itch.io

First, I love the graphical look and the premise. It's what convinced me to buy! We played a one-shot and here are some of my suggestions for refinements:

Both the character sheets and the rules text have a mix of single page and two-page spreads. (The EMV is a one-page spread but then the rest of the PDF has both the full page for the Employee AND the full page for the post-mission Forms on the same spread.) This makes it extremely tricky to print. Each standalone page should be in its own spread. Also important for the rules PDF, which can't be printed as a booklet in the current layout.

I like the look of the distressed font you used for the character sheets, but even using the printer-friendly version, it ends up being difficult to read at the table. (My players are all over 50 and have tired eyes.) I'd suggest updating this font to one that is bolder, with stronger definition. 

Finally on the gameplay front, I was really interested to see how Forged In The Dark worked with a deck of cards instead of dice. By the end of the session, my players really struggled with it. They pulled a lot of failures and none of them got to activate one of their special abilities using a face card from their cache. (With three players and only two Queens in the deck, there's about a 2-in-3 chance on any given pull that the Queen you need to activate Borrowed Time is going to go into another player's cache and that player may not even have the Queen XP ability chosen).

I think the other issue with the mechanics here is that in a game with dice, when you roll a result of 2,4,5,6 the next time you roll you have the same odds of rolling a 4 or 5. In this design, those Partial Success results go to the trash and are essentially wasted if you pulled a face card. I know it's a game of diminishing returns but by the end of the mission the players essentially ran out of black cards and were frustrated by failure after failure. It is possible that I may have a GM style that calls for more rolls than your average Forged In The Dark GM and therefore I burned through more cards than usual.

All that said, I really love the premise of this game and it looks terrific. There's some great dystopian cyberpunk worldbuilding in here as well.  Personally I am keen to play it again. I suspect I'd revert back to the usual dice pool mechanics and if not, I'd definitely let players pick three or four Employee abilities and shuffle in the red face cards if I was playing a one-shot just so there would be a better chance of their abilities triggering.

Hope that is useful feedback!