# Day 19: Cosmic Dark - Hudgyns, Mining Engineer tags: #articles/CharacterCreationChallenge/2026 #game/rpg/cosmic-dark > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2026]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] ## Game of Choice Let's take a detour down a strange pathway. There are games that are set up in ways that are difficult to show to people without actually playing them together. Today's game is on that list, and I'm not sure how this is going to turn out. If you've ever heard of the game *[[Cthulhu Dark]]*, this game is the direct inheritor. It uses a similarly extremely lightweight system to resolve narrative conflict. But it moves us into a different space, very literally. ![[Cosmic Datk (cover).jpg|400]] I'm talking about *[[Cosmic Dark]]*, which is, as it calls itself, **"a game of weird space horror."** You'll need 2 to 5 players who are playing employees of a space corporation called Extracsa. You're all exploring a bleak region of space which has one major feature: The Glitch. Looking at it, you see a giant golden scar in space. What is it? What are you doing? How did it get there? Go through the five assignments in the core book and you'll find out. Then the setting opens up and you can put together your own scenarios. Normally, this would be entirely too tight a setup for me, and I'm going to be honest with you, it still is. It's not really designed to be run as a series of explorational things which are character motivated. Instead, it is very much about players being put in scenarios with a little bit of persistence from session to session. I'm not really the guy for that, but since this is where we are in the list now, it's what we're doing. ## Acts of Creation Character creation is simultaneously super lightweight and quite involved because effectively running through the first assignment in the book is how you create your character. Remember how I said that you want somewhere between 2 and 5 players? I'm really not kidding about that. There is no real way to create a character by yourself. Character generation is a communal process. I'll walk you through it and pretend to be other people when necessary. So if I come out the other end of this thing as a schizophrenic, it's your fault. ### In Brief Things kick off in an unusual fashion. You start by telling the players that they are on a shuttle descending to the surface of an asteroid. Above them is their vast transport ship, *The Exchange*, which brought them there, and below the asteroid glows with a phosphorescent violet light. Then they get a voice on the communicators. > This is the Extracsa transport ship. You are descending to the surface of C-151. > > Medical officer, please acknowledge. And then you wait. You wait for one of the players to answer. Whoever responds, they're the new medical officer. If they respond with their name, that's fine. If they just say acknowledged, that's fine. This is how the roles necessary for each scenario assignment get selected. In the first one, there's also the mining engineer, the geologist, the comms officer, and the team leader. These things get referred to as the employee's Specialisms. If you don't have a player for each slot, the most important ones are assigned first up there. You can get by without what you don't have. Being the go-getter we are, we chirp in response to the mining engineer query: **"Hudgyns, reporting."** Now we're the **Mining Engineer**. The GM gets a little more exposition to drop in front of the players. > Thank you associates. > > We have a beautiful pristine asteroid for you to excavate, no signs of previous mining. You have all the equipment you need and you’ll step out on to the surface shortly. Good luck, we’ll be back for you in a year. Then we go to the next phase. ### Growing Up - Planetary The GM tells the players that all the employees grew up together on a backwater planet and that they're all human. The first thing that needs to be decided is what type of planet it was: a rural planet, a mining planet, a watercolor-covered planet, etc. Then every player invents one fact about the world, and then together we name the planet. In this case, we are going to establish that it's a backwater mountainous planet primarily devoted to mining. Think space Appalachia. I'm going to put out a few things which are relevant to the world. Assume that they were pumped out by the three players. - Not Poor - Fields of blue-green mountain grasses - Employees live in mountainside arcologies I think it's a lot more interesting if *Space Appalachia* is not a poor backwater, just a hard-working blue-collar city of mining settlements. Fields of blue-green grasses grow on the sides of rocky mountains while the employees live in small arcologies of single buildings which are sort of grafted to the side of the slopes. - **Name:** Cumberland ### Growing Up - Pairwise It's at this point that we would normally split into pairs as the employees grow up together and form relationships. The players describe those two employees playing together as children on the world as described. You have them. Talk about what their employees look like and then ask one of them to say, **"It's time to go."** Then have them keep the conversation going for a little bit before they find a place to stop. Next up, the GM has another employee pick a player to be their biggest rival. Again, go through the description and then ask one of them to say, **"You know what I do better than you?"** Then play out the scene. You do this until every player has described their employee as a child and played a scene. There's a list of potential scenes here, and it's not bad: childhood friend, biggest rival, someone you feel close to, someone you admire, someone you would confide in. If you have less than five players, you leave out the ones at the end. We're going to pretend that we have three players, which means that with three players, basically, you're going to have someone who is someone's childhood friend, someone else who is their biggest rival, and at that point, everybody's been in a scene. Though I think by the way that it's phrased, it really means until everyone has **framed** a scene. So someone will frame a "someone you feel close to" scene, whose critical question is, **"What do you think will happen to us?"** Alba and Bushnel are the other two players, playing characters whose names are just the same as their own.[^1] Alba frames Bushnel as her childhood friend. We're framing Bushnel as Hudgyns' biggest rival, at age 6, in the mountain arcology "playground" (effectively a big-ass roof). Bushnel says "Do you know what I do better than you?" eliciting the immediate reply "Cry like a bitch?" followed by a swift sharp kick to the nads. We're hard-core up in here. Bushnel frames Alba as someone he feels close to, unsurprisingly. ### Psych Assessment Next up, the GM narrates how the exchange is closing in on the section of space known as the glitch. As it does so, the employees are in their sleep pods, where their vital signs are monitored and they undergo a psych assessment before the assignment. It's at this point where each player gets asked a few questions. There's a list of five questions here, but if you have less than five players, pick an appropriate number of questions to match. Again, we're going to assume we have three players. So in response to the AI's soft, emotionless queries, here's what we've got for Hudgyns. - **What scares you the most about space?** That it just doesn't care. It doesn't matter what you want or what you think. Space is infinite and infinitely empty. - **What is the most terrifying way to die?** Burning in an oxygen rich environment. - **If someone else was dying, would you help them before helping yourself?** That depends entirely on whether I'm dying too. If I die, I can definitely never help anyone again, so me first seems reasonable in that context. There's Hudgyns' three answers, and I'm absolutely sure that none of this will ever come back to haunt him ever again. All of these answers will be coming back later in the assignment to make their horror personal in the Dreaming and Waking section. But you knew that, because why else would you ask questions like that? ### Operations The exchange gets to the asteroid, comes into orbit above it, and the employees get their operational instructions: 1. Find a suitable place to set up the living pod. 2. Take an initial sample using the geological analyzer. 3. Check in with the exchange using the subspace radio. 4. Rest. 5. Find a suitable space and drive the mining shaft. The employees board the shuttle, cargo doors open, and the shuttle drops, bringing us right back to the beginning of the situation. Except now, the characters have some sense of background and their orders. ### Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes There is one more thing that the players need to know, and that's that they have a changed score, which shows how much space has Changed them. Anytime something happens that affects their body or mind, especially if there's something weird or physically damaging, they roll the Change die. If they get higher than the current Change score, they add 1. When Changed hits 6, their employee is broken. Their story is over. ## Exunt And that's it. Play proceeds. The sessions are very much a sort of scripted set of progressions which explicitly call back to previous things and build on each other. ![[19 - Cosmic Dark - Hudgyns, Mining Engineer.webp]] > [!info]- Side Note > The character sheet for this game is just this side of fucking useless, with not enough room for the things that are definitely going to take up room, and not really designed for updating between assignments. > > In fact, there are stats which don't even have a slot, which really should be recorded, like the current amount of Change and eventually Burnout. > > This is the kind of thing that really irritates me, even though it shouldn't. Don't do this. Characters are not limited to keeping the same specialism between assignments. It's assumed they can learn whatever they want to, as long as they have some time in the pod. When things need to be resolved, you start with one d6 reality die, if what they're trying to do is within the bounds of reality. If they have a specialism that's applicable, they take another die. And if they're pushing themselves mentally and/or physically, they can take the changed die. Highest die shows what they get. You roll a one, you get the bare minimum. You roll a four, you get everything you could reasonably expect. You roll a five, you get everything you could reasonably expect, plus some file from the corporation, which probably reveals things you'd rather not know. If you roll a six, you get all the above, plus you see an anomaly, a weird and horrific occurrence which could prompt a changed role. Reality is a destroyer of the mind and body in too high a dosage. Anomalies for each assignment are actually given in the text, so you don't have to be particularly creative with those. And there are a handful of records that you can find given in each assignment as well. That's it. That's the game. Is this my favorite game of all time? No. It leans too hard on pre-written, almost scripted encounter situations. And while they do open up a bit as the book goes on, they're all still pretty tight. I do really like the core mechanical resolution system. It is minimalist, sleek, easy to describe, easy to understand, and the idea that rolling too much success is more dangerous than rolling too little gives me a certain thrill. The question is not necessarily whether you are going to succeed; it's how much it is going to cost you as a person and what it is going to do to you to succeed. For some people, this is going to be absolutely the bee's knees for running short campaigns or a pickup game here and there between other games that they're playing with their friends. It's not particularly helpful for me except as a mechanical inspiration. Your mileage may vary. That's it for today. Tomorrow is going to drop us onto a real wasteland. I'm going to need you to bring a deck of poker cards. We'll pick up there. [^1]: For simplicity, not because I'm incredibly lazy.