Cosmic Dark Preview
Preview copy provided.
Diaz stood at the edge of the ravine, a piece of phospherant purple rock in her hands. She let it go.
The act took Diaz back to her youth with Derek, finding pieces of ruined spaceships and clambering up to a high spot in order to drop it. A simple pleasure, one of the few things they could do for fun on the blighted world of Breaker 59.
Derek fell too. His climbing winch snapping, dropping him and Doc down into the depths of the mine and the explosives they’d set with too short a timer. The flames would get them before the mine… hopefully.
Diaz watched the rock fall, watched the spaceship debris fall, watched Derek fall. She took a step one last step and joined them.
Cosmic Dark is a sequel to Cthulhu Dark, a game which I’ve reviewed and… enjoyed is a tricky term. I love it, but it’s caused the bleakest, weirdest Lovecraftian RPG stories I’ve ever run. So my expectations were pretty high for Cosmic Dark. It’s been in development for a while, mainly through Graham Walmsley’s Patreon and shown on a few actual play channels such as Ain’t Slayed Nobody.
Cosmic Dark is a science fiction RPG with a weird, bleak tone to it. The ruleset is extremely simple, giving little space for people to hide behind mechanically. You are exposed to space and to the weird things out there.
This isn’t Alien though, or even Event Horizon, although it borrows some tonal elements from them both. While technology is as junky as Alien, there’s a lot of the modern day to it, too. Built in obsolescence and the horrible maths which decides whether sending employees to what is probably their doom is something which is acceptable compared to the profit they can get.
There are strange and unspeakable horrors, but this game is all centred about Extracsa, who characters all work for. They’re not adventurers or investigators, but Employees. The game starts and ends there, a new innovation compared to Cthulhu Dark which did not expect characters to be usable by the end of a story. Employees live on The Exchange, a gigantic ship which flies around a golden tear in space called The Glitch. Characters are sent on mission after mission and if they survive, hopefully they won’t be too burnt out to keep going.
As much as I love the Alien movies and Event Horizon, the characters are hardly deep. That’s no bad thing in a movie, but Cosmic Dark takes a different approach, one which I adore. Character creation is handled in game, something which I’ve been chasing the idea of for years. It starts as simply as the GM prompting, “Mining Engineer, please acknowledge”. Whichever player speaks first is now the mining engineer. This continues for each player and then we flash back to their childhoods.
This is an important part of the game and a great way of creating characters. Each player has only the most basic element of their character; their role. Now they collectively make their home world and play through scenes of their childhoods. What did they look like? Who were they? Something really interesting here is that the short childhood scenes all have the GM feed the opening line to a player and get them to go from there. This is a wonderful tool which I’ve not seen before but will have to use in games in the future as a comfortable prompt for players. After these vignettes, the players and the GM have more of a sense of who they are.
Ideally by this point, characters will have a name and relationships, as well as their specialism. As one last touch, the Exchange’s computer asks questions of the characters when they’re drifting off to sleep, to check the psychological wellbeing of everyone.
Questions like: What scares you about space? If you could murder one of your team, who would you kill?
You know, normal stuff.
This is all relevant, this is all important. As much as none of this provides a statistic for you or anything like that, as the line from The Wire goes, “All the pieces matter.” There’s a nice GM sheet with spaces for each character and for the home planet, where you can write down details to bring back later from their childhood, their psych profile and general chatter in game. I used the borders to draw relationship arrows and shared details between characters, which definitely helped when doing things like seeing if someone will save their rival.
Characters are built in game in this lovely fashion, and they learn in the same way. The rules are embedded in the first scenario, with a guiding hand to suggest how to interpret dice. It doesn’t hold on too tightly and gradually eases up by early in the second scenario. I had a criticism of the Arkham Horror RPG Starter Set embedding rules throughout the scenarios, mainly as they didn’t have a separate listing of the system. Cosmic Dark’s preview compiled the rules in the back which was really useful.
My first group made a world called Breaker 59, a junkyard world where people harvested pieces of old ships. Diaz and Derek narrated their childhood dropping pieces of ships from heights. “Doc” and Gregor narrated their special schooling as people singled out for scientific knowledge. Of course, this led to a rivalry between them and some interesting cybernetics in Doc. Despite being team leader, Derek admired Doc due to his position aiding the group, then rounding things out, Gregor believed he could confide in the normally cold Diaz.
We had our group, so what about the system?
Gregor immediately started scanning the asteroid and I introduced the group to the Investigation roll. Players roll one die if the task is in the realm of reality, one if it’s in their specialism and a Change die if they’re pushing themselves. Like Cthulhu Dark and Trail of Cthulhu, no matter the roll the plot will keep moving. You look at your highest die and on a 1, you still get some information even if it’s limited. A 4’s the sweet spot, giving you what you want. A 5 will dredge up something about Extracsa and the mystery, while 6 will show you an Anomaly. Too much. This will often lead to a Changed roll.
I love the Changed rolls. You make them when you encounter something weird or if your Change Die result is higher than the others. If it’s higher than your current Change score then it’ll go up. At six, your character is eliminated. This means that it’s really easy for the score to go up early in the game, but as it gets higher, you’ll be less likely to do it. The players are actively encouraged to make the call about whether they roll and to do it often. Listening to the Ain’t Slayed Nobody, there was a definite sense of fun when people would make the roll. My first group were pretty good at prompting themselves, although Doc must have had ice for blood as he kept rolling 1’s no matter the horrors he saw. My second group were a little more cautious and wrote a lot of things off. You can reduce your Change and unlike Cthulhu Dark, this can happen from 3 instead of 5. My second group were pretty quick to try and reduce their rolls, even though that did mean some amputation at one point.
There’s one more type of roll which covers anything that’s not investigating. I started calling it a Risk Roll in the style of Trophy, but you can get away with just asking people to make a roll. This is similar to the Investigation Roll, but you don’t get the extra and/or horrific information on 5’s and 6’s. There’s one last wrinkle, which is the Failure Die. Anyone around the table can roll a die against you if they think that failure would cause an interesting result. Then you have to roll higher than that, with a tie needing a compromised success. At the end of the first two scenarios, there are finale points where the GM rolls two Failure Dice and the players need to beat the highest result. For both of my groups, I rolled a 6.
This is a campaign game, which feels perplexing after running my fair share of Cthulhu Dark. My first group had two people die in an explosion, one throw herself down a ravine and the last one seen wading into icy water, hands reaching up for him. My second had one player send out a warning for people not to come to the asteroid, another broke her back in a deep hole and narrated being found centuries later, displayed as a piece of strange art. One player tried to flee and another fell into a gooey pool of kind-of-people. In both of these games, some of these characters were straight up dead, but some can be recovered.
Extracsa generally recover you if you’re not at Change 6, if you’re not dead in the narrative, then they’ll heal you up using cloned body parts, memory anaesthetic and more. You gain a new stat (yes, double the stats compared to Cthulhu Dark!) called Burnout. This is like your Change score for surviving in the long term. You roll to see if it goes up when you need surgery or when you don’t trust Extracsa.
The first scenario; Extraction, is a very good introduction and gets the tone across very well. This is less Event Horizon and more Solaris. One of my second group compared it to a storyline in The Expanse, but as I’ve not seen or read it, I’m not really in a position to comment. The horror’s quiet, creeping, but still worked well to tell a complete story in a three hour session. My second group rushed a bit near the end, but we had a shorter amount of time and they had taken a bit more time analysing things.
The framework of the scenario has different anomalies and files from Extracsa which can be used, and locations which allow different experiences. Both of my groups experienced the key events in different ways, specific to their backgrounds and psychological assessments. They also went to different locations and had different finales.
The preview included the second scenario, Time Murder, which is set on a planet where people are harvesting strange glassy-golden flowers. I won’t spoil things for it, but I’m very excited to run it. While Extraction shows the general tone, Time Murder dials up the presence of The Glitch. That omnipresent scar in space runs through each of the scenarios (I’ve been listening to the campaign being played on Ain’t Slayed Nobody, so I’ve got an impression of what the others entail). I assume there will be an ‘end’ to the campaign, even though it’s unlikely to be the glorious overthrow of Extracsa. Why would you want that, after all? There are a lot more stories which can be told with it, and a host of guest writers are adding two-page scenarios to the book in the crowdfunding campaign.
This year’s been one of space horror for me, with Mothership and Alien already having taken up a lot of my play time, and even some moments in Star Trek Adventures getting that way. As much as I love Cthulhu Dark, I did wonder whether it would be doing the same thing as Mothership and Alien. I’m pleased to say it really doesn’t. The tone of Walmsley’s Cthulhu Dark and his Trail of Cthulhu scenarios have a unique, gorgeous, bleak flavour to them. I recently reread his roleplaying advice book, Play Unsafe, and it’s interesting seeing how his skills have grown and he’s putting them literally in the game to help GMs create a great session of weird space horror.
Cosmic Dark is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter.
