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!