Devlog: Farewell to Fatigue

As Midnight of the Century is built from Cairn, Liminal Horror, and Into the Odd, one of the core mechanics was fatigue and inventory management. That works for something combat-focused like Runecairn, where you need to manage resilience and fatigue while navigating deadly encounters. For something slower-paced and more reflective like Midnight of the Century, those mechanics felt forced and clunky.

Following on from recent fracture changes, I’ve also updated the fatigue and damage system. Now, your ability scores (body, mind, will) are also ability pools that you draw from to use investigator skills. The cost of using these skills scales with the doom phase, from 1 to 4 points.

Now, instead of gaining fatigue when you use skills, your pools diminish and need to be refilled in downtime. If any ability score drops to 0, you roll on the Fracture table.

This change also removes the need for inventory management, which always felt a bit off in this game. You still have investigator tools on you, but you don’t have to micro-manage what you take with you.

I’m boiling the mechanics down, streamlining them to what works best for the experience. Hopefully this translates to something engaging and interesting to play!

Recently worked on:

Writing out a new set of Fracture tables, one for each ability. Fracture will function more like Scars in Cairn, but like everything else gets more serious the later the doom phase.

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