Devlog: Current state of development

I’ve got a markdown document that’s my current development copy of Midnight of the Century, along with a Microsoft Teams planner board that I use to keep track of stray ideas, work on structure, and manage what needs to be done. I have a bucket called Structure that I can use to re-arrange sections and visualise the flow of information.

Right now I’m focusing on getting the core rules and mechanics into a workable state. I’m baselining everything around the Profiler specialism, which is closest to the source inspiration (the TV series Millennium), but later on I’ll focus on the other specialisms. In my head, the two core specialisms are Profiler and Occultist, as both have similar investigative abilities but totally different approaches.

The rules/mechanics includes stuff like gameplay loop, ability saves, skills, damage, resting/healing, etc. In other words, the game part of the TTRPG. Since there’s no combat, I need to work with a different dynamic than I’m used to.

My goal is to get things into a sturdy enough state to playtest. I’ll start with one player, to make sure gameplay is engaging and interesting, and then move to a larger party. This means having multiple specialisms ready to go, since having a group full of Profilers would get boring pretty quick!

I’m using Liminal Horror as a rough framework for the rules, as it’s a solid skeleton to build on and similar enough to Into the Odd and Cairn, which I’m pretty familiar with.

What I worked on today: Fleshing out an introductory investigation, both to include in the book and also to sanity check the current rules and investigative flow.

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