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[SOUND REMASTERED] Dark Conspiracy - Problematic Aliens? Grab Your Storm Rifle!

• Iain Wilson • Season 1 • Episode 67

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PRODUCTION NOTE - INCIDENT REPORT #DC-001

Subject: Anomalous Audio Interference During Initial Recording

Classification: Empathic Incursion (Suspected)

Status: RESOLVED

Fellow Minion Hunters,
We regret to inform you that our initial release of this episode experienced what can only be described as supernatural audio interference. During the original recording session, our carefully balanced audio levels were mysteriously altered, causing the background music to surge in volume and completely drown out the primary discussion track.
Our technical analysis revealed no equipment malfunctions, no human error, and no logical explanation for the phenomenon. The audio signatures show patterns consistent with Class-3 empathic interference, specifically targeting frequencies in the vocal range while amplifying ambient sound elements.
Possible explanations include:
•Dark Minions attempting to suppress information about their 1991 operational plans
•Residual dimensional energy from discussing proto-dimensional travel rules
•The ghost of Lester W. Smith protecting his space combat mechanics from ridicule
•Standard equipment failure (least likely explanation)
After consulting with our empathic technical specialist and performing the appropriate protective rituals, we have successfully remastered this episode. The dark forces have been contained, the audio has been properly balanced, and you can now hear our full discussion of Game Designers’ Workshop’s prescient masterpiece of dystopian horror.
We apologize for any inconvenience caused by these otherworldly interruptions. As any Dark Conspiracy veteran knows, the conspiracy never sleeps—and apparently, it really doesn’t want you to hear us making fun of the space travel rules.
Stay vigilant. Trust no one. Check your audio levels.

Contact us at:

EMAIL: roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/rolltosavepod
WEBSITE: https://rolltosave.blog

HOSTS: Iain Wilson, Steve McGarrity, Jason Downey
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page).

Iain:

Welcome to Roll2Save the RPG history podcast Dark Conspiracy. Hello and welcome to another episode of Roll to Save the RPG history podcast. It has been a while since we've done an episode Over a year, in fact. Gdw's 1991 game about a crumbling world where social and financial inequality are everywhere and where dark forces have risen up to fill the vacuum where hope once was. No, it's not actually set in the modern day. It's set in a world that's a dystopia, that's overrun by monsters in this case, actual monsters, not the human monsters that we're dealing with nowadays. Nowadays, filled as it is with an extremely complex combat system, rules for absolutely everything and lots and lots and lots of pages of lovingly illustrated firearms, this is a game where players are not so much encouraged to avoid the darkness but to go toe to the hole with it and see how many shots to the face the darkness can take before killing over. Anyway, grab yourself a drink, sit back, relax and enjoy our latest episode as we take a look into the dark world of Dark Conspiracy. Picture this it's 1991. The Berlin Wall has fallen, the Soviet Union is in its death throes and Brian Adams has been the number one in the UK charts with Everything I Do I Do it For you for what seems like 400 years.

Iain:

Meanwhile, in the realm of tabletop role-playing games, a similar revolution is underway. Tsr's stranglehold and hobby is starting to crack. While D&D still dominates the fantasy market, savvy gamers are discovering that there's a whole world beyond dungeon crawling White Wolf's Vampire. The Masquerade is about to revolutionise horror gaming and gaming in general, with its focus on personal horror, political intrigue and storytelling. Cyberpunk is painting a neo-noir future where corporations have replaced governments and style matters as much as substance. Meanwhile, shadowrun is gleefully mashing fantasy and cyberpunk, together with all the subtlety of a troll wielding a rocket launcher and if you've ever played Shadowrun, you'll know full well that troll wielding a rocket launcher is a valid character class. It's an exciting time to be a gamer, but it's also confusing. The hobby is fragmenting into specialised niches, each with its own aesthetic and mechanical philosophy. Players are hungry for games that reflect the anxieties of a rapidly changing world, but they also want systems that can handle the complexities of modern storytelling.

Iain:

Into this messy and chaotic landscape swaggers GDW's Dark Conspiracy, a game that somehow manages to protect the next 30 years of American history, whilst also being an example of the most gloriously overwrought 90s game design you'll ever see. It's a game that wants to be Blade Runner, the X-Files and those weird kitschy 1950s UFO movies, all at the same time, despite the fact that one of these things doesn't exist yet and a couple of them really probably shouldn't be sharing table space with cosmic horror. But here's the thing about Dark Conspiracy If you ask anyone who's played it, despite its identity crisis, or maybe perhaps because of it, it seems to have created something genuinely unique, a setting that, oddly enough, feels more relevant today than it did in 1991. We're all wrapped up in a system so thoroughly committed to its vision that you can't help but admire its audacity whilst shirking slightly from its complexity. So let's start with Dark Conspiracy's vision of early 21st century. It reads basically like a checklist of everything that actually happened, just dialed up at 2.11. It's set in the United States of the early 21st century, after a greater depression has destroyed the global economy and left many countries isolated and bankrupt. But it isn't just any economic collapse. No, this is a full societal meltdown, with a little bit of supernatural season in chapter one.

Iain:

Many American cities have expanded to form massive metroplexes, in some cases covering entire states. Those of you who have read any Judge, dredd will be getting Mega City 1 vibes at the moment. It's kind of like the designers didn't read that and then looked at the North East Corridor in 1991 and said, hey, what we blending all these cities together before some British gamers pointed out that was done 10 years ago, by 2008. Anyway, it's dystopian. These Metroplexes were most of the world's population lived, a blend of lawless, gang tough and corporate fortresses ruled by men and women powerful enough to be above the law. So you've got corporate feudalism with a side order of gang warfare, basically, if you took every cyberpunk cliche but also made it depressingly mundane. We don't have neon lights or cool chrome cyber limbs here, it's just good old fashioned wealth, privilege and inequality and a whole ton of assault rifles Outside of these metroplexes.

Iain:

The majority of the country has become known as the outlaw, where there's virtually no federal or state protection and the road network joining metroplexes is poorly maintained. The government's basically given up on huge swathes of the country, turning them into lawless wastelands. The countryside is sparsely inhabited, its natives suspicious and violent. Somebody basically saw Mad Max and said, hey, we should do that too. That looks really cool. Think road warriors, wandering gangs, petrol shortages, people mugging each other for tyres and fuel canisters and that sort of things. If you've ever driven through rural America lately and thought, oh imagine, this all went a bit feral or more feral in some cases that's what we're looking at here.

Iain:

However, not content with social and financial inequality and Mad Max style gangs roving the wasteland between cities, dark conspiracy decides that it has to be properly wheeled. You see, scattered throughout the outlaw and even in the darker and more forbidding areas of Metroplexes, there are zones known as Demon Ground. These areas are warped and twisted by energy leaking from other dimensions, and they're trying to impose a new version of reality onto our own. And it's actually a brilliant metaphor wrapped into the whole cosmic horror setting. What Dark Conspiracies authors are saying are the places where society has failed have become literal hell on earth. Basically, when people lose hope, reality begins to break down. It's almost like somebody read about urban decay and rural abandonment and thought you know what would make this worse? Interdimensional incursions by demons. Let's do it.

Iain:

The game basically paints a picture of America as a failed state held together by corporate muscle, where the abandoned spaces between these islands of civilization have become brooding grounds for nightmares. It seemed to understand something in 1991 which we're still trying to come to grips with today, which is basically when social institutions collapse and the safety net vanishes, the vacuum gets filled by something, and that something is usually something worse. That can feel kind of heavy-handed for those of us living in America these days. What makes the setting work, despite this kitchen sink approach to dystopia, is how grounded it feels in recognizable trends, especially as I mentioned today. Yes, there are monsters from other dimensions, but they are spawning in places that look suspiciously like rust belt america. It's very similar to the way they put vampire the masquerade together and they took the decaying town of Gary, indiana, and said hey, you know what we mean. There's lots of vampires For a game which, on the surface, actually appears just to be about badass trench coat clad demon hunters toting assault weapons. It's actually a pretty philosophical observation.

Iain:

The genius of Dark Conspiracy's setting is that it took basically all our post-Cold War anxieties economic uncertainty, corporate overreach, environmental degradation, social fragmentation and it gave him teeth, quite literally. In this case, when people talk about late-stage capitalism as a horror setting, they're actually describing dark conspiracy, even if they don't know it. So what's actually happening in this nightmarish world? Well, the first edition core rulebook poses the central question, with all the subtlety, of a brick through the window what is the link between the sinister horror and the mysterious holes in the ozone layer, the rise of empathically aware humans and the alien visitors from another star system? Well, when you put it like that, it's obviously all connected, isn't it? By linking together environmental disaster, fear of people who are different of us and fear of an alien invasion, we're basically taking every early 90s anxiety, throwing it into a blender and hitting puree.

Iain:

The game suggests that the real conspiracy isn't your typical aliens secretly controlling humanity scenario, but something potentially far worse an ancient evil that's been working its way across the cosmos. And these alien visitors are likely either servants of the darkness or have been unwittingly corrupted by it. Earth appears simply to be the latest target of what may be a cosmic campaign of destruction. Lovely, while the X-Files wouldn't air until 1993, dark Conspiracy seemed to understand its themes perfectly, and it seemed to understand that people were kind of terrified about the possibility that humanity was going to be outclassed by forces beyond our understanding. Interestingly, when the X-Files first aired, I remember calling my friend Michael and saying hey, this is like Dark Conspiracy, the TV show. So, now that we know what the actual Dark Conspiracy is, let's talk about how we play this game and let's talk about the poor souls who have to deal with this nightmare, namely the player characters.

Iain:

Similar to a lot of games back then, especially GDW games, character creation is achieved through a multi-state process in which players select various career terms for their characters, a sort of life path system. Now, unlike Traveller, you can't actually die during character creation, which is a blessing. But Dark Conspiracy is famous or should I be infamous for producing some of the most gloriously ridiculous adventuring parties in RPG history, and I will come to that in a minute. When it comes to building a character, it's fairly standard fare characters of seven attributes strength, constitution, agility, intelligence, education, charisma and empathy. Empathy is your weird, or it might be psychic power. There are also a bunch of skills, with each skill being governed by an attribute, and when you're building your character, you can choose to either roll some dice to randomly determine your attributes, or you can use the point distribution method which, when you look at it the point distribution method lets you make a more balanced character, but you can potentially get something more overpowered by letting the dice decide your destiny when it comes to building your character, the life path system works like this Each term, which is a period of four years, you choose to either stay in your current career or move to a different one.

Iain:

Every career has various requirements for entering. For example, you want to be a lawyer? Your character has to have gone to a law school. For example, you want to be a lawyer, your character has to have gone to a law school. And when you spend a term in a career, you get a number of skills and you get a number of contacts, and you can spend as many terms as you want building your character. However, once a certain age limit is reached, you have to roll some dice to find out if your character is going to lose some physical attributes due to ageing. There are well over 50 career paths available, ranging from fingers like astronaut, to special forces guy, to prisoner, because you might even end up in prison for doing naughty stuff during your term.

Iain:

This, understandably, can produce some truly spectacular mismatches. Picture this your party consists of a 34-year-old special forces vet with three tours of duty, a 22-year-old trust fund kid who's never worked a day in his life, a 46-year-old university professor with a PhD in ancient history and a 30-year-old ex-convict who learned most of his skills in prison because they were really unlucky with their dice rolls. Now imagine being the poor games master who has to come up with a plausible reason why these four people would ever be in the same room together, much less trust each other enough to hunt interdimensional monsters. Yeah, well, you see, the professor was researching ancient texts when he discovered references to some symbols that the soldier said he saw in Bosnia and the rich kid's trust fund money came from a corporation covering up supernatural incidents and the ex-con, well, he was robbing the building when the monsters attacked. Yeah, good luck with that.

Iain:

The beauty and curse of this system is it creates characters with some genuinely interesting and detailed backgrounds. You'll know exactly what your character did every four year period in their adult life, what skills they learned, who they met and how much money they saved. It's kind of thorough to the point of obsession, but thorough for individual characters. What it does do is it creates a bunch of groups. That can make this Scooby gang look like a model of cohesion If you compare this to modern RPG character creation systems, where most games start with broad concepts that players can customise or use simple professional class systems that ensure party members have complementary roles.

Iain:

Dark Conspiracy is the opposite end of that. It focuses narrowly on individuals and then basically says to the referee find a way to glue these people together. The random generation method, where you randomly roll your attributes. That's where things get truly chaotic. You can end up with somebody who has all the physical capabilities of a linebacker and the education of a PhD student. Conversely, you can also get someone with genius level intelligence and all the schooling of a high school dropout. The points allocation system helps level us out. Somewhat Weirdly and I found this with the latest edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay as well, which actively encourages randomising stats this randomness can actually often be more fun than points allocation. Points allocation is great fun if you're a min-maxer, but sometimes it's nice to just take the chaos and embrace it. What you will find in the end of the day is that the characters in Dark Conspiracy, their reasons for being together, tends to be a little bit like a rather complicated soap opera, but that can also be great fun. Generally, though, the first stop for most of these characters should actually be group therapy.

Iain:

Anyway, the first edition. It uses the same skill-based rule system as Twilight 2000. I keep saying the first edition. There are later editions of Dark Conspiracy but I won't be going into them in this episode because I've never seen them before. And this skill system, it's a D10-based system that determines success at skill use. And this is Dark Conspiracy'sw heritage shining brightly for basic task resolution. You're rolling a d10 against your skill level, various modifiers apply, you're halving it or doubling it depending on the level of difficulty, and it's those sort of you know, mathematical gymnastics that make perfect sense to role players back in 1991. If you don't have the skill, you roll against your attribute and you're much less likely to be successful. This can lead to characters jumping around through lots of different careers trying to pick up at least one point in the skill, because mathematically, having one point in the skill means you're massively better at something than defaulting to your attribute. So you end up with these characters that are all just slightly good at a lot of things. Now, sensible parties might get together and work on character creation together to ensure that maybe they're all specialists in the same field, but certainly in my experience there's a lot of people with one or two points in a lot of skills, rather than individual skills at very high levels.

Iain:

However, it's in combat where Dark Conspiracy really shows its roots. Combat is broken into 30 second rounds, which are in turn broken down into 5 second phases. This means that, yes, when facing down minions of the dark, you can calculate exactly how many seconds it takes you to reload your pistol. The combat system includes rules for aimed shots, automatic fire, suppression cover, different types of armour, hit locations, wooden effects and probably what happens if you try to dual wield while riding a motorcycle in a thunderstorm. Basically, it's exhaustively complete in that way that only 1990s games that have the roots in military simulations could actually be.

Iain:

There's also my personal favourite space travel rules. Yes, space travel In a game that's primarily about investigating supernatural conspiracies and the ruins of American civilisation. Somebody thought it was essential to include detailed rules for orbital mechanics and zero gravity combat, because, obviously, when you're hunting dark minions in abandoned shopping malls, what you're really thinking is I wonder how this would work in microgravity. That being said, the space travel is a perfect encapsulation of GDW's design philosophy. If it exists in the world, there must be rules for it, no matter how likely it is to come up in actual play. It's that kind of thoroughness that simultaneously impresses and is also completely insane. You have to admire the dedication to world building, though that says, yes, our horror game is about economic collapse, but it really does need rules for calculating Delta V. The system also includes rules for vehicle combat, because nothing says personal horror like tank-on-tank action. There are detailed missile rules, artillery rules and enough ballistics calculations to satisfy every maths nerd out there.

Iain:

Playing the Dark Conspiracy sometimes feels less like running a horror game and more like conducting a very strange military exercise where one side happens to be interdimensional monsters. Now don't get me wrong. This obsessive level of detail and it is obsessive can be both a strength and a weakness. When the system's complexity serves the game's themes, like, for example, in character creation, when it emphasises contacts and the importance of building information networks something that's really helpful in an investigative game it enhances the experience. However, when you're spending 20 minutes calculating the exact trajectory of a grenade, while tentacled horrors from beyond space and time wait patiently for you to finish your maths, it kind of kills the mood. Basically, dark Conspiracy wanted players to have a fully realised world that they could engage with, where consequences matter for what they did. The madness of the system is it applies this philosophy to absolutely everything, whether it needs to or not.

Iain:

The really fun part of Dark Conspiracy, though, and where the game really shows what it's all about, is in the creature section. Now, in a review of Dark Conspiracy, the venerable author Alan Varney noted that the horror aspect of the game felt somewhat unfocused, dealing as it did with everything from the brooding horror of Lovecraftian style entities to campy 1950s space monsters and brother. He was right about the tonal whiplash. The first section of creatures is called Beasties, and it covers everything from normal animals to classic fantasy monsters, while the section Dark Races really deals with the more horrific, intelligent threats that the players come up against. There was a spin-off board game of Dark Conspiracy called Million Hunter, and that gave us a real snapshot of the core threats.

Iain:

In Dark Conspiracy, there were extraterrestrials, new kids, which were radioactive mutants Morlocks, underground cannibals and Fae. Interestingly, each one of these categories represents the broad brush strokes of of the dark conspiracy as a whole. There's the environmental disaster represented by the nuclear mutants, the alien invasion, the social collapse you know these people living underground and being cannibalistic, and ancient evils returning from beyond. Now, separately, they're all very compelling threats from beyond. Now separately, they're all very compelling threats Together, they kind of create a monster of the week setting where literally anything could be looking around the next corner, and that can be both thrilling or completely bonkers, depending on how the referee handles it. It's almost like dark conspiracies, like well, we could just do a game with the aliens, but why not throw in all these other things and let the referee decide which one they want to use? There's also dark tech, which is the game's approach to supernatural technology.

Iain:

The book also mentions individual extraterrestrials who aren't corrupt and evil, working with humans to fight against the darkness, creating items to hold the dark ones off, and this exists in the dark tech chapter, along with the sort of gruesome biological weapons of the dark minions, as well as super advanced human technology. It's basically trying to treat technology as horror Devices, that blood, the line between science and magic tools that might save the human race, or damas, gadgets that work through principles that human science can't explain, etc. It's a solid concept but again, the execution can vary wildly between genuinely unsettling bio-horror and random sci-fi gadget that somebody thought, hey, this looks cool. This whole kitchen sink approach to technology and creatures means that Dark Conspiracy can accommodate almost any type of horror scenario If you want body horror, there are biological horrors that remake human flesh. You want cosmic horror, there are aliens from beyond time and space, and if you want monster hunting action, there are a barrel load of creatures that you can throw in, that the players can track down and kill every single week. Oh, and if you want a conspiracy thriller, there are creatures that are infiltrators who look just like us. The downside is that, unless you really pay attention, it's impossible to maintain a consistent tone, because the book contains everything from mutant rat with anger issues all the way to ancient god thing that feeds on your despair. So it's really up to the ref to curate the threats and decide what kind of horror game they're actually going to be running.

Iain:

After all of this, though, we come to the real elephant in the room the equipment section. Oh, the equipment section. Oh, the equipment section. Like a lot of GDW games, this game includes an expansive illustrated list of equipment for use in the characters' fight, and there are so many pictures of items, weapons and vehicles. We're talking about 70 plus pages of lovingly detailed firearms, tactical gear and military hardware, which all come with enough technical specifications to make even the most depressed Pentagon procurement officer weep with joy. The most depressed Pentagon procurement officer weep with joy.

Iain:

The game's designer, lester Smith. He defended this approach in an interview and said some people want lots, others want little. People who don't want them can ignore them, but people who do want them will be glad they're there. As a role player myself, I want to be able to see what something looks like if my character is going to be carrying it well. Fair enough, lester, but did we really need three pages on the different variants of the M16 rifle family when reality itself is unravelling in the background? I mean, I get it.

Iain:

Gdw games comes from a wargaming background, and military simulation games live and die by their equipment lists, but there is something almost comical about the idea that the right combination of night vision goggles and ceramic body armour is going to save you from an interdimensional monster that treats physics as merely a suggestion. The equipment section, though, reveals something fundamental about how Dark Conspiracy views its own world. This isn't a game where investigators stumble around with flashlights and pocket knives and books, hoping to survive long enough to run away from the monsters. No, this is a game where player characters are expected to tool up to that seeming commando and look like they're planning to invade a small country before taking the fight directly to the forces of cosmic evil. If you want a suppressed submachine gun in Dark Conspiracy, here's a table comparing the sound reduction characteristics of different silencer designs. If you need explosive ordnance, here's everything from hand grenades to anti-tank missiles, with detailed rules for blast effects and penetration. Planning to fight monsters underwater? Hey, there are rules for that too, along with appropriate equipment recommendations.

Iain:

This is military fetishism meets cosmic horror, and the results are something. On one hand, the thorough equipment lists support the game's central premise that the Dark Minions can be fought and defeated through superior firepower and tactical preparation. On the other hand, this can lead to people spending 20 minutes selecting the optimal loadout for their character, and this rather kills the mood, especially when you're supposed to be investigating disappearances in rural Iowa or something. The equipment obsession also affects how the game's world feels. When every player character is walking around with enough military hardware to outfit a small mercenary company, it raises a question about just how scary these supernatural threats really are. If players can legally purchase anti-material rifles and demolition charges, either the government has completely given up on any notion of weapon control or there's a tacit understanding that citizens might need to deal with threats that require serious firepower and, if so, why is the government not doing anything about it? The 70 plus pages of illustrated weapons serve another purpose, though.

Iain:

The established dark conspiracy is a game where violence is not only expected but celebrated. These aren't investigators trying to understand or banish supernatural threats through knowledge and cleverness. These are heavily armed specialists whose solution to cosmic horror is shoot it with big guns until it stops moving. It's a distinctly power fantasy approach to horror gaming, where the correct response to learning that reality is under assault by interdimensional parasites is to visit your local gun store and get tooled up. Compare it to Call of Cthulhu, the granddaddy of horror RPGs, an RPG that wasn't afraid to say hey, this isn't a power fantasy. You're going to play someone who is fundamentally outclassed by the threats that they face, and the best approach is usually to be run away before they go insane. Dark Conspiracy says screw that, let's give the players assault rifles and see how Cthulhu likes that. It's basically horror gaming for people who thought Call of Cthulhu investigators were too passive, too fragile and too reluctant to solve problems with high explosives.

Iain:

Horror games that focus on storytelling things like the worlds of darkness. They focus on personal horror, the monster within, moral choices, the cost of power. Dark conspiracy is more interested in external horror, the monsters without. They're kind of reduced to tactical choices and the cost of ammunition. It's less what does it mean to be human and what do these blots on my soul do? And more how many rounds does it take to stop that dimensional shambler? Where Call of Cthulhu has sanity mechanics to represent how exposure to cosmic horror breaks the human mind, dark Inspiracy has hit points and armour ratings.

Iain:

The assumption is that player characters are tough enough, well-armed enough and professionally enough to face down interdimensional horrors without immediately pissing themselves and dissolving into gibbering madness, whereas your average Call of Cthulhu protagonist would be like alas, the horror is upon us. I must write down these last words so that my mind does not crumble. Your dark conspiracy protagonists are very much being oh, the horror's here, pass me the storm rifle and let's see how many shots to the face he takes. It creates a very different kind of horror experience and sometimes it's not even horrific. It's much more a tactical combat game. Instead of the creeping dread of investigation slowly revealing incomprehensible truths, you get the visceral thrill of this tactical combat against supernatural threats. Instead of protagonists who have scars and dilettantes in over their heads, you get protagonists who are soldiers and professionals doing what they do best.

Iain:

The game's approach to empathic abilities also sets it apart from other horror games. Rather than treating psychic powers as something inherently corrupting or dangerous, as many other games do Call of Cthulhu's magic is a great example of this Dark Conspiracy presents them as tools that can be developed and used responsibly. Empaths aren't tragic figures doomed by their abilities. Nope, they're another type of specialist with useful skills for fighting aliens.

Iain:

Modern horror games often emphasise collaborative storytelling, narrative mechanics and player agency in shaping the story. Dark Conspiracy is much more traditional in its approach. The ref controls the world and the mystery and player characters react to that world. It's less concerned with innovative mechanics and storytelling and more focused on providing a thoroughly detailed simulation of this world. The game's length and complexity are something that would stand out in stark contrast to more modern design trends, where contemporary games often prioritise streamlined roles and quick setup. You see all these quick start roles that you can download and drive through RPG. Dark Conspiracy assumes players want to spend a lot of time in character creation and that they don't mind consulting multiple tables mid-combat and that they don't mind consulting multiple tables mid-combat. It's a product of an era when comprehensive was considered more important than accessible. So, with all that said, was Dark Conspiracy a good game?

Iain:

I think Dark Conspiracy hit the gaming scene at exactly the right cultural moment. The Cold War was over, but nobody knew what came next. The internet was still this weird academic curiosity, but people could sense that technology was about to reshape society in very fundamental ways. Economic inequality was growing, trust in institutions was declining and environmental concerns were becoming less fringe and much more mainstream. And into all that certainty came a game that said hey, what of all your worst fears about these things were true. Oh, and, by the way, there are also monsters. It's the cyberpunk future without the neon aesthetic, aesthetic Call of Cthulhu, without the academic protagonists, a military simulation, but really without clear-cut enemies. It captured that paranoia of a world in transition where old certainties had collapsed and new threats emerged from unexpected directions. This may sound unnecessarily philosophical about a game where you can literally buy something called a storm rifle, but the game's vision of corporate feudalism, rural abandonment and environmental collapse nowadays it seems almost prophetic. It understood that the post-Cold War world wouldn't be characterised by peace and prosperity, but by new forms of conflict and, more importantly, new forms of failure, and it understood that these failures would create spaces, both physical and metaphorical, where new horrors could take root. The game's demon grounds aren't just random monster spawning areas. They're what happens when society abandons places and people, when the social fabric tears and something else, something evil, moves in to fill the void. I hope that's not too heavy handed again for people living in 2025 America.

Iain:

The game also arrived at a moment when horror media was undergoing its own transition. Those slasher films of the 80s were giving way to more psychological and atmospheric horror. The X-Files was about to completely redefine how conspiracy fiction worked. Dark conspiracy feels like it belongs in this new wave of horror. It's more complex, more political and more grounded in the real anxieties than the monster movies of the previous decades. It's kind of ironic because the monster sections in Dark Conspiracy does feel like a grab bag of monster of the week monsters, but there is that tacit understanding that the referee should be taking the individual components they want and building their own world that is thematically consistent.

Iain:

For gamers, dark Conspiracy offered something unique. It was a horror game where player characters could actually fight back After years of Call of Cthulhu characters telling us that the best outcome was well, you all die, but the darkness is postponed for another decade, here was a game that said, nope, you can stand up and fight the enemy and actually win. It scratched that power fantasy urge that LEDD had done 20 odd years earlier, d&d had done 20 odd years earlier. So I've rambled on for more than half an hour about this so far. What do I think of Dark Conspiracy?

Iain:

Well, on its surface, dark Conspiracy is a game that shouldn't work. You've heard all the contradictions. It's trying to be too many things at once A military simulation with cosmic horror, cyberpunk, dystopia, but also a monster hunting adventure, serious social commentary and absolutely absurd equipment, pod fetishism. It's got rules for space combat and again primarily about investigating conspiracies and burnt out rural farmhouses. And it can generate parties so mismatched that the closest the referee can get to cohesion is hand waving it all away and saying, fine, you're all friends and you went to school together. But somehow, if you talk to most people that play Dark Conspiracy, it does work. People have fun with it, maybe not despite its contradictions, but because of them.

Iain:

Dark Conspiracy captures something that the early RPGs all seemed to know that when we're responding to monsters, what do we do? We buy more gear, we form unlikely alliances and we solve problems through superior firepower, and we refuse to admit we are completely out of our depth. Yes, it's a ridiculous power fantasy, but sometimes that can be fun right. The game's strength, though, is also its greatest weakness. It takes every element of its premise completely seriously. If there are monsters, there must be detailed rules for fighting them. If there are conspiracies, there must be complex systems for investigating them. If there are monsters, there must be detailed rules for fighting them. If there are conspiracies, there must be complex systems for investigating them. If there are empathic powers, there must be comprehensive mechanics for using them. If there's a chance the characters might end up in space, there must be rules for that too, because why not?

Iain:

This commitment to completeness isn't a knowing nod to the audience. To completeness isn't a knowing nod to the audience. It's taken very, very seriously and it can be kind of off-putting to newcomers. It's also completely ridiculous. Half of the rules in the book you will never use as a referee, and when you come to that understanding, that's where the fun comes in.

Iain:

You take the parts of dark conspiracy that works for you and you meld them into a game you're going to enjoy. The best example of this is the 70 plus pages of lavishly illustrated equipment. This isn't just gun porn although it is that as well but it's a statement about the game. You can choose to include all of that and play the most gung-ho, rambo version of this game you want, or you can. If you want to do a more investigative horror game, take away the big guns and leave them with just the tools you need for the investigation. Again, it's about crafting the sort of game that you want to play.

Iain:

The really fascinating part of the Dark Conspiracy, though, as I mentioned a few times, it's how it predicted our current moment with somewhat unsettling accuracy the economic inequality, the corporate power and overreach, the rural decay, the social fragmentation of a society, the environmental crisis. The social fragmentation of a society, the environmental crisis, the rise of conspiracy thinking and people not looking beyond their own beliefs. Whether it meant it or not, dark conspiracy understood that when institutions fail, people don't just suffer. Something dark and evil seeps in to fill the vacuum. So, love it or hate it, you kind of have to respect Dark Conspiracy's audacity. It's a game that looked to that emerging post-Cold War 1991 world and said you guys think this is bad, wait till you see what's coming next. And 34 years later we are still finding out just how right it was In the end. Dark Conspiracy stands as a fascinating artefact of early 90s game design An insect trapped in amber. Ambitious beyond reason, complex beyond necessity and strangely prescient beyond belief. It's a game that dared to imagine the worst possible future and then handed the players assault rifles and said go, fix that. And it felt perfectly appropriate for 1991. And, oddly enough, for today too. And that was our dark conspiracy episode. I hope you enjoyed it.

Iain:

We've dropped the monthly moniker from our monthly role-playing podcast title because, let's face it, it was a massive lie. But we are going to be back soon with another episode. This time it will be a round table about Dark Conspiracy, where we talk about our memories with the game and the fun we had and how we managed to gel together this incoherent mess into something that our gaming groups actually enjoyed. If you want to get in touch with us, the best way is via email. You can get us at rolltosavepod at gmailcom. We no longer use Twitter for well only obvious reasons for not doing Twitter. We also have Instagram too, but we've not posted anything there in ages. That might change, though, who knows? Anyway, we hope you enjoyed the episode.

Iain:

If you're a new listener, we have a whole back catalogue that you can go through of episodes involving history roundtables, there's some interviews, there's even some actual plays as well, if that's your thing, and even some product reviews. So take a look at that if you enjoy, and if you enjoyed what we did, please leave us a little review. Those five stars go a lot to getting us visibility and, who knows, it may even encourage us to do more episodes. Anyway, thank you very much. We hope you enjoyed it and we will hopefully have another episode up here soon.

People on this episode

Contributor

Iain Wilson

Host
Contributor

Jason Downey

Co-host
Contributor

Steve McGarrity

Co-host