Good morning, brave Operatives!

We are nearly a week into the Dark Conspiracy campaign, and your support has been astounding - thank you for that! Some of you have been asking about how we put together this game and where the ideas came from. So, story time (punctuated by some excerpts from the Core Rulebook)...

Way, way back in the past, in the hallowed days of the D20 explosion, we had an idea for a new game.

The working title was Codename Veil and, set in the modern world, players would take the part of... Operatives... recruited from intelligence agencies into a new organisation. Aliens were known to be attacking the Earth in secret, and the Operatives were the first and last line of defence in this hidden war.

There would be a grand, over-arching structure to the game that would see three books extending the timeline from the modern day secret fight, to an open war, to final victory (or not).

I think you can see where we are going with this!

However, we had a massive problem. The Operative/player-facing side of things was the easy bit. It was the aliens we could never crack.

You see, we knew it would be the aliens that would make or break this game. If they just landed on Earth, took off their rubber masks and turned out to be lizards, well, that has kinda already been done. We went through many iterations of possible aliens, but nothing really clicked. We went back to this game time and again over the years, always with new ideas, always with no success - nothing that just shouted at us to publish right now.

So Codename Veil languished. We knew there was a good idea there, we just could not pierce the fog that surrounded it.

Over time, we left the D20 System behind and focussed on other games - including Traveller, licensed directly from the creator himself, Marc Miller. And it became very popular, forming the majority of our library.

We gradually began to reach the point where discussions about the future of Traveller were being had and, while this is really a topic for another time, the short of it was that Mr Miller had made plans for passing Traveller onto us in the event of... the inevitable. We were extremely grateful, but after a while we went back to him with a question - 'suppose, if we gave you some monies... Traveller was passed on now?'

It took a time for Marc to arrange (Traveller has a long, long history, and not all of it was easy to parse!) but the legalities were finally straightened, piggy banks were cracked, and Traveller formally moved to us (Marc is still very much involved, not only with T5 and his own fiction, but we are in constant contact with new ideas, thoughts and questions).

At the time, we had mentioned that we would be interested in the other games that formed the GDW catalogue back in the day. Space 1889 had already moved to another publisher (which we regarded as quite the shame, as we could see that the Traveller system would fit beautifully with that universe!), but it was not long before Marc came back to us with an offer for both 2300AD and Twilight: 2000. Terms were quickly reached, and both of those games joined Traveller with us.

Which left Dark Conspiracy. We were not chasing it, but every now and again we would raise the possibility of its sale. One day, while chatting to Marc about Traveller matters, I made an idle mention of Dark Conspiracy, as I had done before. About a week later, Marc gave me a call and asked 'So, you want Dark Conspiracy?'

The price had been set, so we said sure, and just a few days later the paperwork was complete (way quicker than Traveller had been!). Great stuff, Dark Conspiracy was now part of the Mongoose 'stable' and would sit around until we had figured out what to do with it. No great rush, it was not as if we did not have enough projects on the go.

And then it suddenly hit me.

The entities of the Dark Dimensions were what we had been looking for as an adversary in Codename Veil. They would work perfectly.

We already had a structure for the player-facing side of the rules, we had the Traveller rules system itself, and we even had a long-running arc that could encompass three separate games, with three separate playing styles - or be combined into one truly epic mega-campaign.

When the stars align like that in game design, you reach for the notepad and the laptop, and start writing!

The player-facing rules (Operative creation, skills, equipment, the cell system and headquarters) were written in about two months and went to initial playtest quickly. The Travellers rules needed to be moulded to Dark Conspiracy, but we knew Traveller intimately and we knew where we were headed with Dark Conspiracy. 

That was the easy part.

A past designer said of Dark Conspiracy that it was a good foundation, but ultimately 'lacked focus.' We had already identified this, and had been calling it a 'kitchen sink' game.

These both meant the same thing. The original Dark Conspiracy seemed to have every idea possible thrown into it - which is good for many GMs, as it means the game can be approached in many different ways. However, that comes at a cost of identity.

So, we started to dig into the original rulebooks and went to work. What made Dark Conspiracy what it was, what needed to be retained at all costs, and what would need to be added or changed for a 21st Century audience.

The first things to go were the aliens. While Codename Veil was based around an alien invasion, we realised that anything from another dimension was, by definition alien... so why not save a step? Also, those aliens, in a modern game would be, we thought, kinda goofy.

Which left the Dark Minions themselves. With effectively an infinite number of dimensions, we could come up with... well, anything.

While I had been handling the rules side of things, development of the dimensions and the Dark Minions within them was taken over by Cassie and Bella (also the leads behind the Shield Maidens RPG - worth checking out if you like the idea of a Cyberpunk and Viking mash-up!).

They went through a great many ideas and brainstorming sessions. For a while, the dimensions were divided into horror-styles - so, you would have the slasher dimension, the psychological horror dimension, and so on. Then they played with the idea of the Seven Deadly Sins. Then they began to follow the idea of the Seven Deadly Sins being crossed with the Seven Heavenly Virtues - so, mixing Greed and Justice would result in a distinctly unjust dimension where rules were nonetheless ruthlessly pursued. We considered basing each dimension around a specific demonic church.

In the end, with infinite dimensions to play with, we picked and prodded our way through all of these ideas and chose our favourites from each. We knew that the actual dimensions would not be featured in a major way in the first Dark Conspiracy game, but their minions would and you would see shadows of a dimension in its Demonground portal - so they had to be defined in our heads for expansion later.

The bow that was tied around all of this was one of tone. With Cassie and Bella behind it, this was always going to be much darker than the original game. You have already seen some of the artwork of the new Dark Minions, and some of them are just plain... yuck! Others are darker on a more psychological level (such as the Parallax). Add a dash of satire, because that tends to crop up in many of our games, and we had a solid base to work from.

There was one final twist we wanted to put on things. With the players being super-secret Operatives, we thought it might be fun to turn the tables a bit in this 'era' of Dark Conspiracy, and make the players the ones who were constructing the conspiracies.

This went on two levels. First off, when assigned missions, the Operatives would be responsible for keeping the rest of humanity in the dark (so to speak). We wanted to avoid the 'mass panic' cliché, though that would obviously be some sort of factor, and instead leaned into the idea of nefarious people cracking open breaches between dimensions to pursue their own greed, which would obviously be a Bad Thing. Plenty of real world influences to draw upon there...

However, we wanted to go further than that. We wanted the players to be generating their own conspiracies beyond missions - give players and Referees the option to include the real madman, red-string on the wall kind of conspiracy.

We will showcase this down the road but, in a nutshell, players are able to do their own investigations in the downtime between missions. Basically, they start trawling internet forums, talking to contacts, reading questionable publications, after which the Referee gives them one-line conspiracy headlines (and we have an appendix full of those for Referees to draw from!). Players then arrange these headlines into a web (we give the option to have a red-string wall board though!), and concoct a conspiracy that links all of them together. They investigate throughout the campaign and then, when they feel ready, they present their conspiracy to the Referee.

After poking holes in it, and perhaps sending them back for more investigation, the Referee is then able to construct a mission, during which the players can see if they were right or not!

The important thing here is that the Referee provides conspiracy headlines and builds the mission - absolutely everything in-between is player-driven, as they go round and round in circles, tying themselves in knots, becoming ever more convinced that they have unearthed a grand conspiracy that will doom the world if they do not take action, and no one else can see it!

All that said, we did not simply turn aside from the previous material, and veterans of the Dark Conspiracy will find much that is familiar, albeit often in a different context. Some of the original Dark Minions are in there, as is the concept of the Dark Ones. We made sure the door was left open to the future world described in previous editions, which effectively forms our second 'era' (though you will have to wait a few more years for that!).

You will even find reference to Zena Marley, who is just beginning to understand the kind of world we are all living in!

So, we have a Dark Conspiracy that we hope you will find different, but the same. Familiar and yet with plenty of newness to explore. And for newcomers, a range of playstyles from the darkly macabre to the plain whacky and gonzo. Your table, you pick your own ground.

Over the next few weeks, we will be showcasing more of the Core Rulebook, and start unveiling the missions and campaign that follow...