First Impressions - Those Dark Places (Industrial SF Roleplaying)

 

Those Dark Places - a very distinctive style

Those Dark Places is my third roleplaying game purchase from Osprey Publishing's roleplaying line. The previous books - Romance of the Perilous Lands and Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades - have been fantastic and both gave me the GM tingles that means I'd like to get them to the table. I came to this with high hopes but finished the book disappointed.

TL;DR: I found Those Dark Places disappointing. It looks gorgeous, but the style of the text is Marmite; you'll either love it or hate it. I had a visceral reaction against the way it is written in the style of a darkly-humorous in-game artefact. My view is that the exposition of games rules should be clear, easy to parse and unambiguous; this is not the case here. The game mechanics are buried in waffle which acts as a barrier to the transfer of information. The actual setting information is bland and vague, and very little of it acts as a hook that makes me - as a GM - want to build on it. The mission type descriptions are nebulous and don't provide structure or any real hooks. The game is a big miss for me, failing to excite or engage. 

Those Dark Places was inspired by the movies Alien, Outland, Silent Running, Blade Runner and Moon. All movies I love. The book is a 128-page hardback, presented with distinctive artwork mainly using black and white with a signature colour (red, blue, orange...) dependent upon the scene portrayed. I really love the way that this looks. There's a 45-page player section, with the remainder of the book being dedicated to the 'Game Monitor'.

The game looks gorgeous.

The rules are incredibly simple (although it's fair to say that Fria Ligan's Alien game is not significantly more complex). You roll a six-sided dice and add an attribute (ranged from 1 to 4). If you have an appropriate crew position, you can add +1 or +2 depending on how strong it is. Success is achieved if you roll 7 or more. In some circumstances, this may be reduced to a target number of 6 or increased to 8. If you are in opposition to someone, you roll an opposed roll where you look for the highest roll instead.

There are four attributes; Charisma, Agility, Strength and Education. Your CASE numbers. You have scores of 1 through 4 which you assign as you prefer across them. Bear in mind that an attribute of 1 will only succeed on a roll of 6. 

The players between them form a crew, each of which is trained to cover two positions on a crew; Helm, Navigation, Science, Security, Liason, Engineering and Medical. You will get one as your primary and the other as your secondary (the primary is your day-job, and gives you +2 for rolls). 

Combat is simple - initiative order is decided with an Agility attribute roll. Hand-to-Hand is resolved with opposed rolls based on Strength. Ranged with an Agility roll based on the range of the target. Surprise affects the damage mechanic (automatically maxing rolls out). Damage is taken off the strength attribute. Unarmed causes 1 point, hand weapons typically 2 points, and firearms can cause up to 5 points. Once you get above a single point of damage, you roll a D6 to see how much damage you cause, with the weaponś maximum damage acting as a cap. If your Strength is reduced to zero, you're unconscious, and you die if your strength drops to -2.

There's also a sanity/panic mechanic called pressure. You have a pressure bonus, which is the sum of your Strength and Education. A character can be asked to make a pressure roll when confronted with something incredibly stressful. You roll D6 and add you pressure bonus, looking for 10 or more. If you fail your pressure level goes up by 1. Once you hit pressure level 2 then you roll a D6; if it's less than your pressure level, you suffer an episode, which results in a roll on a table which can reduce attributes or trip you into freezing or fleeing. The severity of the roll is capped by the pressure level you're at.

The book describes the usual form of a mission; you've signed up for a 25-year tour, a good part of which will be spent in LongSleep as you travel between the stars. If you get a bonus from a job, it usually reduces the time before you can retire. Your aim is to survive. 

The Game Monitor's section expands with some more detail on the attributes and positions and has a good worked example of play. It suggests that the characters could be part of a Deep Space Support Team (DSST or 'Dusters'), corporate troubleshooters assigned to resolve issues. The basic crew position needs for such a team are described, followed by some fluff descriptions of ships, outposts and stations which use a lot of words for little content. Different types of simulations (missions) are described. There's good stuff here but it's buried in the same way. There are basic rules for NPCs and synthetic automatons (like Ash in Alien, or a replicant in Blade Runner).

The book rounds out with a sample scenario outline - The Argent III Report. This sends the characters off on a retrieval mission for Cambridge-Wallace Inc, nearly 12 light-years away from Earth. They're sent to the Proycon system to recover an engineering team who have been decommissioning an old orbital station. It's a straightforward and reasonably linear scenario which should serve as a simple introduction.

The last two pages include some of the key references for the book. Herein lies the rub; if you added two or three short lines in for the rolling mechanics, you'd have the whole game mechanically on two pages. You could add character generation and mission points on a second sheet of paper and it would be spot on.

The book also suffers from some annoying typos, only a few but they really grated with me. The reference section headings talks of 'FRIENDS AND ENIMIES' and CO2 is consistently misspelt as CO2. The former is a basic, albeit annoying, failure on proofing. The latter is grating in a hard SF adjacent game and setting.

I found Those Dark Places disappointing. It looks gorgeous, but the style of the text is Marmite; you'll either love it or hate it. I had a visceral reaction against the way it is written in the style of a darkly-humorous in-game artefact. My view is that the exposition of games rules should be clear, easy to parse and unambiguous; this is not the case here. The game mechanics are buried in waffle which acts as a barrier to the transfer of information. The actual setting information is bland and vague, and very little of it acts as a hook that makes me - as a GM - want to build on it. The mission type descriptions are nebulous and don't provide structure or any real hooks. The game is a big miss for me, failing to excite or engage. 

I'm probably in the target audience here; I love the films it's built around, I love the genre of science-fiction and I'm a fan of focused, simple, narrative games. I think it fails for me because it isn't focused; it's opaque and the background material is opaque. I'd hoped for a cross between The Sprawl and Electric Bastionland but ended up with something hugely different. The game system is fine, and I'm sure would power a fun game, but the other hundred-or-so pages fail to ignite my imagination.

Edit: On further reflection, I think I know what really jarred about the tone; the book claims Alien, Outland, Silent Running, Blade Runner and Moon as key influences, but it is written more in the tone of a corporate from Aliens. The company was faceless, uncaring and distant in the movies cited, whereas here it's wisecracking and darkly humorous. 

30 December 2020