The Midnight Generation
A downloadable game
The Midnight Generation is a rules hack for Masks: A New Generation by Magpie Games inspired by the Shin Megami Tensei: Persona series of JRPGs. Take the role of teenagers thrust into mystery and conflict. Explore the cognitive landscape of The Midnight World, the realm made by the collective unconscious of humanity and the distortions that arise when people retreat from reality. Take control of powerful Facades, spiritual manifestations of one's true self to battle powerful Shadows, willful manifestations of human emotions and to overcome the trials set forth in The Midnight Generation!
The Midnight Generation contains three chapters to convert Masks: A New Generation over into The Midnight Generation.
Chapter One details powerful Arcana, the empowerment of the Players Facades, rules on creating Rulers, Shadows, Palaces and the Facades themselves. Additionally Chapter One covers converting existing Masks Playbooks for use in The Midnight Generation.
Chapter Two introduces Hawthorne, a city in the far North West grappling with a secret history, a dangerous cult and the trials of school life for the Players. Hawthorne outlines five Rulers and their palaces, the city of Hawthorne itself and advice for GMs wanting to run their own game of The Midnight Generation.
Chapter Three covers the Playbooks of The Midnight Generation, each created to more closely parallel the inspiration material as well as using the Playbooks in games of Masks: A New Generation.
- The Golem: You were created for a purpose, to study humans and the emotions they carry. Can you go beyond your programing and gain the very emotions you study?
Touchstones: AEGIS, Labrys- The Icon: You have to put on a mask every day for a crowd that you fear won't accept your true self. Are you that mask, is it worth hiding your true self from the world for fame?
Touchstones: Takamaki Ann, Kujikawa Rise, Kitagawa Yusuke- The Navigator: Something or someone pushed you, or caused you to flee, the real world. Perhaps that someone was you. Whatever the reason, you've withdrawn into a safe space, filled with creature comforts as a distraction from the truth. Will you come out of your shell and trust your new friends or isolate even further from the world?
Touchstones: Sakura Futaba, Yamagashi Fuuka- The Outcast: The world assumes just because you're a little rough around the edges that you're dangerous, that you don't belong. You act out to reinforce this fact out of fear. Fear that they might figure out that you're not the delinquent they think you are or, worse, that you are the delinquent they think you are. Will you stop acting the clown and show your worth or prove them right? That you don't actually belong.
Touchstones: Tatsumi Kanji, Sakamoto Ryuji, Iori Junpei- The Practiced: You've been hurt, you've lost and you're terrified you'll lose again. Of all your friends you know the stakes of fighting Shadows, of exploring the Midnight World. Will your fears overcome you or will you protect your friends? Even more pressing, will you let them protect you?
Touchstones: Sanada Akihiko, Aragaki Shinjiro, SEES- The Prisoner: The world of adults is difficult, a world where power and influence mean more than the truth. You ran afoul of this fact, made the wrong people mad and now you're suffering whatever consequences that might bring. With these new powers however you finally have the means to bring those that put you in chains to justice. Will you be a Virtuous Thief, a modern day Robin Hood, or use this power to perpetuate the same crimes you yourself have suffered?
Touchstones: Joker, The Phantom Thieves- The Psientist: You've uncovered a truth of the world. That the Midnight Generation is real. You didn't do this on your own, someone discovered this information before you, put you on the trail, but the trail went cold. Whoever came before you is nowhere to be found, another mystery to uncover even if it might be best to let sleeping dogs lie. Will you do what it takes to bring the fate of those who came before you, and the truth of the Midnight World, to light or will you suffer the same fate, lost and buried to time?
Touchstones: Kirijo Mitsuru, Takuto Maruki- The Shadow: You were born in the Midnight World, born from the collective emotions, dreams and fears of mankind but you're different. You are not some mindless thing, you have hopes and dreams of your own. Your appearance may be strange, you may not truly know why you are different from other Shadows, but you have friends to help you figure it out. Will you discover that you really are just a simple Shadow, nothing more than the sum of your parts, or will you show what it truly means to be human after all?
Touchstones: Teddy, Morgana
And two special Playbooks!
The Assistant: An attendant for the Midnight World with a unique mechanic that focuses on Facades and their power. The Assistant has hidden their true Facade away and taken up another false image they hope to project into the world.
The Unruly: A wild and dangerous Facade user who has begun to create their own Palace. Their existence within the Midnight World shakes its foundations, warping and distorting the cognitive world by their mere presence.
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $15 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Development log
- Midnight Generation is Complete!Oct 07, 2023
- Three New Icons!Oct 03, 2023
- Icons incoming!Sep 29, 2023
- The Midnight Generation is out!Oct 01, 2022
Comments
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Hi! I just picked this up and am about to run a game of it for my friends and I happen to notice in the pdf that the relationship questions for The Shadow and The Unruly are the same. Did I miss something?
You didn't, we missed that apparently as we added The Unruly at the last minute! We'll get that fixed but for now.
Relationships
I hurt __________ in the past, I hope they can forgive me.
__________ helps me when I fly off the handle.
Those are the Relationship questions for the Unruly.
Hi there, in case Kickstarter messages don't work for me! - I'm backer 163 and should have had a key for this game as well as All Stars, etc, it sadly never came through to me from itch.io, any chance of a new one please?
I replied on Kickstarter, but we haven't sent these out again. We sent them out last year however. We'll send out updates when we get the art done which should be soon.
Thanks for the reply! itch.io notifies me, in the same way that Kickstarter does not - and this way I could prove I was logged in and the fault wasn't on my end or my email's end at least! I appreciate that you've sent the codes out last year. At the time my husband was extremely unwell and we lost quite a bit of time before I realised around Feb-March we hadn't had them. I was wondering what to do when the newly updated Worst Generation pdf dropped and I'm so glad to finally have a copy after all! However any other codes that I should have, I sadly don't. I was hoping it might be possible given you can prove my backer ID now to get the smaller ones re-sent to me so I don't miss anything, but I'm more than happy to be patient and await the finalised art and finished copy first to avoid too much hassle and get as many as I can through the global means. I just didn't want to keep not messaging / informing you in case there are some I won't be able to access that way. eg. the single playbooks!
I'm sorry to hear about your husband, I hope he's doing better!
I sadly cannot re-send codes to individual people. They're not assigned to an account, they're assigned in the system to e-mails which then you have to claim. We, Five Points, don't know what e-mails those codes are assigned to. That's something Itch has on their end. We're looking for ways to avoid/work around this for our next Kickstarter because as you can imagine it's been a real, excuse the language but we're just as frustrated as you all are if not more, fucking pain in our ass. So at this time we just can't send you the missing codes for The Midnight Generation. We will be re-sending the WAR Book codes however probably next week some time so as not to spam everyone's inboxes.
As mentioned, we didn't hit All Stars during the campaign. We really wanted to, we got halfway there but the Kickstarter was always to pay for art and graphic design and that money has long been spent. Even if we could reallocate funds from other projects to finish it, we made it clear during and post-campaign that we didn't hit it and it wasn't something we'd be able to put out as part of the campaign. We realize there was some confusion with how it was listed in the Tier rewards and that led to some thinking it was coming out even though we didn't get it hit with the stretch goal.
The only individual Playbook you should have is the Liminal, we've not sent any of the individual ones to our Backers. We might do a collected Just the Playbooks for backers however. We're still in discussion.
Completely understandable what a pain it's been! I promise, I did try my best to find the codes, then and now - dredged every bit of my spam folder as well as the bin but either it literally never came or auto-deleted in the meanwhile back then.
I'm very glad to have had the Worst Generation code through given this, and am looking forward to the WAR Book. The All Stars I hadn't realised was a failed goal - don't worry about that then! Sorry, it HAS been a while, I only mentioned it because it's still listed in my rewards list on KS, which is probably a good part of the confusion on others' parts as well. I currently don't have the Midnight Generation or the Liminal, however, and am glad it's confirmed I should have. The Just the Playbooks idea is really grand and would solve the latter!
I would appreciate it if the Midnight Generation code could be re-sent when all the art is finished up, then. Is that what you mean by what's planned? If it updates in a standard way, I won't automatically get it without a code, but if you re-sent the codes to all the way your team just did for Worst Gen, it'd solve this completely for me :)
Otherwise if there were some way I could buy it with a one-off discount to effectively still have the reward that would be amazing. Of course I should have prodded much earlier too, and ultimately it's at least still buyable... Sorry for harping on, it's just the MG was the whole reason I pledged - I'm a huge Persona fan. But I'm down with waiting, just worried if it never comes at all.
You'll get your code resent when the art is done, yes. It'll be sent to the same e-mail Worst Generation was sent to.
After reading this expansion front to back I can now give my full review on this product.
This is definitely a SMT:Persona add-on! Several mechanics fit within for a world befitting a JRPG. The game mechanics do make it difficult to plan a game around Persona 3, or earlier titles and works best for Persona 4 or 5 type settings. The theming of this add on is really good, and definitely gets the creative juices flowing. The city of Hawthorne is a great start to making you're own modifications.(I've based mine as a Martha's Vineyard type city) The adventure is very bare bones, which allows the players to do what it is they please.
The adventure comes with a plentitude to get you started on your own world. How to get into the shadow world, characters, and main story beats. It doesn't include fine knit NPC's as it's main goal is to give you that power. The game does want you to include a few NPC's that marge into the character's backstory, and give them an arcana.
Character creation is a lot of fun. Choosing a playbook, an arcana, and several moves is great as it allows you to have greater expression in characters. The Arcana are numerous, and some double up on what I would consider powers or roles. The mechanics are nicely explained, until they're not(more on that later). The ability to include base game playbooks, and how to change these playbooks to use in the base game is incredible! And very welcome for players who look at the base game playbooks and have a favorite.
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I am however, not a fan of the Highschool being split in four houses, or that the school has dorm rooms. It might make more sense in a Japanese sense, but the school and city are all in America. The school system seems to be an attempt to meld American and Japanese school systems, which I think is done rather confusingly. Students are required to help with jobs around the school, live in the school in the dormitories, and are forced to participate in school festivals. As High schoolers are 'required' to stay in the schools dormitories what is the point of the entire city, if the students are trapped in the school?
There are just several very small issues that I have with this add on. The playbooks often mention something, that isn't mentioned at all anywhere else in the entirety of the book. The Shadow has a move that mentions having a 'Non-Human' form, but nowhere else in the book does it mention having one, what the requirements are, or even what it is. I can only assume that it means that the Shadow playbook is like Morgana or Teddy from the Persona franchise, having an animalistic form in the shadow world and having a human guise in the real world. The Laundry list feature for The Prisoner is a great nod to Persona 5, but lacks in explaining itself. As it has several contradicting verbiage uses. Missing a roll says not to clear a mark on the investigation track. What is the investigation track? When would I clear a mark? On a hit it says to mark off an investigation. Is that a clear? Do I lose a mark? If that's the case, how do I gain one?
There are several issues where the DM and the players have to infer as to what their base mechanic means, and what it does. And this could differ from different perspectives of the entire table. I think the weirdest thing I've noticed is the use of the word 'malus' in the Arcana Palace move 'No Place Like Home' where it says to apply any 'malus' like normal. Malus being, a banking term for profit loss. And it's the only time it's ever mentioned or used in the book.
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Overall, I give this add-on a glowing review. The few things I nitpicked in detail were only the few times I had a rough experience with trying to translate or explain to a player. There are rough edges that require a bit of sanding, but as it stands this is a great addition for those who love MASKS and the Persona series as a whole.
Hi! Thanks for the review and feedback! A few comments of our own, if you'd like
1. The Houses for the school, as is all of Chapter 2, are entirely optional. They're more modeled however after American Boarding Schools, where students are assigned dorms. Kyle, our writer, attended a Boarding School and wanted to more fully embody that within the setting. As the students live on campus during school, we felt that dorm assignment and such should be carried forward as well. Boarding Schools often do this to keep different grades into a single unit so inter-grade cliches and bullying can be better mitigated and addressed. The students are, likewise, not expected to be "trapt" in the school. They're most certainly free to go out with assumed supervision and of course, the weekends are free for students like anywhere else. This is also fairly typical of American Boarding Schools.
2. The Shadow's Move in question assumes the players know the source material and like PbtA games in general, lets players and GMs adjudicate exactly how Moves and the narrative work for them at the table.
3. The Investigation Track are the pips next to the names on your Laundry List. It appears we missed a header for those, we'll make sure to add that in when we update the art. The pips are also supposed to be filled in, not blank. They're a Clock like any other in PbtA, where you tick down instead of up like most Clocks in Masks. We'll make the graphic easier to understand. Thanks!
4. Malus is a term in tabletop games that is the opposite of Bonus. So any penalties to a roll.