Darkspace – Should we be sad that we couldn’t save the Space-Racists?

This is a game I found out about last year at Origins, and I didn’t know much more about it than;

• That’s some neat artwork; Looks kind of like a Cathedral window from a Zdzisław Beksiński painting
• It’s a space game based on a game called Shadowdark, which I also know nothing about.

The opportunity to try it out came up, and I figured “why not?”. This was my second ‘something weird is happening on a spaceship; go figure it out’ game of the convention. We didn’t blow this one up though.

The system turned out to be Space D&D, probably with a few extra things tacked on but we didn’t run into those. Setting-wise, we were part of the scavenger group at a no-name station right on the edge of a big dangerous zone, gathering the wreckage of things that drifted out.

And then something really big came out, under power, aiming at the station, and we were nearby, so we got the panicked “stop it” call.

It turned out to be a huge colony or generation ship from 200 years ago, full of Human Supremacists who wanted to start their own colony. Given that only one member of the group was human, we already weren’t that well disposed towards them & their motives.

On our way through the ship we found Space-Harpies, who attacked us, retrofitted rooms full of hibernation pods with not-entirely-human beings in them, and on the bridge an albino gorilla wearing a ship security uniform, who also attacked us. Bit of a theme there, to be honest.

I did get a laugh out of the GM when it came to safely transporting the very fragile Navigation Data Storage Box; When I started asking about the Captain’s Chair he was assuming I wanted to use it like an office chair on wheels, not “strip the padding and cover and use them to turn the Nav Box into a Naugahyde Beach Ball”.

By the time we got to the engine room & read a few logs, we pretty much figured it out;

• Ship got into a really dangerous area of space about 15 years¹ in, so they put everyone into cold sleep
• One crew member was ‘uploaded’ to become the ship AI and keep track of things
• Some alien entity got aboard and partly infected the AI, and they started experimenting on the crew to make better humans. Even more supreme Supremacists?
• Eventually they ran out of people, so they turned around and came back to get more, which is where the station would come in

Yeah, a fight broke out, and we eventually shut the thing down using a tactical maneuver called “if we attack from enough different directions it can’t get us all, and we only need to hit the shutdown button once”. We got the crap kicked out of us.

Basically, the thing was a Space Dungeon with a Boss Fight at the end, but it was fun. I’m not sure whether the mild horror theme is a part of the game, or if it was just this scenario. Based on the poster art I’m guessing it’s at least a little bit dark?

¹ As an amusing moment for me, they guy I was sitting next to thought I was a mathematics genius because of how quickly I converted Mission Elapsed Days into Years, faster than he did on his calculator app. 😁