I ran a first session of Midnight of the Century yesterday. I had one player who chose the Profiler Specialism and I ran the Widening Gyre.

We went through character creation together, and that was fun and went into more depth than expected. The Profiler Psyche Profile is quite evocative. We skipped over rolling on all of the physical traits, as the player had something in mind linked to how the character doesn't take care of himself but looks in good shape because he doesn't eat enough. Had some nice description of his apartment (Haven). When we moved on to the mystery, and I asked the questions about the Haven etc., there were more details drawn out and that was fun.

Scenes:

• [Morning] We had a brief scene in his apartment, when the pager buzzing wakes him up, fallen asleep in front of the TV.
• [Morning] A scene driving with Will Butler - I made the choice to not give all of the detail in the briefing at this point (I'm not entirely sure why, I guess in my mind it seemed too early in the investigation to have much background on the victim), so mainly shared who the victim was, that nature of the killing, and that Oroboro were called in.
• [Morning] The alley scene had a nice pace and he was asking a lot of questions. He asked about CCTV (maybe less common in the 90's, but I said there was no footage available anyway). I was a little baffled for a moment when he asked how the cops identified the victim. I'll say a little more about improv in general thoughts later, but I said that the cops had his fingerprints because there had been a burglary at his house years before and they collected them for elimination, then I though, "Crap, is he going to try to track down the burglar? 🙂"
• [Afternoon] He drove to the Locan Home. Talked to the cops outside and then did a thorough search of the home. He made a couple of phone calls to numbers found during this search. By this point his WILL had been hammered, so he called his Connection and made a plan to meet for food.

Skills:

I triggered a Glimpse in the alley, when he was looking at the body, and again at the Locan Home for the vision there. I wasn't sure whether that vision was intended to be used with Glimpse or as more of an Occultist one, but it seemed to work. In both cases he didn't resist the Glimpse.

Early on, the player helpfully reminded me that basic investigation doesn't require rolling, after I asked for one. That works well.

He used Force to open a locked drawer, and used Interview during a phone call. There were other occasions where I considered calling for a roll for Interview but didn't. He didn't use Profile at all. I more or less forgot about it, so didn't suggest it at any time. I'm not sure if the player remembered and just chose not to use it until it feels more timely. I also asked for a WILL save when he did something of questionable ethics, to cover the potential guilt/stress from that.

Rules:

The rules are very clear. The player has plenty of experience as a GM too, so we chatted about the rules a couple of times during play. We had a little doubt about whether it was correct that he lost so much WILL, but once we understood that it drives the gameplay loop of investigation and recover, it makes sense, and I think will lead to some great roleplaying.

In the section "What causes a Fracture Check?" there is a reference to 'critical' saves. I interpret that as very important saves, but the use of the word critical confused me a little because it also has a meaning for rolling 1s and 20s.

What stood out:

The decreasing of WILL stands out, compared to other Odd-like games I have played. But I like it, and it feeds into the next point about character.

It felt very character driven. It can often take some time for a player to settle in to a character, but I think the character creation here is great, and the whole thing very atmospheric with familiar touchstones to draw on.

We progressed through the mystery slower than expected (though I *always* overestimate how fast things will go in a game), but I really liked the pace. Looking forward to seeing things escalate in the next session.

What slowed it down:

It was mainly slowed down by my GMing. I'm used to relying more on improv than on pre-written adventures. I was reluctant to improv too much in case I threw in something inconsistent. So I had to check the notes several times to make sure I didn't misstep. The Widening Gyre is layed out very well, especially the timeline. Another read through it before the session would have set me up well. It feels flexible, that the bullet points of information can be easily pulled from and revealed at times that suit, and I played around with that a little, giving a bunch of information to a cop at the Locan House, or moving some polaroids from a locked drawer in one room to another room.

I was worried that it might feel like railroading, when he finished investigating the alley, and the only other declared location at that point was the Locan House, but when I asked the player later that wasn't his feeling at all. And the amount of stuff that he found in the house made him feel like the investigation was opening up in a lot of directions.

Really enjoyed it, looking forward to more!

hi colin

I GMd this twice with my gf.

1. Players: 1

2. Specialisms: We had a go at both.

3. Investigation: The Widening Gyre

4. Skill use: With reminders (we're both pretty nooby) once in each location. I mostly used as an opportunity to drop in flavour text and emphasise important story elements. Game works without using them.

5. Clarity: Agree with Luck Roll above - may need some clarification around the use of specialisms and subsequent hit to will/mind, fractures etc.

6. Pros: We appreciated the focus on crime scene investigation over fighting. The timeline with 'behind the scenes' details was helpful for me (gm) and helped with replay-ability.

7. Cons: player wanted to speak to the wife of the deceased immediately after the alley but she is at her parent's home. Had to improve these scenes. 

Just finished up The Widening Gyre, and it went great! I enjoyed running it and the players enjoyed shaking up our usual Call of Cthulhu sessions with a new system. Midnight of the Century isn’t perfect yet, but definitely has some strong bones, and we’re excited to see what direction the RPG goes.

The Widening Gyre - Playtest Overview

Thought it might be of use to answer the first few questions with a quick overview of how things went down in our run of The Widening Gyre. Hopefully this also gives some insight into how it can get played, in practice.

I ran this with a group of 3 players: two occultists and one profiler. It took us about 4.5 hours to complete across two sessions, not including character creation. Since we had one more player than recommended, I bumped up the doom cycle by one day, which seemed to work out well while keeping the pressure on, although they still only reached Doom 3 by the end.

The story started as expected: the party inspected James’ corpse & gathered the available intel. The players then jumped over to James’ house and latched onto his computer. With the players totally ignoring the scattered notes in his desk, I instead had them roll MIND to swiftly search the forums for clues (the failure risk being lost time) which led them to a private chat mentioning the burger joint.

The players then split off, two going to the burger joint and one going to confront James’ wife at her parents’. I decided at this point that leading them to the university was a bit too difficult, so I made this more obvious by retconning James as a teacher at the University of Washington, indicated by the conversation with James’ wife and by a parking badge found in his car at the burger joint. This is also where they found a note containing Nick & Leah’s contact info (moved from the desk notes that they ignored).

This is where things went off the guide rails and required improvisation on my part. After a rest, the players headed to the university, opting to sleuth out all the schedules of students named Leah. The players then found Leah’s last name in James’ office on a pervy list of names to romantically pursue. Cross referencing the two sources of info, they pulled Leah out of class ASAP and warned her of the imminent danger.

In the process of running around the university, the players were pretty forthright and blunt about James’ death. I ruled that this caused some hubbub on campus, prompting additional police and cancelled classes. This ultimately increased Nick’s risk of sneaking into the university, scaring him back home for a short time and cancelling his kidnapping of Leah.

After some deliberation, the party set a trap. They convinced Leah to hand over her conspiracy forum credentials and used this to message Nick for a meetup with Leah at an abandoned mall nearby (one of the player’s havens). After a delay (Nick fleeing the university and heading home) Nick responded in earnest and was easily lured in. The players took the delay time to close off all but the mall’s main entrance. To seal the deal, one player disguised as Leah left from the university housing to the mall while the real one stayed back.

Nick tailed the fake Leah into the mall as the players waited in ambush on the second story balcony. With the players well hidden and not answering Nick’s callouts, he stopped briefly to re-read the address sent to him, and this is when the players struck in ambush.

One of the players jumped on Nick directly from the second story, concussing and slowing Nick, but also breaking the player’s arm and taking severe BODY damage from a failed save. After various failed attempts to talk Nick down and incapacitate him, and with no foresight to bring cops for assistance, the party was left with two members stabbed dead. As Nick, battered and bruised, dragged the two dead bodies back into his car, the single surviving player in a last ditch effort went back to the dead mall (his haven) and convinced stray dogs (his connection) to attack Nick. While the dogs nipped and dragged Nick, the surviving player choked him out to finally incapacitate the killer.

This player called in police at this point to help him clean up, and enough evidence was gathered to point the crime back to Nick. Crisis averted… but at what cost?

Direct Feedback

How did the players use their skills?

The specialist skills came out pretty early, then waned as the investigation went on. The occultist communed with James’ body, as expected, but also used the herald ability on the feather on the ground which hinted at the fishing cabin. The profiler utilized all available glimpses and profiled the killer a couple of times: once early on to get a general idea and once when facing him head on in the final moments to get a read on the killer’s psyche.

The general skills were used much more often, of course. WILL saves definitely reigned supreme, with my party doing lots of deception & persuasion to get their way around. There were MIND saves sprinkled in there, but quite rarely, e.g. with the party navigating the forums in a timely manner. Also sparse BODY saves, being almost entirely at the final confrontation with the killer.

How were the rules in terms of clarity and ease of use?

I thought they were great! But I am biased. I run a fantasy Cairn campaign already, so picking up Midnight of the Century’s ruleset was very easy to adapt to. I do recall that Stress confused me at first, as it’s referenced in the specialisms before it is brought up in the rules.

The players, who had never played an ItO-like, seemed to pick up the rules fast and were appreciative of how easy it was to learn.

What stood out as especially fun or interesting?

As a GM, I loved the glimpses and heralding special abilities. I think these are great mechanics to give background info that is otherwise left out of the player’s reach.

I also love the rules-liteness, as I think it resulted in some really creative solutions to problems that could have been inhibited by other, more rules-heavy systems. The simpleness of the saves meant something as wacky as searching for an airsoft gun in an abandoned mall can be implemented super easily.

The mechanics to help innately maintain pace & danger (doom clock, stress, injects) were all very appreciated as well and worked well in practice.

Players particularly liked the character creation. Said it made evocative characters in a quick manner, and they pretty quickly got into character despite having some zany results!

What slowed down the session?

Keeping all my facts straight about the investigation caused a few hiccups for me, and even just finding people’s names for reference caused a few pauses. This may warrant some higher-level reference sheet light pages for investigations? Or it’s just a learning curve issue on my end, having never run an investigative game before.

Players also took a second to adapt to 90s technology. In particular, they forgot multiple times that phone books existed and are invaluable in finding people. This caused a slowdown as the players investigated more complex alternatives to just looking up Nick’s phone number, although it did result in a more interesting & unique ending.

The biggest perceived hiccup from the players was selection paralysis. The players came from Call of Cthulhu (and systems of similar complexity) which is clearly a different and less freeform design ideology. In adapting to a rules-lite system like this, I heard multiple times “I don’t know what I can do” and “uh… should I roll now?”. They wanted to see a larger list of possible options for actions they can take, and didn’t fully grasp that no risk = no roll. I don’t personally agree with this assessment, and I really didn’t notice this issue in play aside from brief pauses. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t note it, as the players were quite outspoken after our session. I guess from a GM side, I’d love advice on how to ease such players into systems like this, but it’s also possible this group just isn’t right for this type of system.

The final encounter with the killer also had a few hiccups as I had to haphazardly rule how damage should work. An ingrained basic combat system, even if heavily weighted against the party, would be nice to have as a neutral arbitrater in such circumstances.

In Conclusion

We all had a great time! Players emphasized that they enjoyed trying it out, despite the growing pains, and we are all keen to keep watch on the system and see how it grows. As a GM, I’m particularly excited to see future, zanier adventures and run them with more friends! Keep up the good work!

I ran it for my wife last night. For background, she enjoys investigative and horror games, prefers one-on-one play, and loves most of the media that inspired Midnight of the Century (though not, notably, Millennium). Her favourite TTRPGs have been Quietus (FitD based horror for 2-3 people) and Cthulhu Confidential (GUMSHOE one-to-one mystery). 

I'll answer some of your specific questions first, then break our feedback down to rules and mystery.

• How many players did you have? Just me as Warden and my wife as player.

• What Specialisms did they choose? She was a profiler.

• What investigation did you run? The Widening Gyre.

• How did the investigators use their skills, general and specialist? I provided the Glimpse visions when the adventure noted them, and suggested that she create a profile of the killer at one point in the case. No general skills were used.

The Rules:

Rules were clear and easy to use. As Warden, I particularly enjoyed the use of Shifts to handle time, it provided enough structure without getting bogged down. Our session spanned two full days. The first time we hit a fourth shift my wife chose to rest and pick up the investigation the next morning. But on day two she knew about Nick's cabin and chose to push on into phase four. It created tension having the effects of exhaustion looming over her (although she didn't end up needing to make any saves in the final scene). I also liked how WILL loss was tied to stress/failed saves, it added a sense of growing dread, and using the connection as a way to replenish it created an opportunity to flesh out that relationship and insert some straight roleplay into the session. 

I'm not sure how the MIND stat gets lowered. BODY is clearly the result of doing something physically dangerous, and WILL is tied to stress. There are probably fractures that affect MIND, but other than that what kind of save would you make that would lower your MIND? I only ask because there's a mechanic for restoring MIND so it follows that there should be things that decrease it.

Once character generation was done I think my wife only rolled dice one time in the entire session (a failed attempt to break into James Locan's car). Having played some GUMSHOE I'm a fan of the 'you get the clue without rolling' philosophy, but there didn't seem to be a lot of situations that called for a save under the definition of 'a dangerous action' (the only reason I called for one with the car was the danger of someone thinking she was a car thief). So from wife's perspective I was really just giving out clues for her to follow and roleplaying the reactions of witnesses she interviewed (I did roll on the reactions table for one). She never chose to resist the Glimpses (just took the stress cost) so she didn't have to roll there (more on that below) and when the time came to face the killer she wisely brought the police and stayed out of the way. When we played Cthulhu Confidential I'd say the session was about 4 hours and we rolled dice a half dozen times. That felt like the sweet spot where it was mostly RP but there was enough uncertainty that we had to let the dice decide on several occasions. This is probably more a comment on the mystery than the rules themselves, but the limitations on what actually calls for a roll were definitely a factor.

I wonder if this game could employ some element of Cthulhu Dark's investigative philosophy: you always get the clue, but depending on your roll you either get the bare minimum, the full clue, or more than you bargained for. Maybe a critical success, not a critical failure, triggers a fracture? Or a success that's right on your stat does? I think the idea of seeing too much because you rolled too well would carry over really well to this game, but I'm not sure the best way to implement it.

My wife didn't like that she had to pay stress to use her special ability. I told her it was her superpower and having/using it was stressful. She accepted that, but felt like if it's this character's gift they shouldn't be penalized for using it. I think a possible solution would be to drop the idea of resisting the vision and have the player always make a MIND save after a glimpse and only accrue stress if that save fails. Especially when it's not a specialist skill they choose to employ (rules say they happen automatically), it feels like gaining stress should be the result of a failed save just like any other skill.

Overall, she felt the game was "too easy". When I asked what she meant, a lot of her issues came down to the fact that she could rely on Seattle PD to help out (I took the fact that they had called in Oroboro as meaning she was leading the investigation -- she used that role to order uniforms to track down leads, bring it witnesses, secure crime scenes, etc.). Compared to Cthulhu Confidential where she was a lone investigator it sounds like she thought her character here had too many resources to draw from. This could be me misreading the game's intent, or it could be that a built-in antagonistic relationship between Oroboro and local authorities would make for a better experience.

The Doom Phases were easy to track based the timeline provided, but no saves were made after the stress cost went up so there was no mechanical effect. From the wording it the rules I almost got the impression that the Doom Phase raised the difficulty on saves, but that didn't seem right since then you'd be adding 1 to every save during the first phase, and it didn't end up mattering because as I said no saves were rolled later in the game. I think that needs to be clarified though, because the rules talk about Doom Phases increasing in difficulty and I think you mean they increase in severity.

I wonder if the Doom Phase could raise the threshold for a critical roll? Let's say you did make a fracture happen on a critical hit. As the Doom Phase increases, the roll for a critical goes from 1 to 1-2 to 1-3 and so on.

The Mystery:

As we talked through what she liked and did not like about the game, a lot of my wife's issues were actually based more on the mystery than on the rules. It is entirely possible that this was my fault as Warden, but at a minimum I think some details could be made clearer. For example:

James Locan's wife reports him missing Monday night. Tuesday morning when searching the house the bed is made and his suit is laid out. This confused my wife, and made her think the wife was hiding something. Also, we're told Janet is staying with her parents. I read this as she went there because she's distraught her husband is missing. But if she's supposed to be out of town, how would she know her husband didn't come home Monday night?

The polaroids of women in James' desk feel too much like a clue not to lead anywhere. My wife had Seattle PD tracking down every woman they could and bringing them in for questioning! Also, whenever she met a woman (the waitress, Nick's wife) she expected one of them to be among James' conquests. I get that James is just a creep in general, but if you put something that notable inside a locked drawer players are going to assume it's crucial information, and it's not even a useful red herring. If Leah is in one of the polaroids, and their relationship predates the meeting at Carter's, then there's a push to find her first (and maybe even suspect her).

Finding Nick and Leah was maybe too easy (phone numbers + police resources seems like it would be possible to have addresses by next shift) and nothing in the mystery addresses what happens if the cops go to Nick's before he starts stalking Leah. I played up Betty's refusing to pick up the phone or answer the door as long as it was reasonable, and Leah was interviewed and released THEN stalked and kidnapped by Nick, but it felt like I had to stall the investigation to keep it from wrapping up in Doom Phase 1 (there's enough evidence in Nick's house to derail the whole apocalypse very early on).

Both of us really liked the details of the case, the gruesome nature of the killing, and the overall vibe -- the mystery itself just feels like it needs to be a little tighter.

Final Thoughts:

Midnight of the Century checks a lot of boxes for me. Hell, any game that references Nowhere Man in its list of inspirations is a must-have. I like the simplicity of the rules and the concepts of Doom Phases, Shifts, and Injects. I expected it to be a hit with my wife based on her love of serial killer stories and one-on-one TTRPGs. She had fun, but compared to Quietus (the first game she's ever said she wanted to play again after finishing) and Cthulhu Confidential (a game she told me she could "play every day of the week") Midnight of the Century did not wow her the way I expected. But when I told her it was still in development and that this was a demo game she expressed interest in playing a finished version. I look forward to updates as they come, and might try my hand at creating a mystery of my own.