Cold Carrion
A downloadable game
Cold Carrion is a solo pen-and-paper dungeon crawl where you scavenge what you can from war-torn spaceship hulls.
This game has:
- Pre-designed abandoned ship hulls for you to land on and explore.
- Tactical grid-based combat played on an 8x8 grid, with 3 combatants on each team.
- Drones you take into combat. You choose which two drones to take from a list with different abilities.
- Your own ship, The Albion, where you can repair your drones and create med-kit charges mid-exploration.
- A long list of compartment types you might come across in each ship.
- Three types of enemies, each with their own set of behaviours in combat: the swarm, security bots, and pirates.
- A simple progression system that gives you access to new drones, and lets you upgrade your ship.
There are 6 pages of rules and 7 pages of look-up tables for drones you can take into combat, consumables, equipment, weapons, ship layouts, compartment contents, enemy types, and combat layouts.
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Development log
- Cold Carrion 1.278 days ago
- Cold Carrion 1.180 days ago
- Cold Carrion 1.0Jul 11, 2024
Comments
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Excellent little system and clear, concise rules. Perfect for slipping some excursions into my ongoing Umbra playthrough. nice work
Excellent to hear that. I'd be interested to hear more about how you fold it into your Umbra play-through. And also if you have any feedback on the combat system. It's the first tactical combat I've designed, so I want to make sure it's fun.
sure thing! Well I’m about to start the umbra Stations expansion so in my ongoing narrative (I like to thematically tie the games I’m playing together so there’s some flow between them and a sense of scale), the commander needs to first ‘acquire’ the derelict craft that will be used in that game. So I’m using Cold Carrion as a means of exploring potential options.
I don’t have much specific feedback yet as I’ve only done one ship so far. Combat moves fairly slow, but that’s because I haven’t figured out the best way to keep track of the combat area yet. I’m just using a pencil/eraser on the same grid and it’s a bit messy. I might move to a laminated grid and dry erase marker, or even a chessboard! :)
Have you thought about more enemy variations or the possibility of starting with a higher number of enemies? Being outnumbered might help increase the difficulty curve and force a bit more strategy. I don’t think it would unbalance things. But I haven’t designed a combat system so I could be way wrong.
One thing I noticed was a typo on the consumables and equipment tables say d12 when it’s a d8 :)
Hope that feedback is ok, I’m not one for heavy overly complicated rules, nor too easy/quick, and this is just about the right level for me.
This is great, thank you.
When I play-tested the game, I did it in a digital canvas tool (Figma) which let me paste in the grid image from the rules, and then move virtual pieces around to keep track of combatants. I think a chess board is a good way to do this in the real world, or if you print out the grids and use tokens/pieces of paper. Not quite as "pen-and-paper" as it could be.
I hadn't thought much about the difficulty of combat. I didn't want it to feel unfair, but that's about it. Let me know if you consistently win battles, and maybe I'll think about ways to make it harder.
I've updated the PDF to fix those typos. Well-spotted.