blades in the Dark™ is a trademark of One Seven Design. The Forged in the Dark Logo is © One Seven Design, and is used with permission.
"Stacking the Dice" by docoverachiever is licensed under CC BY 2.0
."Tower" by JohnnyZi from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0), in use here as the site's favicon.