Introduction

The game is published by Jarnringen Forlag AB, well known in Sweden for its successful post-apocalyptic rpg "Mutant - Undergangens Arvtagare". The rulebook is written in the Swedish language, with no definite plans for an English-language edition as of this writing. Jarnringen have announced an ambitious line-up to support the game through the coming years.

Appearance

The Coriolis rulebook is a full-color 232 page hardback sporting no less than 149 original color illustrations to set the mood of the game. It is an ambitious product by any standard, and a very beautiful one if you ask me. The sturdy binding and the two bookmark ribbons add to a feeling of luxury, especially for a standard edition. Of course, the price matches the production values at approximately 500 SEK (currently around $80, £40 or €50).

Perhaps as expected for a science-fiction game, typefaces, tables etc. all sport a "modern" clean look and are clearly readable. The book generally uses black text on a white background, but with generous sprinklings of sidebars, illustrations, and tables to arrive at a read that's pleasing and varied to the eye. The main inspiration manifests itself in such small details as characters pictured having kaftans or sashes, weapons shown with abstract pattern adornments, and tables generally being right-justified.

The art itself is often suggestive rather than descriptive, just like good sf art should be. Mysterious hangars and foggy bazaars are mixed with exploding spaceships and space troopers taking cover. Other art depicts more mundane activities, such as a freighter being unloaded or a batch of goods going through customs. Furthermore items from pistols to star freighters are given a worn finish suggesting heavy use, which appeals to this reviewer.

Creating a player character

This paragraph discusses character generation in Coriolis, as covered by the first two chapters at fifty pages or so.

Coriolis only revolves around human characters. The background story hints at mysterious beings of considerable intelligence, but there's no other mention of sentient races, only scattered references to a small selection of exotic pets and animals.

Coriolis uses an ad/disad system, and has no numeric attributes (such as Strength or Wisdom). Instead, you get 100 creation points to buy Advantages and Skills, and, as expected, you get extra points for each Disadvantage you select (they're optional).

Advantages are beneficial traits. They can provide bonuses to skills (e.g. Favorite Maneuver or Organizer), supply story perks (Ally, Academic Diploma) or provide other bonuses (Rich, Fast). Disadvantages are the opposite (Dark Secret, Dyslectic, Impulsive, Unbeliever, etc). They're graded on a scale with three severities, with 5-point ads/disads being minor, and 15-point ads/disads having the highest impact on the character. Some ads/disads are available in three versions - one for each severity.

To guide and inspire a player faced with all these choices, the game offers six Backgrounds and sixteen "Koncept" (professions or careers). You select one of each, which not only provides you with an archetype (such as Settler Ship's Hand, Stationary Preacher or a Privileged Prospector) but provides a set of "in-concept" Advantages and Skills which you can buy at a heavy discount. This answers how this game steers a Technician into skills like Computers and Security Systems, while a Courtesan tends to have Etiquette or Negotiate instead.

Any character can have any Advantage, Disadvantage or Skill, however. Coriolis really is a wide-open system that expects the GM to monitor and approve each character. This also makes for a game with substantially less "crunch" than systems like RuneQuest or Dungeons & Dragons - it is apparent (to me) the designers of this game have left the job of keeping power-gamers at bay to the Games Master.

Skills and Task Resolution

The next chapter describes the twenty-odd skills used by Coriolis, and explains the general mechanism to resolve actions, over fourteen pages.

To determine success at something, you roll two ten-sided dice and add your Skill Score and try to reach the Difficulty Level. There are six Difficulty Levels in five-step intervals, from 11 (Child's Play) to 36 (Absurd). Proficiency at a Skill ranges from 0 (Ignorant) to 25 (complete Mastery), but a character may not start with any Skill Scores at 16 (Expert) or more.

A character with a Skill Score of 12 will thus have a 72% chance of making a Normal (DL 21) skill roll. "Making a roll" is called a "Limited Success". To get a complete success, however, you must beat the Difficulty Level by two levels (i.e. reach 31 or more in the previous example). The importance of this varies with the skill used, but this does make it worthwhile to roll even for the easiest tasks. If you roll twenty on your dice (a 1% chance) you get to add an additional level of success (i.e. a roll of 20 counts as a 25).

This streamlined mechanism is then consistently used throughout the entire game. It comes across as very neat, mainly because the designers have managed to avoid the temptation of introducing exceptions and corner-cases. This I predict makes the game easy to learn and use. (The rules do provide rules to cover a few slightly more involved cases, such as assisting others or getting synergy bonuses across different skills.)

The skills themselves include the usuals, categorized into five groups: communication skills, applied skills, combat skills, applied sciences, and science skills. Examples include Persuade, Piloting, Maneuver, Bureaucracy and Behavioral Sciences, to pick one from each group. The grouping allows certain Ads/Disads to provide bonuses to several skills, as well as to allow the book to make general rules for all skills of a certain group.

Combat

Combat in Coriolis really separates the wheat from the chaff. A character with little to no combat experience will have only one action per round, while a scarred battle veteran can have as many as five. If you then take into account how the skill system heavily favors high skill scores as well as the fact that every shot can be crippling, you have yourself a very fast, very deadly system where experience counts for everything!

This section discusses the fourth chapter comprising perhaps 25 pages.

Making an attack uses the same 2D10 plus Skill method as the rest of the game, of course. What's a bit unusual is that Coriolis attempts to answer all three main questions with that single die roll: Did I hit? Was it a killing blow or a mere scratch? Where did the hit take?

If you reach the Difficulty Level for your target (this starts at Easy (16) but quickly rises for targets that seek cover and evade being hit) you have scored a hit. Each step above that required for a hit translates into one more Wound. And the hit location is simply a function of your die roll: the higher you roll, the higher on the body you hit. (Yes, this means weak combatants either miss entirely or hit the upper body.)

Most opponents are human and so have 15 Wounds, just like the default for player characters (before applying Ads/Disads). If you reach zero Wounds, you're dying. But each lost Wound imposes a cumulative -1 penalty to all actions, so you can see how quickly downhill you go in a losing fight! In addition, if you suffer a single hit of 8 points of damage or more, that body part is rendered instantly unusable. This allows outcomes where characters are knocked out but not dead.

I found the terminology regarding rounds and actions to be confusing at first. A round in Coriolis is of variable length (up to 30 seconds or so). The number of actions you may take in a round is determined by your Skill Score in the Combat Skill Maneuver (the game's most important skill?). If you have 0-5 you get one action, if you have 11-15 three, and if you have 21-25 you get five. Coriolis directs play groups to declare all actions before they're executed, and Jarnringen promises combat cards will appear as pdf freebies on their website to facilitate this.

Each round is divided into five action phases. You can only make one action in each phase, and as explained, you need a Maneuver score of 21+ to get to put an action into all five. Phases are resolved in order (first everybody who can and wish to act in the first phase; then the second etc), so you normally will want to act in the early phases. Initiative within a phase is simply determined by comparing skill scores: highest skill acts first. If no-one acts in a certain phase, it's simply skipped that round.

You're allowed to switch your declared action for a defensive one (such as a Parry) after the GM reveals you're about to be attacked, but if the attack misses, your parry is wasted. And you can only parry at all if you have an action to spare - there are no free evasions!

Thus an experienced fighter will often first make one or two actions in conjunction with those that have fewer actions, and then they can make their remaining actions with impunity. This is very deadly, especially in close combat, where it is Easy (16) to hit somebody who doesn't actively parry or dodge your attack. (If your weapon skill is well above 15, an instantly killing blow is almost assured!)

There are two main exceptions to the above rules regarding actions and phases, both of which I found rather clever:

1) Surprise. A surprised character must place his actions in the latter action phases of that round. A character with two actions will thus only be able to act in the fourth and fifth phases, if they remain alive by then. A character with five actions is for all intents and purposes unsurprisable.

2) Repeated actions. Thus far, a veteran will not only be able to shoot five times as often as a untrained civilian, but move five times as quick as well. To avoid this, a few actions (notably the movement action) can be used in all five action phases by any character if the action taken is the same in all five phases. A raw recruit might not have the wits and guts to move and shoot, move and shoot; but when he all-out sprints, he's moving as fast as the rest of them (again, barring Ads/Disads).

This chapter is rounded off with damage rules covering assorted sources (disease, poison, radiation, vacuum and the like) as well as healing rules.

Equipment

Being a science fiction game, Coriolis presents weapons ranging from primitive clubs and spears via "ordinary" flamethrowers and "Vulcan Carbines" to shoulder-launched missiles and "Thermal Rifles". Likewise, armour ranges from hides and leathers, through ordinary "armaweave" and combat shields up to armored exo-skeletons and "Animated Armor".

While it's easy to be blinded by some of the more extreme amounts of firepower available, don't forget the example in the combat section above: It didn't feature a weapon at all! In other words, any solid hit is crippling, getting a +6 to damage for your armor-ignoring highly exclusive Meson Handgun is just icing on the cake.

The equipment lists are servicable if not exhaustive. Sitting down at a café for a hookah would cost you 2 "birr", the game's currency. A remote-controlled scouting probe would go for 750 birr, but wouldn't be available in remote or backwards areas. A "modulator" (a device allowing you to manipulate remote objects through nanoprojection technology) would set you back at least 10,000 birr.

Spaceships & Space Combat

Though perhaps technically equipment, spaceships got a chapter of their own. These 25 pages provide simple rules to design, price, and fly a spaceship both through normal space and through the portals that connect pairs of star systems.

The rules to create your own medium freighter or torpedo boat are certainly not going to satisfy the hardcore Traveller player, but I found them to keep a nice balance between the tedium of details and not offering enough customization options to allow the GM to present a diverse array of ships.

For example, hulls are divided into classes, which determine the base price with a power plant, propulsion and a command bridge included. You don't have to design your own fusion reactor before starting to create your ship. And you can set the vessel's speed pretty much to any value you want, no complex calculations based on real physics. This allows you to concentrate on the "fun stuff" such as weapons systems and armour. In all, a fast and simple system that covers the essentials but not more than that.

Space combat is also kept to a simple level. Speed, for example, is measured in abstract units (from 1-4), which serve as days in long-distance travel, and squares in space combat. Combat is kept to a 2D plane.

Like the general combat system, Coriolis goes for a quick and deadly system where the winner often is the ship that can get a lock on the other ship first, where the loser might not even realize it is under attack before it is engulfed in a thermonuclear fireball. It's definitely not Star Wars or Star Trek, more Das Boot (the classic movie about a German submarine during WWII).

As you probably have concluded, Coriolis isn't about making space combat into a sub-game of its own. The game provides enough support for the GM to narrate the sequence, but not more than that.

Campaign Setting

These 45 pages describe the Third Horizon (the section of space reachable from Coriolis), the space station itself, and its power centers.

The setting info includes a short run-down of the Icons (the "gods" of the setting), a brief history of how the horizon was settled from Earth in two waves and later isolated, the friction between those who came first and those who came later, a listing of star systems (about thirty) with a few words on the most significant ones and a overview map depicting connected systems.

The 10 pages on Coriolis the space station are the only ones that go into any kind of detail (What religious holidays are observed? Where can I get a place to stay? Where are the important facilities located?) which, needless to say, isn't much.

Then the rest of the chapter provides an overview of the administration of Coriolis, its positions (but not holders) of power, and 15 pages on the "Fractions" of the game. These associations are based on power, business or religion. One example is "Hegemony of Zenith", consisting of aristocrats of the second coming that claim leadership over the Third Horizon in general and Coriolis in particular. Essentially, they're guilds. (Splatbooks anyone?)

This is the weakest chapter. Power structures are mentioned in passing, not explained or described in detail. There is very little on actual locations, actual NPCs, and actual adventures.

In fact, there isn't a single NPC profile in the entire book! Now, in fairness, the system is so simple you're supposed to just pick a character with scores of 10 in all skills for a regular opponent, and perhaps one with 15 in all skills for an elite one. But still. A few animal critters are mentioned, but never statted.

Judged by their other game line (Mutant) Jarnringen intends to flesh out the setting through adventure modules. But this is small comfort for those who have the rulebook (and only the rulebook) now!

The Games Master

These twelve pages constitute the last chapter of the book, and involves the usual stuff: mechanisms for things players aren't supposed to know much about (the power of Prayer and Fate, and mystical powers), advice for the GM how to run and construct adventures and how to hand out experience points.

Religious fervor has a distinct but modest influence on the game. Handing out small bonuses to individual rolls encourages prayer. "Deeply faithful" is an Advantage while "Non-believer" is a Disadvantage.

Coriolis take on action points is the skill-like attribute called "Ode" (Fate or Destiny). It's skill-like in that it is purchased the same way a skill is (though at double cost) and that you will even have to make a Fate skill roll in certain circumstances (failure here isn't recommended!).

But Fate has more uses. You can spend your Fate skill points to gain bonuses to general skill rolls (on a 1:1 basis, maximum 5 points per roll). Spent points of Fate are recovered after each adventure. You can escape certain death by accepting a permanent and cumulative -3 penalty to further Fate rolls, though not if this penalty would bring your Fate score below zero (making this option unavailable to NPCs with zero Fate as well as success-greedy PCs who have spent too much Fate already).

Fate is also used by Mystics; the game's take on psionicists. Priests of the Icons have limited mystical powers only related to spirits, and they are deeply suspicious of mystics (both those who eschew organized religion for personal enlightenment and those who manifest real powers). Finally Fate is involved in perhaps the game's best mechanic, that of "Defective Stasis". If you try to travel through a portal to another star system awake, or if neither prayers nor chanted astrogation charts helps the crew while frozen in sleep, you can get as much as a whopping 100 points of Disadvantages to simulate how you go insane, get possessed by "space ghosts", or are otherwise cursed. Accepting a permanent -1 penalty to Fate here halves this amount.

Publisher's Support

The game has its own website, at http://www.coriolis.nu/. The publisher maintains a (Swedish-language) forums for all its games, including Coriolis, at http://forum.jarnringen.se/index.php?c=50.

Jarnringen has announced an ambitious lineup of support material, roughly falling in three lines: "Ikonernas Nad" (The Grace of the Icons) - a four-part adventure campaign; "Den Tredje Horisonten" (The Third Horizon) - world and campaign modules; and "Coriolis Kampanjbok" (Coriolis Campaign Book) - three supplements to provide additional support on a drama-heavy, intrigue-laden and action-orientated playstyle respectively.

Summary

First a word on editing and typos. Generally the book is at least average, with a few scattered typos, but there are a few major errors that really should have been caught before printing. The rules for firing at a distance aren't complex, but the explanation is completely impenetrable. The hit location table is about to be revised, as the designers apparently momentarily forgot about the bell-shape probability curve of 2D10. There are a few references to rules that have been changed or moved. In this Internet age, I won't let this detract from the final score, however, as Jarnringen have a fairly prompt presence at their website and forums.

The Coriolis rulebook gets a Style rating of 5. It is one slick and beautiful game that's easy to read with a friendly layout.

For the Substance rating, however, the book only gets a weak 3. It really doesn't contain all you need to play in the third horizon, and even comes across as merely teaser material for some crucial pieces of GM information. This doesn't mean the book is bad, just that I need to withhold two points for having to buy separate Antagonists and Campaign World supplements. But the potential for a strong sci-fi game is there, which hopefully Jarnringen will realize for us during the next two years of releasing supplements!

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