The Pretty Good Dark

I’ve been running a huge table – seven players! – of Free League’s new edition of Coriolis.

Coriolis: The Great Dark is good, it’s fine. It’s a more focused take on similar ground covered by Coriolis: The Third Horizon. This edition is all about a society clinging to the edge of hostile space, delving into alien ruins to find scraps that might help everyone survive a little longer, and getting eaten alive by an interstellar ecological disaster. Free League’s Year Zero Engine is my favorite trad platform, so it’s always nice to take it out for a spin.

I like being reminded of how much work many indie games are doing for me, because those tools and affordances are just not there once you’re in trad-land. Is there an NPC I can talk to? Once I make one there will be! What happens if a player misses a roll? Up to me, and as harsh or petty as I like. Rocks fall, everyone dies.

There’s not a lot of deep diving for me to do on the Year Zero Engine at this point. It’s in Tales from the Loop, Twilight 2000, Alien, Vaesen, and so on. Free League have built a publishing empire (city-state maybe) on it. The system is good. In this edition of the game, there are three “hit point” tracks that are all under stress during a delve into alien ruins: hope, health and heart. Running out of any of them is bad and might permanently change the characters. Much like Sanity in Call of Cthulthu, that’s where a lot of the fun is hiding.

Seven players, though. It’s a lot of people. Noisy. Chaotic. Requires a firm hand.

My happy place is four characters in a PbtA style r-map driven game. Follow everyone around, watch character lives get entangled, let events be character-driven and inspired by player interest. It’s more…conversational, I suppose. I still don’t think every game “is a conversation” but PbtA style games certainly are the most conversational.

But you get a trad style game to the table, right? There’s a necessary bit of material prep the facilitator just has to do, because trad gaming is largely centered on material realities. There’s less improvisational quipping and more prepared speechifying, as far as conversing goes.

I’m not planting an ideological flag or anything. It’s just an observation. “Conversation” contains multitudes.

So my seven players, right? It’s a mix of brand-new-to-tabletop-roleplaying folks, very old hands, and novelty-hound indie nerds. My goal was to build a quorum-proof body of players, sort of West Marches style setup. Ironically nobody ever misses a session. Other than our most recent, we’ve had a solid run of seven player tables. Even then we just missed one.

The Great Dark has a pretty good setup for varying participation. The characters are embedded in a relationship map, sure, but it’s not the kind where the whole situation is contingent on full attendance. To be clear, that’s the kind of game I actually prefer. I like following everyone’s entanglements. But this is fine. There are lots of factions hard at work scheming around the future of Ship City, the game’s home base, as well as the vast Greatships that ply the slipstreams between worlds. And there’s a heavy technical emphasis on delves, the actual beat-by-beat missions where characters go into alien ruins, deal with problems, and haul out ancient relics.

This setup reminds me a bit of the tempo that Free League’s first game, Mutant: Year Zero set up. There’s unstructured play in a civilized space, and then there’s highly structured play outside of that space. Social threats versus physical threats. Good tempo. Highly structured play with seven players, though? It’s so, so slow!

The funny thing is, everyone’s having a good time at the table even when it’s slow. Like, it doesn’t actually matter if the characters only get into a room or two into a delve in a 3 hour session. In that way I think BWHQ’s Torchbearer showed me the way. You can have a fastidious bit of competency porn where “not much happens” in the grand scheme, but obviously things are still happening. It’s just that now we care about each beat as they drop into ruins. Each sudden attack by weird alien critters. The inevitable drain on hope, health and heart.

The shift to less-structured free roleplay when the players aren’t locked into a delve is a nice palate cleanser as well. Meet with NPCs and each other, get pulled into drama, start laying the groundwork for future fictional developments, all that. These folks are good about letting scenes play out…but not too long! There are so many of them! Real tight scene framing, hard frames into difficult situations, and lots of variety from scene to scene. Hardly any NPCs are out to get them! For now. There’s even a little bit of romance around the edges.

There’s no real review to be had of The Great Dark here, other than “it’s colorful” and “it’s a good use of the Year Zero Engine.” If you like sloshing around in an interesting setting, Coriolis gives you plenty of exotic material to barf forth. Unlike Free League’s earliest games, though, The Great Dark doesn’t come with a campaign. In line with how Free League publishes now, the official campaign comes in a separate box and you get terrific production values for all that. I’m not waiting on the boxed campaign, though. Hell, I’m pretty sure whatever I’m cooking up now will directly contradict it! The loose ends where the official campaign will eventually tie into are pretty explicit.

Anyway. Feels good to stretch my big-table muscles and refresh old trad-prep skills. There’s something to be said for synthesizing and delivering someone else’s setting material as long as you trust it. I’m not a fan of gonzo free-association shit! I don’t think The Great Dark is that, although it does leave out “official” answers for the box that’ll come out. Meanwhile, our heroes are hurtling through space in a huge ship eating up all the pseudo-future-history they can swallow.