An Interview with Graham Walmsley on Cosmic Dark

We first became aware of Graham Walmsley’s work with Cthulhu Dark, an influential Lovecraft-in-miniature masterpiece which removed everything that distracted from investigative stories into beings beyond our ken (and perhaps even beyond our barbie), and gave it a firm underclass-looking-up-perspective.

Now, with Cosmic Dark, presently kickstarting, he’s back, turning his attention away from beings from beyond the stars, in favour of taking us all up there in an an A24ish sci-fi space-elevated genre RPG.

In a medium where some sci-fi games’ influences range from Alien to Aliens, this is a game which focuses on weird sci-fi horror. Tarkovsky, Ballard, Vandermeer: frankly, the good stuff, but with a set of rules that drill down to make this mindbending and enchanting material as accessible as possible.

Be aware, we are highly partial here: Kieron’s doing a stretch goal, which has been hit. With support, Jim will be joining him. We’re on board, but we’re only on board because climbing aboard a space-ship to an awful destination and sure that the alien life we meet will be us is what we live for.

Here’s Graham to tell us all about it.

Old Men: Spaaaaace. It feels like it’s been getting extra attention in RPGs lately. Mothership is obviously the motherlode for this particular moment. Cosmic Dark is clearly in a different space, no pun intended. How do you consider your work to relate to the moment? What made you think we needed a game that was more Solaris than Aliens?

Walmsley: Do you want the easy answer or do you want me to talk about surrealism? 

Okay, let’s talk about surrealism.

In the 1920s, the surrealists made strange, dreamlike art. They smashed concepts together, reaching into their nightmares and their unconscious for inspiration.

I find this art – by Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst and others – deeply inspiring today. It’s still affecting, still strange. And I love modern analogues such as the films of David Lynch: I’ve been watching Twin Peaks and I especially love the final series. They put me in a headspace I can’t describe, that takes me out of everyday life and makes me feel better when I go back into it.

But the surrealists were doing something political. They were reacting to the horrors of the First World War and the powerful people that had sent men to die. They were abandoning rationality, suggesting it was better to look inside your mind and trust your imagination.

There’s something of that in Cosmic Dark. I don’t think it’s going to change the world, but, in some way, it’s a reaction to the way the world is going.

Science fiction is a great way to tell stories like that. It lets you put strange twists on time, technology and reality – with time loops, doppelgangers and more – and see what happens.

Oh, and there’s something around corporate horror, isn’t there? I remember when companies like Amazon and Google seemed young and exciting. Now they seem to have a darker side. That’s a fascinating thing to explore. Science fiction lets you do that.

And I’ve always been interested in exploring class. My last game, Cthulhu Dark, had a rule that the Investigators were people with little power, exploring a horror at the heart of the power. In Cosmic Dark, I wanted to explore work: you work for a huge, amoral company that sends you to risk your life. How do you write about that, without just writing about the modern corporate world? Well, if you do it in space, it becomes fun.

Old Men: Having read the preview edition, it’s interesting to see you embed the rules for the game in the first mission (i.e. Scenario). As in, the rules for running the game are presented as part of the scenario you should be running first. That still seems a rarity to do, but also really interesting as a way of onboarding and bringing people into a game. What led you to pursuing this? Is this something you’d hope to see more of? I did find myself thinking that tutorials-as-part-of-game has been in videogames for getting on for thirty years now, so it’s a surprise that it’s still a relative rarity.

Walmsley: I remember playing Skyrim, which designs your character based on the skills you used in the tutorial. If you sneaked a lot, then you got more points in your sneaking skill. And you’re right: even when video games give you instructions (press R3 to duck), they do it in a tutorial, which is the start of the story. Why can’t we do that in RPGs?

Convention play was important too. I often run games at conventions, both online and in person. I don’t want to use pregens, because I want people to make characters they’re invested in. But, if you create characters at the start of a three hour slot, that leaves you with only two hours to play.

So there’s something very attractive in sitting down at the table and starting the story straightaway: “You’re in a shuttle, descending to the surface of a planet”.

There are RPGs that have done similar things. In James Wallis’ Alas Vegas, your characters have amnesia, so you literally make them as you play. In Vincent Baker’s Poison’d, there’s such a strong starting setup – you’re all on the deck of pirate ship and someone just murdered the captain – that  you hardly need to make characters to get started.

For a while, I wanted to make Extraction, the first Cosmic Dark scenario, a tutorial mission. It would be very structured: you land, you talk, you do a roll to analyse the rock, you do a Changed roll. That felt a step too far, but that’s still the general idea.

Old Men: One of the references in your documentation was Ballard. I feel like he gets missed out in a lot of contemporary sci-fi discussions, and I worry perhaps his influence is on the wane in a time when he has proven to be even more astute and prescient than ever. How did the prophet of Shepperton influence you?

Walmsley: After I finished Cthulhu Dark, I wanted to get away from Lovecraft. He’s an unpleasant character and he’s so ubiquitous these days.

But who else was there, if I wanted to write horror? Who would be my touchstone? Lovecraft always put me in a particular weird headspace and I wanted an author that did something similar.

In the end, it wasn’t just one author. It was Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, Olga Ravn’s The Employees, Emily St John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility and J O Morgan’s Appliance, with a bit of the videogames Prey and Citizen Sleeper. They all blended together in my head into a little genre of “Weird space horror”. 

And it was Ballard, especially the imagery of his early short stories. Maybe I’d been influenced by his stuff before: in the Cthulhu Dark scenario Consume, the skyscraper is a Ballardesque twisting, growing entity.

And Ballard has a political side, of course, which attracts me. The book everyone talks about is High Rise, but the one that really got me was Concrete Island, in which someone drives off the road and becomes stranded in a forgotten space between roads. What’s it about? It’s hard to tell. But it messes with modern themes in a way I like.

Old Men: On BlueSky Kieron said that Cthulhu Dark was quietly one of the most influential games of the last decade and change, and you seemed surprised – and he was glad to see that Jesse Ross chipped in with its influence on the Trophy games, for example.

Walmsley: Yes, that word “influential” surprised me! Cthulhu Dark gets played a lot: someone told me they’d heard two teenage girls talking excitedly about Star Vampires, who turned out to be playing Cthulhu Dark. I love that. 

But influential? It isn’t as well-known as Fiasco and it hasn’t inspired a range of games like Apocalypse World has. 

But yes. Through Trophy Dark and The Gauntlet community, it inspired a bunch of games. I love that. And designers tell me it’s influenced their stuff. That’s incredible.

Old Men: Cthulhu Dark has no combat, full stop. Limited dice. Always get the necessary clue, extra details. What do you like about minimalism? The rejection of the thing which most games (“combat?”) in the genre are based around?(The dice system is one we really like, is there a story to how that came about?)

Walmsley: Around 2010, there was a vogue for small games: John Harper’s Lady Blackbird is the most famous example, but Marc Majcher’s Twenty Four Game Poems is another.

So I started thinking: how would you do a rules-light Cthulhu game? You’d have one die for your occupation, some other dice too, then you’d roll to investigate things. That’s obvious so far, I think?

Then Cthulhu Dark takes the trick of “You can’t fail an investigative roll” from GUMSHOE. I remember Simon Rogers, who publishes GUMSHOE, mentioning someone who suggested replacing the point-spend mechanics with die rolls. It was a joke, but I wondered how you’d actually do it. Maybe when you investigate, you roll a die and always succeed, but the higher you roll, the better you do? Maybe if you roll high, you discover extra things? 

What Cthulhu Dark adds is: if you roll a 6, you “discover too much” and glimpse the horror. I think that’s the best thing about Cthulhu Dark. It’s a uniquely horror mechanic, which ensures the horror can pop up any time.

I also wanted some kind of Sanity mechanic. The simplest way to do that with a single die is to run it from 1 to 6, then if you roll over/under, your Sanity goes up/down. 

I like it when different mechanics interact. So, for me, it was obvious to add this Sanity Die to investigative rolls. But we’d already established that 6s meant horror, so that suggests swapping Sanity around, so it runs from 1 (total sanity) to 6 (total insanity). That makes it an Insanity Die. Later, I wanted to get away from the allusion to mental health, so it became the Insight Die.

As a technical aside, this is a reverse death spiral: the more Insight you have, the less likely it is you’ll gain more. That’s the opposite of the Sanity death spiral in Call of Cthulhu, in which the less Sanity you have, the more likely you are to lose more. That’s deliberate and it’s really thrilling in play: your Insight shoots up at first, until, at the end of the game, you’re teetering on the edge of total destruction. 

And the other significant rule is the one you mentioned: “If you fight anything you meet, you die”. That’s because Lovecraft’s stories don’t feature much combat, but RPG players often turn to combat to solve things. There were various ways to deal with this – I could have introduced penalties, for example – but I knew players would try combat anyway. So I just ruled it out.

One thing I always say is that Cthulhu Dark isn’t just a stripped-back system. It’s small, but the dice do things to the narrative. I think this idea of dice that affect the narrative is something we’ve lost in recent years. 

(Oh, and I had to give this rules-light Cthulhu system a name. I couldn’t call “Cthulhu Light”, that sounds totally wrong. So…)

Old Men: Could you talk about how Cosmic Dark grew out of the thinking you did a decade ago?

Walmsley: With Cosmic Dark, I wanted to put mechanics behind a lot of the GM advice in Cthulhu Dark. 

For example, in Cthulhu Dark, you glimpse the horror when you roll a 6, and there’s some GM advice about “creeping horrors” which build over time. 

But, in Cosmic Dark, it’s much more specific. When you roll a 6, you glimpse an Anomaly, which you choose from a list. You can vary the Anomalies or invent your own, but you start from the list. 

Similarly, I start many Cthulhu Dark scenarios by asking questions whose answers I’d use later. So I’d ask “How do you know Lily?”, and then of course Lily dies.

In Cosmic Dark, those questions are hardwired into the scenario. Every scenario starts with a Psych Assessment,  with questions designed so the GM can use the answers later in the scenario. 

That’s a big change in Cosmic Dark, along with the “no character creation”. And then the other big change is campaign play, which I finally figured out how to do!

Old Men: Linked to that, I found myself thinking of what has influenced you as a designer – what excites you?

Walmsley: I’ve always tried to look outside tabletop gaming for influences. 

So I saw Dear England, a play about Gareth Southgate as England manager. I’d love to write something that deals with such a popular subject in such an engaging way. The audience stood and sang along at the end. How can I get players to feel like that?

I saw a play called Ben and Imo tonight, a two-hander about composers Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst. Why can’t we write two-hander RPGs? Why can’t we write RPGs about composers?

And I love modern art. I saw the sculptures of Leonora Carrington recently. She’s got an amazing story: she ran away from the UK to France, then fled the Nazis heading through Spain and Portugal, then made her way to New York then Mexico. I’d love to put that into a game. 

And I’m into local history. There was a forest court in my home town, which adjudicated crimes such as poaching and fish pond thievery. That’s definitely becoming a game. 

Old Men: While the main adventures are written longform, the stretch goal ones are written in a compressed form, reminding me of (say) the deconstructed adventure of something like Brindlewood Bay where clues are presented without a set location.  The Records and Anomalies seem skin to that, but divided interestingly into two types. What excites you here?

Walmsley: Yeah, there’s a tension there. I like writing traditional scenarios but I also like designing tools so players can tell their own stories!

When I run scenarios, I’m always moving parts around, so that a horror that I’d planned for one location might pop up in another. So I’m fascinated by the idea of deconstructing that: you have a list of locations, you have horrors, you have other items of lore you can learn, and they can combine lots of ways. And there’s always an attraction in keeping things minimal. 

I’d love to write a game where there’s no prewritten scenario. You just start with a few pieces and build from there. Imagine the scenario replaced by something like the Threats from Apocalypse World, which advance gradually whatever you do, in a way that’s only broadly specified in advance. Maybe that’s next.

Cosmic Dark is presently kickstarting.