Descent into Midnight: Gaming Better, Down Where It's Wetter (Interview with Richard Kreutz-Landry and Rich Howard)

This week, I had the opportunity to sit down with 2 creators of another Kickstarter in the Roleplaying Game (RPG) genre, Richard Kreutz-Landry and Rich Howard of Descent into Midnight (DiM). Based on the popular Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) engine, this Kickstarter still has a couple of weeks to go and is already well above its $25,000 goal.

In DiM, you play as characters in an underwater society, one that has not interacted with any type of human society. It is your responsibility to create this community and defend it from some type of threat. The exact nature of that threat can vary between games, as the game is centered around how the characters respond to these varying threats. I’ve kept an eye on the development of DiM for a while now, ever since I played in a couple of games with Richard at Acadecon a few years ago.

Chris: Ok, so on "the surface" (yep, I'm starting off with a pun), Descent into Midnight seems like another Powered by the Apocalypse RPG. What's the elevator pitch of what makes DiM so special?

Richard: The uniqueness of DiM starts with the setting. It's underwater. It's on an alien world. It's a civilization full of biotechnology and psionics. It's in a world you build yourself at the table. All of that is just the window into what makes it so impactful, though. We use the strangeness of the world the characters inhabit, and the characters themselves, to give the players a new perspective on relationships between dissimilar beings and their community.

Rich: Richard really nails it. The thing I'd add is that this alien world has never been touched by human civilization. DiM is an experiment in understanding how a non-human, or even humanoid, civilization can develop, and the rules guide the players to create it themselves. Instead of being intimidating to players unfamiliar with our oceans, the world-building mechanics and, character playbooks are designed to welcome players to interact with the story at a level where they feel comfortable. And each new one shot or campaign will be completely different.

Chris: How long have you been working on DiM? Where did the idea behind the game come from?

Richard: I'll let Rich talk about the ideas that have been rattling around his brain for decades. That said, I can pinpoint the exact conversation that started it. At 8:38 am Pacific Time on March 24, 2017, I tweeted at Taylor, Rich, and Quinn Welsh-Wilson "Does monsterhearts have a sea creature playbook? Imagine: jock dude-bro named Broseidon." and the rest is history. The funniest thing is Quinn had just recorded a Monsterhearts off-season arc for their podcast, Swallows of the South, and made a similar joke. Great minds think alike.

Rich: Richard has the exact moment recorded for what would specifically become DiM. The concepts driving it are things I've been playing with in RPGs since the 80s. RPG "technology", if you will, hadn't caught up with the things I wanted to accomplish. I've played with short stories about non-human alien cultures; been fascinated by biotechnology in books like Harry Harrison's "West of Eden" and the advanced civilizations inspired by the Alien franchise (Brood, Zerg, Genestealers); pursued a degree in marine biology; and have always looked for the emotional and cultural threads to pull on in the games I run. Every once in a while I'd discover a game like Biohazard's "Blue Planet", or "Cerulean Seas" by Alluria Publishing. Unfortunately, even my favorite systems like Hero focused on powers or technology over emotions.

Until I started listening to podcasts like Backstory, +1 Forward, Modifier, Party of One, and One Shot I didn't understand the leaps and bounds game mechanics had taken while I was playing more simulationist systems. Games like "14 Days" by Hannah Shaffer and "Our Radios are Dying" by Aura Belle kicked the door open on how games can do the things I always wanted. Then Brendan Conway gave the world "Masks: A New Generation" and everything changed for me. Masks' socio-emotional Labels and Conditions were the last key to the lock, and I can't thank all of these amazing designers and podcasters enough.

So, how long? Three decades, give or take. 

Chris: So, do you mean the advancement of more story driven games? Is that the type of game mechanics you have been waiting on up to this point?

Richard: Exactly. But not just narrative control. Also diving into making the internal journey of the character visible. DiM isn’t really about the fact that you can play a sentient kelp ball with psionic powers. That’s part of it. But really it’s about what it means to be a sentient kelp ball with psionic powers who had to sacrifice something to protect their friends, or look into a thousand terrible futures to find the right path forward, or sing a lullaby to the last child of disappearing species.

Rich: Yes, Richard nails it. It’s not just story-driven mechanics, but mechanics that guide players to unique and deeply personal experiences. “14 Days” is a game that teaches empathy for people with chronic pain by helping you understand the resource management of personal energy, which speaking as a nurse, is very real. “Our Radios are Dying” is about two lovers who have been in conflict, knowing they will die in 1 hour when their air runs out, and how they navigate their last conversation and the emotions around it. Absolutely brilliant! These are the experiences I wanted but wasn’t getting with Champions and Star Frontiers.

Chris: In some of the announcements, you mention that DiM has no canon setting, what do you mean by that? 

Richard: We decided pretty early on in development that we would do as much collaborative world building as possible at the table. We set up some suggested truths about the world that we think will make the game sing, but we encourage people to do what works for them. The "default" setting for DiM is a technologically advanced underwater civilization that blends biotechnology and psionics. We present the concept of the Echo as the thing that lets the characters communicate with psionics, see glimpses of the future and the past, and even project their consciousness into other worlds. It will take its own shape at your table based on the narrative you want to tell, and we've had it be everything from a dimension from which the physical world is distilled in one game, to the Force in a Star Wars game we ran with Tabletop Squadron. And then there's the Corruption. Again, you're defining what that is for your group at the table, and it can be anything from an extra-dimensional giant betentacled being to psychic pollution to an other-worldy malaise that is infecting your city.

Rich: Adding to what Richard said, people have enjoyed the aquatic settings and adventures I've made for my games, but I'm always the one running them. I have the information I need. I've written scores of articles and been on numerous podcasts discussing aquatic adventures in established RPGs, and I've played with my own setting for games like DnD (some of which you can hear on DSPN Presents), but when you create your own setting the pressure is on you to make it as interesting as possible to a wide range of people, and more frustrating, your target audience is likely to be people already interested in that kind of setting.

The foundation of my gaming career has been on how to make aquatic settings more accessible and welcoming, especially to people who are intimidated or frightened or feel they don't know "enough" to do it justice. The answer ended up being simple, at least in concept. Help the players create the kind of world, stories, species, and technology that is the most interesting to them, then get out of their way. We call our "game master" a Guide for this exact reason. We don't "master" anything. We act as a tour guide through the story that the players are creating, helping to tie the disparate threads and ideas into a cogent story. And it's worked far better than any of us could have anticipated. I've run or played in 30+ one shots at this point

Chris: Are there any other games besides the ones you’ve mentioned so far that were inspirations in creating DiM? This is coming from my own RPG bias, but while reading your descriptions, I was reminded a lot of Monte Cook Games’ Numenera. Not a direct one to one comparison, but in the creation of an environment that is almost “foreign” to the standard humanoid RPG settings.

Richard: Definitely. If you’re looking for weird tech and intelligent octopi MCG’s Numenera has a lot to offer. The Into the Deep supplement is fantastic, and you can go listen to The Amber Clave to hear some Numenera aquatic content in action. It’s weird and wonderful in a way that tries hard to generate awe in a way that many games don’t.

Also, the style of asking questions to give you the bonus on your roll instead of a stat or tags was something we borrowed from Pasión de las Pasiones, by Brandon Leon-Gambetta. We use that for the violence move, and it helps set it apart from the other moves in the game. Brandon is a fantastic designer who helped us brainstorm ideas in the initial phase of development and gave us the unofficial code name of the project: “Aquacalypse World”. The group chat Rich, Taylor, and I use is still actually called that. 

Rich: Headspace by Mark Richardson was one of the first PbtA games I’d ever experienced. The combined psyches of the players in Headspace we ported straight into DiM because it so beautifully erased one of my pet peeves - “Did X hear all the details of Y conversation, and do they know what I experienced in the room? Who knows what when and whom?” It pulls people out of the narrative. Headspace negated that elegantly. 

Also, stats in Headspace are psychosocial - Fear, Rage, Ego, etc, and the narrative clocks are tied to them as well. It, along with Masks: A New Generation, reprogrammed my brain to see what RPGs could do.

Chris: Why use the Powered by the Apocalypse system as opposed to another system or even creating your own?

Richard: The simple answer is that PbtA was a system that all three of us were familiar with that has been proven to do the kind of storytelling we wanted to do. Rich co-hosts a podcast about Young Justice and how to tell good stories, so it should be no surprise to anyone that he loves Masks: A New Generation. It's a system custom-built to tell emotional stories of super-powered individuals. Taylor is a prolific game designer who has his thumb on the pulse of indie games. And after diving headfirst into the RPG Academy podcast and the affiliated shows, I'd recently realized that the way that PbtA games directly engage with guiding fiction and player experience in explicit rather than implicit terms would make it easier to explore the weird genre that we were cobbling together. People have asked us what sort of game we're making and it's hard to pinpoint because there aren't a lot of examples of it in fiction that we know of. Part nature documentary exploring wonders of the deep, part horror, part hopeful superheroes, and part meditation. Using PbtA helped us to put those options front and center and allow the players to engage directly with the themes and tones they want to explore.

Rich: PbtA was made for DiM. DiM takes our favorite tools in the PbtA toolbox and magnifies them: player agency, socio-emotional stats, failing forward, playbooks that ground and guide players in this unusual setting, moves that make failure as narratively powerful as we can make them. As I mentioned above, Masks was a huge influence. Few systems allow for characters as varied as living oceans and leviathans to exist side-by-side with sapient plankton or manifested concepts. Masks answered the question "How do Green Arrow and Batman stand beside Wonder Woman and Supergirl in compelling superhero stories?" The answer is: focus on the emotional stakes over the physical. During an interview on Whelmed, Jeff Stormer once told me "The best Superman stories aren't about his powers, they are about whether his morality remains intact at the end." That line is one of the many inspirations behind our move "What Have We Done", which triggers when a character reflects on the consequences of their actions and who it affects everyone around them.

Chris: One of the "cool" things (you can't stop me at this point) I've seen with this Kickstarter is that you have a designated backer level centered around getting 2 copies of the book. One of these copies is to keep and one gets donated to a school/library/etc of the backer's choice. How did this idea come about?

Richard: My brother is a middle school teacher who runs a gaming club, Rich home schools his kids, and I think we're all aware of how much good gaming can do for people. One of the secret goals of the game is to get people excited about marine biology. Getting games into the hands of kids and of folks who can't afford to spend money on books is a win for everyone. On top of that, we really tried to lean into exploring emotional stories, and despite the setting being extremely alien, they're human stories because we're telling them. I spent two decades playing roleplaying games that were all about blowing up big robots or killing things that didn't look like me to take their things. I still enjoy those things, but I wonder to myself how might my relationship with games have been different if I'd spent those years playing games that focused on building communities and exploring the relationships of characters who are going through hard things together.

Rich: More than one backer level, actually. Every $80 or higher tier includes a donation copy in addition to any other rewards they offer. The idea was inspired by Brie Beau Sheldon's "Turn" Kickstarter campaign. I loved the concept behind "Turn" and wanted to back it as much as possible. Being able to back at a level that provided a donation copy made me so happy and Richard, Taylor, and I all felt strongly about doing something similar.

Education through gaming is very important to me. My storytelling, reading, and math skills were far more developed by gaming than school. As Richard mentioned, my wife and I have moved to homeschooling this year and it's been an incredible experience. Every week I see someone on Twitter talking about After-School gaming programs, education through gaming classes, library gaming events, and more. DiM, with its focus on socio-emotional themes and discovering fascinating things about our real-world oceans is exactly what I would have wanted when I was gaming with my friends. And it's something we think academics, librarians, school educators, and parents will appreciate as well.

Thanks again to Richard and Rich for talking with me about Descent into Midnight. Please go take a look at their Kickstarter page and consider backing this game. If you have any follow up questions, send them an email at info@descentintomidnight.com, or you can message them on twitter @DiMRPG.

Who would you like me to talk to next? Let me know in the comments, or message me on Facebook (facebook.com/boardsandswordspod) and Twitter (twitter.com/christheprof).