A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure! Dark as Day and Cold as Ice is a wholly original sandbox setting for a Free League's Alien - The Roleplaying System Building Better Worlds Colonists Campaign. At the heart of the Cyclades Cluster, in the distant reaches of the American Arm, far beyond the Outer Rim, sits Chartier’s Star . In orbit a single ancient Gas Giant with a single roughly earth-sized moon: Karn's World is a radiation-soaked icy ocean world with surface temperatures that never rise above -70° C... and home to about 500 colonists : Hard-working, good, decent men, women and children. Families. Engineers. Farmers. Service workers. Most live in Karn City , a modular habitat hanging beneath half a kilometer of ice, over a vast lightless ocean, connected to Triton Comms Station at the surface, and the only space port, via elevator. But the ride may take some time: Karn City has to be kept at 50 atm with a special heliox air mix, and even with Proteus Industries' proprietary anti-bends medicine pressurization requires a couple of hours. The work: Farming bioengineered tube worms, mussels and shrimp around mineral rich volcanic hydrothermal vents to provide the necessary protein for much of the Cyclades Cluster, at a depth of almost 2000 meters and a pressure of 200 atm . Brass calls the farm Doris Station but most colonists call it the Deep Down. What you cannot do via ROVs, you have to do in heavy duty power armour diving suits. Space suits are nothing compared to this. One crack and you implode literally faster than the blink of an eye. There are two other installations on Karn's World - the Charybdis Penal Mining Station , where the Outer Rim's worst of the worst dig for pegmatites containing lithium, beryllium and niobium. Recently Shaft Ereshkigal, one of the four major mine shafts, flooded and about a hundred prisoners were crushed in an instant. Corporate was not happy about the dip in productivity. The other is Madoc Station , a fairly small, remote research station, developing the bioengineered sub-nautical farm life for the colony. The 30 or so scientists and administrators there rarely visit Karn City, though the guards and staff from the Penal Mine get regular leave and bring welcome additional cash into the colony's struggling economy - sufficient to keep a few bars and a casino operational. Things are going fine . Work is hard, and the isolation can put a lot of, well, pressure on people. There are rare cases of helium-induced HPNS psychosis, but the signs are usually spotted in time. There are the usual spooky rumours - things living in the ocean, people seen in dark corridors where nobody should be, etc. People got to tell stories, but really everything is going well. The only life in those oceans is what the colonists brought with them. The population is small and all accounted for. Everything is fine. Everything. is. fine. Inspirations include films like "2010: The Year We Make Contact" (1984), "The Abyss" (1989), "Deep Blue Sea" (1999), "Below" (2002), "Europa Report" (2013), and "Underwater" (2020), video games like "Bioshock" (2007) or "Soma" (2015) as well as "The Expense" (Novels/TV Series) and RPG supplements like Cyberpunk 2020's "The Bonin Horse" (1993) and "Sub-Attica" (1994), Call of Cthulhu's "Grace Under Pressure" (1993), and GURPS's "Transhuman Space" (2002), esp. "Under Pressure" (2003) We create characters together during a (free) Session Zero. We'll be using Free League's Alien RPG - Evolved Edition rules, incl. those from the Building Better Worlds Colonists supplement, and perhaps the Colonial Marines Operations Manual . Starting available careers will be Colonial Marshal (only 1), Kid , Medic , Officer , Roughneck , Scientist (from the Core Rules) and Entertainer (from "Building Better Worlds"). All careers have access to the additional Colonists career talents. Starting characters cannot be androids. (Depending on character turnover, later characters may include other careers and androids.) If you do not have access to the rules or are new to the game, don't worry, I will walk you through character creation and the rules. We will be using Roll20 for character sheets, dice rolls, maps, handouts, etc., and Discord for the voice chat. I will send you the necessary invites to the game and the server when you join the campaign. We will be using a mix of tactical battle maps and Theatre of the Mind , with station , submarine , sea floor , mine and planetary surface maps , NPC portraits , location sketches , handouts , etc. to create the right images and mood. If all players enjoy it, I will be using ambient music , though I have found that some players prefer to play without as it can make online communication harder. Expect a gritty, realistic, mostly by-the-(campaign-play)-rules game, though on occasion narrative needs may override the hard "rules as written". This will be a survival horror game, and while less deadly in campaign mode compared too the cinematic mode , character death is definitely a real danger. When that happens, you will create a new character from the types of colonists, researchers, guards or other personnel that might at that time join the party. Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence. This is a scifi survival horror game, set on a remote alien world mostly hundreds of meters below the frozen surface of a planet-spanning ocean, in a dystopian hyper-capitalist corpocracy. There might also be hostile non-human entities, though even if, it remains to be seen who is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage. But that does not give anyone (including me) carte blanche to act abusively whether in or out of character. This game is LGBTQ and BIPOC friendly and no form of sexism, racism or bigotry will be tolerated. I do not use a Lines and Veils document or a formal X Card, however I do take player safety seriously. I n my experience most formal safety tools can - depending on the player - sometimes be as restrictive as they are helpful and for each player who feels empowered by one tool there can be one who feels constrained and muted by the same. Instead I go over general safety behaviour in Session Zero and encourage players to signal any discomfort with me, the game or other players anytime either openly in the chat, in private messages to me during the session, or anytime between sessions, however suits them best, and I will do my best to create a safe and welcoming atmosphere for everyone. (And yes, anyone can change their mind anytime about what might be crossing a line or be triggering, you can step away or we can pause the game for a recalibration anytime. This is a game and we're all here to have fun.) Weekly Gameplay, Thursday 11 AM PDT, 2 PM EDT, 7 PM GMT, 8 PM CET, 4h Sessions, Beginner Friendly, LGBTQ+ Friendly, BIPOC Friendly, GM with 4 Decades of Roleplaying and Gamemastering Experience, Price: $20 per Session and Player payable through StartPlaying.games, free Session Zero for Character Creation and all Questions & Answers. Link to game page on Roll20: <a href="https://app.roll20.net/campaigns/details/19386668/alien-dark-as-day-and-cold-as-ice" rel="nofollow">https://app.roll20.net/campaigns/details/19386668/alien-dark-as-day-and-cold-as-ice</a> Link to game page on Startplaying: <a href="https://startplaying.games/adventure/cmc2x4e1v000je4xucu46cycm" rel="nofollow">https://startplaying.games/adventure/cmc2x4e1v000je4xucu46cycm</a> GM Contact on Discord: "orvil_pym" (with the "_" underscore) This game will require payment to the Game Master at a rate of $20 per player and session, payable via StartPlaying. Roll20 is not responsible for any payment transactions and cannot enforce any private arrangements.