Cosmic Dark

Cosmic Dark: Character Creation

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You can read more about Cosmic Dark in this earlier post about running the game.

In Graham Walmsley’s not-yet-released Cosmic Dark, a weird space horror game based on the ruleset of his earlier Cthulhu Dark, character creation is almost entirely done through role-play. The one thing not established through role-play is a character’s occupation — their Specialism in the language of the game — which is defined by the role they’ve been trained for by the mega-corporation the character employees work for. As an example, in the introductory scenario “Extraction,” the employee specialisms are Medical Officer, Mining Engineer, Geologist, Communications Officer, and Team Leader.

Players choose their character by responding to the intercom page as their shuttle is descending to the asteroid they’ll spend the next year mining. The GM asks the medical officer to respond, and repeats the request until someone does. They’re the medical officer. These specialisms are defined by the scenario.

Likewise, as I explain in the earlier post, each character has only one stat: Their Changed score, which starts at 1.

So, how are the characters developed? Through role-play flashbacks. After the players quickly define their home planet upon which they all grew up together, each character gets two brief scenes. The GM sets up the scene and asks the players to play it out. For example, two characters, I imagine them as tweens in this scene, are in the school yard, and one says to the other, “You know what I’m better at than you?” and then the GM turns it over to the two players.

It’s simple and quick, but it establishes parameters about who these characters are and what their relationships to each other are. Having played a PC employee and run three separate games, this is enough character development to let the players play those characters who, of course, further develop through the course of the scenario. (Or campaign if you run all five scenarios as a campaign.)

As I’m writing this, I realize — I can’t believe I haven’t made this connection before — that Graham has designed Cosmic Dark on the Forget the Tavern twin principles of starting the game in media res and with a shared group history. The twin principles are obvious solutions to common problems for anyone who thinks about the challenges of starting a campaign, and I note in the start of that series, they’re ideas I stole from others.

Running Cosmic Dark

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I’m currently between sessions running Cosmic Dark, the 4th time I’ve run a Cosmic Dark scenario, and the third time I’ve run the introductory scenario “Extraction.” I had the great pleasure of being a play tester for “Extraction” which Graham ran in June 2023, and I’ve gotten access to the game piecemeal by supporting his Patreon account.

Cosmic Dark is Graham Whalmsley‘s not-yet-published weird space horror game based on his Cthulhu Dark ruleset.1 The mechanics for Cosmic Dark and Cthulhu Dark are simple in a really-rules-light sort of way.

A person in a sapce suit standing on a violet asteroid. In the background are a large celestial body (planet) and a number of smaller ones.

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. ↩︎