Midnight impressions

[pawsplay]

I haven't come near to digesting the whole book yet, but I find Midnight very intriguing. It has strong Tolkienesque flavor. I find the disparty between heroic characters and everyone else a bit disconcerting--the setting is fairly low/restricted magic, except for the PCs--- but admittedly it clearly stamps the PCs as something exceptional. I'm always interested in new magic systems, although in this case the system is different enough that I realize that Midnight is not set up to simply play a D&D game in a different campaign world. It embraces an entirely different paradigm, using some of the same tropes but ultimately a game of legendary heroism more than quirky spells.

I found it a little odd not to have half-elves and half-orcs, instead having dworgs and elflings. Half-orc, half-dwarf is not an archetypal with deep roots in the genre, but it seems to fit in with the setting backstory. I wonder why that decision was made for aesthetic reasons, however; a way of distancing the game from Gygaxian fantasy?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I like Midnight- and I share your assessment of it, so far. Some elements of it are not to my taste. IOW, I don't see myself running it anytime soon.

However, it has the distinction of adding the game mechanic I most love out of all the stuff introduced by 3PP- the Heroic Paths. I'm so yoinking those- with appropriate campaign-specific tweaks- its not funny.

Definitely "worth the price of admission."

 

[wayne62682]

When I heard about Midnight I liked it, however what turned me off completely was the defeatist tone of the campaign... that no matter what you did, YOU could never overthrow the Sauron-ripoff (Izrador, I think?) and return peace to the land. The rules basically stated it was impossible.

That, for me, utterly ruined the campaign. While I like "against all odds" genres, IMO the point of those things is for the final climax to be the heroes doing the impossible and saving the world. Midnight basically says that you can't ever do that, but you can accomplish minor things that are largely irrelevant to the bad guys. It's like saying "The heroes established a base of resistance. However, in twenty years they were overwhlemed by the dark forces and killed. GAME OVER"

 

[Dagredhel]

http://darknessfalls.leaderdesslok.com/index.htm

Check it out. Great stuff.

 

[Quartz]

When I heard about Midnight I liked it, however what turned me off completely was the defeatist tone of the campaign... that no matter what you did, YOU could never overthrow the Sauron-ripoff (Izrador, I think?) and return peace to the land. The rules basically stated it was impossible.

I don't recall that. 'All' you had to do was go around and destroy a bunch of mirrors. Of course, the PCs don't know that to start with. After they've destroyed the mirrors, they need to start raising armies. A GM might note that there's plenty of room for an unconquered island or continent.

This actually meshes quite nicely with 4e: in the Heroic Tier, they're running around trying to survive, eventually learning the secret of the mirrors; in the Paragon Tier, they go around destroying the mirrors, eventually tackling the ones in the northern lands; and in the Epic Tier, they raise armies to take the fight to Izrador's home turf and shut him back in his prison.

 

[wayne62682]

Maybe they changed that then... I looked at the 1st edition of Midnight and it basically said "We'll never have stats for Izrador, anyone who challenges him is killed mercilessly". Which I guess makes sense in the context that he's basically Sauron and you couldn't just go up to Sauron and kill him, you had to do it through other means, but it felt cheap because that should be the whole point of the campaign.

If they changed that, then kudos. When I run my 4E campaign I'm either going to run Eberron or basically copy Midnight and change some things and run a game like that

 

[hewligan]

I own the second edition and most of the supplements. I have read them, but not yet GM'ed a game. My view is that a campaign would be all about defeating Izrador. The fact that the game makes it sound so highly improbable that this could ever succeed is exactly why the players would want to try, and as a GM I would be very happy to craft a campaign around this.

The best approach would probably be as suggested above - episodic, based upon smashing each of the mirrors, and then perhaps from level 15 going for the final smash, and level 18 and up about raising armies and taking to the field to destroy the dark one.

The key word is 'episodic' though. I don't think I would want to run this game straight for the 2+ years it would take to do it service. I would probably split it into sections (perhaps 10), and run these between other games, dipping in to Midnight for a few dark months, and then a few months of something lighter, and then back again.

I hope to play this campaign at some point, but for now I am running Pathfinder Rise of the Runelords, and that is going to take another few years to complete (I GM PbF).

 

[pawsplay]

When I heard about Midnight I liked it, however what turned me off completely was the defeatist tone of the campaign... that no matter what you did, YOU could never overthrow the Sauron-ripoff (Izrador, I think?) and return peace to the land. The rules basically stated it was impossible.

That, for me, utterly ruined the campaign. While I like "against all odds" genres, IMO the point of those things is for the final climax to be the heroes doing the impossible and saving the world. Midnight basically says that you can't ever do that, but you can accomplish minor things that are largely irrelevant to the bad guys. It's like saying "The heroes established a base of resistance. However, in twenty years they were overwhlemed by the dark forces and killed. GAME OVER"

To me, that sounds like refusing to play Marvel Super-Heroes, because in twenty years the world will be destroyed by warfare between the humans and the mutants.

 

[pawsplay]

http://darknessfalls.leaderdesslok.com/index.htm

Check it out. Great stuff.

Oh, nice. Is this were the OGL stuff for Midnight ended up?

 

[slwoyach]

I like the feel of Midnight, and the magic system. But there's a lot that doesn't make sense. One is coinage being outlawed and their entire economy being based upon the barter system. Despite this there are still huge cities and inn's remain open. This economy is simply impossible.