Coriolis: The Great Dark’s fascination with material triage creates desperate, stifling drama
The path to progress is littered with spent oxygen tanks.
I love depictions of deep space as this awesome and terrible expanse of inchoate stuff, floating unbothered until humanity blunders through and attempts to exert some level of mastery—or at least understanding—on this chaotic soup of rocks and gas. Suddenly, space is defined as resources and hazards, ports and destinations, equations and enigmas.
There’s a strong vein of this kind of fiction running through Coriolis: The Great Dark. Free League’s pulp archaeology-meets-polar expedition tabletop RPG is rounding down a crowdfunding spree where it offered a digital quickstart—88 pages of rules and one prewritten adventure called The Sky Machine. Peeking inside revealed a version of the Swedish studio’s Year Zero Engine retuned for claustrophobic delves and longhaul space travel to and from an asteroid retrofitted for diaspora.
The Great Dark’s world is evocative and full of intrigue—four major factions (Machinists, Navigators, Gardeners, and the doleful, antiquated Coriolites) and plenty of opportunistic upstarts vie for control of dwindling resources and labor among an uncharted Jumuah System. Ship City hoped for utopia, but its inhabitants, 200 years from home, found only the Blight-stricken bones of an ancient, dead civilization clinging to barren rocks and volatile gas giants.
