Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your myth.
Rumi
Coriolis – Arabian Nights in Space
The Coriolis TTRPG takes unfamiliar prompts and spins them out to new places. Rooted in ideas from the Middle East, it creates a space where we can weave sci-fi space opera / science-fantasy stories which are neither eastern nor western. The core game is published by Fria Ligan (Free League) in Sweden, and over the years they and others have published work in this setting with a range of flavours. For ourselves, publishing under license, our aim is to remain true to the core books while diving more deeply into the potential to craft truly memorable settings, where we can play with inspirations, ideas and dilemmas which might not be commonly found in popular sci-fi.
For our first title, The Diamond Sands (available here) we had a lot of fun playing with ideas of the purpose of laws, the nature of privilege, manifestations of power… but mainly we just had fun painting a picture of a highly unusual setting (or set of interlocked settings, really) for TTRPG players to enjoy.
Then as a bit of an aside we published Combat Elite (here) as a players’ supplement, giving military characters more tactical options. We want the Horizon to be as rich as possible, and so as well as the stories and backgrounds we’d like the players to have as much freedom as possible in how they approach the challenges and dilemmas before them.
For forthcoming releases, we’ll be heading in a few different directions….
A Corilois Roadmap
Perhaps not so much a “roadmap”, as a “meandering journey”, we are currently working on six further supplements….
As the main focus of this, we want to give GMs campaign materials with a lot of depth, that dive into already established parts of the setting. The Eye of the Sun provides a detailed, small-scale campaign focus, providing timelines for the evolution of a small space-station as a “home port” for PCs. The Gift of the Wind Dragon is a multi-part mini-campaign (four adventures and three single-scene episodes). Both of these focus on Lubau, taking the already excellent materials that exist for this planet (notably The Mahanji Oasis) and diving into much more detail about the people and conflicts of the planet. Each of these will probably be around 80-100 pages long, have been written up as first drafts, and are currently in playtest.
While in-depth materials are great for long campaigns, we also want to put out adventures that are suitable for one-shots or shorter campaigns. We are currently playtesting a stand-alone scenario called The Insatiable, which has a feeling that will be familiar to players of sci-fi horror games like Aliens and Mothership, but which give the classic idea of an infested mine a distinctly Coriolis spin. And we also want to release New Tales For Old, a collection of adventures which are more directly inspired by Middle Eastern lore: inevitably there will be at least one adaptation of a tale from the 1001 Nights (because if we’re going to say “Arabian Nights in space” then we really need to open with a story from the Arabian Nights!), but we’re also drawing from broader sources (such as the Sirat Bani Hilal in the Arabic oral tradition). Probably weighing in at around 50-60 pages each these will be quicker reads than the campaign materials.
Lastly we’re keen that players the potential to get into more depth with their characters’ abilities and equipment, allowing them greater flexibility in how they respond to the challenges before them. So, Combat Elite already provided options for martial characters, and we’re slowly putting together Quiet Victories for more peaceful or subtle PC options.
As far as possible we want to keep all of this consistent with the materials that are already available. Certainly we won’t be contradicting the core rules. But we’ll also try to avoid trampling over the excellent unofficial or minor materials. For example, the Talents in the players’ books will be additional to (not contradicting or repeating) the options already available in Erik Åhlin’s excellent Veterans of the Horizon; The Gift of the Wind Dragon will build on (not replace) the official Mahanji Oasis setting. Where we do contradict any existing lore (for example, Kadcidil in The Eye of the Sun is the same size and in the same place as the station in the Swedish language supplement Mahanjis Väktare, but has a very different feel), we hope that the original authors will forgive our contrariness, and that GMs will appreciate the alternative options for their campaigns.
We’ll probably be releasing these at a rate of roughly one every two or three months, in addition to any short materials that we put up on our RPG Resources page.
If you want alerts when we release these, there’s a sign-up form for our mailing list right here….
The Diamond Sands At A Glance
- TTRPG supplement for Coriolis
- Available now, from DriveThruRPG
- Published December 2022
Combat Elite At A Glance
- TTRPG supplement for Coriolis
- Available now, from DriveThruRPG
- Published February 2023
All products are created under license. Coriolis and its logo, are trademarks of Fria Ligan AB. These works contain material that is copyright Fria Ligan AB and/or other authors. Such material is used with permission under the Community Content Agreement for Free League Workshop. All other original material in this work is copyright 2022-2023 by Kevin Hassall and published under the Community Content Agreement for Free League Workshop.