Horizon Wars: Midnight Dark #P001

The "P" in "P001" is for "Patrons only". This is the start of an irregular blog series looking at the development of Horizon Wars: Midnight Dark, some of which will be publicly shared through my blog at http://precinctomega.co.uk, and some of which will be just for you folks.

I've been very tentatively sketching out ideas for how MD will be different to its progenitor and thought I'd share some of those thoughts:

1. Drawing from Zero Dark, I plan to expand the application of the core shooting mechanic to allow more complex action choices and the introduction of bonus actions.

2. Drawing from Infinite Dark, I also plan to inject more personality into the rules, with the option to add "heroes" to your forces. This will naturally make the game more conducive to campaign play. I am tentatively seeing heroes as acting as a balancing mechanic to replace the clunky "intelligence" rules in OtH. What this will look like is still very vague.

3. Solo mode will be part of the core rules, using the framework laid out in Over The Horizon but with learning points from ZD and ID.

4. Over the Horizon will also contribute back into the game features like Strategic Assets and Electronic Warfare. However, my gut is that superheavy elements, BioWar elements and metaformers will still be kept out of the core rules and reserved for an OtH2 supplement as none of them feel true to the principle of "hard-ish" scifi.

5. Missions will get a major overhaul, but I don't know what they will look like, yet. My gut is that I'll still include a random mission generator system of some sort, but there will be a lot more set-piece battles for both Solo and Versus modes.

6. Weapons tables will still not be a thing. But there will be a lot more options for customizing your elements to allow more distinction between, for example, heavy cavalry elements. Each element will get to choose from two "menus" of customization options - a generic menu that everyone an access, and a menu unique to the element type.

7. Battlefield taxis will still not be a thing.

8. Cover will.