The Midnight Editions: Starting Small
This week has been a busy one but I’ve been thinking about the practicalities of making the next thing. I’ve taken the two ideas I mentioned briefly at the end of my last post and started to organise thoughts and start planning. I’m calling the stand-alone game It Has Been Far To Long Since We’ve Played, it’s the further along of the two but I’ve stalled on it. I’ll go into more detail when I’ve got far enough to introduce it. The second is a follow up to my post Big Shaymin Energy in a way, I’m calling it The Midnight Edition for now.
To refresh on the main project I’m interested in learning what it takes to produce a gamable world. To keep the scope manageable I’ve decided to take a modular approach. I’ll start with something small and self contained which I can build out from. The obvious place to start from with that in mind is the sublime 24XX by Jason Tocci. The Midnight Edition comes from the idea that 24:00 could be midnight if you read the clock weird, I may change it but I don't hate it for now. 2400 has a lot of what I want in a system to be honest, it's very light, it doesn't have maths I need to worry about, its resolution mechanic isn't interested in what I want to resolve, and it has a comprehensive and easy to use SRD1 which I can work from.
For this setting I will be going back in time further than I intend to with the larger setting I have planned. A lot of the ground I want to cover in that bigger document is inspired by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fin de siècle and the birth of modernity and on into post-modernity. The separation allows me to consider what I want to become mainstays of the setting later in a different context. When I was thinking about what time periods to choose there was one stand out for me and that's the previous transitional period, the Regency which saw the end of the Long Eighteenth Century. In that mode I can look to some of the all time great literature in English, Jane Austin, Emily Brontë, William Blake, The Lake Poets, Shelly. I can draw on works like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Sharpe, Bridgerton and other modern literature about versions of the period.
The first of the Midnight Editions will be a game on the 24XX template covering the sorts of storytelling you might expect to find in Bridgerton or the London scenes from Sense and Sensibility2. Tales of romance and scandal in an urban setting during The Season3. The first game will focus on aristocratic families because it’s an obvious place to build from4. I don’t have a name for this yet and haven’t started work on it but that’s the idea.
Once I have the aristocracy as a core I can expand from there; The Peninsula War brings in Sharpe influences and gives us the Officer class, that leads on to time in the Country and Pride and Prejudice. At a certain point you have to have to consider below stairs staff and the working classes, North and South and Upstairs Downstairs stories. Let’s not forget the elephant in the room though, the meat of the eventual setting is bringing in folklore, the occult, magic, faerie, Strange & Norrell and weaving in strands of The Weird. From there The Brontë’s and Shelly take us through ghosts and electricity to the setting I originally conceived of. I’m getting ahead of myself though.
That’s the plan, I start with Jason’s wonderful shell and build a world piece by piece emulating new genres with each release. I’m excited to get started and I hope I’m up to the task!
System Reference Document↩
Downtown Abbey and the Jeeves stories are other touchstones though closer to my original time period in their own setting.↩
The social season of events when the aristocracy moved to the city↩
It’s also a genre I love and would like to play games in.↩