I’m taking a
momentary break from the OSR offerings to review Coriolis. For those
unfamiliar, it is a sci-fi RPG developed by the Swedish group Modiphus Entertainment, who
were behind Mutant Year Zero. I managed to pick up my copy on Free RPG
Day; my local shop went and had the hardcover core book sitting right there on
the table next to VAM! I actually asked the guy at the counter if it had
been misplaced. It wasn’t.
I should
have gone for the Dungeon Crawl Classics
hardcover instead.
Coriolis is not a good game. There are
individual pieces of it that are good, but the game as a whole is put together
atop feet of clay. I couldn’t see myself ever using it, outside of maybe taking
a few examples of its positives and utilizing that in another game.
The primary
positive I will give Coriolis is the following: It’s a game about flying
around space having adventures with a crew of colorful characters, and so the
ship and crew as a whole are the first things in setting up a game. Before
anyone gets to character generation, the group decides what kind of crew they
are going to be (merchants, explorers, pilgrims, mercenaries, etc), settles on
the group’s patron and nemesis, and chooses a group talent.
Then comes
the spaceship, and thankfully Modiphus did the spaceship part pretty okay.
The game
provides a small selection of pre-made ships, but the fun is in the
construction. Basic ship types are expanded with modules and additional
features of the builders’ choosing, with things like mechanical quirks and
shipyard of origin coming into account. This all determines how much debt the
party owes on the ship when the game starts (50% of total cost)
While I do
like the idea of debt as the driving, over-arching motivator and long-range
goal, this is about where the good ideas stop. The rest of the book has
essentially no support for the act of actually making money – no tables of
bulk-good prices, no tables for discoveries or artifacts and reward costs.
(This is as
good a time as any to say that the book does an awful job of providing DM
tools. There are tables, but they aren't incredibly helpful.)
The central
die mechanic of the game is simple and I’ve got no issues with it. Attribute +
Skill Rating = # of dice you have to roll. Success is on 6, more than one 6 is
a great success. Characters are easy to build, though customization options are
on the lower end.
I do give a
sideways glance at the system of DM intrusions (“Darkness Points”) that the
game gives the DM as determined by actions of the players, but it’s not a deal
breaker. It’s just a bit silly to me that the thing with the horrible gangrenous
mouth can only infect you if you used a specific talent or flew through space
without using the stasis tanks.
The real
deal breaker, though, is the setting. My stance on setting in RPGs is simple –
if you are going to bother publishing a setting along with your rules, make
sure your setting is worth using. It’s got to have something that catches
my eye and imagination so that I want to use it, instead of just using
the general ruleset for a world of my own devising.
The setting
of Coriolis is practically a case study in how to waste space: it
provides nothing that a decent DM could not do better with elbow grease and the
Stars
without Number planet generation tables. The creators of the game have
described it as “Arabian Nights in space” (as one can see on the blurb on the
back cover), and I have significant difficulty finding any legitimacy in that
statement.
1001
Nights is built upon the frame story of a woman using her wits and
storytelling skill to avoid getting murdered by her husband. This format could
be used (and absolutely should have been used) for this core rule book (the
mechanics section would be a bit difficult, but I’m sure someone could do it),
but the setting chapters have absolutely no excuse. Illustrating a setting
through hearsay, tall tales, spacer superstitions, news from foreign ports,
folklore, and lies that might have something beneath them, all told by a
single narrator? I adore the idea. It doesn’t happen here.
What does
happen is twofold: we are introduced to a great number of ideas that don’t get
fleshed out enough to even be evocative, and it is revealed that “Arabian
Nights in space” translates to “there are some Arabic names, and a page about
clothing, and one of the enemies is called a djinn.”
Coriolis
is Middle Eastern flavored about as much as Firefly was Chinese
flavored: not in the slightest substance beyond the superficial. It does not evoke, it pays lip service.
<Aside>
Somewhere in the ocean of unused ideas there exists a wuxia-western space opera
that sits right at the juncture of Avatar: The Last Airbender and Cowboy
Bebop and my heart aches for its absence from our cruel, merciless world.
</Aside>
It’s boring,
terribly boring. And most of it is just
that, save what I would mark as outright creative cowardice: the primary
religion of the Horizon.
Now,
I find religion in space to be a terribly interesting thing to wrestle with, especially
when dealing with the technological and cultural developments that will put
pressure on faith systems to adapt or die out. Here we have an ostensibly
Mideast–inspired setting that not only conveniently lacks Mideast religion(s), but
replaces it with something far less interesting.
We are treated to the Church of the Icons, a religion with a strong central
hierarchy that worships a nine-aspect god and has female leadership. It’s the Church of the East +
Faith of the Seven, except with nine of them, and also in space.
There’s no form of
Islam to be found, or even anything that seems to be its descendant. Jews are right out. Christianity only gets its knock-off brand.
Zoroastrians are nowhere to be seen. Yazidi? What's a Yazidi?
Any sort of meaningful conflict, discussion, or exploration of real-world
religion and culture through a fantastic lens is thrown right out the window
and they don’t even have the decency to replace it with the fun kind of space gods.
It’s boring,
it’s lazy, and it is pushed every chance it can be. If there is a focus in Coriolis, it is the Icons.
But even
then the game can’t seem to focus on an element of its setting long
enough to actually do it justice. On top of the Icons, we have the following to deal with:
- The ancient, vanished Portal Builders who leave vague, undefined ruins – nothing would be lost if the interstellar portals were naturally occurring.
- The Emissaries rising up from the depths of their gas giant to do vague, undefined things. (They get four paragraphs in the entire book, which mostly re-state each other and provide no gameable material)
- Four other intelligent alien races (who get a paragraph each, buried in the bestiary chapter, despite being character options)
- Artificial human clades (they are listed as character options, but there are only three of them, and they are barely mentioned again after that first sidebar)
- Factions with generic names (The Legion, the Foundation, the Syndicate, etc)
- At least two wars and a major culture clash between colony waves (sounds way better than it is)
- Interstellar space is apparently both magical and actively malevolent and monsters live there, and apparently the Icons protect against it.
I make these
seem significantly more interesting than they are. If the game could focus
even a slight bit on any of
these, start using more evocative language, perhaps start tying things together
into a cohesive whole, and present the information in a gameable way, there
would at least be steps toward being a good setting. We could have gotten that feeling of infinite
fantastic adventures in fantastic worlds, never knowing what tale will be told
the next night.
But we
didn’t. The game even flat out says that the mystical parts could just be kept
as spacer stories – it is that unimportant to the game as a whole. Coriolis is sci-fi that is neither hard nor soft enough to maintain interest. It is gummy oatmeal.
With such a
weak setting, there’s really nothing to recommend this game for. Just having a passable
system doesn't cut it with the price of entry.
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