The gates of Hell have been broken.

In this splendid Age of Discovery, when honor, glory, and the pursuit of wealth would weave the world together, something festers within the dark. Nightmares now crawl into the waking world, ripped from the minds of tormented sinners. Families flee plague-rotten villages, breathing fear and sickness in the ears of any who may listen. Voices, half-remembered from kinder times, coax wayward travelers into the maws of hellish beasts. Corpses laugh within their caskets, devouring their own funeral shrouds to curse the living. Clergy burn their congregations alive, praying that the flames might draw attention from a god that has abandoned them. Yet, in the failing light of humanity, there remain some few brave souls willing to stand apart, reclaim the world, and defy the children of the night.

Hello, everyone. It’s certainly been a while, and if you could not tell by the state of things in the year 2026, it’s been quite the effort just to survive! Regardless, I hope you are all doing well and have something worthwhile to celebrate despite all the strife we’re contending with.

For some years now, I’ve been working on a TTRPG (tabletop roleplaying game) I’ve titled Night Children.

Most game announcements are filled with amazing images, cool mock-ups and beautifully evocative websites, none of which I have for you today – this year has been many things, but profitable was not among them.

Instead, I’m simply sharing the fact that the system is functional, most of the required rules to play it are in place, and we’ve transitioned into the playtest stage, where we’ve had quite a bit of success and gained an enormous amount of positive and generally helpful feedback!

What Is Night Children?

Night Children is a fantasy horror roleplaying game that sends players into an alternate, benighted past. In the Late Middle Ages, while humanity was awash in blood spilled in Holy Wars and corpses claimed by merciless plagues, the denizens of Hell began to spill into our world. Each act of butchery became a profane prayer, a nightmarish seed that let such shapeless beings of spite and enmity take physical form. Now these devils, demons, monsters, specters, these creatures from ancient fables and feverish night terrors are real.

Spreading like a plague carried upon nightmares, these night children have found their way to the white towers of Normandy, the sprawling Forbidden City of China, the coppery sands of the Iberian coast, the towering Tenochtitlan temples of Azcapotzalco, the civil-war torn steppe of Mongolia – wherever blood was shed and fear gripped the heart of humanity, the night children slithered their way into our world.

These beings of corruption as yet work from places unseen with sickening patience and guile, ensnaring the powerful and destitute alike as tragic puppets in their malevolent play.

The presence of these nightmares has sparked other sudden changes across the globe. The great Tree of Magic, unknown outside of a select secret few, has reached its branches further into our world, dangling the powers of nature, creation, heaven, and hell within reach of mortal hands.

Latent powers surge within human blood, blurring the line between history and myth. Miracles, birthed from the most unlikely sources, lead humanity toward salvation like pinpoints of light in a sea of roiling dark.

Some Preview Mechanics

Night Children uses a d20 dice system, the familiar 7-piece dice set is right at home here.

Roll Under

However, like the other games that inspired it, Night Children uses a “roll under” system – where the players themselves have a target number (their Statistic) and must roll below that number to do the action they’re attempting – including avoiding damage, hitting enemies, casting spells, or leaping between buildings. It’s all player-facing.

By example, a human veteran trying to prize open the jaws of some great, decaying beast might have to check their Athleticism statistic by rolling a d20 against their Athleticism of 11. The veteran rolls a 9 on the d20, and is successful!

The reason this type of roll-under system appeals to me, as a player and designer, is that it’s entirely player-facing. On a success, the player gets the opportunity to input their own spin on the storytelling because they know, without input from the GM, that they’ve succeeded.

The Veteran player can roll, see the number is a success, and say “Valhurst grabs the mangled rotting teeth of this titanic… thing… and hisses from behind his helmet – all of his muscles shake with effort, but he manages to pry the jaws open.” It’s been something I enjoy quite a bit.

Exploding Dice

Damage in Night Children is horrifically dangerous, because every single damage die is empowered by an exploding dice mechanic. If you happen to roll the maximum result on a damage die, you roll the die again and add it to the result. In one playtest, a Mirror Demon that usually deals 1d8 damage on a successful hit managed to roll an 8, then another 8, then ANOTHER 6 – slashing the knightly Returned Smith named Egon for 22 damage!

Since Health totals are a lot lower in Night Children, where 4-12 health is common, armor also has to be robust. Luckily, Egon survived the encounter – but the knowledge that every single strike could be your last makes players extremely cautious, which does wonders to improve the horror elements within the game.

Esoteric Magic

In the fiction of Night Children, the Tree of Magic has been uprooted by the imbalance of the world, and it’s caused mortals to, for the first time, harness its powers for themselves.

The interesting tidbit is: there are no written spells in Night Children, only types of magic and rules for adjudicating what your spell mechanically does. Depending on its size, its power, and the effects it generates on creatures and the world, it may be more taxing for you to cast it or maintain it for very long.

In playtests, this has DEEPLY rewarded ingenuity and clever use of magic, which has alleviated some of the comparisons between weapon users and spell casters. Yes, dealing amazing amounts of damage is possible with magic, but it may be much more costly, especially when classes that can use weapons deal potentially deadly amounts of damage with every swing anyway.

I’ve had players explode corpses into shrapnel, conjure protective bubbles of light, scribe blinding traps onto trees, copy entire books worth of information onto their own bodies, hurl blades of razor-sharp ice, and physically look through decay to see the monsters hunting them. It feels so different that some players balk at the idea, but generally after 3-4 spells cast, they seem to embrace the tightly-structured way that spells can be manipulated.

Stamina Dice, Health

Lastly, most things in the game are fueled by your Stamina Die, including the potential for your character’s death…

When you use special things (talents, skills, cast a spell, suffer from a strange attack or disease) you’ll likely have to roll your current Stamina die. On a roll of 1 or 2, your Stamina die reduces in size by one step, making it more difficult for you to avoid that dreaded 1-2 roll.

If your Stamina die is a 1d4, which is the smallest die supported by the system, and it would be reduced again – you become exhausted. If you’re ever exhausted AND have 0 Health, you die.

Babysitting your Stamina die, choosing when and where to use your powerful abilities, and ensuring careful application of your survivability are all enormously important, which has led to some pretty desperate situations in playtests thus-far, which really captures that fantastical horror experience.

What Happens Next?

I wont lie, we’re still quite a way off before Night Children gets into the hands of the public. My intention is to have the game completely finished, except for the art, before Night Children hits a crowd funding platform.

My hope is to create a playtest packet for Night Children in 2027 and release it to the public as a pay-what-you-want product and use any money it generates to further the production on the book. I even toyed with the idea of doing a Start Playing playtest campaign of Night Children where I could ‘sell’ seats and run the game for people who are interested, again to cycle more money into the development and release.

Eventually, it’d go live on a crowdfunding site after all of the text and book layout is complete – since I have 10 years experience in layout/design for print and digital publishing, at least I know enough to know how little I know.

Thanks for Reading

I hope this little preview post for Night Children makes you interested in what is going on. I’m working on several games more or less in tandem, including Six Chambers (Western), Salvage (sci-fi space survivalists), as well as a couple party games SQUATCH! (sasquatches stealing stuff for fun) and Helicopter Parents (you’re a literal attack helicopter trying to support your normal child as best you can).

If any of this nonsense speaks to you, pretty please reach out to me on Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/dropthedie.bsky.social) or via my contact form on this website. I love my playtesters, but I would welcome more perspectives, more opportunities to learn and grow and develop the game into something really special.