Those Dark Places - industrial sci fi. Report from the Argent III scenario (spoilers!)

The Argent III Report, report! (Spoilers, spoilers and once more just in case - spoilers).

I purchased Those Dark Places over a year ago.  The industrial sci fi setting really appealed and, aligned with a simple set of rules it was a no brainer to purchase the book and start playing.  As with all great plans everything went well until the bit about ‘start playing’.  I suspect like many I buy too many rules and then don’t run the games I have purchased within a year or even two!  Anyway apologies to Mr J.Hicks (the writer of the game) but I can say that now I have ran the game, got a TPK and am ready to run more of this game in the future.

I ran through the scenario included in the rulebook ‘The Argent III Report’.  As a starter story it is great, short simple and lots of opportunity for the General Monitor (GM – get it?) to provide elements of horror and fright to the players.  I ran the scenario with players from the RPGNook discord:

• 4acrossisemu – playing as Alan Grist, the grease monkey and engineer
• Speed – playing as Alastair Santana, the helm and liaison officer and supremely confident
• Verben – playing as Wilbur Gradley, the medic of choice if you want treatments that are more 18^th than 23^rd century.
• Hedge – playing as Anja Patel, the socially awkward pilot who ensure everything goes by the numbers.

As character generation is so simple, we started with that before the game, and followed the simple process of assigning either 1, 2, 3, or 4 to one of four stats – Charisma, Agility, Strength and Education (CASE file).  What became apparent during the game is that if you assign a 1 to Strength, that can have serious implications as Strength is effectively the points of damage you can take and even a well-aimed punch or kick can do 1 point of damage.  0 Strength means you hit the deck unconscious so a player’s game could end quite quickly, or at least be interrupted for a little while until they can get some first aid or similar. 

The rules are pretty clear that the stats are assigned before the crew positions as a key part of the game is ‘a game where the players play characters who might not be the best fit for the job at hand.’.  I think some players will find that a difficult concept as in a lot of RPGs your character excels in specific stats and you then choose a class or role based on the stats that are the best fit to give you the best chance of success or survival.  Those Dark Places doesn’t do that, although players can make educated guesses about which stats may work with the different crew positions, and as each player chooses a primary and a secondary position there may well be some weaknesses in one area or the other anyway.

I really like this aspect – you have stats and then you choose a crew position and if you happen to be the science officer and only 1 or 2 in Education, you can assume you went to a shitty university, scraped a third in Biology, your parents refused to attend your graduation and you end up in a dead end position on cargo space ship where the most interesting thing you are doing is analysing the crews shit for any evidence of infection or narcotics.  So much for heroes!

A key part of the game is generating the ‘crew’ interactions and their relationships with each other.  I had really good players who got straight into their roles and very quickly ensured that they were sniping and annoying each other’s PCs from the first minute of play.  For example, the engineer slightly adjusted the pilots seat so it was very slightly tilted to the left.  The pilot then assumed that there was an engine problem on the ship that was causing a drag to the left that they had to compensate for when flying the ship…..oh yes it was all happy heroes working together to get the job done. Not.

From my position as the GM the players managed to make it seem like a working cargo ship doing mundane work that they didn’t want to be doing.  I thought they captured the industrial feel of the game well!  The PCs discussed their ship and its name and decided to go all in with what they were all about and called it ‘SS Profitmargin’.  Very apt.

The mission for the PCs is to go and pick up three engineers that have been stripping an old space station of all its useful items before it is sent into a destructive orbit. When the players arrive, the engineers are not in their accommodation area and there is evidence of them being kidnapped with violence.  Then around the planet a large old space ship called ‘The Argent III’ comes into view, it is not responding to hails.  However, it is a real catch in terms of money for the PCs as they can claim it as salvage for themselves and make a fortune!  Once onboard they find strange goings on and identify that the ship is decades old and was thought lost with all 100 on board.

Those on board for the last 100 years have been reproducing and turning to a bit of cannibalism as well as becoming something less than human.  The PCs must navigate around the strange ship and eventually come across one of the engineers who is locked up in a cage who can give them details as to what has been going on.  Another engineer is dead and the last has been forced to help the strange denizens of the ship to fix their engines which are leaking radiation.

During the game the tension is increased using a game mechanic related to pressure.  Each PC has a pressure bonus that equals their Strength and Education.  You then roll a D6 and need to get a target number of 10 to pass…..if you fail then pressure mounts and you start suffering disadvantages to stats and other panic effects.  I don’t know if this is built into the game on purpose but one of our players had a 1 and a 2 in Strength and Education.  So, their pressure bonus was +3.  As the player pointed out they couldn’t make a pressure roll as they could not get to 10.  This seems a major disadvantage but maybe the game is built that way to ensure there is the potential for the pressure to start mounting quickly.  However, this may annoy some players.  When I run this game again I may try just giving everyone a flat +6 or similar as their pressure bonus to level it up for all the characters to remove this issue.  If you fail the pressure roll (i.e. don’t get 10 in total when you roll the D6 and add your pressure bonus), there is a chance you will have an episode and the more times you fail your pressure roll the more chance there is you have an episode.

I flung quite a lot of situations that required pressure rolls at the players, the issue was that the Roll20 algorithm was with the players (most of the time) and refused to roll low enough for pressure to result in episodes – damn that Roll20!

I went for all action in the scenario with the strange humanoids and included a small odd looking child and slightly more kinetic ‘new humans’ that the players had to interact with.  The child NPC ended up chewing and eating through the leg of Wilbur the medic as he got trapped in the airlock and was knocked unconscious, Alastair was also unconscious as he had raised his space suit visor and got overcome with the nauseating fungus smell on the ship.  He failed a Con roll and as he has 1 Strength took one damage and fell unconscious.  This is what I mean when I described having 1 Strength during stat allocation as a bad idea.  The player took it well, but it does illustrate a weakness in the mechanics.  Meanwhile Anja and Alan were trying to get into the airlock entry to help Wilbur who was being eaten by the crazy child.  Here they failed several rolls resulting in a failure and Wilbur getting eaten alive.  During this the Argents IIIs warning beacons were blaring with a countdown to the engine failure due to the radioactive leak and impending destruction of The Argent III.

So, for speed Alan and Anja blew the airlock and spaced everything in the ship, killing Alastair of course.  As they were sucked out into the void they had to make rolls to be able to control their forced exit via the airlock to reach their ship, unfortunately Alan failed and floated off into the vastness of space……but wait Anja could save him!  She had reached their ship with a successful roll and turned SS Profitmargin back to go and rescue Alan.  She could then always have one over on him in any future arguments they had!  But alas The Argent III was in radioactive meltdown and the engines were critical and it seemed poetic that as Anja got Alan and they prepared to leave The Argent III exploded engulfing SS Profitmargin in its nuclear fireball….

So, a TPK but I believe the players enjoyed playing through the game and the system.  I enjoyed running the scenario and afterwards we had a brief discussion about what we thought would be worth trying if this scenario was ran again:

1. If you wanted to reduce the game time as you only had an hour or two you could just have the players be employed to go and get The Argent III directly that has suddenly appeared and leave out the engineers in the space station section. 
2. There was some discussion about whether the trip to the old space station to collect the engineers that then provides the ‘investigation’ element was necessary. You could base some of the scenario in the abandoned space station, maybe some of the Argent III humanoids have stayed on the station or the strange fungus material has contaminated it, or they have left a trap to collect any other unsuspecting space farers that enter the space station that they can then go and collect to either help them fix The Argent III or be dinner.
3. I played The Argent III humanoids as mindless cannibals, but it would be interesting to play them as dangerous, but capable of some level of interaction. This not only subverts player expectations but also then enables the Charisma stat to be bought into play.  Without this it is not easy for the Liaison officer crew position to utilise their skills.  Obviously there may be misunderstandings during any ongoing discussions, and it doesn’t mean there can’t be tension and even combat but it may make it more interesting and require a wider range of play and skills to overcome the issues.
4. Another idea would be to play the scenario as the three engineers on the space station, rather than the crew to pick them up.  You could play out the kidnap and the transfer to the Argent III to repair the ship. 
5. You could also have Argent III with a ships AI that is hostile or at least interfering that could then also require Charisma and / or Computer Science type checks to keep it on side.  Maybe the AI is annoyed with humanity for letting it drift for 100 years with a crew that are not capable of conversation…

In summary there are a few game mechanics that you need to be aware of when running Those Dark Places and the introductory scenario included in the rules.  I liked the scenario and there are plenty of opportunities for a GM to manipulate it and add their own spin on the story. I will be running this game at Cons in the future, its fast, fun and the players can have great fun with the setting, riffing off of all those movies they have seen and the tropes that go with them.

I look forward to reading other scenarios for this game and potentially getting expanded rules which have been talked about over the last year or so.

Anyway, that’s it for now, and remember Parrying Is For Wimps!