Did the darkness overwhelm, or did it elevate the game? Did you have worthwhile triumphs nevertheless? Nevertheless, I’d love to hear stories about good games of Midnight or other grimdark worlds. Does it enrich the themes of the story and the game, or does it inadvertently shut down and invalidate certain avenues of the conversation? Does it jeopardize everything that’s meaningful about our agency as participants? I think it’s worth considering this when we introduce elements of such oppressive darkness to our games. What I find distasteful in Midnight is that the setting preempts this discussion by essentially making it clear that no reaction you can have to Evil will ever truly have meaning, and at worse, it will never be nothing more than tears in the rain. Through engaging with them, we formulate and negotiate responses.
Many other dark fantasy games, or indeed pieces of dark fantasy media and literature, has evil and darkness powerfully present because they want us to seriously engage with these issues. That’s the crux of my problem with Midnight. It’s too easy to cherry-pick the very worst excesses of evil, real or imagined, and foreground them under the guise of “gritty grim darkness”, followed by silence of what to actually make of this ugliness. I cannot imagine myself enjoying a game week after week where Evil is not only victories, but also philosophically in the right. Good deeds, sacrifice, and heroism appears becomes not only futile. Ultimately, everything is too bleak, too unchanging, too overwhelming. The setting’s assurances that it is all meant to make us want to fight for the modest victories and the small glimmers of hope ultimately ring hollow. Ugliness and despair are ever-present, and… In a sense, it all feels too easy. In Midnight, darkness is the pervasive, all-conquering flavor. I strongly believe that darkness, threats, and the presence of dread are essential ingredients of effective fantasy. Even going back to grandfather Tolkien, there are passages of The Lord of the Rings and the rest of the legendarium (special mention to Children of Húrin – not for the faint of heart, that book!) that are mired in depressive darkness. Some of them have sections that are downright miserable. Elric of Melniboné, the Witcher books, the Black Company, Thieves’ World, and sundry fantasies with highly bleak themes were formative in my understanding of fantasy stories. Now I don’t even want to consider playing it, at least in this state.īut dark fantasy is something I love and adore. I remembered loving Midnight on my first read years ago.
#MYSTERA LEGACY DESTRUCTION ADJACENT WALL PDF#
I closed the PDF with a weird feeling of dispirited dejection. And, frustratingly, much of the Midnight material is silent on exactly how a long-term campaign could ever be brought to a satisfying conclusion. Attempting to make lasting change is futile. Where Midnight falters is, in my view, in its inability to meaningfully deliver on the promise of its themes. Nursing those few embers of resistance and rebellion that are left. The game emphasizes how heroes in the world do not fight to overthrow the Big Bad, but to hold on to last vestige of hope and goodness that are left in the world. Conceptually, Midnight is great it’s basically Middle-Earth if Sauron won, where Evil has already won, the Good Guys lost the great cosmic struggle, and we’re now seeing the aftermath. Seeing that made me page through some of the older versions of the setting I had lying around, highly-produced relics of the 3rd Edition OGL era.
#MYSTERA LEGACY DESTRUCTION ADJACENT WALL UPDATE#
It seems Midnight has gotten an update for the Fifth Edition Era.
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