Running Cosmic Dark

I want to talk about the Changed score, the tracking of how your character is affected by the weirdness of space, however, first I should probably explain a bit about the game.

Characters have an occupation that are tied to the scenario. (Cosmic Dark comes with 5 scenarios and “Extraction” is the first.) In “Extraction,” the occupations of the PCs, referred to as employees, are Medical Officer, Mining Engineer, Geologist, Communications Officer, and Team Leader. In Cosmic Dark, each character has one stat: Their Changed score (in Cthulhu Dark its their Insanity score.)

To do things, players roll one to three dice:

• Investigating or doing? Roll a die (the Reality die in Cosmic Dark).
• Is it related to your occupation? Add a die (the Specialism die in Cosmic Dark)
• Willing to risk body and/or mind? Add a die (the Changed die in Cosmic Dark)

How well you do depends on the highest die roll. There’s slight variations to Cosmic Dark and Cthulhu Dark regarding how you interpret the higher rolls. In Cosmic Dark, while investigating, a 4 gets you all the information that you can learn. A 5 gets you a “record” from the company’s database that adds to the mystery or sets up for the horror. And a 6 gives you a glimpse into greater reality, a glimpse of the cosmic horror.

If you roll the Changed die and it is 1) the highest die, and 2), higher than your Changed score, you score goes up by 1 point. At Changed 6, your character is out: in capacitated, insane, dead, whatever is narratively appropriate.

Players are also encouraged to roll a Changed die any time they think their character is emotionally or mentally disturbed or physically harmed. And, again, if the Changed die is higher than your employee’s Changed score, your score goes up. And, of course, from the start the setting for “Exaltation” is unsettling. It’s low-key at first, but the employees encounter weird as soon as they step off their shuttle.

GMs are encouraged to ask players if they want to roll a Changed die as a way of reminding them that’s a thing to do, but players get to choose when they do so. As a player, deciding when my employee would be disturbed enough to roll was fun. I leaned into it, and, unsurprisingly, my character was the first to reach Changed 6. As a player and as a GM, it’s a lot of fun watching the other players go through the same decisions, and how they justify not rolling the Changed die. Some players explain how they brush something off or how they didn’t see what they saw. Others role-play denial. In the game Graham ran, I believe one character tried to shut out the world through media. In the first time I ran Cosmic Dark, a character hooked into a virtual realty game. Eventually, things happened and they had to engage with the world and other employees around them.

I really like Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold, both of which draw heavily on the basic Cthulhu Dark mechanics, and I’ve run both more than I have Cosmic Dark (those who know my love of Cthulhiana will likely be surprised to learn I’ve never run Cthulhu Dark — I will, I promise), but Ruin (the Trophy games’ version of the Insanity or Changed stat) and Ruin rolls in the Trophy games doesn’t involve a player evaluating the weirdness or horror of the moment. If you choose to do something risky, you automatically include a Ruin die.

Again, what I really like about how Cthulhu Dark and Cosmic Dark handle the Insanity/Changed score is that players decide when they make that roll. A lot of role-play just emerges as you feel your way through that choice, and as you watch and interact with other characters as their players role-play or explain why their character isn’t making the roll.

1. You can download the original two-page version of Cthulhu Dark for free. ↩︎