All about the Benjamins
All about the Benjamins
In which we finish off the Coriolis Great Dark quickstart and do a quick ponder on what was good, bad and ugly.
We’d left the team halfway down the Delve, trying to balance Action versus Supply. This is a common theme as we’d gone through the scenario, Player: Let’s do X GM: That’s fine, but it will cost you n supply. It’s feeling very algebraic and transactional at times.
A small encounter and we continue on the delve, the rolled events are becoming a little wearing, one of the players, Neil, suggests that maybe a future approach is to decide how many events/supplies are lost in a delve of size n (stop it with the algebra!) and then incorporate these more naturally. I concur.
We arrive at the end level, the party punish me by doing a three-way split, I’m still busy tallying up the Supplies, Blight tests, Health reduction, Hope loss and Gear damage from the way down.
There is a tense moment when one of the party debates taking some treasure, but then decides at the last minute not to.
Without getting into spoilers, the party achieve objective one and then is confused & frigtened by objective two and scamper back up to the surface, with the idea of coming back later for objective two. Unfortunately, due to reasons, this means objective two is now beyond them. But they survive!
So it’s probably a 6-9 hour, say three-session scenario. All found the game enjoyable, even with two broken elements.
From here on in there will be spoilers, so look away now if you intend to play this.
As mentioned, firstly, the players are sabotaged before they enter the delve but are expected to carry on as if nothing happened. Secondly, the Sphere deactivates when placed back on the pedestal, the players had no inclination to then pick it back up, seeing as there was a dead body in front of them to remind them what happened to the last person that did that. The players logically surmised that the prospectors had removed the sphere from the pedestal and a deadly trap had occurred - confusingly the scenario suggests that it fell off due to Blight corruption, but then contradicts this with one of the prospectors saying they removed it.
I can imagine a campaign focuses on maybe 1 or 2 delves, just think of an Indiana Jones movie to get the balance right. In between the delves, there is scope for wider-ranging RPG activities, I’m excited about this, as I felt the quickstart was a. slightly flawed, see above and b. gave a very limited impression of the game and the setting. I’m therefore reserving final judgment for when the campaign is released.
So to finish, an overall enjoyable scenario, not perfect but better than Dark Flowers and best played slow across two, more likely three sessions to get a taste of all the elements. I can already see though that I’d not run a Delve so prescriptively, perhaps 2-3 linked events and depending on success you end up losing a greater or smaller percentage of your supply. Supply, the micro-management of these generic Benjamins gives this GM a headache along with the tracking of Heart, Hope and Health but this is the hill Free League have chosen, it’s also what turned me off Twilight 2000, so an area of concern.
I’ve ended up going on a rollercoaster with Coriolis The Great Dark, I love it, I hate it, I love it, … It is so different to The Third Horizon that it’s taken time to adjust, but having completed the quickstart and read & re-read it and listened to all the Nils and Kosta interviews, I’m sold on it.
I believe there will be some pretty big adjustments to how my Delve will operate, I’m hoping for more free-form rules to run a Delve but I am just as excited about all the non-delve elements, having spent a lot of time reading the journals of Martin Frobisher (he of the North West passage fame, fame as in he never found it, but all the best British explorations end in glorious failure!). So, for me, it’s more about the crazy shenanigans at court and with competing expeditions, enemies of the crown and horrendous fallouts from each journey.
“Every day some new fact comes to light - some new obstacle which threatens the gravest obstruction. I suppose this is the reason which makes the game so well worth playing.” ~ Robert Falcon Scott
Thank you to the excellent players Carl, Fabio, George and Neil.
Big thanks to Raldanash for the excellent backgrounds he made available to the community, check out his YouTube including an Actual Play of the Quickstart.
Also big thanks to Miguel for his amazing FoundryVTT module for The Great Dark, honestly it does everything you need to run the quickstart.
Pick up the free quick start here The Coriolis Quickstart v1.1