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I played the quickstart with a group at a gaming club over two sessions.

I have noted my own observations with the players.

We noted several good things and some alarming ones:

- The world building is fantastic, which I knew before playing and was the reason I picked it up try. Players loved it in general, of course that novelty can wear off unless new aspects of the world is introduced, even in ship city, in a longer campaign.
- Combat was surprisingly intense in the end with the black toad crew. Less so with the swarm, in fact I skipped one blight crawler attack for that reason. It felt like it didn’t immerse them in the same way with just one attack. If it has two ferocity as a swarm… and at half health one… But people rarely get fully engaged in these swarm attacks in games as some just couldn’t do anything. Three out of four were broken (one dying), and it came in the end when only one toader was left and they were four still standing. He shot three of them down with autofire, and suddenly it was almost a coin flip. But even before that there were intense moments when they thought they’d lose. All in all, it works, though one player complained over her useless five health a little bit.
- The start with lots of roleplaying was of a bigger success to this group overall than the delve. However, it took almost four hours of playing to get them to the delve, so it became very roleplaying heavy. As a GM I enjoyed it, but the player with low empathy sighed a few times as she was using that skill over and over. The next time she didn’t turn up. It might not have been because of that but it didn’t quite help. To be honest I think she was a morning person and played in the evening and that didn’t help. But one player did note that it felt a bit same-y in the start, rolling the same skills over and over again.
- The delve itself, like I noted in my comments before running it, did actually make the players lose immersion. It was decidedly less engaged there no matter how hard I tried to encapsulate the weirdness. I believe it was the lack of decisions in combinations with the board game feel. Not a good look, and this was a concern for me and the players after. These experiences might be interesting in a book, when you are affected by the thoughts and frustrations of a character, but less so in an imaginative and decision based game. There was no tension from the delve rolls themselves and when the same result came up I was reluctant to tell them they felt directionless again and had to roll or lose a point. There were just sooo many rolls over so little.
- Delving in ruins in general raises another concern. Will this be interesting in the long run when dungeons are in general regarded as the least favourite part of almost all dnd players? Making a dungeon interesting is an art form in itself, because how do you find the variation? Clear missions and cause and effect help, but here everything is so mysterious, almost too mysterious because…
- When the players were inside the structure, this mystery didn’t yield a lot of tension. It was kind of mysterious but one 0layer expressed a bit of disappointment that a lot of the symbols and mystery didn’t really lead anywhere to new knowledge. As a GM I got that you were trying to play at this interesting city is there to explore from the builders. But instead it encountered the Chekhov gun problem. They were playing this short adventure and when thinking about what someone is scratching means and then finding no sense to it, they lost a bit of engagement from the lack of meaning of the story they were told. This leads to…
- The problem of too much mystery is that it doesn’t really engage that much emotionally. The game is not exactly visceral in its design. There is no horror looming. This is not an action film. It is not that personal to save a civilization actually even, like so many of the world-at-stake movies show us. It needs to be more personal, and offer more opportunities for the personal stake. Mystery is interesting when the mystery is soon solved and two other mysteries pop up because of it, and the chain goes on. However, it needs a stake. I admit roleplaying games are tough to establish real and interesting personal stakes. Especially in pre-made adventures. But the best ones leave doors open for the GM to build on.
- One player noted in general (without me saying anything about my own thoughts) that what he liked about dnd was how you had so many different types of skill checks, there are saves, and a hole host of various social checks with corresponding, as well as both investigation and perception etc… so all the major worries I had suspected that could be problematic turned out to be concerns for them as well. Easy systems are pretty good for one shots but can make players wonder about longer campaigns. I know you will let people differentiate the characters more later, like getting +1 on intimidation, perhaps, but I don’t know.
- The role-heavy look of the party still poses the question: is a player with low empathy going to enjoy playing a roleplaying heavy two hours? Will the player with low health and bad weapon skills enjoy playing two hours of combat when sensibly he or she should mostly hide? Here dnd does something good, they let all classes be useful to good in combat, and all classes can similarly have a chance to be useful to good in social or in exploration. I am bot committed to that this part of Coriolis is a failure, but it does raise concerns from my limited experience, when campaign play comes into play.
-Supplies lost and the little events caused no stir in the players.

For these reasons I remain undecided at best. Coriolis is a game which ambition raises a question for me similar to Runequest. It is a game with phenomenal world building and several strengths, but at the same time are the game creators too interested in telling the story they want to share rather than giving my players agency and choices?

I realise this is a quickstart and some points raised are what is implied compared to what is perceived, but still they raise concern. That the main part of the game is this mystery mystery with iridescent and weird phenomenons run the risk of being mysterious for its own mystery, rather than supporting agency. This is a problem in Cthulhu at times also, but less so in an HP Lovecraft book, but the Lovecraft stories masterfully lets us follow the crumbling inner worlds of people, and roleplayers are rarely that scared nor live out the inner world of such an experience.

I would say that a longer campaign need a clear sense of constant discovery followed by revelations on an almost endless upward loop that may be hard to sustain. Because mystery is nothing compared to suspense. Because of this I have a feeling that the delve needs to be made slightly less important compared to the human intrigue around the ruins and what the discoveries may do to and shape the society in ship city, the power dynamics. And play into those very human stories.

Summing up:
- Combat has great potential, and was fun, but not as fun with the swarm fight.
- Delving plays right now into the worst part of dnd and Cthulhu: overly mysterious inhuman dungeons where players are extras in a book that isn’t a book
-The delving system is a board game system that immediately removes immersion, with endless blight armour rolls and travel rolls and random small effects. It also feels like it makes dungeon crawling its centre. If the latter is the case, genius design in plotting and variation is needed from the ruin sections.
- Fantastic mood in the world building, as long as the mysterious doesn’t take over and that new elements of both the human world and the builders worlds are revealed more and more in interesting ways constantly at the same time. A set world has the chance to play at depth of how those worlds change, and create novelty that way.
- Social interactions are somewhat lacking due to overuse of just empathy.
- Character specialisations may hurt the game slightly because of imbalances. In other games, like dnd, players are often engaged by feeling anyone can offer solutions to a problem, in different ways.


All in all it was enjoyable to try mostly. Such potential though. I hope you can raise it. It feels like a game some might enjoy buying for the world building rather than playing it. That is much like Runequest is for a lot of people. The designers are passionate about a world and strict ideas about it. That plays against the passion of imaginative players. Here, the problem is not the world itself, rather the narrow focus and the sense that the designers might be just trying to hide that they are railroading players towards their exciting sci fi ideas in a campaign. And thatbthe mystery is just mysterious for far too long.

I hope I’m wrong. Good luck with it though, and I’m happy people are trying these different ideas.

Apologies for the spelling and grammar errors. I wrote very fast but saw that it should be (mostly) understandable at least and it is very late for changing stuff.

Such a great review, thanks a lot for taking your time to write it!

Having only read, not played, the Quickstart and Beta, I felt that it all was an awesome read, but had my doubts that it was an interesting play.

I want to like Great Dark, but I will wait until I see some more playing material and if it feels engaging, before committing to a campaign with my players.

— Repliy below —

Thanks for the quickstart impressions.

I hope they bring in more emphasis on non-artifact aspects of play in a sequel. Keep the focus on artifacts and a great evolving mystery, but take some inspiration from Alien RPG or political turmoil. Where pressure mounts from chaotic social situations. So delving becomes more like one third of the focus.

Also, I hope they bring in a race of aliens (perhaps from Third Horizon), more creatures and bring back gods and powers from them.

The one thing I’d say about the quickstart impression was that though it did a great job at worldbuilding in the first half, it did less well in producing player agency at the station. There was no sense of any player action leading to something significant or a new thread or to a consequence, or a new challenge at the station. It was just a series of impressions meant to promote a cool world - if it had also managed to combine that worldbuilding with a story with an increasing thread of consequence, it would have been really excellent. Right now it came across as a too long setup before the players had something very tangible to do.

- The role-heavy look of the party still poses the question: is a player with low empathy going to enjoy playing a roleplaying heavy two hours?

I think the problem is, at least for campaign play, that talents go from 0-3 and attributes from 2-6. Attributes thus impacts a ton more than in other games and you can’t catch up much. In campaign play, in general you want to be able to develop a character longer. Especially if you can use the same character in a second campaign, like in Mercy of the Icons. I’d personally prefer the talents at 0-4 and attributes at 2-5, perhaps with a one off option to raise one single attribute one point later for a bigger chunk of xp. Or say 1 point 50xp and a second point 75xp but not be able to raise it to 6 (or maybe at extra cost).

I think with this last option a talent at rank 1 should cost 10, then 15, 20, 25 to make acquiring rank 1 a bit more of a commitment (as well as being realistic). Also I’d start with players having more experience for talents as a starting character to compensate, with the option of getting two talents of rank 1 outside of their occupational talents. Xp is better because the way the system with a starting character works, getting a rank 2 talent saves you xp compared to two rank 1 talents (15 vs 10), which always benefits maximisers (power gamers) who think about these things.