If your gaming group has a soft spot for cosmic dread and shadowy cabals, an old favourite is clawing its way back. Swindon's Mongoose Publishing is reviving Dark Conspiracy, the cult near-future horror roleplaying game, as Dark Conspiracy: The Unseen War, with the new edition due this summer.
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Start organising for freeDark Conspiracy first appeared in 1991 from Game Designers' Workshop, written by Lester W. Smith on a system derived from the post-apocalyptic Twilight: 2000. It cast players as ordinary people who had glimpsed the monstrous forces feeding on a collapsing world, and its heady mix of cyberpunk grime, Call of Cthulhu horror and full-blown conspiracy paranoia earned it a devoted following. It was only officially in print for a couple of years before fading, exactly the sort of half-remembered gem that fans love to see resurrected.
Mongoose's take rebuilds the game on an engine adapted from Traveller, the sprawling sci-fi RPG the studio is best known for. You play Operatives, hand-picked by a mysterious organisation to stand between humanity and horrors from beyond. The sharpest new hook is a Trust mechanic that tracks how far that organisation actually believes in you, turning your own bosses into a source of tension. Around it sit rules for building and customising your cell's headquarters, the first stirrings of Empathic powers among humans, and cult mechanics for the enemy's growing reach. The studio reckons the system can flex between X-Files-style investigation, military strike missions and Buffy-esque monster-hunting.
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Find events near youThe obvious question is whether a Traveller-derived ruleset, built for crunchy sci-fi, can carry the dread that horror lives on. Mongoose has not pinned down a price or format yet, so that is the thing to watch as details firm up. If The Unseen War lands as promised this summer, it could be the modern-horror campaign your group runs through the darker evenings ahead. Fancy pulling a regular group together for it? Find your people on Backseat Gamer.
Sources: Mongoose Publishing | Wikipedia
