Yesterday, we had a peek at some of the things possible with the Dark Minions your Operatives will encounter. However, they are far from the only threat.
Across the world, there are people who are slowly, dimly, beginning to figure out that there is something not quite right about the way things are going. A few of those are starting to work out that there are powers beyond this world and maybe - just maybe - those powers can be harnessed.
7th Son?
When they come together, these people form cults. Some are just a handful of people chanting harmless nonsense in a basement. Some may have direct contact with a Dark Minion and either try to worship it or shackle it. There may be corporations or city councils, knowingly or otherwise, under the sway of the Dark. There are almost certainly cult leaders using social media to gather millions of clueless followers, channelling their emotions to fuel Dark rites. And what will the billionaire ruling class do with such power when they discover it?
However it happens, your Operatives will very likely run against the machinations of a cult at some point.
Building a Cult
In the Dark Conspiracy Core Rulebook, we dive into what makes a cult, what their aims might be, and how they develop. We also 'quantify' them as a 'cult profile'. In fact, we have a full Cult Creation System!
If you are familiar with World Creation in Traveller, there will be much familiar here. Each cult can be boiled down to a 7-digit code that describes its capabilities.
Size: How many people are in the cult - from 0 (dead cult) to millions. Resources: The material assets of the cult, from raw cash to wealth. Influence: Soft power - how good the cult is at influencing local councils, companies and world governments. Structure: How the cult is organised - does it have a single charismatic leader, is it answerable to an outside group... or perhaps it is even a democracy. Suppression: How tight a grip a cult has on its sphere of influence - if your Operatives go poking around in its territory, you can use this to see if they get intercepted, and what the response might be... Reputation: A double-edged sword. A small cult may prefer to work in the shadows. A large international one might be very, very well known... though not necessarily as a cult... Dark Power: What the leadership of the cult actually knows about the Dark and how well they can use it. Dark Power 0 means they literally do not know what they are doing. Dark Power 10 ( or A, in the stat line) means they have attained mastery of the Dark and have actual Dark Minions bound to their will.
Operatives wander into the wrong cult
These numbers all build upon one another. So, for example, if you want a purely random cult, you start by rolling 2D-2 to determine its Size. Once you have that, 2D-7 + Size to determine its Resources. So, the larger the cult, the more resources it is likely to have, but there will be outliers on both sides - you can start to build the story of the cult from these figures. Just why has a cult with just 6 members have so many resources? Or why does a cult of millions have near to nothing?
Using Cult Profiles
Once you have a full cult profile line, you can start fleshing it out and begin doing funky things with it.
For example, Operatives can be corrupted by Dark Influence - well, so can cultists!
This is primarily based on the Dark Power score and Size of a cult, but we give the Referee a great deal of latitude, and split cults down into Casual Members (who may not even realise they are in a cult), Committed Members, the Inner Circle, and Cult Leaders - as you can imagine, Dark Influence tends to concentrate in the upper echelons, but you may find a Cult Leader with a deeply corrupted Inner Circle who has nonetheless managed to keep themselves relatively 'pure'.
We have also added Affiliate and Satellite Cults. Once a cult reaches a certain size or gains an opportunity in a long-running campaign, they may be able to expand their presence to another town, country or continent. Given time and a lack of opposition, maybe they can spread across the world with a central cult directing its satellites.
Do Dark Cults always get along? Certainly not, and we have implemented rules for Cult Wars. Using their profiles, they can actually engage in 'combat' with one another, be it through direct confrontation, political attacks, or rallying allies against them in a process that can take days, weeks, months... or years, depending on the Size of the cults involved (small cults can move quickly, big cults have the brute strength).
Sample Cults
To round out this chapter, we have presented you with some 'sample' cults, including a few that you will be seeing as recurring foils for your Operatives in published missions (such as those in the Field Ops book).
These range from the large to the small, the playful to the macabre... and the just plain weird.
The Ambroisie based in France, for example, is a small cult that has nevertheless amassed great wealth. This might be connected to the Racleur that they have somehow managed to bind to their will, and the 'milking' they do to in in order to sell illicit substances.
Cults have been around for a long time...
At the other end of the scale is Narsil, a technology company that started small and quiet but moved into data analysis/acquisition and computer intelligence. The leader is reclusive but is known to have said that the purpose of his company is not commercial but the elevation of humanity. Stories of massive data farms being built in remote locations where crowds of people are herded into but never seen again are probably just rumours...
Appendix 4: Cult Beliefs
The system behind building a Cult Profile is designed to get a Referee's creative juices flowing and, by the end of the process, you will likely have a good idea of what your new cult looks like. However, it is always good to flesh things out on a narrative level and so in an appendix of the Dark Conspiracy Core Rulebook, we have included a D666 table of random cult beliefs. Simple one liners that describe what a cult is said to believe as its core tenets, the Referee is encouraged to roll a few times on this table to build the cult's direction - and if some of those beliefs seem to be contradictory, so much the better! Cult members are fully capable of believing in two opposing ideas at the same time.
In today's world, cults can reach far...
The Future of Cults
As soon as we came up with the idea of cult wars, we knew there was a possibility of doing a supplement where players were actual cult members... but we quickly figured that would be a Bad Idea.
However, in playtests of Dark Conspiracy, we saw that Operatives almost always tried to infiltrate cults (by which I mean one or two of them was selected as expendable, and then were wired up to the eyeballs while the rest of the team monitored them outside the cult building, waiting for the 'go' order...). There is clearly a massive amount to explore in the formation and operation of cults, as well as going into a great deal of detail with some specific examples.
So, a Dark Cults book looks likely for the future of Dark Conspiracy, but we'll see how things go and how you all react to the game!
So, that is Cults as they are presented in the forthcoming Core Rulebook. We have oodles more to explore and showcase to you, and more glorious artwork is pouring in every day. Some of you have asked us to go through the 'origins' of this edition of Dark Conspiracy, and that seems like a fun idea - I'll see if we can pen something about that next week!
I hope you have all had a stern breakfast, because today we are going to delve into a chapter of the Dark Conspiracy Core Rulebook - the Field Analysis of Dark Minions.
Now, it is important to note... in this era of the Dark Conspiracy timeline, no one really knows anything. Not your Operatives, not the poor deluded cultists, not the power-hungry billionaires... and, at the end of the day, not even The Company.
Part of every mission will require your Operatives to actually learn things (gather intelligence) about the Dark forces they face. However, Referees have tools to work with in this chapter.
Dark Minion and the Rules
Your 'basic' (?) Dark Minion has a stat block that Traveller players will be quite familiar with as it is based on that of animals. However, there are some additions...
EMP: All Dark Minions have access to Empathic powers, even if only at an instinctual level. This provides their EMP characteristic.
Instability: Dark Minions are not of this world, and the link they maintain to their own dimensions can wither, tremble or just plain snap. Wait long enough and Operatives may find they simply fade from existence (or pretend to...). However, there are 'dimensional anchors' that can greatly extend a Dark Minion's stay in our world, and sometimes the link to their own dimension can strengthen in terrifying ways...
Esoterica: It is possible for humans to use Empathic powers, but they are as children compared to the Dark Minions. Operatives may come to learn that there is far more possible with Dark Empathy than they may have ever guessed. For Dark Minions, Empathic powers are organised into groups, or Esoterica, that define the powers they can manipulate. Why is Dark Empathy arranged this way? Do certain minions from certain dimensions share an Esoterica? Is it because they serve a single Minion Lord? Is some hierarchy at work here? Nobody knows...
Traits: Dark Minions have traits just as some animals do - in fact, they may share those traits, but they also have some unique to beings of other dimensions. A Dark Minion may be able to corrupt everything nearby, radiate waves of terror, unleash an Empathic Virus, possess a human, turn incorporeal, or 'flicker' between dimensions.
But what of the Dark Minions themselves?
Parallax
Ensconced within advanced home assistant devices, the Parallax lies in wait for its victim. Unfurling from the device when the user is asleep, at work or otherwise occupied, the Parallax endeavours to replace its owner. First taking on their physical appearance and then striving to take over a person’s life completely, the Parallax eventually leaves them an emotional mess, unable to leave their home for fear of perceived ineptitude and disgust.
Racleur
This minion is vaguely humanoid in appearance, its ‘skin’ a layer of shimmery metal pockmarked by carved holes that drip a dark, viscous liquid. When the Racleur finds a victim, it shuffles close until it violently contacts the victim’s skin, shredding and tearing its way inwards. Once the Racleur has hold of its victim, it forces its way inside their body until it is unclear where host ends and minion begins. Perhaps these minions are too weak to sustain themselves within our world and must take refuge within the flesh of a mortal.
Bloodkin
This one will be familiar to veterans of previous Dark Conspiracy games...
Bloodkin are a group of vaguely related Dark Minions distinguishable by their sallow skin, long legs and arms, clawed hands and feet, and lidless yellow eyes. They have plated exoskeletons and muscular trunks, surviving on a diet of blood and, often, flesh. These minions are more cunning than many of their kin, seeking to invade Earth on the backs of lesser species. Whilst the chattel in front of them kill and maim in a glorious slaughter, the Bloodkin slip between worlds, sequestering themselves deep within the darkness to hunt, drawing upon the life essence of victims to become ever more powerful.
Slaugh
Tiny minions that instinctively gather together, when breaching into our world the Slaugh appear as large flocks of dark birds, perhaps starlings, crows or ravens. Examined closer, they appear as twisted parodies of avian creatures, with skeletal heads, two pairs of wings, and slimy boils bursting through feathers. They are hypnotic creatures that use flowing movements and serene calls to hypnotise victims.
Many more previews on the way - and as we said before, get creating your first Operatives as we have a poll coming to see what you are doing with them!
Well, we wandered into the office first thing this morning, only to find that not one, not two, but three stretch goals have fallen in your investigations. With this dedication, the Dark surely has no chance against your combined efforts to save the Earth (spoiler: it is going to get really bad...).
Stretch Goals
The stretch goals that have been passed already:
Friends and Foes: A decent range of Contacts, Allies, Rivals and Enemies for you to use in your campaigns. You will already have seen that you pick these guys up regularly during Operative Creation and while the Core Rulebook does have some random tables you can use to generate them, these will be fleshed out and ready to go - lovely for the busy Referee!
Ocean Swell: From the fevered mind of Cassie and the deranged writing if Bella comes Ocean Swell, a PDF that will cover a really nasty Dark Minion lurking in the North Sea, the DarkTech associated with it, and a Scottish cult that has sprung up. Plenty for your Operatives to deal with.
Bonus for Creatives: This is something we try to do in every crowdfunder we run. We have many freelance writers and artists who work on our games - they are paid well and quickly (all the art you have seen thus far has been invoiced for and already paid). However, we have a handful of freelancers who have worked for us for years and are regular contributors to all of our games. Frontline freelancers, if you will. With this stretch goal unlocked, we create a 'pool' from which bonuses will be paid to the frontliners after the crowdfunding has ended - usually decent four figure amounts. Most are busy beavering away on their latest creations and so tend not to read Updates like this one, so it tends to come as a nice surprise (it just appears in their bank accounts one morning!). If all goes well, we hope to have another stretch goal like this a little further on into the campaign (hopefully more than one, but let us not count our chickens...). Anyway, just our way of showing our appreciation for their tireless work.
Coming Up
We have oodles of previews and reveals planned for you over the next 30 days, so please stay tuned as we dig into Dark Conspiracy (incidentally, we ran a few previews on our Planet Mongoose blog, so you can dive into those right away) and showcase what we have done, where we are, and what we are planning.
One thing we will be doing very soon is running a poll to see what Operatives you are creating with the free download. In light of that, we thought you might like to see the different specialities some skills have so you can include those in your first Operatives...
Skill Specialities
Those of you familiar with Traveller will know how this works. Some skills have specialities that you select once you get a full level in them - so, ignore this at skill level 0 but, as soon as you get level 1, you choose a speciality, and the skill level goes in there..
Now, when you get another skill level int he same skill, you can either put it in the same speciality (to make it level 2) or pick a different speciality to be at level 1 - so, you get two level 1 specialities in the same skill.
Every other speciality is considered to be skill level 0, so you are at least competent in the other areas.
Skills like this in Dark Conspiracy are as follows (I think they are fairly self-explanatory)...
Animals: Handling, Training, Veterinary Art: 3D Modelling, AI, Instrument, Performer, Physical Media, Visual Media, Write Athletics: Dexterity, Endurance, Strength Computers: Coding, Hardware, Operation Drive: Hovercraft, Track, Wheel Electronics: Comms, Remote Ops, Sensors Empathy Use: Computers, Drain, Foreboding, Healing, Project Mind, Sense Mind Engineer: Aerospace, Civil, Electrical, Industrial, Mechanical Gun Combat: Archaic, Pistol, Rifle Heavy Weapons: Artillery, Portable, Vehicle Language: All the languages! Melee: Blade, Bludgeon, Natural, Unarmed Pilot: Airship, Rotor, Wing Profession: All the jobs! Science: And all the sciences - though pay particular attention to paraphysics... Seafarer: Ocean, Personal, Sail, Submarine
Should be enough to keep you going!
Core Rulebook Add-On
Some of you have said you wanted more than one Core Rulebook (and why not, eh?), and have requested this be included in the Add-ons list - we will be enacting this a little later this morning!
I think that is all for now. Thank you for your support thus far, and do let us know (either here, on our forums or on Discord) how you are getting on with Operative Creations - we really want to know what characters you are creating!
Well, that was quite humbling - we have been working on Dark Conspiracy for well over a year (in a way, for more than a decade - but we'll get to the new Dark Conspiracy's origin story soon enough!), and we are so happy to see so many of you keen to see our vision for the game.
There will be plenty of updates, previews and chats coming up over the next 30-odd days (and beyond!) where we will be showcasing more of Dark Conspiracy and showing you exactly what your Operatives will be up against, how the rules work (and how they differ from Traveller - and why we made those decisions), along with all the gorgeous art that is now continually pouring in from our artists.
If you will bear with us, this is our first time on BackerKit, and all the menu options we have in the backend are... a lot! We are getting to grips with all the 'live' stuff right now, and should be verging towards competent within the next few hours.
For now, I will just say thank you, one and all, and we sincerely hope you will enjoy this new journey!
Yesterday, we had a peek at some of the things possible with the Dark Minions your Operatives will encounter. However, they are far from the only threat.
Across the world, there are people who are slowly, dimly, beginning to figure out that there is something not quite right about the way things are going. A few of those are starting to work out that there are powers beyond this world and maybe - just maybe - those powers can be harnessed.
7th Son?
When they come together, these people form cults. Some are just a handful of people chanting harmless nonsense in a basement. Some may have direct contact with a Dark Minion and either try to worship it or shackle it. There may be corporations or city councils, knowingly or otherwise, under the sway of the Dark. There are almost certainly cult leaders using social media to gather millions of clueless followers, channelling their emotions to fuel Dark rites. And what will the billionaire ruling class do with such power when they discover it?
However it happens, your Operatives will very likely run against the machinations of a cult at some point.
Building a Cult
In the Dark Conspiracy Core Rulebook, we dive into what makes a cult, what their aims might be, and how they develop. We also 'quantify' them as a 'cult profile'. In fact, we have a full Cult Creation System!
If you are familiar with World Creation in Traveller, there will be much familiar here. Each cult can be boiled down to a 7-digit code that describes its capabilities.
Size: How many people are in the cult - from 0 (dead cult) to millions. Resources: The material assets of the cult, from raw cash to wealth. Influence: Soft power - how good the cult is at influencing local councils, companies and world governments. Structure: How the cult is organised - does it have a single charismatic leader, is it answerable to an outside group... or perhaps it is even a democracy. Suppression: How tight a grip a cult has on its sphere of influence - if your Operatives go poking around in its territory, you can use this to see if they get intercepted, and what the response might be... Reputation: A double-edged sword. A small cult may prefer to work in the shadows. A large international one might be very, very well known... though not necessarily as a cult... Dark Power: What the leadership of the cult actually knows about the Dark and how well they can use it. Dark Power 0 means they literally do not know what they are doing. Dark Power 10 ( or A, in the stat line) means they have attained mastery of the Dark and have actual Dark Minions bound to their will.
Operatives wander into the wrong cult
These numbers all build upon one another. So, for example, if you want a purely random cult, you start by rolling 2D-2 to determine its Size. Once you have that, 2D-7 + Size to determine its Resources. So, the larger the cult, the more resources it is likely to have, but there will be outliers on both sides - you can start to build the story of the cult from these figures. Just why has a cult with just 6 members have so many resources? Or why does a cult of millions have near to nothing?
Using Cult Profiles
Once you have a full cult profile line, you can start fleshing it out and begin doing funky things with it.
For example, Operatives can be corrupted by Dark Influence - well, so can cultists!
This is primarily based on the Dark Power score and Size of a cult, but we give the Referee a great deal of latitude, and split cults down into Casual Members (who may not even realise they are in a cult), Committed Members, the Inner Circle, and Cult Leaders - as you can imagine, Dark Influence tends to concentrate in the upper echelons, but you may find a Cult Leader with a deeply corrupted Inner Circle who has nonetheless managed to keep themselves relatively 'pure'.
We have also added Affiliate and Satellite Cults. Once a cult reaches a certain size or gains an opportunity in a long-running campaign, they may be able to expand their presence to another town, country or continent. Given time and a lack of opposition, maybe they can spread across the world with a central cult directing its satellites.
Do Dark Cults always get along? Certainly not, and we have implemented rules for Cult Wars. Using their profiles, they can actually engage in 'combat' with one another, be it through direct confrontation, political attacks, or rallying allies against them in a process that can take days, weeks, months... or years, depending on the Size of the cults involved (small cults can move quickly, big cults have the brute strength).
Sample Cults
To round out this chapter, we have presented you with some 'sample' cults, including a few that you will be seeing as recurring foils for your Operatives in published missions (such as those in the Field Ops book).
These range from the large to the small, the playful to the macabre... and the just plain weird.
The Ambroisie based in France, for example, is a small cult that has nevertheless amassed great wealth. This might be connected to the Racleur that they have somehow managed to bind to their will, and the 'milking' they do to in in order to sell illicit substances.
Cults have been around for a long time...
At the other end of the scale is Narsil, a technology company that started small and quiet but moved into data analysis/acquisition and computer intelligence. The leader is reclusive but is known to have said that the purpose of his company is not commercial but the elevation of humanity. Stories of massive data farms being built in remote locations where crowds of people are herded into but never seen again are probably just rumours...
Appendix 4: Cult Beliefs
The system behind building a Cult Profile is designed to get a Referee's creative juices flowing and, by the end of the process, you will likely have a good idea of what your new cult looks like. However, it is always good to flesh things out on a narrative level and so in an appendix of the Dark Conspiracy Core Rulebook, we have included a D666 table of random cult beliefs. Simple one liners that describe what a cult is said to believe as its core tenets, the Referee is encouraged to roll a few times on this table to build the cult's direction - and if some of those beliefs seem to be contradictory, so much the better! Cult members are fully capable of believing in two opposing ideas at the same time.
In today's world, cults can reach far...
The Future of Cults
As soon as we came up with the idea of cult wars, we knew there was a possibility of doing a supplement where players were actual cult members... but we quickly figured that would be a Bad Idea.
However, in playtests of Dark Conspiracy, we saw that Operatives almost always tried to infiltrate cults (by which I mean one or two of them was selected as expendable, and then were wired up to the eyeballs while the rest of the team monitored them outside the cult building, waiting for the 'go' order...). There is clearly a massive amount to explore in the formation and operation of cults, as well as going into a great deal of detail with some specific examples.
So, a Dark Cults book looks likely for the future of Dark Conspiracy, but we'll see how things go and how you all react to the game!
So, that is Cults as they are presented in the forthcoming Core Rulebook. We have oodles more to explore and showcase to you, and more glorious artwork is pouring in every day. Some of you have asked us to go through the 'origins' of this edition of Dark Conspiracy, and that seems like a fun idea - I'll see if we can pen something about that next week!
Well, that was quite humbling - we have been working on Dark Conspiracy for well over a year (in a way, for more than a decade - but we'll get to the new Dark Conspiracy's origin story soon enough!), and we are so happy to see so many of you keen to see our vision for the game.
There will be plenty of updates, previews and chats coming up over the next 30-odd days (and beyond!) where we will be showcasing more of Dark Conspiracy and showing you exactly what your Operatives will be up against, how the rules work (and how they differ from Traveller - and why we made those decisions), along with all the gorgeous art that is now continually pouring in from our artists.
If you will bear with us, this is our first time on BackerKit, and all the menu options we have in the backend are... a lot! We are getting to grips with all the 'live' stuff right now, and should be verging towards competent within the next few hours.
For now, I will just say thank you, one and all, and we sincerely hope you will enjoy this new journey!
I hope you have all had a stern breakfast, because today we are going to delve into a chapter of the Dark Conspiracy Core Rulebook - the Field Analysis of Dark Minions.
Now, it is important to note... in this era of the Dark Conspiracy timeline, no one really knows anything. Not your Operatives, not the poor deluded cultists, not the power-hungry billionaires... and, at the end of the day, not even The Company.
Part of every mission will require your Operatives to actually learn things (gather intelligence) about the Dark forces they face. However, Referees have tools to work with in this chapter.
Dark Minion and the Rules
Your 'basic' (?) Dark Minion has a stat block that Traveller players will be quite familiar with as it is based on that of animals. However, there are some additions...
EMP: All Dark Minions have access to Empathic powers, even if only at an instinctual level. This provides their EMP characteristic.
Instability: Dark Minions are not of this world, and the link they maintain to their own dimensions can wither, tremble or just plain snap. Wait long enough and Operatives may find they simply fade from existence (or pretend to...). However, there are 'dimensional anchors' that can greatly extend a Dark Minion's stay in our world, and sometimes the link to their own dimension can strengthen in terrifying ways...
Esoterica: It is possible for humans to use Empathic powers, but they are as children compared to the Dark Minions. Operatives may come to learn that there is far more possible with Dark Empathy than they may have ever guessed. For Dark Minions, Empathic powers are organised into groups, or Esoterica, that define the powers they can manipulate. Why is Dark Empathy arranged this way? Do certain minions from certain dimensions share an Esoterica? Is it because they serve a single Minion Lord? Is some hierarchy at work here? Nobody knows...
Traits: Dark Minions have traits just as some animals do - in fact, they may share those traits, but they also have some unique to beings of other dimensions. A Dark Minion may be able to corrupt everything nearby, radiate waves of terror, unleash an Empathic Virus, possess a human, turn incorporeal, or 'flicker' between dimensions.
But what of the Dark Minions themselves?
Parallax
Ensconced within advanced home assistant devices, the Parallax lies in wait for its victim. Unfurling from the device when the user is asleep, at work or otherwise occupied, the Parallax endeavours to replace its owner. First taking on their physical appearance and then striving to take over a person’s life completely, the Parallax eventually leaves them an emotional mess, unable to leave their home for fear of perceived ineptitude and disgust.
Racleur
This minion is vaguely humanoid in appearance, its ‘skin’ a layer of shimmery metal pockmarked by carved holes that drip a dark, viscous liquid. When the Racleur finds a victim, it shuffles close until it violently contacts the victim’s skin, shredding and tearing its way inwards. Once the Racleur has hold of its victim, it forces its way inside their body until it is unclear where host ends and minion begins. Perhaps these minions are too weak to sustain themselves within our world and must take refuge within the flesh of a mortal.
Bloodkin
This one will be familiar to veterans of previous Dark Conspiracy games...
Bloodkin are a group of vaguely related Dark Minions distinguishable by their sallow skin, long legs and arms, clawed hands and feet, and lidless yellow eyes. They have plated exoskeletons and muscular trunks, surviving on a diet of blood and, often, flesh. These minions are more cunning than many of their kin, seeking to invade Earth on the backs of lesser species. Whilst the chattel in front of them kill and maim in a glorious slaughter, the Bloodkin slip between worlds, sequestering themselves deep within the darkness to hunt, drawing upon the life essence of victims to become ever more powerful.
Slaugh
Tiny minions that instinctively gather together, when breaching into our world the Slaugh appear as large flocks of dark birds, perhaps starlings, crows or ravens. Examined closer, they appear as twisted parodies of avian creatures, with skeletal heads, two pairs of wings, and slimy boils bursting through feathers. They are hypnotic creatures that use flowing movements and serene calls to hypnotise victims.
Many more previews on the way - and as we said before, get creating your first Operatives as we have a poll coming to see what you are doing with them!
