What is this?
Keepers in the Dark is a roleplaying game that is designed to mimic a specific breed of action drama TV shows.
Specifically, the sort of TV shows where there is a team of highly skilled people who help random people who need help against some sort of powerful enemy. They generally operate outside the law and, strictly speaking, they are a bunch of vigilantes, committing a whole host of crimes to bring down people that the authorities won't deal with.
Each episode, the teams pulls at least one caper, aka a complicated crime. Usually a heist or a con or some combinations of those, and the bad guy loses. Hopefully. There's also some social interaction roleplay because not everything in a TV show is pure plot. Maybe there's some overarching villain that you deal with at the end of the season in some big two-part episode.
That's the basic framework. This manual will expand on these options later, in the section on building a campaign, but here's a quick list of some of the questions, and possible answers, to get you thinking.
Who is this team working for?
The team might be working alone completely, as soldiers of fortune. They might working next to the authorities, as PIs or consultants, or even psychic detectives, while secretly doing completely illegal things, and have to walk a tightrope to not get caught while still bringing people to justice. They might be part of some odd organization, an entire network of people, maybe with some mysterious backer who is funding this entire thing...or maybe they work off an alternative revenue stream.
What sort of people are on the team?
Could be anyone who know how to do crime. They might truely be criminals, or falsely accussed of being criminals. They might have merely worked in a legitimate field that has people with the same skills, like an ex-spy or a security expert that was paid to try to stop criminals. They might even just be normal people who are oddly good at various things when the chips are down, a martial artist, an actor, a computer programmer, just one really smart guy, etc. And they don't have to come from the same origin, it can be fun to mix them.
Why do they do they help people?
In a Doylist sense, because that's the premise of the game. In a Watsonian sense, it varies. Maybe they just want to help people. Maybe they stumbled across the problem and need to fix it our they're in danger, at least for the first arc. Maybe they are trying to find some sort of redemption for previous crimes. Maybe they're just wealthy and bored. Maybe that mysterious backer is just paying a lot of money.
What other things can be done in this system beside this team of Robin Hoods?
The most obvious obvious thing you can do is just run this as a crime simulator. If you want to use this system to just be criminals and rob casinos, without helping people at all, you can. You can even remove the intended idea of having a fixed cast and each episode everyone just makes a new character to do a fun crime with.
You also can throw sci-fi or fantasy twists into this. Magic threats, some supernatural beasts, aliens, time travelers, etc. You don't really have to change anything above, and the 'mysterious backer' works really well there. You don't need to do alteration of the mechanics if the player characters do not have real new abilities. It doesn't matter that what is happening doesn't fit within the normal understanding of reality, the characters just going to have to assault the monster or modify the summoning circle or grift the alien invaders.
The Tone
This system is designed with the idea that, while you might be criminals, you're probably ultimately good guys, in that your crime's purpose is helping people, and the people you target are the Bad Guys.
But even if you're not, you're the protagonists of this TV show. You might be the villain protagonists, but you're still the protagonists.
So things always somehow work out for you in the end. Cat burglars dance through lasers that are inexplicably visible, hackers say 'I'm in' as gibberish scrolls past, someone punches a few people, maybe the characters areshot at but it doesn't really do much, you have rare car chases where everything works out and somehow everyone doesn't get arrested, and everything tends to be tied up at the end of the episode, outside of a specific season plot. If there are any arcs, they tend to be character arcs.