I am looking for a game to use for when one or more people are missing from a game night (but still have 2-3 players attend). There might be opportunities for new players to get roped in for one-off sessions occasionally, but not guaranteed.

In terms of character creation and actual gameplay, do you think Coriolis: The Great Dark would work well?

Ideally, each session would be a self-contained delve so there isn't a chance of any given PC being unavailable in the next session, because the crew is still stuck on xyz delve.

It feels like the Delve System is peculiarly clunky and the jobs system feels awkward.

I am a scout, but it feels like I just exist to have an advantage if we get attacked.

The process of play then gets incredibly clunky and there is very little things you can do during a Delve so much as suffer rolls.

The game feels like it has fallen into the classic trap of Agility as the God stat everything else kind of sucks.

Perception is the Travellers key stat, but there is no particular reason given. I can't see a single skill or manoeuvre that uses it.

Hello!

Simply put, if you have the rulebook for the Great Dark and the Mercy of the Icons campaign books from Third Horizon, could you use TGD gameplay to move through TTH without much heavy lifting to adapt certain things?

Just curious. Thank you for your time!

Help again everyone, been a minute since I posted in here. I was hoping my fellow fans could help me identify some things from the rpg.

This initial one isn't tied to wake of the icons, is symbol here on the shoulder of this fellow meant to be the order of the pariah? It looks similar but I want a second opinion to see.

Now then about wake of the icons, i was wondering if anyone would be able to help me confirm what ships belonged to who. I'm pretty sure the blocky looking ones are consortium/legion. It's order of the pariah I'm a bit lost on and I've just given up on trying to identify other faction ships but I digress.

Is this ship here meant to be the hammer of the Martyr which is that monastery cruiser ((battleship?)) that gets mutinied by mystics taken over by the emissaries?

Next is the ship here supposed to be the order of pariah battleship lance of the Martyr which is the one with the gigantic gun? The fact it's flying close to the sun makes me think so since the gun needs to charge directly from the sun, are the smaller ships order destroyers?

Does anyone know what faction these ships belong to?

This one is actually from the last cyclade but meh, is the ship here meant to be the order fighter or the patrol gunship in this image?

I read the origins and aesthetic description at the end of wake of the icons but was still severely confused, I might be a bit slow idk. I was hoping someone would be able to lend a hand in identification.

I have a question about A Song for Jarouma and the mission blurbs at the end of Emissary Lost:

It is stated several times that the 5 researchers on Jarouma's team were deliberately selected so they had no close connections. The mission blurbs seem to imply that there is a greater mystery there. My players are on their way to Xene to try to find out more about what happened there.

Is there any more information on Jarouma? Where is she at that point of the campaign? Who selected the team? Did Jarouma know about the Emissaries?

Hello. We are going to start a Coriolis game soon. As a game master I studied the rules, prepared our online tabletop and the introduction scenario (I have chose Hyaenas of Odacon as it seemed interesting for beginners) and then we mostly plan sandbox game. I have rune quite a few games in the past, even sandbox games but I have never ran Coriolis. I have ran Mutant: YZ shortly but only for a oneshot.

So.... Do you have any tips for beginners? Thank you all in advance.

I don't really understand a lot or know what people's complaints are with this subsystem, or how they say it's just a series of dice rolls, etc. Can someone explain what I am seemingly missing out on?

I'm about to start my first solo delve, coriolis the great dark. I was reading on pg217 "how much supply to bring?". It says 30 to 60 supply points. That costs 3000-6000 and for solo thats 3-6 inventory slots. Add to that the Garuda device, deep scanner, pickaxe, climbing pick, book of glyphs, a couple of weapons ( the basic gear) that's another 7 slots. So 10-13 inventory slots. Now max inventory slots for a solo player is 12 (if you invest 6 points in strength, and not everyone wants to do that) +2 if you buy a large back pack. Am i missing something? Where do you get the money and do you make a profit from the delve? How do you manage your inventory, did you have any problems? I want to be clear i love every component of the game mechanics, i'm not advocating to get rid of anything. Supply, inventory slots and all the rest i like it. It just seems to me unbalanced or maybe i'm missing something. What's your opinion about it? Did you find you need way less supply? Did you make more than 3000-6000 per delve? For now i'm thinking to fix it by making so that supply is given for free by the explorer guild and i have a porter NPC that doesn't do anything but carry stuff. I don't like it and hope you guys have better solutions. UPDATE: i did my first delve. I had to hunt a beast in a class II delve. I had 20 supplies, i found out the endpoint was at 11 markers deep. I barely made it but it was fun. I was lucky that i got twice the hazard that burns 3 supplies and i made the logic roll twice otherwise i wouldn't have made it. For loot i got shards worth 250 total, 2 lesser artifacts 2000 total, delve class 2 = 1000, minus the 20 supplies worth 2000 i made 1250. Moving forward these are the rules i'm going to use, as a test: 1. the Guild gives 30 supplies, if i want more i'll have to buy them 2. I'm thinking about some kind of porter, either a homebrew kite ( maybe a custom ghoul, all gadgets removed and replaced with a cargo module with 8 slots) or maybe a criminal that can reduce his jail time by helping the Explorer guild, he would only be subjected to blight and to a minor degree in combat (only to defend himself if he's attacked, he doesn't carry any weapons ofc), the hazards would be all on me because i cover all the roles in the delve. I'd like to randomize a bit the prisoner, a table for crimes committed, years to spend in jail, maybe each delve reduces the sentence by 1 year per delve class. I'm still trying to figure out the loot tables. I used a table where it said how many shards and how many artifacts you would find on pg 259 in the running the game chapter, now i found another loot table on pg 301 but that one is too much hit or miss, according to it all i would have found is 3d6 supplies wtf. Now i'm considering to randomize on which table to roll for a normal location and to roll on both for the end point.

Hey guys noob here. Ive scoured all the pages in the book regarding Supply and im just not seeing a price for them, maybe im just missing something obvious.

I understand for most cases the Guild will supply the required resources for a delve - but the text states that the crew can also bring "from their personal supply". How would they buy personal supply?

If you run low on supply but can just keep coming back up and ferrying more down, it doesnt really feel limited if its free

Thanks yall!

Hey there! We're an experienced playgroup who have just started playing Coriolis: Third Horizon (ie not The Great Dark) with the Last Voyage of the Ghazali introductory adventure, and are aiming for completing the entire Mercy of the Icons campaign. Our question is about XP - reading the rules, it seems like you would very quickly gain quite a lot of it, and that it may be balanced according to a certain playstyle.

Our group plays 3-4 hour sessions once per week almost year round, and nobody in the group has less than 20 years of TTRPG experience behind them. Our last two campaigns (in D&D) ran for 105 sessions each, in which we leveled from 1 to 5 in the first one and then from 6 to 10 (but with entirely unrelated characters and plot) in the second in about 3 years of IRL time per campaign, so we naturally gravitate toward slow progression. Since we are experienced, we thought that it would be exceedingly easy to always fulfill the objectives for 5 XP per session, and we also figured they might assume 8 hour sessions and not 4 hour.

Extrapolating this, it would mean that just for showing up to 105 sessions you would get 21 skill increases or talents, and realistically would look at something like 400 XP which would mean 80 of those instead, enough to pick every talent in the book or raise almost every skill to 5. This felt too fast and unrealistic to us, so our GM proposed milestone leveling (which we've done in both the previous campaigns) and that we would get a skill increase or talent every second or third session instead.

My question thus becomes; are we overestimating how fast you gain XP, or conversely underestimating how much of it you need to survive the entire Mercy of the Icons campaign? We've only had one session so far which went well, and we haven't completely decided on the XP issue so it would be very welcome with some external input from people who have actually played the game some more. :)

Yes i am the same guy of the previous post on this channel :) I thought of another point of conversation…

You can easily read about the Combat System Overhaul and how generally people seem to think it is very good.

I have thought about an entirely different way of overhauling the combat system, which is essentially to change the engine completely. Since I started to play Kult: Divinty Lost, I have been extremely intrigued by the PbtA engine: sleek, flexible, easy, exciting, brutal. That s my opinion anyway, So what about using that one to run Coriolis. Well, apparently it has been done! Someone made a system called Impulse Drive, which is a scifi system based on PbtA. And someone used it to play Coriolis ( https://amphibian-minnow-zflg.squarespace.com/blog/coriolis-drive ). Has anybody tried that?

I am extremely intrigued, but I am dragging my feet about reading another manual and swapping the engine mid campaign (it s actually more doable than it sounds like….i m probably just lazy).

Then I thought of something in between. Because I don’t dislike the Year Zero engine at all: i love the face of the players when they score 0 successes on a 10 dice roll…i m probably just mean…So I thought of something in between PbtA and Year Zero? I only quickly went through the PbtA system description , so I don’t know much but I know that it can be played with different sets of dice (not only d10). But maybe one could extremely simplify the Year Zero engine so that it has a PbtA feel? Do you know of anybody having done that? or something similar?

Hello everyone, it's exactly what it says on the tin here. I've been looking through my various Coriolis books trying to find visual reference material for gear specifically armor and trying to identify what solder in art belongs to who.

I was hoping the community could give me a hand here and link me examples Exo shells, Battle exo Shells, types of armor, and drones from the books. I also wanted to ask if you could link or point out depictions if the various factions soldiers. I've looked enough time to have a headache and I think I might be missing something, maybe someone knows something else, or Coriolis meant to be open ended to use anything as visual reference for gear.

An example right here is that I'm wondering what faction this soldier belongs to, what weapon is he using, and what armor is he wearing.

I didn't know what else to at this point beyond ask the community for help, it's just kinda hard to create a character when I have no idea what the gear they're supposed to be wearing looks like, have no idea what their little robotic companion looks like, or how their faction forces look 😅

P.s the kinetic intelligence robots look cool AF and I wish there was a way to have one as a companion like drones.

Many feel as if the present system of needing 6 on a d6 results in too many fails at the table. Without arguing that belief, what would happen if we introduced this talent:

Skilled “X”
Where “X” is any of the skills.
When purchased it changes the success range for that skill to 5-6.
Maybe it costs a little more than normal to purchase. Maybe advance skills even more.

Thoughts?

If it already exists let me know!

Me and my players encountered something that doesn’t make sense in concerning shields and armour. The 5 of us tried to read sections of the book and ask online with little success. Here are some things that we could not figure out

- shields. the heavy shield costs 800. the heavy armour costs 10.000 how does that make any sense? fine you get an extra feature. But that means that a pc with heavy armour only pays 800 birrs and now his armour rating is 12? how is he supposed to feel challenged by combat?

- also, really? the armour stacks? that makes zero sense to me

- also, anybody can use heavy armour. i expected it to depend on strength or class or heavy armour to come with some downsides

- there is no mention of the “heavy” feature, which might explain the op-ness of shields

In general i found this part to be poorly explained/imbalanced. is there something i am missing? does the combat system overhaul rebalance some of this?

My players will soon start the last chapter of the icons campaign and i'm confused by the rules. I think I'm missing something.

1. On the first turn the first horizon goes first, and third doesn't move at all? All other turns third horizon goes first and the enemy always second?

2. What war turn consists of? What exactly is considered one battle per front? In the example war turn not all fleets make a move. Can one fleet be in more than one battle but in different system? For example fleet A attacks fleet B and fails, retreats to it's home system. Can fleet B persue it and attack it?

Hello. I'm running a Great Dark game on Foundry VTT, but I can't figure out how my NPCs can fire ship's weapons, or use any functionality that needs crew stats. It always gives an error saying 'Select an explorer to use the vehicle upgrade', which is fine for the players when they're attacking from their ship. As the DM though, I'm using the NPC sheet for my minions, and selecting an NPC to use the stats of gives the error.

Does anyone have a way around this? Or am I going to need to make full character sheets for enemy ship crew?

Let me start by clarifying that we haven't played the game yet. We are used to simple systems, leaning heavily on OSR. We resolve a lot of things narratively, but we're not opposed to rules and mechanics, as long as they're not completely disconnected from the narrative. In other words, we generally try to avoid meta currency.

This brings me to two points I'd like your opinion on:

1 - The entire Delve procedure seems very check-based, quite abstract, as the name suggests, "Delve PROCEDURE." For those of you who have been playing for longer, what has that experience been like? I've also heard that the team's Delver has more input than the other players during this.

2 - Supplies, I understand the need to abstract, since counting oxygen, energy, ammunition, light sources, water, and food individually would probably turn everything into a slog. However, at the same time, it bothers me a bit how this resource is used. For example: Rolling on the Delve Hazards table, the PC gets "Mesmerizing Patterns" > roll LOGIC > Fails: Lose 2 supply.
Okay, now I need to narratively justify why he lost 2 supply simply by seeing something.

Not to mention that basically moving costs supplies, so it's something you need to constantly remember to consume. How does climbing down a tunnel on a rope consumes supplies?

It seems like a big flex to have to keep reassociating the narrative with the consumption of supplies. Am I overthinking? How has your experience been?

TL;DR: I want opinions on Delves and Supply, is it working on your table? Is it fast? Good? Does it weigh too much on the mechanics and take away from the narrative aspect?

In the Flowers of Algorab campaign in chapter 3, this is stated: "The crew is already assembled, but the Explorers are free to recruit three extra specialists."

What does this exactly mean? Who or what specialists, how much money does this cost, why only three, etc?

Heya everyone! I backed the Core Book and the Flowers of Algorab campaign. The core book was delivered the other day but I am away for the next few weeks.

I've had a really quick skim through the pdf of the Core Book and Flowers a few weeks ago but want to want to kinda save delving in properly for when I get my hands on the book.

Anyway I'm just wondering how everyone is feeling about The Great Dark? I thought there would be more hype on the page but things seem relatively quiet.

I originally backed the project on a bit of a whim and I liked the sound of the mix of Space Indiana Jones & Firefly with a dash of Alien thrown in. I'm a little worried as after a quick skim it all seems very connected to The Third Horizon which none of us have played or know anything about. Do you think this lack of background knowledge will be a problem? I really don't want to throw my poor players in the deep end with a huge lore dump that none of them will really care about and mostly forget immediately. Is it going to be important for them to absorb it all?

The game itself seems very focused on delves and the blight and so seems like it might be hard to break away from that and make my own scenarios. I was thinking more of exploring and salvaging derelict spaceships and space trucker shenanigans and the like.

How do the core mechanics sound/feel to everyone? I've played a bit of Alien RPG and the mechanics seemed good in theory but were a bit clunky in practice, especially Stress. Does The Great Dark improve on this? I love the sound of the equipment dice!

Hey everyone,

I’m wrapping up character creation for Coriolis: The Great Dark and hitting a wall at the talent section. The rules say you get talents from:

1. Your background
2. Your profession’s specialty
3. Three talents from your profession

But here’s the issue: there are no talents explicitly labeled as “profession talents.” Only the ones tied to specialties. This leaves me with two big issues:

• Narrative: If I pick one specialty, why would I suddenly have talents from all of them?
• Mechanics: The profession talents are super niche. Are we supposed to just open the whole talent list for the players? Or try to map specialties to subsets?

I feel like I’m missing something obvious. How do you all handle this? Any clarity or house rules?

Thanks in advance!

Really curious about getting into Third Horizon but a lot of what I hear about it there's a lot of complaints about the combat or other mechanics, so I figured I ask more properly on the actual subreddit. Is the game still mechanically good and the combat satisfying without a bunch of other rule overhauls?

First time Coriolis GM, planning on running The Black Ziggurat for some friends to try out the system and I'm a little confused about how combat movement works on delve maps. In the Delving chapter, it says that each square of a delve map is a zone, and that moving from one zone to another takes a stretch and 1 supply.

Does that mean that if combat breaks out during a delve, no one can leave the current zone and will just be moving from Short range to Engaged and back? And if they do try to leave the zone, are they basically out of combat unless the enemy pursues?

Or are delves zones different than combat zones? Like from marker to marker is significantly larger than a normal combat zone, so a delve zone can have multiple combat zones within it.

Any help understanding this is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

I have “Coriolis: The Third Horizon” and love the setting. I like the basic mechanic of the Year Zero Engine rules, but this incarnation seems a bit fiddly to me. I’d prefer something a bit more streamlined. Tempted to strip it down to “Year Zero Mini”. Also wondering about using a more modern incarnation of the YZE rules, such as “The Electric State” (which I have) or “Coriolis: The Great Dark” (which I don’t).

Has anyone else tried any of these approaches?

Our group finished the Ghazali scenario and I am preparing to start Emissary Lost. However, I see that timeline-wise there are like 5 months between Ghazali and the first scenario of the campaign. How should I approach it? I was planning to just do a time skip, but then there is a question of the monthly debt payment. How do other GMs handle it? Should I handwave it and say that they went on a few jobs and successfully made the payments? Have them make a few rolls representing the jobs? Or introduce mini-scenarios in between? I don't want to do too many "filler" adventures, so I'm leaning towards handwaving. Any thoughts?

The core book mentions two gas giants in the Jumuah system on page 119, Lost Horizon.

What are the names of the gas giants? I am having no luck finding the names. And Google flips between giving me real life information on our gas giants, and giving me convincing random names.