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Those Dark Places: Industrial Science Fiction Roleplaying
A science fiction roleplaying game of exploration, isolation, and survival in a dark and dangerous universe.
Space is a hell of a thing but you need to be sure that this is what you want. Like, what you really want. The idea of space exploration to further the frontiers of mankind is noble, but let's not kid ourselves--it’s really all about furthering the profit margins. There’s money to be made and out there is the place to make it, but you hear all kinds of stories… equipment malfunctions, strange discoveries, crewmembers going insane... You'll be out there in the reaches, alone, for months or years, breathing recycled air and drinking recycled water, with nothing but a few feet of metal and shielding between you and certain death.
Are you sure this is what you want?
– Crew Orientation Briefing
***
Those Dark Places is a rules-light, story-focused roleplaying game about the darker side of space exploration and the people who travel the stars in claustrophobic, dangerous conditions. Starships, stations, and outposts aren't havens of safety with clean, brightly lit corridors--they're potential deathtraps, funded by budget-conscious corporate interests and running on stale, recycled air and water. The stars may be the future of humanity, but they are also home to horrors and terror the human mind cannot comprehend.
Space is a hell of a thing but you need to be sure that this is what you want. Like, what you really want. The idea of space exploration to further the frontiers of mankind is noble, but let's not kid ourselves--it’s really all about furthering the profit margins. There’s money to be made and out there is the place to make it, but you hear all kinds of stories… equipment malfunctions, strange discoveries, crewmembers going insane... You'll be out there in the reaches, alone, for months or years, breathing recycled air and drinking recycled water, with nothing but a few feet of metal and shielding between you and certain death.
Are you sure this is what you want?
– Crew Orientation Briefing
***
Those Dark Places is a rules-light, story-focused roleplaying game about the darker side of space exploration and the people who travel the stars in claustrophobic, dangerous conditions. Starships, stations, and outposts aren't havens of safety with clean, brightly lit corridors--they're potential deathtraps, funded by budget-conscious corporate interests and running on stale, recycled air and water. The stars may be the future of humanity, but they are also home to horrors and terror the human mind cannot comprehend.
128 pages, Hardcover
Published November 24, 2020
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35 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 4, 2021
Those Dark Places is one of those games I picked up because of the evocative cover art. Love that look of a sinister but humanoid figure reflected in the glass of a space helmet. I also like my sci-fi gritty and Those Dark Places bills itself as an "Industrial Science Fiction" game.
So, what does that mean? It means that space is not the domain of noble-bright explorers. It is the domain of corporations and their peons. Ships are utilitarian. Their designs are boxy, almost ugly. Corridors are cramped. Technology looks like it came out of a 70s Sci-fi movie because it's easy and cheap to repair. People are left in the cold dark reaches of space for years at a time with little company, living on stale recycled air and food. It takes a toll.
The setting has a dirty working-class feel to it but in the desire to have an implied setting it leaves out a lot of things that I think should have been more concretely stated. It kind of feels like it's an attempt to de-politicize it. Like, everything on the ship is done to cut costs. Time dilation in the setting has been solved so it's barely noticed. But 'coldsleep' is still used for any travel longer than a couple weeks. Why? Well, not having to feed and entertain the crew saves power. But the book doesn't really comment on the existential horror of 'coldsleeping' literal years of your life away. Crewmembers work 25 years to retirement and jobs for transient Dusters may take only days each meaning that the bulk of those 25 years will be spent in suspended animation to save the corp money. That's horrifying. A lot of the dread results from badly maintained equipment designed to save money more than keep people operational. Employees are tools to be used up and discarded. When things go bad, the corp wants it covered up. One example in the book is an environmental failure that results in the poisoning of a station administrator who then goes mad and kills a lot of the crew before being killed herself by internal security. "Gosh, these people need a union" I hear you say. The book mentions that they, apparently, have one. I would have preferred there be a mention that they don't have a union because saying one exists but allows this to continue begs the question, "What the hell does the Union do in this setting?" and it's kinda insulting to real-world labor organizers. The corps have a monopoly on space. Of course they'd lobby for laws making it illegal for space workers to unionize. It's easy. And disappointingly believable.
The game system is simple and each player needs only a single D6. There's some basic additive bonuses involved. Nothing fancy almost a pared down version of a PbtA system. It does also have a pressure system which is where things get neat. When the player character receives a shock (seeing a dead body, being in the cold vacuum of space, etc) the roll a pressure roll. If failed they check off a pressure box and make an episode roll. If that fails (and the more pressure rolls that are failed the more likely it becomes) they go in to a psychotic episode. The real neat thing is that the exact cause for the breakdown must be determined and sticks around as a permanent phobia for the character. If it was the tight bulkhead they were in, then you might be claustrophobic. The game promises 'narrative' mechanics but doesn't really have any, not in the way it's generally understood. This isn't a story-driven game, it's pretty firmly rooted in the tradgame genre.
I do like how it leaves some things up in the air. Are there aliens? Maybe. Officially no extraterrestrial life has been found bigger than a bacterium but unofficially there are stories. If you want aliens, go for it. The game is already shooting for a mood like Alien without Xenomorphs to begin with. Writing stories for it would likely be easy. Imagine all the working parts of a space ship or station. Now something goes wrong or breaks. Then accelerate months or years to when the PCs show up. You can run more pedestrian adventures but the promise of industrial horror does kind of mandate that things go wrong.
There is no leveling-up or improvement. Healing pressure is extremely difficult. However the 25-year limit (with much of that time spent in suspended animation) does give a natural campaign arc with an ending. You don't feel triumphant, probably. You feel like you survived. Combat is extremely, perhaps ludicrously, lethal with many weapons capable of killing a PC in one or two hits. The game also has a method for injuries hurting combat effectiveness as strength, the ability score used for melee, is also your HP and decreases with damage. That's kind of neat and it models injury without being overly complicated.
The interior art is.. ok. It's kind of pedestrian, honestly. I like the utilitarian ship designs. But the interior art just doesn't live up to the promise of the cover. The book has stylized itself as an in-character hiring seminar (and technically game sessions are 'simulations' for prospective employees) and this is likely the reason for the relatively boring interior art but I like thematic cohesion. The interior is trying to be illustrative "This is what it actually looks like in the setting" but I like my RPG art evocative and the interior of this book is a huge disappointment. It could have gone a long way towards backing up the promises of the gameplay and the cover art but it just.. doesn't. The game tells us that ship interiors are, in fact, quite badly lit to save money. Show me that!
The game engine is neat and working class sci-fi is fantastic, especially if you can unify it with anti-corporate themes. I think I'll still enjoy running it. I'll just have to find some supplemental art on the internet to show the players.
So, what does that mean? It means that space is not the domain of noble-bright explorers. It is the domain of corporations and their peons. Ships are utilitarian. Their designs are boxy, almost ugly. Corridors are cramped. Technology looks like it came out of a 70s Sci-fi movie because it's easy and cheap to repair. People are left in the cold dark reaches of space for years at a time with little company, living on stale recycled air and food. It takes a toll.
The setting has a dirty working-class feel to it but in the desire to have an implied setting it leaves out a lot of things that I think should have been more concretely stated. It kind of feels like it's an attempt to de-politicize it. Like, everything on the ship is done to cut costs. Time dilation in the setting has been solved so it's barely noticed. But 'coldsleep' is still used for any travel longer than a couple weeks. Why? Well, not having to feed and entertain the crew saves power. But the book doesn't really comment on the existential horror of 'coldsleeping' literal years of your life away. Crewmembers work 25 years to retirement and jobs for transient Dusters may take only days each meaning that the bulk of those 25 years will be spent in suspended animation to save the corp money. That's horrifying. A lot of the dread results from badly maintained equipment designed to save money more than keep people operational. Employees are tools to be used up and discarded. When things go bad, the corp wants it covered up. One example in the book is an environmental failure that results in the poisoning of a station administrator who then goes mad and kills a lot of the crew before being killed herself by internal security. "Gosh, these people need a union" I hear you say. The book mentions that they, apparently, have one. I would have preferred there be a mention that they don't have a union because saying one exists but allows this to continue begs the question, "What the hell does the Union do in this setting?" and it's kinda insulting to real-world labor organizers. The corps have a monopoly on space. Of course they'd lobby for laws making it illegal for space workers to unionize. It's easy. And disappointingly believable.
The game system is simple and each player needs only a single D6. There's some basic additive bonuses involved. Nothing fancy almost a pared down version of a PbtA system. It does also have a pressure system which is where things get neat. When the player character receives a shock (seeing a dead body, being in the cold vacuum of space, etc) the roll a pressure roll. If failed they check off a pressure box and make an episode roll. If that fails (and the more pressure rolls that are failed the more likely it becomes) they go in to a psychotic episode. The real neat thing is that the exact cause for the breakdown must be determined and sticks around as a permanent phobia for the character. If it was the tight bulkhead they were in, then you might be claustrophobic. The game promises 'narrative' mechanics but doesn't really have any, not in the way it's generally understood. This isn't a story-driven game, it's pretty firmly rooted in the tradgame genre.
I do like how it leaves some things up in the air. Are there aliens? Maybe. Officially no extraterrestrial life has been found bigger than a bacterium but unofficially there are stories. If you want aliens, go for it. The game is already shooting for a mood like Alien without Xenomorphs to begin with. Writing stories for it would likely be easy. Imagine all the working parts of a space ship or station. Now something goes wrong or breaks. Then accelerate months or years to when the PCs show up. You can run more pedestrian adventures but the promise of industrial horror does kind of mandate that things go wrong.
There is no leveling-up or improvement. Healing pressure is extremely difficult. However the 25-year limit (with much of that time spent in suspended animation) does give a natural campaign arc with an ending. You don't feel triumphant, probably. You feel like you survived. Combat is extremely, perhaps ludicrously, lethal with many weapons capable of killing a PC in one or two hits. The game also has a method for injuries hurting combat effectiveness as strength, the ability score used for melee, is also your HP and decreases with damage. That's kind of neat and it models injury without being overly complicated.
The interior art is.. ok. It's kind of pedestrian, honestly. I like the utilitarian ship designs. But the interior art just doesn't live up to the promise of the cover. The book has stylized itself as an in-character hiring seminar (and technically game sessions are 'simulations' for prospective employees) and this is likely the reason for the relatively boring interior art but I like thematic cohesion. The interior is trying to be illustrative "This is what it actually looks like in the setting" but I like my RPG art evocative and the interior of this book is a huge disappointment. It could have gone a long way towards backing up the promises of the gameplay and the cover art but it just.. doesn't. The game tells us that ship interiors are, in fact, quite badly lit to save money. Show me that!
The game engine is neat and working class sci-fi is fantastic, especially if you can unify it with anti-corporate themes. I think I'll still enjoy running it. I'll just have to find some supplemental art on the internet to show the players.
December 30, 2020
Those Dark Places is my third roleplaying game purchase from Osprey Publishing's roleplaying line. The previous books - Romance of the Perilous Lands and Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades - have been fantastic and both gave me the GM tingles that means I'd like to get them to the table. I came to this with high hopes but finished the book disappointed.
TL;DR: I found Those Dark Places disappointing. It looks gorgeous, but the style of the text is Marmite; you'll either love it or hate it. I had a visceral reaction against the way it is written in the style of a darkly-humorous in-game artefact. My view is that the exposition of games rules should be clear, easy to parse and unambiguous; this is not the case here. The game mechanics are buried in waffle which acts as a barrier to the transfer of information. The actual setting information is bland and vague, and very little of it acts as a hook that makes me - as a GM - want to build on it. The mission type descriptions are nebulous and don't provide structure or any real hooks. The game is a big miss for me, failing to excite or engage.
Those Dark Places was inspired by the movies Alien, Outland, Silent Running, Blade Runner and Moon. All movies I love. The book is a 128-page hardback, presented with distinctive artwork mainly using black and white with a signature colour (red, blue, orange...) dependent upon the scene portrayed. I really love the way that this looks. There's a 45-page player section, with the remainder of the book being dedicated to the 'Game Monitor'.
The rules are incredibly simple (although it's fair to say that Fria Ligan's Alien game is not significantly more complex). You roll a six-sided dice and add an attribute (ranged from 1 to 4). If you have an appropriate crew position, you can add +1 or +2 depending on how strong it is. Success is achieved if you roll 7 or more. In some circumstances, this may be reduced to a target number of 6 or increased to 8. If you are in opposition to someone, you roll an opposed roll where you look for the highest roll instead.
There are four attributes; Charisma, Agility, Strength and Education. Your CASE numbers. You have scores of 1 through 4 which you assign as you prefer across them. Bear in mind that an attribute of 1 will only succeed on a roll of 6.
The players between them form a crew, each of which is trained to cover two positions on a crew; Helm, Navigation, Science, Security, Liason, Engineering and Medical. You will get one as your primary and the other as your secondary (the primary is your day-job, and gives you +2 for rolls).
Combat is simple - initiative order is decided with an Agility attribute roll. Hand-to-Hand is resolved with opposed rolls based on Strength. Ranged with an Agility roll based on the range of the target. Surprise affects the damage mechanic (automatically maxing rolls out). Damage is taken off the strength attribute. Unarmed causes 1 point, hand weapons typically 2 points, and firearms can cause up to 5 points. Once you get above a single point of damage, you roll a D6 to see how much damage you cause, with the weaponś maximum damage acting as a cap. If your Strength is reduced to zero, you're unconscious, and you die if your strength drops to -2.
There's also a sanity/panic mechanic called pressure. You have a pressure bonus, which is the sum of your Strength and Education. A character can be asked to make a pressure roll when confronted with something incredibly stressful. You roll D6 and add you pressure bonus, looking for 10 or more. If you fail your pressure level goes up by 1. Once you hit pressure level 2 then you roll a D6; if it's less than your pressure level, you suffer an episode, which results in a roll on a table which can reduce attributes or trip you into freezing or fleeing. The severity of the roll is capped by the pressure level you're at.
The book describes the usual form of a mission; you've signed up for a 25-year tour, a good part of which will be spent in LongSleep as you travel between the stars. If you get a bonus from a job, it usually reduces the time before you can retire. Your aim is to survive.
The Game Monitor's section expands with some more detail on the attributes and positions and has a good worked example of play. It suggests that the characters could be part of a Deep Space Support Team (DSST or 'Dusters'), corporate troubleshooters assigned to resolve issues. The basic crew position needs for such a team are described, followed by some fluff descriptions of ships, outposts and stations which use a lot of words for little content. Different types of simulations (missions) are described. There's good stuff here but it's buried in the same way. There are basic rules for NPCs and synthetic automatons (like Ash in Alien, or a replicant in Blade Runner).
The book rounds out with a sample scenario outline - The Argent III Report. This sends the characters off on a retrieval mission for Cambridge-Wallace Inc, nearly 12 light-years away from Earth. They're sent to the Proycon system to recover an engineering team who have been decommissioning an old orbital station. It's a straightforward and reasonably linear scenario which should serve as a simple introduction.
The last two pages include some of the key references for the book. Herein lies the rub; if you added two or three short lines in for the rolling mechanics, you'd have the whole game mechanically on two pages. You could add character generation and mission points on a second sheet of paper and it would be spot on.
The book also suffers from some annoying typos, only a few but they really grated with me. The reference section headings talks of 'FRIENDS AND ENIMIES' and CO2 is consistently misspelt as CO2. The former is a basic, albeit annoying, failure on proofing. The latter is grating in a hard SF adjacent game and setting.
I found Those Dark Places disappointing. It looks gorgeous, but the style of the text is Marmite; you'll either love it or hate it. I had a visceral reaction against the way it is written in the style of a darkly-humorous in-game artefact. My view is that the exposition of games rules should be clear, easy to parse and unambiguous; this is not the case here. The game mechanics are buried in waffle which acts as a barrier to the transfer of information. The actual setting information is bland and vague, and very little of it acts as a hook that makes me - as a GM - want to build on it. The mission type descriptions are nebulous and don't provide structure or any real hooks. The game is a big miss for me, failing to excite or engage.
I'm probably in the target audience here; I love the films it's built around, I love the genre of science-fiction and I'm a fan of focused, simple, narrative games. I think it fails for me because it isn't focused; it's opaque and the background material is opaque. I'd hoped for a cross between The Sprawl and Electric Bastionland but ended up with something hugely different. The game system is fine, and I'm sure would power a fun game, but the other hundred-or-so pages fail to ignite my imagination.
Edit: On further reflection, I think I know what really jarred about the tone; the book claims Alien, Outland, Silent Running, Blade Runner and Moon as key influences, but it is written more in the tone of a corporate from Aliens. The company was faceless, uncaring and distant in the movies cited, whereas here it's wisecracking and darkly humorous.
30 December 2020
TL;DR: I found Those Dark Places disappointing. It looks gorgeous, but the style of the text is Marmite; you'll either love it or hate it. I had a visceral reaction against the way it is written in the style of a darkly-humorous in-game artefact. My view is that the exposition of games rules should be clear, easy to parse and unambiguous; this is not the case here. The game mechanics are buried in waffle which acts as a barrier to the transfer of information. The actual setting information is bland and vague, and very little of it acts as a hook that makes me - as a GM - want to build on it. The mission type descriptions are nebulous and don't provide structure or any real hooks. The game is a big miss for me, failing to excite or engage.
Those Dark Places was inspired by the movies Alien, Outland, Silent Running, Blade Runner and Moon. All movies I love. The book is a 128-page hardback, presented with distinctive artwork mainly using black and white with a signature colour (red, blue, orange...) dependent upon the scene portrayed. I really love the way that this looks. There's a 45-page player section, with the remainder of the book being dedicated to the 'Game Monitor'.
The rules are incredibly simple (although it's fair to say that Fria Ligan's Alien game is not significantly more complex). You roll a six-sided dice and add an attribute (ranged from 1 to 4). If you have an appropriate crew position, you can add +1 or +2 depending on how strong it is. Success is achieved if you roll 7 or more. In some circumstances, this may be reduced to a target number of 6 or increased to 8. If you are in opposition to someone, you roll an opposed roll where you look for the highest roll instead.
There are four attributes; Charisma, Agility, Strength and Education. Your CASE numbers. You have scores of 1 through 4 which you assign as you prefer across them. Bear in mind that an attribute of 1 will only succeed on a roll of 6.
The players between them form a crew, each of which is trained to cover two positions on a crew; Helm, Navigation, Science, Security, Liason, Engineering and Medical. You will get one as your primary and the other as your secondary (the primary is your day-job, and gives you +2 for rolls).
Combat is simple - initiative order is decided with an Agility attribute roll. Hand-to-Hand is resolved with opposed rolls based on Strength. Ranged with an Agility roll based on the range of the target. Surprise affects the damage mechanic (automatically maxing rolls out). Damage is taken off the strength attribute. Unarmed causes 1 point, hand weapons typically 2 points, and firearms can cause up to 5 points. Once you get above a single point of damage, you roll a D6 to see how much damage you cause, with the weaponś maximum damage acting as a cap. If your Strength is reduced to zero, you're unconscious, and you die if your strength drops to -2.
There's also a sanity/panic mechanic called pressure. You have a pressure bonus, which is the sum of your Strength and Education. A character can be asked to make a pressure roll when confronted with something incredibly stressful. You roll D6 and add you pressure bonus, looking for 10 or more. If you fail your pressure level goes up by 1. Once you hit pressure level 2 then you roll a D6; if it's less than your pressure level, you suffer an episode, which results in a roll on a table which can reduce attributes or trip you into freezing or fleeing. The severity of the roll is capped by the pressure level you're at.
The book describes the usual form of a mission; you've signed up for a 25-year tour, a good part of which will be spent in LongSleep as you travel between the stars. If you get a bonus from a job, it usually reduces the time before you can retire. Your aim is to survive.
The Game Monitor's section expands with some more detail on the attributes and positions and has a good worked example of play. It suggests that the characters could be part of a Deep Space Support Team (DSST or 'Dusters'), corporate troubleshooters assigned to resolve issues. The basic crew position needs for such a team are described, followed by some fluff descriptions of ships, outposts and stations which use a lot of words for little content. Different types of simulations (missions) are described. There's good stuff here but it's buried in the same way. There are basic rules for NPCs and synthetic automatons (like Ash in Alien, or a replicant in Blade Runner).
The book rounds out with a sample scenario outline - The Argent III Report. This sends the characters off on a retrieval mission for Cambridge-Wallace Inc, nearly 12 light-years away from Earth. They're sent to the Proycon system to recover an engineering team who have been decommissioning an old orbital station. It's a straightforward and reasonably linear scenario which should serve as a simple introduction.
The last two pages include some of the key references for the book. Herein lies the rub; if you added two or three short lines in for the rolling mechanics, you'd have the whole game mechanically on two pages. You could add character generation and mission points on a second sheet of paper and it would be spot on.
The book also suffers from some annoying typos, only a few but they really grated with me. The reference section headings talks of 'FRIENDS AND ENIMIES' and CO2 is consistently misspelt as CO2. The former is a basic, albeit annoying, failure on proofing. The latter is grating in a hard SF adjacent game and setting.
I found Those Dark Places disappointing. It looks gorgeous, but the style of the text is Marmite; you'll either love it or hate it. I had a visceral reaction against the way it is written in the style of a darkly-humorous in-game artefact. My view is that the exposition of games rules should be clear, easy to parse and unambiguous; this is not the case here. The game mechanics are buried in waffle which acts as a barrier to the transfer of information. The actual setting information is bland and vague, and very little of it acts as a hook that makes me - as a GM - want to build on it. The mission type descriptions are nebulous and don't provide structure or any real hooks. The game is a big miss for me, failing to excite or engage.
I'm probably in the target audience here; I love the films it's built around, I love the genre of science-fiction and I'm a fan of focused, simple, narrative games. I think it fails for me because it isn't focused; it's opaque and the background material is opaque. I'd hoped for a cross between The Sprawl and Electric Bastionland but ended up with something hugely different. The game system is fine, and I'm sure would power a fun game, but the other hundred-or-so pages fail to ignite my imagination.
Edit: On further reflection, I think I know what really jarred about the tone; the book claims Alien, Outland, Silent Running, Blade Runner and Moon as key influences, but it is written more in the tone of a corporate from Aliens. The company was faceless, uncaring and distant in the movies cited, whereas here it's wisecracking and darkly humorous.
30 December 2020
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August 22, 2024Review of both Jonathan Hicks's Those Dark Places and Pressure.
How? Wanted to read these, needed to add something to an order for free shipping.
What? You know the movies Alien and Outland? Yeah, that's this.
It's a rules light game: characters have four attributes and a job (in Those Dark Places) or skills (in Pressure), and rolls are pretty much all 1d6+attribute+job/skill bonus vs. a target of 7. There's a "pressure" mechanic where, eventually, you might freak out.
That's about all the rules in Those Dark Places, with a few more rules re: spaceships in Pressure. So what is in most of this book/these books? There's vibes, of course, and some light discussion of setting. (There's more in Pressure about the failing Earth and the corporations that control most of humanity, and what's going on out in the planets.) And there's a little adventure in each one; special shout-out for the adventure in Pressure that has several sidebars to help the GM run them. But really, that's about it.
Yeah, so? I've said this before, but I'm really curious how the Osprey RPG team makes their decisions about what to print.
That said, I like and am frustrated by these books. I like the rules-light focus, and I immediately get what these games are about -- in part because the author really does mention Alien and Outland many, many times.
And I like the art, more so in Those Dark Places because the white-black-red color scheme really feels dreadful, whereas the white-black-blue of Pressure doesn't quite seem so scary. Perhaps that's on purpose, since, while Those Dark Places is meant to represent normal people caught in horrible situations, Pressure is meant to showcase more skilled operatives. (And yet, the skill system in Pressure is almost identical to the job-bonus system of Those Dark Places, so I don't see how the PCs of Pressure are actually all that much better.)
That said, the book is written in a very dialogic way, as if some middle manager in the future was prepping you for a job -- it actually says that the GM should read this out loud to players in character, which is.... not actually a good choice. On top of that, the split between players section and GM section might need some rethinking, especially in a rules-light story-focused game like this. That is, there's discussion in both sections about what the attributes and job/skill mean, but all that info should be part of the players section.
All of which makes me feel like this book/these books could have been rethought to maybe add some more adventures or sample monsters.
How? Wanted to read these, needed to add something to an order for free shipping.
What? You know the movies Alien and Outland? Yeah, that's this.
It's a rules light game: characters have four attributes and a job (in Those Dark Places) or skills (in Pressure), and rolls are pretty much all 1d6+attribute+job/skill bonus vs. a target of 7. There's a "pressure" mechanic where, eventually, you might freak out.
That's about all the rules in Those Dark Places, with a few more rules re: spaceships in Pressure. So what is in most of this book/these books? There's vibes, of course, and some light discussion of setting. (There's more in Pressure about the failing Earth and the corporations that control most of humanity, and what's going on out in the planets.) And there's a little adventure in each one; special shout-out for the adventure in Pressure that has several sidebars to help the GM run them. But really, that's about it.
Yeah, so? I've said this before, but I'm really curious how the Osprey RPG team makes their decisions about what to print.
That said, I like and am frustrated by these books. I like the rules-light focus, and I immediately get what these games are about -- in part because the author really does mention Alien and Outland many, many times.
And I like the art, more so in Those Dark Places because the white-black-red color scheme really feels dreadful, whereas the white-black-blue of Pressure doesn't quite seem so scary. Perhaps that's on purpose, since, while Those Dark Places is meant to represent normal people caught in horrible situations, Pressure is meant to showcase more skilled operatives. (And yet, the skill system in Pressure is almost identical to the job-bonus system of Those Dark Places, so I don't see how the PCs of Pressure are actually all that much better.)
That said, the book is written in a very dialogic way, as if some middle manager in the future was prepping you for a job -- it actually says that the GM should read this out loud to players in character, which is.... not actually a good choice. On top of that, the split between players section and GM section might need some rethinking, especially in a rules-light story-focused game like this. That is, there's discussion in both sections about what the attributes and job/skill mean, but all that info should be part of the players section.
All of which makes me feel like this book/these books could have been rethought to maybe add some more adventures or sample monsters.
April 29, 2025
At heart, this short game could have been presented on two sides of A4, but has been stretched to 128 pages with the addition of some nice, clean art and a teeth-grinding faux training officer-style presentation that made everything much more complicated to understand.
As Bilbo might put it, the game's background is "sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread." This would have been much better if more time had been spent on a straightforward guide to gamemastery and a bunch of fit-for-requirements random tables instead of the offered faux training approach. All the references to simulations also made it confusing - are you meant to run the game like simulations, or is that just a conceit for the book's format?
I'd love to see Those Dark Places condensed into something 24XX-style—something terse, focused, and brutal would be spot on to match the setting.
As Bilbo might put it, the game's background is "sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread." This would have been much better if more time had been spent on a straightforward guide to gamemastery and a bunch of fit-for-requirements random tables instead of the offered faux training approach. All the references to simulations also made it confusing - are you meant to run the game like simulations, or is that just a conceit for the book's format?
I'd love to see Those Dark Places condensed into something 24XX-style—something terse, focused, and brutal would be spot on to match the setting.
May 2, 2022
This is an exceptional, rules light science fiction role-playing game.
It is clearly written, concise, and has loads of atmosphere to it. Whilst the default setting notes are deliberately left vague, the framework for player advancement is more than enough to hang several adventures on.
Others have commented on the style used by the author to present the information, and I have to say I really enjoyed it, as it reinforced the tone of the gritty, blue collar, missions the players will likely find themselves on.
For me this book hits a real sweet spot as it requires minimum prep time, and it even comes with a nifty adventure you can use to get your players exploring the dark corners of outer space
It is clearly written, concise, and has loads of atmosphere to it. Whilst the default setting notes are deliberately left vague, the framework for player advancement is more than enough to hang several adventures on.
Others have commented on the style used by the author to present the information, and I have to say I really enjoyed it, as it reinforced the tone of the gritty, blue collar, missions the players will likely find themselves on.
For me this book hits a real sweet spot as it requires minimum prep time, and it even comes with a nifty adventure you can use to get your players exploring the dark corners of outer space
March 7, 2023
Fun, slim little book with incredible art that really captures the grimy, outdated feel of the universe (peep all those floppy drives).
There's a lot of working class science horror games right now, and they're all pretty minimal as far as the rules go. This might not be the best of the bunch, but it might be the most mechanically minimal and narrative driven. A plus for a role-playing genre that largely seeks to imitate 70s cinema more than any other specific games.
There's a lot of working class science horror games right now, and they're all pretty minimal as far as the rules go. This might not be the best of the bunch, but it might be the most mechanically minimal and narrative driven. A plus for a role-playing genre that largely seeks to imitate 70s cinema more than any other specific games.
November 6, 2021
Nice little roleplay in the dark cold space.
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