An enjoyable moment of good or bad fortune

During our Coriolis: The Third Horizon campaign - Mercy of the Icons, the players accumulated an utterly ridiculous 41 Darkness Points and counting.

Darkness Points are a sometimes dubious way of messing with players: players may push their rolls, praying to the Icons for good fortune, granting them a re-roll, but each time they do, they hand the GM a point with which to make their future considerably less fortunate.

These can be used to jam a gun, power a monster, add some more enemies to the fray, or add events to each act of a scenario that complicates the lives of the PCs.

After listening to the Effekt Podcast discussion about them (see below), I used the points primarily to introduce larger events and campaign complications rather than to make individual encounters harder.

There was plenty of immediate bad fortune. Gokhan suffered a near-fatal injury, courtesy of the wonderfully unforgiving crit table found in Coriolis and many other Year Zero Engine games. His survival came down to an all-or-nothing Medicurgy roll, and, fortunately, it succeeded.

But the accumulated 41 Darkness Points eventually demanded something more substantial. The entire group crossed a campaign threshold and suffered the resulting complication:

Their spaceship was stolen.

“Each prayer disturbed the equilibrium. In the darkness between the stars, something had begun the slow repossession of every miracle.”

Effekt Podcast discussion on Darkness Points here, here and here.

I also prompted a discussion on their podcast regarding a hack of Tales of the Old West’s Faith mechanic into Coriolis Icons, essentially aligning more purposefully with Icon tenets and the impacts of abusing them; see here.

But how this has developed is for another blog, or even a Coriolis community release!

Plus, we really need to get into how deadly the critical tables are between ALL the Year Zero Engine systems; again, another blog beckons.

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