This is a short article that I wrote for the Dark Conspiracy 4th edition Kickstarter that never saw publication. It looks to detail, at least from my perspective, why I continue to love, support and create for Dark Conspiracy and why I’m so excited for a new edition!
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Shapes that rip and tear. Shadows that live in corners… Windows in space and time that lead to realms of madness and decay…
And with those words an untold number of gamers were lured into the world of Dark Conspiracy. It was the early 1990s, and for years, roleplayers had played their games across infinite worlds of heroic fantasy, the bounds of airless space or facing the maddening terrors of Lovecraftian horrors, but rarely had they the opportunity to act out their adventures in a setting that reflected so darkly humanity’s own missteps into the future.
Dark Conspiracy is the game of modern, conspiracy horror, set against a backdrop of a bleak future dominated by greed, evil and nightmares from beyond reality. It was a product of its era, the result of a zeitgeist of suspicion and fear – likely driven by a recent stock-market crash, a changing governmental structure and a rapid rise in personal technology – that would spawn not only TV shows like the X Files, Millennium and Dark Skies, but also a plethora of other similarly focused roleplaying games.