A recent exchange on one of the Coriolis related internet groups set me thinking. In essence, it was suggested that Coriolis: The Great Dark was effectively a dungeon crawl, boring and its predecessor was a far superior game and setting. That, of course, is a subjective view and if I put my cards on the table, I love both settings but I slightly prefer the game engine in The Great Dark as it feels more simple in use.
If you skim-read the rules, you may think that the delving procedure is mechanistic and tedious. If you play the scenarios, you find it's very much something else. It becomes a narrative led resource-burning exploration into the unknown.
Let me give a quick overview of how it works.
The Explorers are entering into the unknown; this could be a Builder installation, ruins, part of a space station or (at the current point of our campaign, a deep gorge. Understanding the safe paths and routes is not a given; unless you actively scan the location successfully, you will only have a partial map and will be 'delving blind'. That's treated as more dangerous and you burn more supply when you do that.
Supply is the abstraction of air, filters, food, water, batteries, lights and ammunition; the consumables that limit your exploration. In Fria Ligan's Alien game, these are separated into different currencies, and you track consumption. The Great Dark abstracts them all together and has a simple slot based mechanic for encumbrance. Distance is measured in markers, and each marker travelled burns more supply. Larger parties burn more supply. Gun combat burns supply. Hazards faced can burn supply. Supply is finite and running out is not good; you will suffer despair, conditions and your suit will shut down at low levels of supply. If you are completely out of supply, then you will rapidly deteriorate and can die if you are broken by damage. And, just to be clear, being out of supply can cause damage.
Even when you know the routes, you don't know the risk from Blight. That's where the Bird comes in. You can send it ahead to search out Blight levels, but this takes time (and so burns supply). The Bird can fail to scan properly if you roll poorly, so you may face the quandary of waiting another stretch (15 minutes) or choosing to scan again.
The number of markers you progress in a stretch depends upon how well you roll; the distance travelled is the number of successes. If you don't reach a significant location, you'll face a hazard. In play, this can be partially hidden from the players by just narratively injecting the hazard that a particular delver faces. Hazards are rolled or picked from a set of tables in the core book or the scenario itself, and typically target a single explorer with a challenge or threat to overcome which could cause harm in some way or cost supply or equipment. The published scenarios also include events that the GM can inject at the right point to add another challenge, for example stumbling upon the nest of a dangerous creature. When you stop in a location, you will suffer a blight attack if it's present.
This may seem pretty mechanistic, but it's very easy to present with a lot of narrative opportunities. To be frank, if you didn't, it would be pretty tedious. As it is, the design of the scenarios indicates that the narrative feel is a key part.
When you reach a key location, the system falls away; you're not making delving rolls any more, but you will still mark supply. You only encounter blight if the location shows it is present.
How does this all play out? Sitting in the GM's chair, you see players acting like they are explorers as they plan the best route and try to work out how much supply to take with them. You see tension building as they progress through the delve and supply and heart points dwindle from distance, encounters and blight. It's very obvious that the further the crew are into a delve, the more nervous they become about coming back out (that is usually handled abstractly, but it still costs supply). My experience is that the whole delve sequence builds a feel of threat, exploration and challenge, which is what the game is thematically about.
Coriolis: The Great Dark is about more than that though. The sessions that we played in Ship City, with the inter-factional challenges were great, and you could easily build a campaign around that. Indeed, Fria Ligan are, as they plan to release a new Ship City book in 2027. That could be really good fun to play with. It was all about interaction and rivalries.
The feel is different to the Arabian Nights in space of The Third Horizon, but that is still there if you scratch the surface of the factions; the Coriolites and the Guilds very much feel that they are realistic successors to the past history. It feels like the old ways have drifted, driven by the world of hardship and challenge that the diaspora has faced, but the echoes are still there in a resource-limited, fragile world.
I'm really interested in how you've found The Great Dark if you've played it. How did you approach it? Did you find the delving mechanics fade away? Did they build tension and make you feel like you were an explorer in a dangerous world of unknowns?
6 November 2026
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