AUGUST 2, 2024
by Keaira
<aside> đ This is my contribution to Autocratikâs event happening during the month of August aimed to talk more about the hobby of table top roleplaying games.
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Somewhere at start of last year I had an idea that was a long coming - one that connected two of my favorite hobbies, TTRPGs and Excel tables - I made a statistics sheet for all my RPG sessions. And watching the number of sessions fill the cells, the pie charts gaining colourful slices representing different systems, is wonderful.
The last entry in the table is the answer to todayâs RPGaDay prompt - Coriolis RPG with its Mercy of the Icons campaign, played on Raspy Raven discord - a community led by our GM (@jwmuk.bsky.social).
Coriolis: The Third Horizon (by Free League Publishing) is a sci-fi game I stumbled upon by accident and then ordered everything Coriolis-related that the site had to offer, from the gorgeous Core Rulebook to the pack of cards with Icons on them. Not knowing what exactly this universe is about, or whether this system even fits my player taste, spoiled by rules-light GMless indies, I jumped head first into the vast complicated lore of the Third Horizon.
Yes, the lore. The Firstborn, the Zenithians, the Portal Wars, the taboo of the Dark Between the Stars, the Consortium ruling the Coriolis station and the merciful Icons guarding every step (and every dice roll). The lore may be the blessing and the curse of this game. Not based on any known IP, as many of Free League other games, the game is often described as Arabian Nights in space luring people to try it, and then hurling them into the tangled web of factions, beliefs, star systems, portals and the mythology, impossible to explain in an one shot. In a campaign on the other handâŚ
And thatâs where my most recently played game comes in. Our GM does wonderful job uncovering the politics and the spiritual world slowly, introducing the factions where it matters, keeping the mystery alive and the atmosphere of mysticism ever-present. And it works. With proper and house-ruled session 0, that added character creation elements of Robin D. Lawsâs DramaSystem as explained by Alexandrian, we created a relationship map, that would make soap opera writers green with envy - but more importantly, it gave the full party of 6 people (even after new player replaced other) a good base for roleplaying and a good understanding of their crewmates.
Since that moment maybe two years ago, when I went on Coriolis shopping spree, I learned how the mechanics work and I know now, that for a person like me, whose favorite combat system is âone-roll-and-doneâ Yellow King RPG, the combat in Coriolis is a nightmare. It is tactics based and âold-schoolâ. But it does not matter at all, because the engaging story, world and the party of weirdos - from the flashy pilot, who spends crewâs last money on the coolest grav bike, to the captain who would do anything to prove a point to his husband - matter much more.
Day 3 â>