Media Nocte Game & Media Nocte Open

Media Nocte (Mid of Night) is a Videogame Tabletop RPG adventure that spans three different old school pen and paper roleplaying genres, Fantasy, Horror, and Cyberpunk.  

Media Nocte Open is an open source engine built to help support the conversion of old school adventures into a solo digital experience.

 

Fort on the Edgelands Screenshots

The following are sample shots from one of the three Eras of the Media Nocte Game.  Here we see an old school DnD adventure named Fort on the Edgelands using the Basic Fantasy ttrpg system. 

What Is Media Nocte?

How can someone today experience the unique feel of a classic Tabletop Roleplaying Game (TTRPG) as a solo player — not a CRPG or JRPG approximation of one, but something closer to the real thing: the adventures and stories told in basements around the world for over half a century? Media Nocte is an attempt to bring a piece of that experience to modern solo gamers.

Below are the Goals for both Media Nocte Game and Media Nocte Open.  What is Media Nocte?   Media Nocte is…

A VTRPG

A Solo Game for Multiplayer Adventures

A Physical Game in a Digital Medium

A Meta Story

An open source engine

 Think of Media Nocte as a Videogame Tabletop RPG: take the idea of a modern Virtual Tabletop (VTT) like Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, or Foundry, and simplify it for a solo experience. The foundation is built from open-licensed TTRPG systems based on classic old-school games, with classically inspired adventures, modules, and missions layered on top — all tied together by an overarching Meta Mystery designed for a solo player to have an epic tabletop experience.

Computers are great at automating away the manual effort of a complex physical game into a fast, optimized experience — but in doing so, they strip away a lot of what makes tabletop gaming fun.
 
Media Nocte goes the other way. It’s a tactile game run on a computer. The computer could roll dice for you, but instead you’re asked to roll real dice yourself. It could track your quests for you, but instead you’re asked to keep your own notebook. It could draw you the full map, but instead you’re asked to draw your own.
 
The result is a slower, more deliberate videogame that asks you to pretend you’re sitting at a table with pen, graph paper, polyhedral dice, a snack, and a drink — the computer facilitates the experience rather than automating it away.
If you want to play a TTRPG online with friends, tools like Roll20, Foundry, and Fantasy Grounds already do that job well.
 
If you want a multiplayer feel without anyone running a game, other genres already scratch that itch.
 
But if you want to solo-play an adventure written for a tabletop RPG designed around a party of players at a physical table, that’s the niche Media Nocte fills.
Media Nocte tells one epic tale across three different Eras of gameplay and two different Realities. Two multi-cosmic forces, *Lights Answer* and *The Dark Solution*, battle across the Multitude to answer the First Question posed by the Omniverse: who is stronger, Creation or Destruction?
 
You play an Avata — a unique soul able to connect with and influence one or more Avatum (“Player Characters”) in another world — using that connection to help each Avatum defeat a Primeval sent to tip the balance of an entire universe toward the Dark Solution.
Media Nocte is built on a homebrew multiverse tabletop RPG setting by Aaron Worsham called *Avata Arcanum*.

Media Nocte isn’t built to tell just one story — it’s a game engine that can retell any old-school TTRPG adventure for any system it supports.

Today it supports **Basic Fantasy**, an open source system capable of running original D&D-style adventures. Planned support includes **Basic Roleplaying (BRP)** — the system behind Call of Cthulhu, focused on investigation — and **Runners in the Shadows (RitS)**, bringing classic cyberpunk missions.