Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your myth.
Rumi
Coriolis: The Third Horizon – Arabian Nights in Space
When we first published a Coriolis: The Third Horizon supplement at the end of 2022, we summed our approach up as: 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.
And that’s still what we want to do.
At the time we announced a slate of upcoming projects:
- The Diamond Sands
- Combat Elite
- The Gift of the Wind Dragon
- The Eye of the Sun
- Quiet Victories
- The Insatiable
- New Tales For Old
So how have we done? And what’s next?
The Story So Far
We’ve released the two linked campaign supplements: The Eye of the Sun (available here) focuses on a single space station above the planet Lubau, with multiple campaign arcs and side-adventures for GMs to choose from; and The Gift of the Wind Dragon, (available here) is a multi-part mini-campaign (four adventures and three single-scene episodes) set on the surface of Lubau itself.
For something very different The Diamond Sands (available here) is a luxury resort, full of decadence and wonder, which has been described (thank you Reddit hivemind) as being “more Arabian Nights than the official books”… though in fairness, it’s easy to get an Arabian Nights vibe when dealling with the super-rich; the challenge would be getting something that hits the same note but when dealling with the very poorest (for which, see below!)
Meanwhile, applicable to all campaigns in any part of the Horizon, Combat Elite (available here) builds out more combat options for PCs (talents, equipment, etc.), while Quiet Victories (available here) caters to less violent characters, covering lots of questions that players frequently ask (like how to design and cost custom-made drones, or what thieves’ equipment is available), through to questions that very few ask but which we can answer anyway (like how to manage your diplomat’s wardrobe, or what the cost and bonus would be for a ship’s module which works as a science lab but where all the scientific equipment is plants). If you are running a Coriolis campaign then after getting Erik Åhlin’s excellent Veterans of the Horizon (you’ve got that already, right?) these are the PDFs that you’ll need.
Where Are We Now?
The situation with Coriolis is, at present… interesting. The publisher, Fria Ligan, makes their money from Kickstarters; having determined that Kickstarting more Coriolis books wouldn’t be worthwhile, they cashed in the brand equity in the name by attaching it to a new and very different game (Coriolis: The Great Dark). Fans would be forgiven for thinking that TGD is a new edition or sequel, but aside from some backstory the two games are very different – one being a free-roaming Arabian Nights In Space and the other a Western-inspired sci-fi dungeon-crawl.
Certainly we saw interest in Coriolis books drop dramatically when Fria Ligan announced a “new Coriolis”. But on the other hand, the publisher has said that there will be new terms under which 3rd parties (like us) can publish Coriolis: The Third Horizon supplements. So we’re expecting that the creative quality of the setting, and our contribution to it, will keep plenty of fans exploring The Third Horizon, and with better terms for third parties it should still be viable to keep expanding the setting.
Right now we’re on hold, and have been since the announcement of The Great Dark, but…
Future Releases for Coriolis
Once the new license terms are announced, what will we do next? And what happened to The Insatiable, and New Tales For Old?
At the moment, we have four books which are either fully written and playtested, or written in draft form but still needing some editting/testing. And we say “books”, not PDFs, because we expect that the new 3rd Party terms will allow us to publish these as physical books, not just as PDFs.
These are:
- The Blood Tree
- Witch’s Venom
- The Serpent
- The Insatiable
The first three were intended to be part of New Tales For Old, but they expanded to the point where they had to be their own books. Each of them takes inspiration from a different Arabian-Nights-ish source, to create vivid, original sci-fi stories and settings.
The Blood Tree is an investigation in the sprawling Conglomerate of Kua. We did this deliberately to test whether we could get the same Arabian Nights feel that we got in The Diamond Sands, but when dealing with the urban poor. And yes, we could. We drew in particular on The Book of the Idols written 1200 years ago by Hisham ibn al-Kalbi to build a story of spritual danger, desperation and violent revenge, which also works as an introductory adventure for Coriolis: the PCs start in the impoverished sprawl in the shadow of The Monolith, and after this the only way is (literally) up.
Witch’s Venom is a murder-mystery that started from the premise that if we’re going to say “Arabian Nights in Space” then we really should have an adventure based on one of the Arabian Nights stories. Of course, throw this inspiration in with the Coriolis setting and rules, and add a big dash of originality, and it may not be obvious which story we are drawing from – but that is rather the point: we want the original inspirations and unique feel to create new experiences for 21st Century players, not to ape past works.
The Serpent, set out in the Caph system, has a different feel again. This is a mini-campaign (half a dozen adventures, with the potential for spin-offs) which is based around themes and quotes from some of the great works of medieval Persian literature – Gulistan, the Shahnameh, etc. It is quite dark – the line in Kalila and Dimna that “to serve a king is to trade your safety for bread” sets the tone – and draws the PCs into a court conspiracy which is likely to end bloodily.
All three of those we have a clear plan for. Exactly how deep we go with these (what budget do we have for art?) will depend on how much interest there is for these, and what the new 3rd Party licensing terms are, but we have options either way.
What is slightly more uncertain at the moment is The Insatiable. We’ve been sitting on this for about four years already, for two reasons. First, we’re aware that art for this would absolutely have to be human-generated – whatever else our thoughts on AI art might be, it is certainly true that AI has creative limitations. So we need a sense of how much interest there would be on this before we decide whether to shelve it, or to release with no art, or whether there will be enough interest to pay decent money to real human artists. Second, this is the least Arabian Nights-ish of these supplements. One playtest group said it felt like Call of Cthulhu in space, and while it’s great to have a range of games to play with Coriolis we weren’t sure that we wanted to release this until we had pushed further into the core Arabian Nights In Space concept.
After The Insatiable, what else might we have? Well, there are a bunch of other adventures in note form; we could look at the areas not really addressed by Quiet Victories and Combat Elite – space combat and the Command skill. So we have plenty of options. We’ve still barely scratched the surface of the awesome stories that can be told in The Third Horizon. But we’ll need to see what the new Third Party Licensing terms from Fria Ligan are, and we’ll need to see how much appetite there is for exploring the Third Horizon.
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
The Gift of the Wind Dragon At A Glance
- TTRPG supplement for Coriolis
- Available now, from DriveThruRPG
- Published August 2023
The Eye Of The Sun At A Glance
- TTRPG supplement for Coriolis
- Available now, from DriveThruRPG
- Published May 2024
Quiet Victories At A Glance
- TTRPG supplement for Coriolis
- Available now, from DriveThruRPG
- Published September 2024
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.