Blades in the Dark

From the rulebook:

Blades in the Dark is a game about a group of daring scoundrels building a criminal enterprise on the haunted streets of an industrial-fantasy city. [...]

We play to find out if the fledgling crew can thrive amidst the teeming threats of rival gangs, powerful noble families, vengeful ghosts, the Bluecoats of the City Watch, and the siren song of the scoundrels' own vices. [...]

You're in a haunted Victorian-era city trapped inside a wall of lightning powered by demon blood.

Do you wanna be bad? Blades in the Dark by John Harper (and published by Evil Hat Productions) lets you play a crew of criminals pulling heists and jobs of various kinds in a post-apocalyptic fantasy city of Victorian flavor. The sun went out in a cataclysm thousands of years ago, and the city of Doskvol (and the rest of the world for that matter) languishes under eternal night. Demons prowl the wastes outside, and to keep them at bay, the government funds fantasy whalers to harvest their blood to be refined into ectoplasm, the fantastic substance that powers everything from the lamps of the nobility's quarters to the massive lightning barriers that keep the demons and ghosts out (and you in).

Doskvol isn't fully safe, though. The city - the world - is haunted, and no one can avoid the ghosts. The Spirit Wardens do their best to destroy any ghost before it can manifest after a ****, and crack down on any unnecessary or unexpected deaths as they make their jobs harder. But ghosts are a part of life, if a harrowing one - many people have encountered one, some know one as a friend, rival, or even lover, and still others will encounter one soon. Then there are ghosts of a more metaphorical kind - the stolen land on which the city sits, memories of the crimes and depredations its wealthy visit on the less fortunate, and the lingering small violences that its population inflicts continually on one another. As people scrabble to maintain their position and fend off their rivals in a place that's just too small to accommodate them all, Doskvol fills up with vices.

Let's sample some, shall we?