Midnight – When evil triumphs…
“Imagine if Frodo had died during his journey and the One Ring had returned to Sauron.”
That was how it was described to me the first time I picked up the Midnight Campaign Setting book, once again from Fantasy Flight Games. A very apt description, and if it doesn’t get your d20-shaped heart pumping, nothing will.
Midnight is a world where an evil god has triumphed in his war for power, and the characters are fighting a seemingly hopeless battle against the forces of darkness. The races of Eredane, the main continent, are besieged on all sides by orcs, demons and the Night Kings.
In flavor and description, Midnight borrows heavily from Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. But where his story is that of the light of hope sparking in the midst of descending darkness, Midnight is one of the fading glimmer of hope in the midst of near-total darkness. The rulebook does quite a good job of creating this sense of doom, and strife.
There’s a temporary lull in operations and the skies are clear over Oklahoma, so I thought I’d take the time to set the record straight about our expedition to Dragon*Con via the Black Gate zeppelin, the Harold Lamb. John described the 
Dark Worlds #5 (Summer 2010) is online at last.
I arrived at our building this morning to find people milling around in the street, pointing into the air. A fat, smoke-shrouded zeppelin was moored to the Black Gate rooftop headquarters.
Have you ever woken up in an extremely good mood, found you were left enough hot water for a skin-peeling shower, stepped on the scale and found it down two pounds in spite of the bacchanalia of the night before? Have you ever leapt out of bed feeling euphoric and thought, “I really love my life?”
“The city is a different place in the daylight, bright banners waving from towers, houses likewise bright with hangings and with designs painted on walls and roofs. The ships of the river unload by day, and the streets are filled with the babble of tongues, while traders and officials and barbarians and city wives all haggle together. It is a place of sharp fish smells and strange incense and leather and wet canvas and unwashed rivermen who bring outlandish beasts from the villages high in the mountains, near the birthplace of the river.”