Coriolis: The Great Dark Session zero - The exploration begins

Last Thursday evening, while the Habs plowed through the Carolina Hurricanes, my roleplaying buddies and I were rolling up our characters for a first run within Coriolis: The Great Dark.

I picked a Roughneck, with Machine Tender as her specialty and Mechanics as her innate talent.

Your archetype already tells you what kind of story you came to play. A Roughneck says: I want to be the one with grease under her nails when the lights flicker. The one who notices the hum in the bulkhead before anyone else does. 

Not the diplomat or scholar. Not the mystic or poet. The hands.

What is Coriolis: The Great Dark?

Coriolis: The Great Dark is Free League Publishing's sci-fi roleplaying game, built on the Year Zero Engine. It picks up the Third Horizon setting and pushes deeper — into uncharted space, dead civilizations, and the strange things still waiting in the dark between stars.

Players take the role of Explorers: salvagers, scholars, mystics, and roughnecks crewing fragile ships on the edge of known space. The play loop leans toward investigation, exploration, and atmosphere — closer to Alien, Dune, and The Expanse than to a tactical shooter.

Combat is fast and lethal. Faith and technology share the same table. And the universe, more often than not, is watching you back.

A quick bit of context before I go further. 

Our group spent a few months playing Fallout, and though I loved the atmosphere, the wasteland and the group of characters we had, we seemed to be fighting the system to play the game, or were often times bogged down by the game mechanics.

Combat sometimes slowed to a crawl, we were managing systems more than surviving the wasteland. More rolls, than roleplay. For me, that's the moment a game starts losing me.

So we simply pulled the plug. No drama. Just time to move on.

And I'd already been waiting a few years for the alternative.

Coriolis: The Great Dark

Though I didn't back Free League Publishing's Kickstarter for The Great Dark, the theme and lore definitely caught my attention. Explorers, not soldiers. Ancient ruins, not simply rooms to clean out. A universe that quietly stares back, and sometimes bites back hard.

If I had to pitch it in one sentence: Alien meets Dune meets The Expanse, with a salvage job that might wake something older than civilization.

Combat exists. Combat is also fast, dangerous, and costly. Treat every problem like a gunfight and the setting answers with disaster.

That's the game I wanted to be in. Tension over tactics. Investigation over inventory. Mystery over churn butchery.

Meet Safiya al-Khatib

Roughneck. Machine Tender. Mechanics.

Her stare is ice. 

One side of her face carries a tribal tattoo that reads lived-in rather than decorative. 

Her armor is scratched industrial plate, utility straps, grease-stained tubing, retro-futurist edges worn smooth by use. Resilience. Exhaustion. Competence. And something quietly violent underneath.

She joined the Explorers Guild for one reason: Greatships. The mile-long behemoths that crawl between the stars. She wants to be inside one — to hear how something that big actually holds together.

That's her hook. 

The rest of her arc, we'll find out soon enough.

The crew

Around the table: Shadi, Vynx, Alex, with Alamo running the show. The same crew I've been playing D&D with these past few for years, and recently Fallout. We have a Scholar. We have an Esoteric. Shadi hasn't rolled yet as I write this post. The pleasant surprise wasn't a single "aha" moment — it was the texture of the character creation process itself. 

The professions feel genuinely distinct from each other, or from anything we've played before. The background system gives you story hooks you didn't know you wanted. And once you've rolled, you can still bend the arc. Nothing is locked. The character grows as the campaign progresses.

Running it on Foundry

This was my first time on Foundry (as well as Coriolis). The first thirty minutes were the usual scramble — where's the sheet, how do I roll this, why is that window floating there. But Alamo was there to guide us through.

The themed look matches the tone. Drag-and-drop just works. Rolling is two clicks and a result.

Next session is this Thursday evening. Then June 6th, in person — dice on the table, snacks in arm's reach, the way RPGs were truly intended to be played.

What comes next

Picking the Roughneck wasn't an accident.

I'm here for the ancient machines, the fragile crews, and the things that hum in the dark before the lights go out.

I'm looking forward to sharing how this story unfolds!