RPG: Descent Into Midnight – An Aquatic Adventure Into The Unknown
Come and take a trip into the deep blue sea with Descent into Midnight, a Kickstarter about community, hope, and the unfathomable depths of the ocean.
Descent into Midnight is a Powered by the Apocalypse game that’s all about finding your community amid a technologically advanced aquatic community. So whether you’re looking for a game that leans Waterworld or SeaQuest or SeaLab 2021, you’ve got a game right here. It’s an interesting take on community–players are the Guardians of their society, but it all depends on whether or not they can ward off corruption from their own worlds. Let’s take a look!
via Richard Kreutz-Landry
At its heart, Descent into Midnight is a game about community, family, and hope. It’s a tabletop roleplaying game that takes place in a technologically advanced aquatic civilization whose culture has never been touched by humanity. Bioengineering and psionic, or mental, powers allow the strange and varied species to communicate and interact with their surroundings no matter their physiology.
In the game, players take on the roles of guardians, defending their community from a physical, emotional, and even existential threat. The game focuses on the relationships between the guardians, the inhabitants they protect, and their internal struggles and dreams in the face of a corruption that threatens to change their world.
Descent into Midnight uses the award-winning Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) system developed by Vincent and Meguey Baker and used in popular roleplaying games like Masks: A New Generation, Monsterhearts, and Headspace. PbtA is a story-focused system that incorporates the best of both narrative and mechanical gameplay. Though players familiar with other PbtA games will have a solid foundation with Descent into Midnight, we have developed the setting and mechanics to inspire your imagination in new and surprising ways.
In the game you’ll work with the players to develop your own civilization, as there is no canon setting in the game–each setting is supposed to be intensely personal, coming from the mind of the players and GM, tailored to the characters in the game. If you’ve never played a Powered by the Apocalypse game before, this is a great way to leap right into the fray with a whole bunch of narrative.
Unlike other RPGs, we have no canon setting for Descent into Midnight. Instead, we help players create the species they want to play, then work with the other players to weave their cultures and histories together to form a civilization that’s entirely unique to their table. Designed to welcome everyone, no matter their knowledge or understanding of our real-world oceans, Descent into Midnight guides you into a new and mysterious world, one that you and your friends help create.
Instead of classes or point-buy systems, Descent into Midnight uses Playbooks to guide you through character creation and to weave your story into all the others at the table. Each playbook is written around a familiar trope, giving you a narrative anchor in this alien environment, and then uses leading questions and evocative language to seed your imagination with ideas.
Sample playbooks include:
- The Empath – Emotions, memories, and experiences flow through you — both your own, and those of the inhabitants around you. At one time these energies overpowered you, pouring through the open door to your heart and mind. Now you have learned to ride the waves of emotion, flowing with and redirecting the anger, joy, fear, and corruption of others.
- The Cultivator – Gardener, bioengineer, aquaformer. You coax and shape the world around you to serve your needs, sometimes at great personal cost. You nurture life and those around you, growing the tools you need to solve some problems, and giving of yourself what is necessary to solve the rest.
- The Redeemed – You were created to excel at one thing: conflict. Whether through physical training, bioengineering, or psychic reprogramming, you are the center of the storm when challenges arise. Though your original purpose may have been to inflict terrible consequences on your enemies, the choice is now yours – are you a weapon of war, a symbol of peace, or something else entirely?
- The Awakened – You were once like the rest of your kind. Then you woke up. Some believe the planet chose you, awakening your Echo to fight the Corruption. Others worry you are a child of the Corruption, mutated to serve its ends. Yet something calls to you, from the Far Echo or the deep ocean. You were awakened for a purpose. If only you could find it…
- The Orator – Ambassador, politician, commander, or community leader. Your words, presence, and experiences inspire your community to work miracles. When danger lies at your community’s doorstep, folks look to you for guidance. When people have disputes, they go to you to provide mediation. When the community needs a leader, you are there.
- The Traveler – Where many lives thrive within and around the cityscape, you have spent years, perhaps even centuries, studying the world outside. Whether as scholar, trader, explorer, or bounty hunter, you have collected a lifetime of knowledge and experience, and seen the best and the worst the world has to offer.
- The Muse – Crafters, sculptors, singers, and storytellers, you draw on the thoughts, hopes, and fears of your community and express them for all to see. The manifestations of your imagination exist beyond the physical world, weaving the essence of the Echo into physical expressions of beauty and emotion that live in two worlds, whether through a haunting song, a life-changing story, or an architectural wonder.
- The Specialist – You are an expert at getting your allies into and out of dangerous or questionable situations with skill and grace, whether rescuing the victims of a natural disaster, negotiating a lethal hydrothermal vent field, breaching the biotech security of an ancient civilization, or extracting psychic information from a coral hive-mind.
- The Seeker – The Far Echo calls to you, a current carrying you to the Echoes of other realities. Do you explore those realities for knowledge and insight, or do you draw on their strange perspectives to manipulate and control the inhabitants around you?
- The Touchstone – Corruption can never extinguish the wonder of life as long as life maintains hope. True, deep, and genuine compassion can transform not just a single life, but the world in which it lives. You are the innocent that befriends the grotesque or abandoned; the ally that reminds those around them their unique gifts create a better world; the stable friend providing shelter against the crushing tide of despair.
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Happy Adventuring!
