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A fan podcast celebrating (mostly Swedish) RPGs including, but not limited to: Coriolis; Forbidden Lands; Symbaroum; Tales from the Loop; and, Alien.
Hello, and welcome to episode 228 of Effect, Lost in the Dark. My name's Matthew.
Dave:And I'm Dave. And, if you could look behind the, the curtain that hides all the the wonderful mechanics, you would you know, behind this podcast, you would realize that we are lost in the dark today for sure. It hasn't been the best start, should we say? But welcome to the show. What do we have on offer today?
Matthew:That's the bit you're meant to tell us, Dave.
Dave:I know. I'm I'm yes. It's building up to it, mate. Come on. Okay.
Dave:So the the big event of today is more Coriolis conversations. So we've had a a few of our fabulous patrons came on to the show to talk a little bit about the quick start and their hopes and aspirations for the new game. That's the the, you know, the meat of what we have for you today. But before that, we have our usual world of gaming section where we've got a few things to talk about. And, obviously, our new, article in the program is our tales of the old west update.
Dave:So we will give you a give you a flavor of what we've been doing in the last couple of weeks on, on getting tales of the old west to, yeah, to be in your hands and playable one day soon.
Matthew:Yes. Yeah. And before that, of course, we, haven't got any new patrons to say thank you to. But I do just wanna do a call out to all our stationery, patrons. Oh, gawd...
Matthew:You know, what with this new Coriolis game? Can we still use PBM, stationery, and Privileged?
Dave:Yeah. Don't know. Don't know.
Matthew:Gonna have to think about that. But, our mid level patrons who have,
Dave:it it always it always it always sounds a bit strange to me. We're saying, yeah, our stationary patrons, as in the ones that just
Matthew:don't move don't move.
Dave:The ones who just sat in one place and go nowhere.
Matthew:If you're a patriot of ours and you're driving a car, you are either plebian or privileged. But if you're sitting in the lounge, just listening to the podcast, concentrating on our voices, then you're stationary. Yeah. So, these are our mid level patrons, and they have been supporting the development of Tales of the Odd West for some time with their increased pension. We increased extra extra patronage.
Matthew:And they've been privileged to see sort of work in progress editions of that as we've gone through. And I think they would have seen quite a lot of change in that time.
Dave:Oh, yeah.
Matthew:But the other thing they've been doing with their increased donations is they've been subsidizing our first stabs at, art for the, for the podcast. Not for the podcast, for the for the final gain. Yep. We've got a couple of artists online now, and they're both producing stuff for us. We've gotta do a we've gotta do a cover commission, Dave, actually.
Matthew:That's one thing we didn't talk about enough yesterday. We can Yeah. Talk about that. Anyway, so I think they deserve some physical swag. So we sent out physical swag to all our privileged patrons over the last few weeks.
Matthew:And all around the world, they've been receiving that physical swag. So now, it's time to send the same swag which is a lovely dice tray with your face and mine on it in as drawn by one of the artists we've got for the game. So it's a tales of the old west dice tray with a couple of cards on it. And the cards are 2 kings. And the 2 kings, I'm sounding really fucking arrogant here.
Dave:I was just I was just about to comment that this isn't a vanity project at all. You know, this is no no vanity involved in this.
Matthew:This is pure vanity publishing.
Dave:Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.
Matthew:It was a bit of a joke from one of our previous patrons who said, our next bit of swag should be signed photos, which I took to heart. I thought, well, we could do that. We're gonna need some author portraits to put on the Kickstarter thing so it all fits in. So we signed these, dice trays as well. We didn't physically sign them on the dice tray.
Matthew:We printed our signatures onto a dice tray with these cards. And, I'm really selling this dice tray now. But if you want to roll your dice on our faces, you can do even as a stationary, patron. Just drop us a line in Patreon, please. Because that way, we're we're we're not keeping your address, somebody else's with with who who looks after all the rules on data security and stuff like that.
Matthew:Drop us a line in Patreon, send us a message, and, give us your postal address. I'll quite happily put one of these in the post to you. But do it before UK Games Expo at the end of May because I have a sneaking suspicion we might go around to some movers and shakers and offer them some free dice trays in favor of some, you know, extra publicity and stuff like that to, to get everybody up. On tabletop on tabletop is another site. We were talking yesterday where we need to do marketing.
Matthew:And on tabletop will be at, UK Games Expo, and I'm sure they would love a dice tray.
Dave:And actually, I mean, vanity aside, the these these images are actually really good. I you know, they're yeah. The artist has done great work with with some, you know, questionable material. And, yeah. It is great.
Dave:It looks really cool. So, yeah, make sure make sure you sign up and get one.
Matthew:Where we at? You've thrown me off the floor now. I'm sure that's a good segue into the old west update. Dave, how what we've been doing so far in the old west?
Dave:So the last couple of weeks, it's been busy busy busy on getting the quick draw into, into shape. Neil has been going through an editing, which is great. Really, really helpful stuff. We've been getting the artwork commissions done and progress is being made on those. And with a bit of luck on some of those, images, we might see some, initial drawings pretty soon with a bit with a bit of luck.
Dave:So they're coming along. Maps, likewise, are coming along. So the quick start actually is in a really good place at the moment. So, our intention was to get it ready to be, available by mid May, a couple of weeks before UK Games Expo gives us a bit of contingency. And the moment, I'm feeling reasonably comfortable.
Dave:We've we're we're we're quite well on track. So that's all good stuff. Excellent work. We've also been doing a bit of planning for a bit longer term about what we can afford potentially, on on how many backers we think we might get, which actually is the biggest question because frankly, I have no clue. It's, it's Yeah.
Dave:We could get
Matthew:It's an unknown quantity.
Dave:Isn't it? Totally unknown quantity at the moment. There's a lot of moving parts here. So I think one of the things that we were talking about yesterday was, getting a marketing strategy going, getting ourselves out there a little bit, and seeing what kind of feedback we get. Because really, that's gonna be the only measure we'll have of, you know, how many backers we might get at the end of the day.
Dave:And that obviously has a big impact on how ambitious or not ambitious we need to be in in putting the actual, Kickstarter project together. So it's, we've done quite a lot of work on that. It's kind of not very exciting work to talk about on a podcast really. It's lots of figures.
Matthew:It's very exciting work. We've had furious arguments.
Dave:Well, we haven't had any arguments. We've had Well, we we've had opinions raised.
Matthew:We have expressed our opinions vociferously. Well, you can Dave, he wants to give you, the backer, too much. No. No. Not not exactly that.
Matthew:Printing's really expensive,
Dave:you know. Printing is more expensive than we'd anticipated.
Matthew:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we we'd already decided it was gonna be very expensive, and we'd budgeted an amount. And it's about twice that amount.
Dave:A bit less than twice that amount.
Matthew:And given that the amount that we budgeted, Yeah. Really. But yeah. And the interesting thing that we will consider some more, Dave, is, you know, the first estimate I thought, right, I'll go for the the bells and whistles, the really gorgeous paper and all of that sort of stuff. And that was obviously gonna be too expensive.
Matthew:And then I said, right. And then next quote, can we do it for the the cheapskate toilet paper one? Not quite toilet paper. But, yeah, much cheaper paper. And much cheaper paper isn't actually much cheaper.
Dave:No. I mean, there may well be a decision where we decide to go for the for the better quality stuff anyway, because it actually isn't that much more expensive. Yeah. But yes. So there's loads of moving parts here.
Dave:There's, you know, a discussion of what we consider to be the minimum viable product of what what does this book have to have? What do you as the backer need to see in that book when you get it in your hands? For you to go, yes. This is a good game. This is a complete game.
Dave:Right. I can crack on. And what's Yeah.
Matthew:And there's a subtle bit of trickery here as well though, isn't it? There's a minimum of our product, which is what can we offer for Kickstarter that if we only get what the Kickstarter pays us, then that's still a a decent product to have in your hand. Absolutely. And then there's the one with with the stretch goals on top of that, which Yeah. Which which make it a really decent product.
Matthew:So for example, as an as a discussion of some of the arguments that we are potentially still having, actually, and I'm not gonna tell you who's gonna win this argument, because it's gonna be me.
Dave:You always say that and then I win. So, you know and it but this isn't this isn't a combative thing, though. This is a collaborative discussion. And, you know, when when we have a conversation and you actually listen to me, you go, oh, yeah. You do make some sense there, Dave.
Dave:And then you agree with me.
Matthew:No. Very rarely. Very rarely do you make sense. Very, very,
Dave:very, like usually.
Matthew:We're obviously really polite to each other because you know how we we we interact with each other as listeners. You you have heard us. I'm very, grown up. Not at all insulting conversations with each other. And and the current one we're having is should there actually be an introductory scenario in the book?
Matthew:I argue that could just as easily be done as a PDF, accompanying it. But we're, you know, we'll
Dave:Well, the
Matthew:the answer is we'll work
Douglas:over that.
Dave:The right answer is obviously yes. So, you know.
Matthew:Well, is it so obviously?
Dave:Well, I think it is.
Matthew:Is it so? Yeah.
Dave:I think it is. Yeah. Anyway, this is this is a sense of one of the some of the things that we are debating about. And the and the the kicker question is, how much will it cost us to include that in the book? And if we get only the minimum amount that we we we target, can we afford that in that target?
Dave:Now I think there's a way of cutting quite a lot of the other stuff we've got that's gonna cost money that will reduce the costs. So a lot of the costs we're we're working on at the moment are kind of worst case scenario. Now Yeah. They won't come a lot less than that, but there will be bits we can chip off here and there. So I think there's, yeah.
Dave:There's there's there's a lot more discussion to be had. And I say, when we finished chatting yesterday, I said, you know, I've got a, you know, an idea for this this sort of the minimum viable product as we're calling it for the book. And we didn't get a chance to talk about that yesterday. So I've I'm gonna give you a a few notes as to what I think that is, and you can have a look over them. Because I think things are a lot more doable in one way or another.
Dave:So for example, we've got quite a lot of you know, one of the key things in this game is about the town and how the town is part of your life and how, you know, you are part of the town's life. And we've got some, you know, really good rules about how all that works. Now that they're quite long. Yeah. There's quite a lot of tables and things in there.
Dave:You know, we can make a decision to include that. The page count doesn't really add that much in the cost that we just said because the printing is always already quite expensive. You know, the cost then comes in with the ancillary artwork and stuff to make it look really good. But there might be a way of doing towns differently and then having a stretch goal being advanced towns. You know, that kind of thing.
Dave:So I thought that's the way I'm thinking about it at the moment in terms of if we only get that absolute minimum target that we go for, we can't afford anything else. You'll still get all the things we want to be in the game, but you'll just get a version of it that is a bit more slimmed down. And then if you get the stretch goal, we then can afford to put in the whole big, you know, big big kahuna.
Douglas:But
Dave:Yeah. It's quite a complex
Matthew:And there's other things, so there's things like, again, discussions that I think we still have relatively open is we've kind of got three methods of character generation. We've kind of got port, point buy. We've got archetypes and we've got life path. Now very often, your man, your men, your people at Free League offer life path generation as a stretch goal. Yeah.
Matthew:So it isn't necessarily in the in the first packet. But, you know, which of those should we which of those should be in the minimum viable product and which could be stretch goals, I think is a thing worth considering.
Dave:Yeah. For sure. And I I think it's very easy. And I mean, actually, if we decided to put the life path as a stretch goal, that's really easy because that's a chapter that just isn't in the book unless we get to the stretch goal. But again, that's another one where it's quite a lot of pages, but it's it's it's mostly tables.
Matthew:Exactly.
Dave:So
Matthew:As opposed to archetypes where Yeah. Every archetype kind of needs an illustration Yeah. And each illustration costs a bunch of money. Yeah.
Dave:Exactly.
Thomas:So so yeah.
Dave:Actually, keeping the life path in with less artwork around it might be might be doing Might
Matthew:be a better way of doing it.
Dave:Might be something to think about. So it's yeah. There's lots of there's lots of things to think about. But yeah. But it's great fun though.
Dave:It's really it's really enjoying doing it. It's it can be a bit frustrating. I think it's gonna be a bumpy road. Certainly, you know, we've never done a kickstarter before, so it's gonna be a learning experience as we go. But, you know, I'm really enjoying it so far.
Dave:I've got quite a lot of bits and bobs left to do on rules and chapters that either aren't written yet or I think needed a little bit of, reviewing.
Matthew:Yeah. And I'm reverting the first part of that life path thing as well. So
Dave:Yeah. So Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, that's
Matthew:There's still bits of work to do.
Dave:Yeah. But but but that's fine. You know, and because, you know, ultimately, you know you know, ideally, if we got enough backers and had enough money, we would have an introductory scenario. We would have a campaign framework. We would have all this stuff.
Dave:Now I haven't written the campaign framework fully yet, but there's quite a lot of work already been done on it because I'm using stuff that I've been using in our games, in the games I've been running. So there's a lot of content. But, actually, we don't need to write that until we know whether we can afford it or not. So, actually, I could potentially write that in August or September.
Matthew:Need to finalize it. Don't need to finalize it. No.
Dave:But I mean, it's it's mostly well done. It's, you know, it's it's not gonna take long to write it because most of the material is there. And I I know how I want to to to present it.
Matthew:Yeah. I'm just So I'm just very nervous when I hear somebody say that, you know, sounds like my kids, they, you know, the day before they have to hand an essay. Yeah. Mostly in my head.
Dave:Yeah. Well, it's not mostly in my head. And I've got a whole bit of a one piece of paper here that with all my notes and everything on it. So it's gonna be easy to do and quite quick because most of it's been done already. Cool.
Dave:But the point being is we don't need to make all the decisions now. Some of those decisions can be let further down. Well, I will
Matthew:And that is actually
Dave:part down the line. Yeah.
Matthew:Part of the decision making process is what, you know, is kind of by designing a minimum viable product, we can say, well, what are the decisions we make now, and what are the ones we leave effectively for our backers to decide for us?
Dave:Yes.
Matthew:Yeah. But I also I think it's it's key. I I'm very keen to point out that what we want to do and what Dave and I will subsidize is we wanna get a lot of the art done before the Kickstarter. Yeah. Because I've noticed that art is one of the things that can Yeah.
Matthew:Generally not. When when the art's going well, it doesn't hold up a Kickstarter project. But art is one of the things that can go badly. An artist can drop out. An artist can turn out to be using loads of AI stuff that that the publisher doesn't want to use, and that can really delay a project.
Matthew:So I want to have most of the art in the bag before we even come to market with it.
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:And, that's one of the things that we're doing. So we are wanting to be, I think it's worth saying, really close to the finished project when we hit the Kickstarter, time. So that Yeah. Kickstarter is really just saying, right. Okay.
Matthew:You need to finish off this. We'll finish off this. Finish off these these stretch goals. If we're lucky enough to get any stretch goals at all.
Dave:Yeah. So I think we'll Yeah. Absolutely. We'll have that, and we will have all the pieces pretty much done. And it will just be the the kickstarter project that will tell us which pieces we can put in which place.
Dave:And then we just need to do that. So then it will be it will be quite quite straightforward. But, yeah. It's great fun. And, yeah.
Dave:Let's crack on. Let's get it done.
Matthew:Yeah. And let's move on to talk about the world of gaming day.
Dave:Indeed. Go on then.
Matthew:So, we've got our world of gaming has, until relatively recently, been quite, yeah, 0 heavy, what with various announcements and things from from Free League. But right now, I have only 1 year zero game to offer you in, this week's world of gaming. And this is available, I think, exclusively through drive thru, RPG. And it's a agent provocateur. I'm putting a bit of a French accent on it.
Dave:Agent Provo.
Matthew:Which is the the game of running an underwear? No. No. It's not the game of running an underwear shop. It's, it's the game of secret agents using the 0 engine.
Dave:It is.
Matthew:And I bought this, well, this is brought to our attention by our patron, Nicholas. So thank you, Nicholas. It passed him by. I didn't see any big announcements, and neither did he, but he he caught it on drive thru and pointed us at it. It seems to be relatively recent, but there seems to be quite a lot of material for it.
Matthew:Looking I haven't actually bought it yet. We we will buy it and we will give you a better opinion of what it's like on the inside. But looking at the, drive through pages, there's quite a bit of material. I think it's based mostly on the Alien flavor of the year zero engine. I think as well that it kind of bundles the year zero engine SRD with, the with the extra material for the the secret agent bit sort of to one side.
Matthew:So he hasn't sort of integrated the rules in and rewritten the rules for, for the secret agent. He's just added stuff to it. And there's there's quite a lot of adventures or missions as they're called in there as well. So if you're looking to play spies, and I know, Dave, you frequently are, then I thought this might be an interesting thing to explore.
Dave:Yeah. I'm just having a little look at the, the preview on on drive thru. It doesn't actually tell you very much, but there is a when it comes to the weapons and the artwork for the weapons, it is very reminiscent of, the old Victory Gaming James Bond double 0 7 style. The other artwork, I guess it's probably similar to that as well. But I always loved the the nice little sort of line drawings of all the guns in the old James Bond one.
Dave:And they've gone for a similar style in this. So, yeah, I mean, it looks fine. It doesn't I can't see anything here that talks about the push mechanic or how they are, you know, like Well, no.
Matthew:They do mention stress dose though, which is why I think it's alien flavour.
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:So I imagine it's a stress related Yeah. Push mechanic.
Dave:Yeah. But yeah. I'll be interested to have a look at it once we, once we get a copy. Yeah. Yeah.
Dave:Cast my impression.
Matthew:Well, important. And if you like it very much, we may seek out the curator, which is, Twin Engine Games. And, maybe maybe we'll have a chat with them as well at some future episode of the podcast. Yeah. So there's that.
Matthew:There's a couple of announcements. So one that caught my eye, but only because I'm waiting for the year 0 engine under the black flag that you did a little bit of work on some ages ago before getting sucked off in a war stories direction, Dave. And this is Pirates and it's called Rapscallion and it comes out of Magpie Press. I again, I'm not massively certain I, know much about the system. And I know that Thomas has been doing a very successful year 0 pirates thing having been so dreadfully disappointed by 7th sea.
Dave:Powered powered by the apocalypse is what it says here on its
Matthew:Yeah. I
Dave:MagnaKit page.
Matthew:I I didn't want to say that, but I I was guessing that Magpie would use powered by the apocalypse because they've done that for loads of games, including one that I've got, which is called Cartel, which I really would like to get to the table at some point.
Dave:Okay.
Matthew:And of course, most famously, their massive seller of, Avatar, The Last Airbender Yeah. Which is powered by the apocalypse.
Dave:It's funny. That that became such a big splash. You know, obviously, because they're huge huge Kickstarter. Mhmm. I'm not hearing anything else.
Dave:It doesn't come up in conversation or on the socials at all?
Matthew:No.
Dave:I mean okay. I'm not I'm not completely across social media at all. But in my the little pool that I swim on social media, I haven't seen anything about it.
Matthew:It's just Facebook, really.
Dave:Mostly. Yeah. Largely Facebook. Yeah. Bit of Discord.
Dave:Bit of Discord thrown in.
Matthew:That's because nobody's using Facebook, Dave, apart from you.
Dave:It has sounded a bit quiet lately. But but considering how big, you know, how big a project, how successful it was, I'd kind of expect to hear something, really.
Matthew:But not even not even
Dave:a review or anything. I mean, I haven't looked for them. But
Matthew:I think I have seen an actual play out there, but it doesn't seem to be in, if you like, the for want of a stupid fancy academic word, in the logic conversation. I'm not hearing people going on about Avatar. Even in the way that people are still discovering Alien and getting really excited about Alien as an IP and Yeah. And and and the role playing game. Now it may be because, you know, I'm I'm not into Avatar.
Matthew:So, obviously, Facebook isn't serving me any Avatar related content, I guess. No.
Dave:Of course. Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew:But, yeah. Yeah. It doesn't seem to have been having had that massive splash, from, you know, being one of the most successful role playing game Kickstarters ever, it does seem to it feels a little bit quiet in the in the global conversation.
Dave:Yeah. Kinda landed with a huge splash and then the surface of the water went very still and nothing has come back up again, it seems. So I don't know. I mean, just an observation. I
Matthew:yeah. And I noticed as well that this game, Maps Galleon, isn't doing as well as Avatar, which is obvious because it's not an IP that people all around the world recognize. Mhmm. But it's got about It's doing quite 2,400. Yes.
Matthew:It's not doing badly. I've if Tales of the Old West does as well as this game, which it won't,
Dave:but if
Matthew:it did as well, I would be over the bloody moon.
Dave:Well, yeah. I mean, more than that. It would be yeah. It would be yeah.
Matthew:If we can't yeah. A 100 and
Dave:Yeah. So if if we if we did, like, 10% as well, I would be quite pleased. Yeah. You know?
Matthew:If we did 10% as well as this, we may even get a book out of it. Come on. Printing costs are really expensive, David.
Dave:Yeah. They are. They are.
Matthew:Yeah. So, I'd like to do 10% as well as this. It's a 150,000 at the moment, and there's still 18 days left to run-in the campaign.
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:That's on back a kit. We will put a link in the show notes if you are into pirates. I it's interesting. We we you and I, Dave, talk about the difficulties of, you know, in Tales of the Odd West, it's an inherently colonial game. You know, that's that's a thing that we have to work around, work with in Tales of the Odd West.
Matthew:Pirates are also inherently colonial, even if they've got sea monsters, which they obviously have because they're fighting a sea monster on the cover of this game. You know, it is actually and I think I think the failure of the second version of of 7th Sea is partly due to the fact that they were trying to say, here's people acting a colonial fashion, but in a totally non colonial way. And, you know, I'm not sure that that particularly gels. Plus the mechanics are dreadful.
Dave:Yeah. Well, I haven't I haven't played it. Yeah. But I think yeah. I mean, it's it's easy if you take something from history that, you know, and what period of history doesn't have difficult parts to it.
Dave:If if you take that that period of history and then fantasize it, you can kind of forget all the difficult bits.
Matthew:Yeah.
Dave:And it makes it it makes it a bit easier. But then obviously, you're not you're not recreating a historical feeling in your game. You're you're you're kind of, what's the right word? Exploiting that historical feel for your fantasy game, if that's the right word to use. So, you know, which is fine.
Dave:Everyone does it, you know. Zombies and vampires in the wild west. We make them onto something.
Matthew:Which maybe a brilliant segue day.
Dave:Funny that. But yeah. So it's we have taken on a particular challenge by wanting to do a gritty, you know, realistic, wrong word, authentic, wrong word, but historically respectful game. That does bring challenges, that if we just set it as a fantasy setting, we could probably be we could probably have ignored and nobody would have minded that we ignored them. Whereas in tales of the old west, we can't if we ignore them, then we are kind of whitewashing a big chunk of history, which is not what we are all about.
Dave:So
Matthew:Yes. Yeah. Shall we talk about, Yeah. Cowboys? Good.
Matthew:What we are talking about now is, again, brought to us by one of another one of our patrons who expressed an interest. And this is Will. Will, thank you very much. Will gave me, the book that we played from yesterday, Dave.
Dave:Oh, cool. Excellent.
Matthew:The, I've enjoyed. I've got the PDF of Melified Mage for Forbidden Lands. But I had publicly said, oh, I wish I'd got the book of this. And, Will, who is, I think, getting rid of all his free league stuff for various not free league stuff. All his Forbidden Land stuff for various reasons.
Matthew:Gave me, his copy of, The Melified Mage, which has got a great adventure in, which we enjoyed yesterday, in the back of it as well. But, Will is a big fan. His his one true love is Monty Cook Games' cipher system. Everything from oh, what was the first game they did this with? I can't remember what it's called.
Matthew:Numenera. But everything on that system. And they have just announced 3, not 1, but 3 new games in the sofa system that collectively they call the Knights of Dust and Neon. And, Neon is all very cyberpunk y. Dust is where where your segue was coming from.
Matthew:Dust devils dance and swirl along the tracks. The only motion visible aside from the sway of the station's signboard. The folk, the townsfolk, know how to stay out of sight when the 1017 rolls into town. A slow hiss of steam and tick tocking of the boiler sound almost like a real train, but there's a sinister edge to it. Just like the sinister pinpricais under the disembarking stranger's shadowed rim.
Matthew:It gives you a bit of a flavor of what we're aiming for here. Yep. We're talking Wild West with vampires and zombies in, I think.
Dave:Yeah. Something along those lines. Yeah.
Matthew:The game that that game is called High Noon at Midnight. Yeah. So Neon Rain for Cyberpunk's High Noon at Midnight for, Fantasy, Undead Cowboys and Gunslinger Nights. Vaguely, I guess, combining the 2 into a 3rd fantasy setting. And interestingly, I know this is also on back of kit and not Kickstarter, which is interesting.
Matthew:And once again, this has got 13 days to go. It's got fewer backers than Rap Scallion. It's got 1600 backers at the moment. But it's made more money. They set their target high, a Ā£100,000 or 100,000 US dollars, I should say.
Matthew:They have reached that and more. They're at 260,000. So 10% of that would be lovely. No odds of crowdfunding.
Dave:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Matthew:Would be would be over the moon at that, frankly. But yes, they're doing 3 games there. So I I guess you kind of have to divide that number by 3 to get what we might expect. Yeah. What do you you've got anything to say about that?
Dave:Not not really. I've I've never played the Cypher system. And, yeah. I've read about it, and I know some people are very very keen on it. It would be interesting to give it a go at some point, where you, you know, you it's a, you know, d 20 role, but then you you have what do they call them?
Dave:I can't remember now. Like exploits or bonuses or things that are transitory, you know, an ability Yes. That you gain and you spend.
Matthew:In fact, I think
Dave:it's what they call it. Exactly. Oh, yeah. Strange that. Yeah.
Dave:And and so that's an interesting dynamic. When I first read about that, I thought, okay. You know, a character who can do something in one minute, but then can't next. But it'd be be interesting to give it a try. So it looks good.
Dave:I mean, you know, it all looks really nice. The artwork is really good. It's not I'm not gonna back it again. You know, I have to be a bit more careful about what I'm backing at the moment, so I won't be backing either of these ones that we just talked about. But it does look really nice, actually.
Dave:So, it does you know, they've done a good job of production by the look of it. So it's
Matthew:I did they're always good with their art. I remember in fact that the first version of New Minera was almost the first Kickstarter I backed way back when. I can't remember when they did it. And I and the thing that grabbed me, I'd been looking Kickstarter kinda just arrived into my consciousness. I think possibly wasn't.
Matthew:I think I actually back my my son and I had seen a Lego game on Kickstarter at one of the Lego shows. He was tiny. And they they had a stand at one of the Lego shows, and they were kick starting. So I think that was actually the first thing
Thomas:that I
Matthew:backed on Kickstarter. But then, you know, then I was looking at Kickstarter, and I saw the numenera thing. And the art was amazing. And I'm a big fan of, I don't know if you remember the old Jean Wolf books, Shadow of the Torturer. What they call book book of the new sun, I think the whole series is called.
Matthew:I was big into that, and this reflected that in a way. So I thought all this looks really exciting. And then I watched I had some videos on how the system works, and I didn't like it. It felt very g 20 to me, very old school d and d. It isn't.
Matthew:I've not I've since then played it with Will, and it isn't. It's it's a bit cleverer than that. Okay. I'm still not sure that it would be my favorite system.
Dave:Because it's still a it's still a it's still a d 20 roll
Matthew:It's still a d 20 with, broadly speaking, rollover, I think. And your difficulty levels come in 3. So you kind of you know, you piss poor easy is obviously 3 and 6 and 9 and 12 and 15 and up up the thing that way.
Dave:And heroic is 30.
Matthew:Yeah. So,
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:Yeah. It's it it it plays easier than I thought it would play. It's still a little bit linear because it is that single d twenty roll, effectively. Yeah. It's it it doesn't quite float by boat in the way that it floats Will's boat, but that's fine.
Matthew:You know? There's lots of gamers out there, and different people like different things. And this for me, I got really kind of annoyed at their their big thing they did, the big black box game, whatever that's called. I can't remember. This this feels to me like, more like a game I would back.
Dave:But Yeah.
Matthew:But as I say, I don't actually need 3 new games. I can't play the games I've already got. And, I'm saving my money. Can't imagine what for. But, yes, I have a sneaking suspicion that I won't be able to spend much money on this.
Matthew:I really want to get household having paid that. And that's currently kick starting as we talked about in the last episode. But the print the print of that is quite expensive. And I,
Dave:That's that's turning you off, is it?
Matthew:Shy of that. Yeah. I've only got a few days to make a decision on that.
Dave:What's the what's the what's the what's the, what's the pledge for for print?
Matthew:Well, I I think there's 2. For so I'm only in I'm not into so what they're currently kick starting properly is the yeah. Dot year 5. What do I mean? 5th edition version of the rules, but they're also reprinting the original rules, which
Douglas:is their
Matthew:own system. Yeah. So it's those original so it's a back of levels for those rules that I'm going for. Right. And broadly, that comes in 3 books, which is a core book, a campaign book as it were, and something in between those 2.
Matthew:And that costs something like a Ā£150.
Douglas:Yeah. Yeah. That's
Matthew:Or you can get just the core book for Ā£70 and the other 2 in PDF, which if I was gonna back it is I think the level I back at.
Dave:But is that
Matthew:the core also
Dave:Is that the core book in 5e though?
Matthew:No. That's the core book in the old system. Yeah. And they've got similar pledge levels for the 5e versions of all those
Dave:as well. Right.
Matthew:So, still so so, you know, it's a good kick starter in terms of, you know, being able to get exactly what you want in whatever flavor you want. But, but, yeah, Ā£70. Yeah. But it's why I was talking about, you know, maybe we're given the cost of the printing, but we were having our meeting yesterday about Tails of the Old West. Might we be pressing our book a bit low?
Matthew:Yeah.
Dave:Possibly. Yeah. Think. Anyway, Indeed.
Matthew:You, our, potential backers, will will find out what our pricing decisions are gonna be at some point when we've actually made them. I think we left that one hanging in the air, didn't we? Yeah. Yeah.
Dave:We don't need to decide that for a while yet. So Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew:So yeah. Anyway, that's that that's my thing. I think that might be our world of gaming done.
Dave:Well, the one thing you did want to mention, which we are a little bit late on, Our Brilliant Ruin, which is a is a game that's been on Kickstarter, which is just finished, I believe. But, a lot of our patrons are have been talking about how lovely it is and how good it looks. So, you wanted to give that a little call out even though sadly we are, we're too late to help with the Kickstarter. Although I'm not sure it needed help, actually. I think it did alright, didn't it?
Matthew:I think it did not bad. Studio Hermitage, did it, and 821 backers pledged 4 $47,000 to bring the project to life.
Dave:Okay. And on on Kickstarter, it's saying late pledges are still open. So
Matthew:And late pledges are still open. That'll be I'm sure if we click on that, it'll take us through to back a kit or something.
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:And so it does. Mhmm. Yeah. Back a kit. There we go.
Matthew:So so, yes, you can you can backlight there. It really wasn't floating my boat despite all the chat about it. Something about it wasn't quite working for me. It's set in a kind of fantasy interwar 19 twenties
Dave:Upstairs downstairs kind of feel to it.
Matthew:Yeah. For those people who
Dave:are old enough to know what upstairs downstairs is was. Yeah. Downton Abbey, for, I guess, for for the more modern
Matthew:Yeah. I guess, I think the more modern.
Dave:Well done.
Matthew:Well done with you and your youthful references there.
Dave:Yeah. Because Obviously. Downton Abbey, the average the average watcher of that is 16, isn't it? You know, I mean
Matthew:Yeah.
Dave:We are we are looking at the
Matthew:You're obviously keeping with the Ute there. Well done.
Dave:Not that I ever ever watched Downton Abbey. It doesn't really float my boat. But, Upstairs Downstairs was a series from from back in the, what, the seventies probably, which is all about life in a in a in a stately home with the upstairs people, you know, the family, and the downstairs people, all their servants, which for a very long time was very popular.
Matthew:I seem to remember it was in a London set.
Dave:I don't I don't remember.
Matthew:As opposed to us to. Yeah. Anyway anyway, it was I was too young for it at the time. Yeah. And this game is all about that, but with added body horror and weird shit, I think is I think you could say.
Matthew:Yeah. Possibly some form of vampirism. It's got a dice pool, d 6 dice pool, so, you know, we're gonna love that, aren't we, you
Douglas:and I?
Dave:It's not a year
Matthew:it's not
Dave:a year 0 one, though, is it? It's it's
Matthew:It's not a year 0 dice pool, but I think it works a bit different to to how our one does. But, Yes. And in fact, there's a link to learn more about our Deutsch system with, an update.
Dave:Because it says here, a gild a a gilded age where upstairs downstairs drama meets existential horror.
Matthew:Yeah.
Dave:Yeah. It does have it does some of the artwork has a very, kind of early Cthulhu feel to it.
Matthew:Yeah. I guess that's an interesting thing. But I think, yeah. I think it's in a it's not it's not in this earth. It looks similar in many respects, but I think it's more dying, how even the now 19 twenties was.
Matthew:I mean, not more people dying. I think I think society is falling apart more Yeah. Is the impression I get. So, yeah. So here's the thing.
Matthew:I think you do it's sixes means success, but when you invoke your passions, fives and sixes mean success. Right. Is all set. So yeah. Anyway, we'll put a link in the show notes.
Matthew:Yeah. I guess to the back of kit late late pledge. So all our links in show notes this episode will be towards back kit, which is itself kind of interesting.
Dave:Interesting development.
Matthew:Yeah. And kit came up in our conversation yesterday without wanting to spoil things. So, shall we move on, Dave?
Dave:Yeah. That's that was longer than we anticipated, wasn't it? We never
Matthew:talked for
Dave:less time than we think.
Matthew:Yes. We I think we last time when we were doing it face to face, we were massively more efficient in our talking and actually came in under the hour for the whole programme.
Dave:We did. It was really short, Wasn't it?
Matthew:Yeah. Maybe we should do that more.
Dave:Not this not this time. This is gonna be a long one. Yes.
Matthew:So the plan was, Dave, that you would and Millie were going to join us for this episode of the book club, which we recorded earlier in the week. There's a recording on YouTube, but if you don't like looking at it on screen, you can listen to it now. Why didn't you join us in the end?
Dave:I had a a stinking headache. I'd basically been doing Tales of the Old West staring at 2 screens since, like, 8 o'clock that morning, And, my eyes were just spinning. So I I tried to I had a break for an hour and I hope that that would make me feel better, but it didn't. So sadly, I I ducked out the conversation. But, you know, safe in the knowledge that there were much more insightful people on the panel than me.
Dave:So that was cool. That was fine.
Matthew:But sadly, Millie didn't make it either. So you're left with just me, Thomas, and Doug.
Dave:Well, at least we got 2 insightful people in there.
Matthew:That's no way to talk about oh, I oh, I see. You're getting at me there.
Dave:Of course.
Matthew:Let me welcome both of you, Douglas, all the way from the colony of Canada.
Douglas:Yes. We're coming.
Matthew:And, Thomas, all the way from the colony of Australia. Ex colonies of course now rightfully independent although still of course swearing loyalty to our king Charles the third.
Douglas:Is Australia still doing that?
Thomas:Yeah.
Matthew:They are. Oh. Yeah. They tried not to a few years ago, but they didn't quite get there.
Douglas:Oh, well. So
Matthew:Oh, did that hit you, Thomas?
Thomas:We had a referendum on The Republic.
Matthew:It was a referendum.
Thomas:Yeah. We did. Yeah. And and, yes, it was lost.
Douglas:We haven't gone that far because we're just lazy and cold most of
Dave:the time.
Matthew:So, well, cold is a thing that I think we expect to be in the great dark. We are gathered here today to discuss the quick start for Coriolis, the great dark, which we've all had about a week to peruse. We may not have had quite that long to peruse the updated edition which came out a few hours ago. But, Douglas, you've been through it, so I'm relying on you.
Douglas:Yep.
Matthew:And, Mohammed's making his apologies. He can't join. And I have to also send apologies from Millie and Dave who both have bad heads. Not that they've been drinking together. I urge everybody, stop those rumors now.
Matthew:They're on opposite ends of the country. So
Douglas:It is a comparatively small place, England, though.
Thomas:Yeah. It is. Throwing a bit
Douglas:of shade on colonies. I just will make the point, you can ride across a part of England in a day on a bicycle.
Matthew:That is true. That is true. Right. A very small country. Yeah.
Matthew:Really quite unusual when you consider the amount of the globe it took over in the 19 For
Thomas:me to for me to go home, it's 9 hours. It's a 9 hour drive. And I don't think that you can go, like, driving the same distance from Cornwall up to the top of Scotland.
Matthew:Well, no. If I were to if I were to drive from Cornwall to Scotland well, yeah, I could take it leisurely and probably do it in in 9 hours. But, yeah, we're a small
Thomas:At a 140 kilometers an hour. That's what we do. Well, you
Matthew:know what kilometers are. We we have miles in this country. They're much further. But, anyway Somebody wants this thing to talk about.
Thomas:Says, Gage. Yeah. Well, there we go. Let's get into it.
Matthew:Mohammed and Eric here just to get us talking about, the great dark. And we've been discussing it on our forum as well, but I have been keeping myself, kind of mum apart from pointing out that they've slightly nerfed, auto fire, which will upset Dave something rotten because that's his favorite thing. Yeah. But first of all, I want to ask each of you, first impressions. Should we start off with you, Taurus?
Douglas:Yeah. I really like it. I am not a nice on the new game. I completely sympathize and actually agree with a number of points that have been made about the fact it's not really next like, it's not a, what do I say? It's not a step from Coriolis 3rd horizon.
Douglas:It's actually not. It's a completely different game. The mechanics work quite differently. So it's not an inheritor in that sense of the word. Like, it doesn't it's not it's not 2nd edition Coriolis in any way, shape, or form.
Douglas:But I like what they've done with the rules. I like the thinking they've applied. I think there are a few things, and one comment in particular I'll say for later about the metacurrency slash mechanics. I think they could have done more, a lot more, actually, if I was being upfront. But yeah.
Douglas:Oh, I like it. I think it'll be fun to play. I think it'll be interesting in a, you know, good adventurous sort of game. Yeah.
Matthew:Yeah. And, Douglas, what about you?
Thomas:I really like it. I like it because, again, not because it's a spiritual successor of Coriolis kind of in any way, but at the you know, you've got the backstory, you've got the painting of the previous generation, but to me, there's just an evolution in the year zero engine, and I like it. It's a full auto. I didn't really experience it enough to really care. But when I I
Matthew:was gonna say, I think apart from Dave, everybody is glad about the change in the world.
Thomas:Okay. Okay. I just I just think that, you know, if you're gonna go into this, a kind of Jacques Cousteau Earl, you know, early 19th century, going into the unknown, this is the way to do it. And I I like the way that they've integrated the exploration into into talents and gear as opposed to just listing off a bunch of skills. I really like the idea of insight and perception as being their own thing.
Thomas:And I don't mind health, hope, and heart. I think that those are absolutely, great, and and I like that. But I do have things that I don't like, and I'll mention those later.
Matthew:Cool. Okay. So my thoughts are this. First of all, I'm just gonna get this out around hope and the actually rather simplistic economy of hope, which is you roll your dice and you spend hope equal to the number of ones you get on that reroll. So you never know when you're gonna run out of hope.
Dave:Mhmm.
Matthew:I like that. I especially like it because I invented that. It was one of the early iterations of faith that we had in Tales of the Old West. Dave didn't like it at all, and I must admit when I playtested it, it seemed to confuse our players, more than I expected it to. So so there's that.
Matthew:So, anyway, that that that's just get that out of the way. I'm slightly I kind of well, I mean, obviously, we're not seeing the full rules here, but within the scope of the core game, I'm not necessarily impressed with how you recover hope. It's not as much fun as the hope recovery, for example, in in the one ring, is what I mean. I'll I like that actually slightly complex, but also very much talking about how the group bond together, form of hope recovery. I mean, I guess I couldn't knit that wholesale because then people would just accuse him of nicking that wholesale.
Matthew:The thing for me though is and this might be divulging a bit of a confidential secret. But last year, we proposed House of the Old West to, the gang, and they rejected it. One of the reasons why they rejected it is because it was too broad. I can't I wouldn't should have got the email out now, but they said that in confidence. But my impression was they they were saying it's not focused enough on one thing.
Matthew:It's one of those do anything ultimate sandbox things, which it is. That's what we've designed it at, and they were saying we're less interested in doing that. And, obviously, what this is is very tightly focused on one thing, whereas Coriolis, the 3rd horizon was very much the ultimate sandbox. I mean, within within the 36 systems of the of the old horizon, 3rd horizon. And in fact, I remember, you know, when we were raving about it in the early days, with the early days of our podcast when it was called Coriolis event.
Matthew:I heard 2 complaints about it or two reasons why people didn't wanna play it. One of which was they said it's like many other space games, there's both too much to do and not enough to do in that space games don't particularly tell you what they're about. And they, you know, they kinda say you can do anything and you end up hopping from planet to planet doing a bit of trading, a bit of crime, moving on when the when the heat gets too hot. But the other thing they said was and there's too much law. There's way too much.
Matthew:And there is, you know, there is effectively roughly 20 years of Swedish world building going on in there, and it was all there. I mean, every I know it's up, particularly every paragraph you read was, what would you say, Kind of a story hook. Every single paragraph you read was a story, but almost every sentence. So there's almost too much possibility, and I think it was really hard. I think some of the things they did like the group concept and stuff like that was trying to help a GM navigate their way through it.
Matthew:But this has taken the opposite tack. This is one game doing one thing. And at the moment, because we've only got the quick start, we don't know how much beyond that one thing it will expand, but I get the impression from the language they're not gonna do that very often. But, sorry, this is me. I'm hogging it now.
Matthew:This is this is what you get because I request everything, and I was gonna say
Thomas:You're you're replacing Dave. That's you're just adding that his time.
Matthew:I think the interesting I wonder whether they're planning on doing more Coriolis games at kind of regular multi annual frequencies that they will expand the Coriolis brand to feature different things in future games because this is a brand they own. And maybe they don't want to, you know, maybe we'll have a few, campaigns in the great dark, and then we'll be moving on or, you know, back to the first horizon or whatever. I obviously don't know, but whether we they're gonna give us the lore in bite sized pieces with new releases. A little bit like they did with, Mutant Year 0 where, you know, first of all, you're mutants and then you could be animals in Jannah Balfour, then you could be robots and unmutated humans and stuff like that. I just wonder whether that's that's the kind of model that they're aiming for.
Douglas:I doubt it, to be transparent. I think giving away the community license, and it is a giving away. I mean, they're being very generous. It's not a criticism, but it's also saying do whatever you want. It would be very hard to come over the top of that with another game set in the 3rd horizon, for instance, because all these people would have bought all this community content, invested all of this energy and time in building it out, and then coming in as a you know, and then sort of saying, oh, well, that's all well and good, but here's the real version of that.
Douglas:And, actually, there was that comment in Besson a couple of weeks ago about, oh, but where's the real supplement? That was commented on. You know, so which I will not take personally.
Matthew:Well, I mean, what it really say is why don't Phoenix publish your Japan book?
Douglas:Why don't they?
Thomas:Why don't they probably not
Douglas:quite at the standard that they would expect, and I I would completely respect that. Look. I think it'll be really fascinating to see what they do with this because I think because I actually genuinely wonder about that delve. I also wonder whether the mystery will be quite so you know so you said there's lots of lore in Coriolis, but it's all a bit sort of fragile. Yeah.
Douglas:And what I mean by that is it's not certain. Right? Like like and a really good example is that I hold a really different opinion from reading Coriolis on what icons are to Dave. A fundamentally different opinion. Like, so completely different it's not funny.
Thomas:So can you remind us of that, please?
Douglas:Just so Dave can rant later.
Thomas:Just so Dave can rant in the comment.
Douglas:Let in the comments. Yeah. No. So I don't think the icons are real. My fundamental premise for Coriolis 3rd horizon is icons are not real things.
Douglas:They are a manifestation yeah. Yeah. Whatever. Nice nice cards. Nice cards.
Douglas:They are a manifestation of people's faith for sure and how that influences the universe, but I don't think the icons have agency. I don't think they have desires, wants, or dreams. And the reason I think that in part is because the beast is explicitly referenced as an as the emperor of Alada. So they're either that or that. They're not both.
Douglas:Right? Like so they're the faith. They're the faith of people in these things that they've then turned into these gods. Anyway, Dave has a completely different opinion, but the point I'm trying to make in in reality is both of us can have read the law and come to that conclusion completely justifiably. Yes.
Douglas:Yeah. There's nothing in that law that says I'm wrong or he's right Mhmm.
Dave:Or
Douglas:he's right and I'm wrong. Do you know what I mean? Like, sorry. I got that. Anyway, you know what I mean?
Matthew:Your third So, boss, there's a lot of lore.
Douglas:It's ambiguous. I wonder whether this game is going to have that same level of ambiguity. So the builders are actually going to be, like, fundamentally, the the the mystery of the game, but the sense I get is they're also gonna be much more known. Like, we've already got references in the quick start to the fact that this place was built by the builders, and they did these things in this place. That's inherently less mysterious.
Douglas:Right? And when you delve and when these campaigns come out, will there be much more certainty about those things? And I wonder whether that'll be a very different vibe. I think that'll be a really aesthetically different vibe for different groups. Anyway, there you go.
Matthew:Yeah, man. That's a good point. And I I think you're right. For me, when I say every paragraph has a plot hook, every paragraph can be taken almost a different way. And what I loved about almost everything they discussed is they inherent within the nature of the thing they were describing were conflicting and opposite interpretations of it even within the text.
Matthew:So, you know, that in particular with the icons, so it would be, you know, this icon is absolutely this person and also absolutely this person. So so that that's what I really enjoyed. But I did think I do think a lot of people were slightly put off by that breadth of knowledge and also that thing that touching on theirs. Obviously, your Japanese Versen aren't aren't real Versen because they're not punished by Free League. I do remember this in enormous reluctance to say, oh, I've got this brilliant idea, but I don't want to turn, you know, get my players into it in case a book comes out from the guys at Free League that contradicts it.
Matthew:And I'm thinking, well, they're not gonna read book and you're probably gonna be telling it to them and I bet you can bend whatever they say in that future book and what they're not even gonna remember what they did in your campaign a year ago. So you can tell them that what they did in their campaign fits perfectly with whatever they published now in the book.
Thomas:Look at Then look at Tales of the Old West and your old idea.
Matthew:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they're they're using my old idea. That's great.
Matthew:And I have to be having now said that I you know, we sent Tales of the Old West to them, I don't think the version of Tales of the Old West we sent to them was had that version of fate in it. So I'm not saying they have, nicked the idea from us, but I'd like to think they have in my heart of hearts. They probably haven't, though, but it was it was good to see. Because it's a good idea, whatever Dave says.
Thomas:So so one of the things about the channel that, I think everybody who listens to the podcast knows that at the end and may the icons bless you. And, and so, you know, I thought to myself, okay. I'm gonna look this up. And, in the beginning of the book, on page 8, it says, praying to the icons. Icon worship is ever present in the 3rd horizon.
Thomas:Though, through faith, the people find strength, and so will you. When darkness surrounds you and all hope seems lost, a desperate prayer to the icons can be what saves your lives. And I think that that fulfills both Dave's view of the icons and Thomas's view
Matthew:of the icons. I'm sure it was Thomas.
Thomas:Yeah. I Yeah. And so the the question for me is, is is Coriolis lesser because they haven't even addressed the icons. The core the Coriolites, they may be able to carry something onto it. But if you look at human history, 200 years is what they were talking about, with Eleanor, I believe, on their podcast.
Thomas:Of the gap between In terms of the gap.
Matthew:The last time. Yeah.
Thomas:Which I was thinking millennium, but, anyway, 200 years. I'm sorry, but 200 years is not long enough to completely and totally leave your religion behind without having some type of either evolution or, change in attitude. I mean, just think about the pilgrims coming across in, you know, 17th century and coming off to America. It wasn't the same, but it was similar enough. And I find that if there's anything that I dislike about this is that, you know, the chapels in the ship, the importance of this hope has completely and totally changed mechanically and also narratively.
Thomas:And I'm wondering what they're gonna do. Does it bother you at all?
Matthew:I think in this quick start, no. I mean, because this is this isn't everything, so there may be more reference in the core book. But, also, the icons were part of the core mechanic of Coriolis, and they're not part of the core mechanic of Coriolis. So, as I always remember Tony, Dave's brother saying when we were first playing, and in fact, he was our first playing the hamam in one very early episode. He said, well, obviously, icons are real because when you pray to them, good things happen.
Matthew:So, he he was a firm believer. Well, now when you pray to them, no. You lose hope. That's that's what happens. You may still get your thing, but you lose your hope.
Matthew:So, yeah. I I think I think probably the great dark doesn't have the icons. I'm convinced the Coriolites will be on a campaign to bring the icons into the dark. The what is missing from the great dark is the icons, and they will bring the shining light of the icons in there. That's in my campaign.
Matthew:Whatever it says in the book anyway, they will be there. But just brings you on to another point. Here's the thing I don't particularly like about the quick start, and that is slightly bad editing. And case in point is the correlates. So we get the guilds and other factions on this is on page 9.
Matthew:Mhmm. And we talk about the navigator's guild, the machinist guild, the gardener's guild, who are the 3 main guilds that we're gonna be dealing with this game. And, obviously, it's a sop to us old hands. The Coriolites get their mention there. Then you turn the page and there's a little box out called lesser players.
Douglas:Yes.
Matthew:And what is mentioned among the lesser players? When they talk about the bloody Coriolites again, don't they?
Thomas:Yes. They do.
Matthew:So, I mean, strikes me that, you know, one of those references should have gone.
Thomas:And and why I I mean, I have this written in the side because I went through it with fine tooth comb. Why are they opposed to the whole project of ship city itself? To what end?
Matthew:Are they? I thought that was the wreckers.
Thomas:No. At at the, evidence points to the members of the Coriolite clans, and it seems centered around an opposition to the whole project. So I'm I'm that might be a way. It may be religious fervor or whatever. I think the pariah mentioned, but I forget where.
Thomas:And then you've got the black toad. Well, I just I don't know. Thomas, do you think that there's I get the feeling that there's a lot of potential for lore just given these two pages.
Douglas:I do. And I I think the quick start, because it's a quick start, doesn't talk at all really about what's happening on the sword on the ship city or the great ship Yep. That you're traveling on. And I'm trusting that because the Delve mechanic by itself isn't enough to generate a campaign. Nope.
Douglas:Right? There's just not enough there. Even if you had a whole bunch of Delves, it'd get pretty ordinary. You you're just doing dungeon bashing. Yeah.
Douglas:That sounds unkind, but it that's what it would be. So I am trusting that in line with, you know, The Walking Dead and, mutants and some of the other games, that there's this vibrant community with these guilds smashing up against each other that you participate in as well. That that is what gives the narrative energy to the game and to your characters, you know, trajectory. Because, yeah, 1 I mean, it's really fascinating to be an explorer and go and find out the great mysteries, but you would assert or or I would assert, that you need other dimensions of play to make the game usable as a campaign. And those dimensions would, in my mind, be things like the conflict between the factions.
Douglas:So there's clearly political, and and, you know, political and resource driven conflict between the major guilds. And then I suspect the Coriolites represent the sort of funny story. I wonder if they've been put there just as a bit of a dig as well. For the old Grognards who wanna go back to Coriolis and play 3rd edition, I mean that in the kindest possible way, but they
Matthew:but they're that when I challenged them on that issue in their first
Douglas:but their rejection or the Coriolis the Coriolis rejection of the particularly of the great city, I suspect is a rejection of the idea that we should stay here at all, that we arrived. It's this horrible place. Nothing really works. We should have invested our energy and time in getting our ship back together and heading back home where, you know, lands of plentiful goodness exist. You know, it's the blessed land.
Douglas:Like, the blessed land is just over there, and we know it's there because we used to be there. So why are we not going back? Why are we wasting all of our Ingean time clutching together this great city? Anyway, I have no idea if this is correct or not, but it would be fascinating that the Coriolites be literally, we should terminate this whole venture. It's a terrible idea.
Douglas:The blight is everywhere. We should head home. Why are you people not getting it? Yeah. And and really challenging that.
Douglas:Anyway, it's a thought. But whilst I'm trusting there'll be more in the city and the ships.
Thomas:I I think that they've set it up. I mean, as I was reading the beginning of it, there were a whole bunch of as I was reading, you could read through the levels, and I was thinking of Coriolis because of the levels. I mean, it it really was almost a parallel with going into the depths of this, a spaceship. Yeah. Into the basement.
Thomas:But, it's a dying city, as it says on page 6, that this is a city that needs resources to continue. And your purpose is to find those resources. I agree a 100% with Thomas that you cannot sustain a game or from not just from a campaign perspective or from a play perspective, but from a marketing perspective. You cannot sustain this without changing it up and in and including many more dimensions. And I think that they've got broad strokes at the moment, and that's gonna have to be fleshed out.
Thomas:I believe that from what Costa and Neil said, I believe on the first interview, possibly yeah. I think it was with Eleanor that it that there's gonna be in the campaign, it's a box set. You're gonna get your campaign. Everything's gonna be there. And that they wanted to focus more on the politics and take out the, the mechanics that stood in the way of gameplay to bring the mechanic to bring the story more alive by focusing more on the world.
Thomas:And I I thought about that, and I thought, wow, that's really cool. I think that they've got it in a bit with the talents and the gear, but it you're gonna have to have more box sets. And maybe that's like, what, Alien at box sets?
Matthew:Yeah.
Douglas:And also, Blade Runner.
Thomas:Yeah. Yeah. I think Alien and Blade
Douglas:Runner have Blade Runner works.
Matthew:Have shown them the way forward, actually, at Free League. I think there's probably a great deal of enthusiasm for box sales as opposed to a simple campaign supplement in terms of sales. And, you know, probably there's more profit in there because I know, you know, when I'm saying, things at, you know, when I'm representing freely. It's an easier sell to sell a box set because there's a bunch of stuff in there. It feels like great value.
Matthew:It may feel like value while actually being slightly cheaper to produce than a than a bad book. I don't know. Anyway, so, yeah, Ron, I just put Ron's comment up here. He says, Maria, Mariah can easily be a full campaign, so why can't delving? I think both of you have answered that in different ways, but also I wanna add my thought, which is I'm reading the terror at the moment, which is meant to be one of the inspirations Inspirations.
Matthew:Of the new game. And and I've just read quite a lot of sex. Oh. Because even though they're stuck out in the Arctic, trying to find the Northway passage and haven't seen anybody for 2 years, they're remembering an awful lot of sex right now in these last couple of chapters that I've been reading. And, of course, a lot of that actually one of those sex scenes, which is, in Tasmania in in a platypus pond.
Matthew:Thomas, I'm pointing at you here like like you live so close to Tasmania.
Douglas:Well, I'm closer than I normally am. I'm in Melbourne, so I'm
Matthew:close to and the politics of the governorship of, Van Diemen's Land as they're calling it every once back then is is all exploding around them and and the the young lady in concern is the niece of the, soon to be exiled governor. And you know, so there is that politics there even in a book that is ostensibly about a bunch of people freezing to death in the, north, Northwest Passage or Northwest North Passage because they're stuck in the ice. So, yeah, I mean, that that does bring in that politics. I I'd like to think we can see some of that politics there. Against that, I did ask whether there'd be an opportunity to, you know, have a say in the building of your great ship and, you know, how that develops.
Matthew:And they didn't particularly point that way, but maybe a future campaign might do that, build that aspect out as you were saying, Douglas.
Thomas:If you look at their history of of their quick start releases and their, just basic bare bones, this is this is to attract you. The words are already there. I would say that almost everything, is gonna be included in the book. And so when I look at the 50 pages that they've devoted so far, they're gonna flesh that out in other areas. I don't think they haven't just put this out and then said, oh, we're gonna rewrite everything.
Thomas:So how big is this book gonna be with, I think with Coriolis, it came into well over 300 pages. It was it was a big book. And lately, they've been trying to get to about 200.
Matthew:Mhmm.
Thomas:And so how much room do they have? Let's say they throw an adventure in there. Maybe it's all gonna be rules, but we're talking about 3 quarters of a 200 page book that's yet to be uncovered. And that is leaving me more excited. Yeah.
Thomas:Because the possibilities and I think that that what one of the great things about today was they released this version 1.1, and they've addressed the concerns that the community was stating. The physical crit table is too deadly. Change it, please. And so they've added 5, different rows to kind of mitigate that. And, and so they're they're listening to the blocking and and the dodging rules just to clarify things.
Thomas:That might bode well for the future.
Matthew:Yeah. Yes. I I although I'm kinda less impressed by that. I like to think that I give the fans what I want to play that I that I don't that I don't change things when when this when the fans necessarily say they don't particularly like it all. Otherwise, I say, give it give it a go.
Matthew:But, shall we talk a bit about mechanics? Yeah. Likes and dislikes in the new mechanics?
Douglas:Likes are it's all much simpler than Coriolis. I think they've actually tried very hard to remove a lot of it. And in, you know, Autofire, let's talk about Autofire because I have a player who, just like Dave, has built their character in such a way that, you know, I have every talent that makes me better at Autofire. They were a group of assassins working for Alarms Temple, so there was a defensible argument for at least one of us should be good at autofire.
Matthew:Well, except how many assassins do you see going
Douglas:Well, you know, you
Matthew:It's a single shot, mate. I'm just saying It's a night in the dark.
Thomas:They they don't have to be good. They don't have to be good assassins.
Douglas:No. They've got the stealthy ones who creeper and who kill people. This is the one member of the assassin team who solves it when they run into the pariah, and it's like, oh, I don't think my garrote's gonna work on that power up, but what should we do now? You know, the anti pariah member of the team. What I was gonna say is I think it's reflective of an intent to simplify, actually, most of the combat and and just make it a little bit easier.
Douglas:It also moves a little bit away from being so combat heavy. So I think enhancing having the concept of blight, having the concept of hope, and having the concept of health is an explicit decision that the real danger in this game is much more diverse. You know, the the danger of the game is much more diverse. Right? So you have those mental health points, in Coriolis.
Douglas:I'm struggling to remember what they were called. I think they were just called MPs or something like that.
Matthew:Mind points, I think. Yeah.
Thomas:Mind
Douglas:points. Mind points. They were barely used. Right? Let's be pretty direct.
Douglas:They were barely used. No. Absolutely. The game Yeah. The game revolved around health and damage and armor and weapons.
Douglas:I think they've made a deliberate decision to move away from that to make this in line with their intent much more about horror and exploration and all of those sorts of things. So I like that a lot. I actually don't I'm I'm with Doug. I like the 6 stats. I think it's fine.
Douglas:I think having skills and talents basically be the same thing, which is what they've really done, and then mechanically, we haven't seen the full rules, but the suggestion is mechanically, a lot of them or at least some of them will have rankings that you will buy, which I think inherits from, twilight 2,000. In that, you can buy upgrades on on talents. Also, builds on good old Forbidden Lands with its ranking of talents as well. So I think, mechanically, that makes a lot of sense. I don't think there's any big deal with not having skills pulled out and talents pulled out.
Douglas:I think that's good. Yeah. I like I like a lot. I I do have probably the same niggle that you both sort of hinted at with hope, which is I think they it's actually just a metacurrency. So my problem with hope is it's just the metacurrency.
Douglas:It doesn't have any grander vision attached to it. And this is actually where I think they've this is the thing I think they've got wrong with it in comparison to Coriolis, or this is the thing they didn't carry forward from Coriolis. Not saying they had to keep prayer and you know? But they haven't embedded the the the sort of core mechanic around hope in any way in the broader concept of the game that I can see. Now in the extended version of the rules, that might be completely different.
Douglas:There might be a whole bunch of stuff I can't see right now. Maybe, you know, doing great things for your ship gives you an automatic boost to hope, and it's all suddenly getting mechanically improved. But right now, it feels a bit sort of I tick boxes, I cross boxes, you know, which is a bit sad, actually, because, you know, that's a loss.
Thomas:Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of the tick boxes, I I think I I'm worried about bean counting when it comes to your Supply. Your supplies.
Douglas:Mhmm.
Thomas:I'm really worried about that. I'm looking at the 2 character sheets, and, the Coriolis character sheet, well, you've got radiation, you've got experience, you've got those dots, you've got the the, you know, you've got your mind points, and you've got your hit points. And pretty much they've done the same thing. They've added together 2 stats. Here, they've added 3.
Thomas:Nah, whatever. But I hope the icons again, coming back to that is, for me as a player and as a GM, the whole icon system was about you when you go out into the dark, whether you actually believe or whether you don't, whether they're real or whether they aren't, you you are so desperate that something has to give you hope. And you have to lament and pray and and maybe whatever. Maybe it's an internal thing that happens. Maybe it's something that's effectual that happens.
Thomas:Either way, it gives you a mechanical boost that is narratively placed. In this regard, I don't think that they're selling hope that well. Blight, I think that they put all their eggs in the basket of the bird.
Matthew:Yeah. Is that An bad thing, though?
Thomas:No. I think I like the bird. I think I think that having this group, almost crew bird, is nice. Obviously, they've played Wingspan too much, and, they love this. They think this is awesome, and I think that it's awesome.
Thomas:But you've left the other stuff kind of I don't know. But I but I love the attributes. Looking at the gear, it's amazing. We already know that with your talents, you're gonna start off with, 2 dice for 1, 1 dice for the others. I think they've already said that you get a maximum of 3 dice as you level up.
Thomas:Also, we've it's quite easy to figure out that all the attributes come out to 24 points. So you've got 24 points to spend. It's quite easy. Yeah.
Matthew:So I I'm I'm I'm I'm undecided on mechanics. I I do think hope isn't as well integrated into the feeling of the game as any of the other push mechanics that we've ever experienced. Yeah. And I do think for something that's actually quite similar to Faith in total, I think we've done a better job of integrating Faith, which is effectively just a meta currency, into the into the genre and the tropes of of the game of of of our setting. The thing I quite like yeah.
Matthew:You say supply, I'm willing to give them something on because, again, I am reading. If you've not heard me say it yet, I'm reading the Torah. And there's an awful lot of, oh, we gotta get 5 tons of food to the cache, you know, before before the summer happens or the winter or whatever. So so that idea of leaving supply in base camp and coming to it and, you know, and potentially, I guess, there's that thing of leaving. I have not read the adventure, by the way, just in case I get further ideas.
Matthew:No. But but I believe there'd be that concept of, oh, let's leave some supply here for our way back. And then, of course, we don't come back this way, so that's gone. So that's interesting. Blight as well.
Matthew:I'm I'm kind of feeling, in again, in the terror. Half air tinned food hasn't been, hasn't been sealed properly, and so that's all gone off. So I'm I'm willing wait waiting to test the, the the mechanics, and I think I'll only really get a handle on them once they're in play. I just wanna maybe just finish on one thing that I've heard a lot of people said. And, Mohammed, you're here, so I want to ask your opinion as well in Mohammed's in the chat.
Matthew:Lot of people have said, oh, they've got rid of the whole Arabian Nights in Space feel. And I have two points that I want to ask about that. How Arabian Nights in Space was the original game actually? And, you know a lot of what I mean I I really liked the fact that it was a non Western culture that it wasn't simply based on the assumption that white men's white men get to the stars and kinda carry on an Anglic, shall we say, culture in space. I like the fact it wasn't that.
Matthew:I love all the names. I love the fact that there's, derivations of Byzantine and Arabic words that are used as though that, you know, that that they're written into society. I am still seeing those Arabic words in in this game. But, you know, what else made it? I mean, I don't want I don't wanna think that it was simply the idea that icon worship or shall we say the concept of worship was specifically the thing that made it feel Middle Eastern.
Matthew:I don't want to be so reductionist about Middle Eastern culture that you define Middle Eastern culture by the fact that they're quite devout, and therefore, given the 3rd horizon was quite devout, that's what made it, Middle Eastern. I mean, particularly when it's Arabian Nights in Space, you know?
Thomas:It's because it's because you've got a ship and they're and and Arabian Nights is you're going on a ship. Why not? You know? I I mean, you can't just get a red cover on a book, put some Chinese or Japanese names, put some, you know, oriental motifs on it, and call it oriental. And Yeah.
Thomas:I'm I thought that Coriolis had that feeling. I I I hope that it wasn't just the motif of, oh, I think of, Arabia or I think of the Middle East or I think of Islam, and I'm thinking worship. That's the only thing that they do. And and if you're gonna do something like that, don't put it up with a bunch of icons because, that's actually not, very Islamic. And so, I liked I liked the idea in Coriolis, The Third Horizon, of the adventure mindset and I guess the vastness of this of the Dark Between the Stars.
Thomas:I'm not too sure if I feel anything. It's really I I just feel more like, Jules Verne. And if anything, it's not a not very environmentally friendly game as they leave all their crap in one area with all their oxygen tanks and everything, and then they move off to another area so that someone else, 2000 years later, can find their their crap and take it and say, look at the wonderful things we've found. It's In the ice.
Douglas:It's funny. It's interesting, though, because, I mean, if you like, all the media about people climbing Everest, now it's all about all the rubbish they leave behind. And, actually, I suspect that's explicitly where they've gotten that idea from. Right? Because it's literally the reference that you hear whenever you hear people talking about, oh, I climbed Everest, and they were there were dead bodies.
Douglas:There were air tanks. There was plastic rubbish. You know, now there's this kind of desperate attempt to clean it up once a year or something like that. So it's very similar. Mohammed has answered your question, which is to say, yeah, not so much really.
Matthew:And I'm assuming, Mohammed, you're talking about original, 3rd horizon Coriolis when you're saying Yeah. Not that Middle Eastern. Hey? Because I haven't seen any reference to djinn in in the new book.
Thomas:No. But they have mentioned they did mention that they would be coming with djinn and monsters. What can you do? I mean, sell sell yourself big is what I'm thinking is don't hold back in your quick start. Really sell it, and I'm not sure if they've really sold it.
Thomas:Sorry, Thomas.
Douglas:No. No. That's fine. I I it's good. I I think, look, I I don't think it matters as a radical perspective to hold in the sense that it's exactly true.
Douglas:Every game is gonna be a clutch together of cultures, and people are gonna make attempts to make things work. I I actually think, for instance, icons has a lot more to do with what was happening to the Byzantines through that period because let's face it, icon worship as actually a thing in in Byzantine culture for at least, what, 2, 3, 400 years. They fought civil wars over it. That's how seriously they took icon worship. You know, the idea that you would you know, was there the, you know, could you draw a picture of something?
Douglas:Can was that allowed? You know, actually broke empire, at least twice, that I can remember. So
Thomas:Iconoclasts. Yeah.
Douglas:When? Where where did the word come from? Oh, it turns out it comes
Thomas:from the It turns out it's a real thing.
Douglas:It's a real thing. So I think the new game is what I what I what I what I we we haven't really we've spent a lot of time talking about what we don't like. I think we should talk about what we really like. And and what I really like is they've actually been ambitious in creating the new game. They've said, you know what?
Douglas:We wanna tell this very different story where these people have crossed this sort of massive gulf in space, and time in a in a real sense because, you know, 200 200 years, and they're desperate for survival. What would that look like? What would you sacrifice? What would your culture look like to where you're living on the edge of existence? And I think they've had a really solid crack at that.
Thomas:Mhmm.
Douglas:And I think they've really and I think to be to be kind to what they were intending and to let go of our desperate desire to play the 3rd horizon again, What they've actually done is set up a game that is all about survival on the edge. You're alone in the universe, and it's not necessarily a nihilistic game in the same way that, say, death in space or even mothership is
Dave:No.
Douglas:Which are 2 thematically related games. And very thematically related, and that comment's been made by lots of people. It's a game of these people working together to try and survive on the edge of existence, taking all these risks because they have no choice, and that's the narrative drive and the narrative engine that I see in the middle of the game, and I think it's fantastic. And I think a game where hope is the mechanic as opposed to despair, because you could argue in both mothership, and I'll pick on them, and death in space, the mechanic's more about despair than it is about hope.
Matthew:Yeah.
Douglas:Whereas this is a game that is about saying no. In this darkness, in this loneliness in space as the only people we know, we will push to survive. We will take those risks. We will do those things. And I think that's actually kinda cool, and I like the interpretation of it as a bit more of a hopeful game, despite not obviously all the settings, which are terrible.
Douglas:There's blight. There's, you know, gonna be horrible things from the darkness. So, yeah, I think that's what I like about it, and and, I would let go of the cultural connection, and say, no. This is what happens when people are surviving at the edge. They sacrifice so much to survive.
Douglas:Yeah. They sacrifice all these other things to be alive. And this is really asking the question, what has this culture gotten rid of or removed because it's simply tangential? And maybe the Coriolites are kind of the villains in this story because they're holding on to this sort of, you know, this facile or even illusory view of the universe that's just not real.
Thomas:Well, oh, that's just
Douglas:And undermining this attempt to survive to make this thing. I I think that could be a really great way to play it out. Right? Like, I'm sorry, like, kind of the secret villains. Yeah.
Douglas:The wreckers are there, but who runs the wreckers?
Matthew:But I mean, they wreckers.
Thomas:They talk about the nest, which I think is really, really nice because the nest is part of, you know, Akua, and it's part of the majestic glory. They've taken parts, they've made this little kind of, almost like an icon in itself of the past, and they're looking, you know, they're looking to the past for all the answers instead of looking forward, where there's always gonna be naysayers, in society, no matter what. And the whole endeavor of Coriolis, is to move forward and to say, we will make it, and we're going to make it. I plan on playing the character Massima if, Raldanash, lets me play this character. And I just wanna read you the the the kind of summary of what this character is about.
Thomas:Born to a minor Korialite family, you were destined for dusty archives. However, curiosity got the better of you, and you were ousted as a juvenile after an after an explosive, after an explosive equipment in the inner sanctum went spectacularly wrong, freed from the shackles of expectation. So that's the Coriolis endeavor. Right? You have these expectations.
Thomas:You explore the underside of the ship city and found friends in unlikely places. Now you hack, cut, and burn your way through the ruins. And what are you? You are essentially a demolition the demolitions expert. Driver.
Thomas:You're a mechanic. You're you're a welder. I mean, there's something there's something that that a person can connect to immediately with this, that being a welder is an important thing. You need to be this welder. And I just I I love the concepts that they've got with the characters.
Thomas:They're, they're identifiable, and to tie back with what, Matt was saying that, living on the edge is a harsh reality, and you're going to dream of the past, and you're going to think of what it's like. But at the moment, you don't have the luxury of thinking about, anything other than survival, and I think that they've been captured that. So I'm really excited.
Matthew:Cool. And I think that's where we have to bring this discussion to its end. So I think that's an up note. Well done, Thomas, for remembering reminding us to think about what we like in here. Thank you very much, Thomas and Doug, for for joining in, and apologies again from Dave and Millie who are gonna join us, but are feeling a bit crook.
Matthew:And thanks as well to all our listeners live on YouTube. Mohammed, Bruce, Jonathan, and Eric, and even more people that I can't remember. But shall we just say goodbye to our listeners now?
Douglas:Goodbye.
Thomas:And may the icons bless you.
Dave:So, yeah, that's a really good chat. And and, the, the prospects of, the great dark than than perhaps I'd feared might be the, might be the outcome. I I have looked at the the kick start the the the kick start myself, and, I think I agree with, you know, with quite a lot of what you guys are saying, actually.
Matthew:Yeah. So I am less enthusiastic after the kick start the quick start, I should say Yeah. Than I was beforehand. I'm still backing it. Mhmm.
Matthew:And I'm backing it for the deluxe edition partly because as it's turned out, Corviola's changed my life. I don't know whether you noticed.
Dave:Well, like likewise.
Matthew:Yeah. Yeah. And definitely changed yours Yeah. Which is why you're a lot poorer now than you were before.
Dave:Yeah. Victoria Ollis has made me a poor man. Although I'm not. I'm I'm I'm I'm fine. I'm very well off.
Matthew:So, yeah, I feel it's part of our heritage. And it would be churlish of me not to back it. But being brutally honest, just between you and me, Dave, let's not tell any of our listeners this. Yeah.
Dave:Keep your voice up. I am
Matthew:possibly less inclined to play it. Mhmm. Actually. I'm Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew:But there's a thing that I think you're possibly going to say when I let you speak, and I'll let you say that first. So it doesn't look like I've nicked your ideas, but I agree with that thing. Meanwhile, though, I think fundamentally, we have to realise, and I think I touched upon this in the conversation, but I I may not have said it very well. What I mean to say is there are at least 1500 people who batched the first edition who probably feel this isn't my Coriolis. And that's fine.
Matthew:I think they're allowed to think that. I think partly that's what I feel as well. But that was our Coriolis, and we are part of that really exclusive bunch of people who believed in it back then before Free League was famous. And, frankly, they've only become famous now because of this podcast. Let's be frank.
Matthew:We know we we now now as of today, there are 5,000 Wow. 159 people who have batched The Great Dark, which is more people than the 1500 who bat that first one. And I don't know how many copies of Coriolis, freely sold in the intervening 5 or 6 years. But I wonder whether it's even as many as that 5,000 number of the great art that's being sold now. So the audience for Coriolis the 3rd Horizon, which I think might be, well, for me was a far more inspiring game, literally, because this podcast wouldn't exist.
Matthew:We wouldn't be sitting here now talking
Douglas:to each other
Matthew:like this without that game inspiring us to do so.
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:You know, okay. So that's this game isn't gonna inspire us perhaps as much as that game did. That's fine. That has happened and nothing takes what has happened away from that. It still exists.
Matthew:It doesn't exist in print. Do I wish that they would do some more offset prints of it? No. I've got a copy. I've got, you know
Douglas:Well, I
Matthew:could guess anyway.
Dave:I do simply because, I would like another copy because my my version is a bit dog dog eared and, you know, threadbare now. And I very nearly bought myself a new copy of Dragon Meat 2 years ago, 3 years ago, whenever it was. And I didn't. I ended up buying it for that kid who couldn't afford it, if you remember.
Matthew:Oh, god. Yes. You did.
Dave:Yeah. I hope he's been enjoying it.
Matthew:Yeah.
Dave:But so I would like a nice fresh copy that isn't gonna fall apart if I run another campaign with it, which I'm which I'm planning to at some point.
Matthew:But I
Dave:think, I mean, it's it's interesting. I mean, you say I mean, you know, the free league figures for their kickstarter now are again, you know, 5,000 backers is impressive. But if you go back to 2017 2016, whenever the the previous kickstarter was, you know, they made what 1500 backers you said? Yeah. At a time at a time when their fan base is probably 50 times smaller than it is today or even a 100 times smaller.
Dave:So it's it's done super well, but I think there's still something in there about how well Coriolis did back in the day relatively speaking. Yeah. I mean, I I I love old Coriolis for, you know, the way they
Matthew:1900. More like 2,000 backers. Actually, that original campaign. I just went back and looked.
Dave:And maybe that makes it even more impressive considering, you know, this this was pre alien. This was pre, you know Yeah. All of that stuff.
Matthew:This was only effectively their second game. I mean Yeah.
Dave:But yeah. After Mutant. Yeah.
Matthew:The title is the RPG from the games, from the makers of Mutant Year 0. Yeah.
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:That's that's the only claim to fame they had back then.
Dave:Yeah. You know, so I think that shows how well Coriolis did back in the day. Yeah. I'm I'm obviously, I've backed the great dark. I'm not, you know, I'm not gonna cancel my my pledge for for all the reasons that you said.
Dave:And, you know, you know, I wanna keep an open mind, and I may well run it one day. But I think it is like I say, it's not it's not it's not my Coriolis, as you know, as you said. So, I'm interested to see. I'm still intrigued by it, actually, as to how it would play. If it ends up being just like a a simba room in space, then I'm probably less interested than I might have otherwise been.
Dave:But I'm gonna try and keep an open mind and, yeah. I've I've backed it out.
Matthew:But it won't be a symbol room because for a start, it doesn't use a d 20.
Dave:Well, you know what I mean though. I mean, you know, there are there are there are definite parallels between how they are presenting, the great dark and what, you know, the the tagline for Simba Room is. So Yeah. And I enjoyed Simba Room. And I you know, actually, that was really you know, the the short campaign that we had, we ran was a lot of fun.
Dave:I really enjoyed it. But yeah. Yeah.
Douglas:Yeah.
Matthew:Yeah. And that's an interesting thing. I again, I I feel so I think on the print side, I think it would be lovely if they did a print on demand thing through drive through so that people could get printed copies. It wouldn't be as good as the offset. But if it's possible to do that, I think that would go a long way to making people happier
Dave:Yeah. I agree.
Matthew:About, the 3rd horizon not being developed anymore. But I think it's funny. People almost seem to be a slightly schizophrenic, their attitudes to wanting Free League to develop Coriolis. Because what Free League have said is, it's yours now. We're gonna do a licence and anybody can make stuff.
Matthew:You and I can make stuff. We could Yeah. We could, you know and we can we can fashion the 3rd horizon for now on the way that we as players wanna see it go on. Now, you know, a lot of players are saying, oh, but I want Free League to make stuff. I want official stuff.
Matthew:But at the same time, people are saying the same voice, oh, I didn't think the last couple of bits of the campaign was very good.
Dave:Were very good.
Matthew:Yeah. I know. You you
Dave:didn't you didn't
Douglas:quite get it.
Matthew:And they've they spoiled the 3rd horizon and, you know, they changed it in a way I didn't want to change it. And I'm thinking, well, you know, either either you want them to do canon stuff that you wanna follow or you wanna play in your own horizon. Well, you can still play the the advantage of this is and the the thing I thought you were gonna say, which you haven't actually worded, so now I'm gonna say it to remind you that you'd already told me this is Sure. This campaign for Coriolis, The Great Dark has inspired you to revisit Coriolis, The Third Horizon Yeah.
Dave:Absolutely. And
Matthew:your gang are thinking about doing a new Coriolis in 3rd Horizon campaign. And good on you is what I say, and that's probably I mean, I'm all about Tales of the Old West now. I can always I I always don't want to play any other game apart from Tales 0 because I'm enjoying it so I no. That's not fair. I enjoyed running,
Dave:Forbidden Lands. Yeah. That was great.
Matthew:Forbidden Lands. Yes, Dave. Right. But, yes, I can imagine myself returning to Coriolis The Third Horizon before returning to Coriolis The Great Dark.
Dave:Yeah. And I agree. And I think, you know, my you know, when I mentioned it to to to the couple of guys at our club, they both went, hell, yeah. We'll definitely play that again. And then they commented how much well, actually, that one of them said that the Spectra Corsair campaign was probably the best campaign he's ever played in, which is, you know, brilliant to hear.
Dave:And it was great fun. I loved running it. So, yeah, so I I would I would go back to Coriolis before Mercy of the Icons, so none of that happens in my Coriolis world. Because I, you know
Matthew:Yeah. And you can note that. You know, that is the beauty of Yeah. You know, and if that was seriously the best campaign he's ever played in, then maybe you we we we've got a publishing company there. Maybe when we when we got Toto out through the door, maybe you should be writing that up.
Matthew:We publish that. Yeah. Because we can. Because there's gonna be a licence for it. And if it's the best campaign people have played in, then it may actually be quite good.
Matthew:I I think he's wrong. Probably, that bloke. Oh, he's had a very disappointing life. But but still still, you know, that is the that is the opportunity that Free League have given not just you and I,
Dave:but
Matthew:everyone out there. Yeah. And to yeah. And to focus on we're gonna do the furtherizing before all that shit with the mercy of the icons. Yeah.
Matthew:Absolutely fine. Yeah.
Dave:That that's cool. Right. We've rabbited on, mate. I think we probably
Matthew:ought to
Dave:call it a call it a day for today. You have things to do. I have sofa to go and sleep on because I got up so early, and dogs to walk and stuff. So, next time. Now last time, you promised to do some kind of analysis, didn't you, on critical effects tables.
Dave:Yeah.
Matthew:And by God, I'm glad that I didn't do that. Because of course, one thing they've changed in the quick starter is the
Dave:is the crystal.
Matthew:It's the quick triple deck table. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which was pretty damn deadly before.
Matthew:That might be fun to have a look at that still and see the changes in that one. But yeah, next time we will bring you that promised critical effect analysis from all the year zero games. So so, yes, I'll do that next time.
Dave:Excellent. Good stuff. Cool then. Alright then. Without anything else to say, happy Easter everybody, whenever you're listening to this.
Matthew:Yes. It's Easter day as you're recording this.
Dave:It is.
Matthew:It may well still be Easter day where you are when this comes out.
Dave:So it's, goodbye from me.
Matthew:And it's goodbye from him.
Dave:And may the icons bless your adventures. You have been listening to the effect podcast presented by Fiction Suit and the RPG gods. Music stars on a black sea used with permission of freely publishing.