Many developers of this game are Ukrainians. Some of them are in immediate danger, some of them are safe, but have relatives in the war zone. We had to put our development on hold some time ago due to financial problems, but we planned to return to this game as soon as our problems were figured out. It is extremely difficult to make any plans now.

We wish strength to the people of Ukraine. We wish them to live, to protect themselves and their loved ones. And for those who fight, we wish to impose well-deserved death, fear and devastation among the invaders.

We call on all citizens of Russia and Belarus. It is not enough to say “No War”. It is time for radical acts of disobedience. It is time for a rebellion. It is time for a revolution. It is time for tyrannicide. The only decent thing you can do is to bring the war back to the homes of those who started it. You got the “Kill The Police” badge in our game? Imagine how cool will it be to get one in real life.

If you are from another country, you can support Ukrainian Army or humanitarian NGOs. And one more important thing: you can put pressure on your governments to help Ukraine not just by imposing sanctions and sending weapons, but also by protecting our sky against Russian planes and rockets. Our soldiers will do the rest.

Our game has always been political, even if it has not been articulated explicitly. It’s a game about how the same character can end up on different sides of a conflict, a game about how the difference between enemies can be very subtle, and the difference between allies can be huge.

But now everything is very simple. There is no difficult choice between two evils. Putin’s Russia and its enablers are evils far worse than all unnamed Lovecraftian horrors put together. Because the abomination from Kremlin is real, and it has been poisoning our world by lies and death for years, it wants to destroy everything we love.
It is finally time to put a stake through its rotten chest.

Слава Україні!

The post Statement on the Putin’s Russia war against Ukraine appeared first on October Night Games.

The power will rise till the night of its fullness, on the thirty-first, the combination which brings us together. And with the rising we begin our work, that which draws us apart. The days ahead will be interesting, as the openers and closers reveal themselves by their actions.

Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?

Florence Reece – Which Side Are You On?

The setting of October Night Games is built around the ritual of the Great Game, which determines whether the gates that separate our world from the Ancient Gods and their offspring will open or stay closed. On the full moon on Halloween, the two teams of Changers and Keepers confront each other, laying out the ingredients on the altar and exchanging spells and curses. 

The final ritual is preceded by 30 nights of preparation, during which the players collect ingredients, perform Lesser Rituals, obtain artifacts, find servants and sacrifice materials. Allies and opponents have to interact with each other, but no one knows in advance who will turn out to be a friend, who will be the enemy, with whom is it good to trade, whom to fight, who should be assisted and who should be confronted.

Thus, October Night Games contains features inherent in games of social deduction. The most famous representatives of this genre are Mafia or Werewolf. These games (in fact, this is one game, the differences are only in the setting, the mechanics of the Mafia and Werewolf are identical and created by one person) appeared in the 80s. The psychological experiment was turned into a great game, which simultaneously gained a lot of popularity on both sides of the ocean, with countless options, modifications, and variants. Separately, it is worth highlighting the political game of social deduction Secret Hitler, in which a group of fascists is looking for ways to abuse democratic procedures, and the liberals are trying to identify and neutralize the conspirators.

Some elements of this genre are also used in board games without a roleplaying element. In the game Saboteur, saboteurs disturb the work of honest gnome miners and the players have to recognize who makes harmful actions intentionally and who has to do it because of bad cards. In the board game Battlestar Galactica, based on the series of the same name, people are opposed by Cylons, disguised cyborgs who may commit acts of sabotage at the most unexpected moments. Unlike the Mafia / Werewolf, these games offer a possibility to determine the affiliation of opponents not only by their words but also by their actions: destructive actions can be the result of an unlucky coincidence or a malicious intent. The same can be said about the computer game I am not a Monster: alien parasites are hiding among the passengers of the spacecraft; they can be detected because of their strange behavior or if they recklessly show their true appearance.

All the games mentioned so far have one thing in common – players, by default, are considered to belong to the “good”, “law-abiding” team, and only a small number are masked foes, who need to be identified. But there are other examples, for example, in the game Carriage to the Devil’s Castle, two equivalent secret societies compete. It is possible to guess which player belongs to which of the teams based on what artifacts they seek to get. The Coven game is a little more complicated, where in addition to the confrontation between the “good” and “evil” witches, an internal struggle for power and influence in each clan is waged.

Some games of social deduction are based on roleplaying, the ability to bluff and call someone else’s bluff, while others provide teams with the opportunity to prove themselves through game mechanics. In the tabletop version of October Night Games, roleplaying is possible but completely optional. Moreover, it is not necessary for a computer game: the communication between players (human or AI-based) will be carried out using pre-written phrases so that it will not be possible to confuse the enemy with good acting. It is necessary to guess the team affiliation precisely according to the actions of the players: Changers and Keepers possess magical techniques that are available only to a certain team. Their use can give an easy tactical advantage, but it will give a player out. Is power worth conspiracy? But another question is even more interesting, what should the rest of Players do when somebody gives themselves away? Should they help their ally and attack the enemy? Or should they do the exact opposite, confusing everyone else? 

There is another important unique feature of October Night Games, which lies in the game setting itself. The characters and their familiar have a personality. A vampire, a witch, a serial killer, a sectarian monk, a mad scientist, and many others – each of them has a character and a story. The same can be said about their animal companions. But the distribution of Player/Familiar pairs and their teams is determined by a chance every time. Even today, in the early prototype, the chance to get an identical alignment twice in a row is 1/72, and the number of characters and familiars will increase soon. Thus, the probability of playing for the same characters will decrease to 1/200 or even less. At first glance, the possibility of the same characters to appear in the different teams can look like a game assumption, but, in fact, it carries a meaning. This randomness demonstrates the way people choose parties to conflicts, be it a friendly quarrel or a political confrontation. You can find out general patterns, but the actions of one separate person will be unpredictable and chaotic.

People’s decisions are influenced by many negligible small factors, which can simply be replaced by a random number generator without spoiling the final result. In any major political conflict that divides society, people of close views may turn out to be enemies, and people with opposed political positions may find themselves on one same side of the barricades. This was sharply manifested during the Maidan in Ukraine when the carriers of “left” and “right” political identities were divided in the most unpredictable way. The “Left for the Maidan” and the “Left against the Maidan” could justify their position by resorting to the same political rhetoric, but with exactly opposite conclusions. We observe the same thing in Great Britain during Brexit – both among the “Leavers ”and among the “Remainers” there are both left and right. Irreconcilable opponents want the same, while people with similar views and identities cannot find the common ground.

Political identities and principles are questioned when something truly extraordinary happens: revolution, war, the election of Donald Trump or the possibility of the return of the Ancient Gods. Our game, of course, can hardly be called political in the traditional sense. We don’t try to teach the players “what’s right and what’s wrong”; rather, we want to give them a reason to ask themselves sometime: “why do I think that is right? and do I really think so, or was it just a chain of chaotic coincidences that brought me there?”

The post October Night Games of Social Deduction appeared first on October Night Games.

The Second Week of October

This is the Holy Hexagram.
Plunge from the height, O God, and interlock with Man!
Plunge from the height, O Man, and interlock with Beast!

The Book of Lies, which is also falsely called Breaks,
The wanderings or falsifications of the one thought of Frater Perdurabo
(Aleister Crowley)

October Night Games are about magic. Magic is the basis of the setting, magic should be the basis of gameplay. No matter how different the characters may be (witches, vampires, monks, crazy scholars or adepts of unnamed cults), no matter which different abilities they have, no matter how different are paths they go and why, all of them had to prepare and perform a magical ritual. Therefore, inventing a magic system was a very serious task.

The first thought was to borrow rituals from different variations of the Necronomicon. We were inspired by Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October, but the author himself was inspired by H.P. Lovecraft and his followers (especially Robert Bloch). Many authors have tried to recreate the writings of Mad Arab: especially worth mentioning are such works as Al Azif and The Simon Necronomicon. Another important book containing Lovecraftian rituals was De Vermis Mysteriis, a book published by Robert Bloch. This manuscript revealed the terrible secrets of the Ancients centuries before the Necronomicon was written.

Alas! It was impossible to re-create Lovecraftian ritual magic in the game. Not only because of the excessive cruelty of Necronomicon’s rituals described there (we have nothing against human sacrifices per se, but good old Alhazred went sometimes too far). The point is excessive accuracy and attention to the smallest details. Rituals require a certain position of stars and planets, they require the use of strictly defined items, they often are geographically bound. Another important aspect of most Necronomicon rituals is the proper recitation of spells and prayers. Proper gestures are also important.

All this could be realized like some kind of mini-game. Imagine a Cultist Hero game where you would need to press keys corresponding to the syllables of spells being recited. It would look great in some other kind of project, but it would be unusable for us, as mini-games would completely kill the “digital tabletop” spirit. And if we simply reduced all these painstaking and complex actions, almost nothing would be left. As a result, the player simply would not have felt any involvement in what was happening.

Another limitation of Lovecraftian ritual magic is that it would force players to follow a single path. October Night Games, on the contrary, should stimulate creativity, make players improvise: choose the ingredients for the rituals on their own, achieve unexpected and even unpredictable results in each game session. 

From “fictional” occult schools, we moved on to “real” ones. The bridge between them was the chapter The Metaphysics of Lovecraft from The Satanic Rituals by Anton Sandor LaVey. This opus did not help us much, however, I advise those who are planning to make some Lovecraftian LARP to study LaVey’s rituals. The grandfather of modern Satanism knew a lot about role-playing games. Then we turned to Aleister Crowley, who explained in a popular way the legacy of many medieval hermeticists.

Ultimately, everything was brought together via Chaos Magic, special thanks to Peter Carroll and his Liber Null. Chaos Magic is a modern syncretic occult school that allows the mage to choose their own symbolic language, invent new rituals and spells, or give a different meaning to existing ones. That’s exactly what we needed to do.

A hexagram is the heart of our magic and combat system. There are planet symbols around it, each symbol is related to certain magical or if you like, psychological phenomenon.

Each ingredient that can be found in the game contains two primary elements. By placing an ingredient in a corresponding slot, we draw a line connecting these elements on the hexagram.

Each Lesser Ritual (all the rituals are performed before the Halloween night are called Lesser Rituals) is set by a magical figure, which has to be drawn by placing the ingredients, containing the elements in particular order. The ingredients, which were used in the Lesser Ritual do not disappear – they will be used at the end of the game, in the Great Ritual, which involves all Hexagrams of all Players simultaneously.

To draw a Unicursal hexagram (used by Crowley) we would need a human eye, a crystal bottle containing the moonlight, the heart of a dead man, a bottle of wine, library dust and mandrake root.

Of course, there will be sacrifices in October Night Games. The player has the opportunity to subdue the NPC, both humans and non-humans, by breaking their will and their mind. You can use the obedient puppets as servants or sprinkle their blood on the altar. Such an offering can replace several ingredients and allows you to complete the Lesser Rituals faster.

The players who prefer to avoid killing (you can win the game without making your hands bloody) can go the other way, creating missing ingredients for the ritual in the alchemy laboratory. What happens if you put together in a crucible a skull found in a cemetery, a fly agaric hat and add some wine to it? We will not reveal all the secrets ahead of time.

As it was already mentioned, magic is closely connected with the combat system of the game. Dice, each face of which corresponds to one of the primary elements, are used to predict the future and to manipulate reality. The battle takes place mostly behind the scenes, but what exactly happens will depend on how you deal with the rolled dice. Different combinations of elements correspond to different actions. You can inflict physical wounds on enemies, try to drive them crazy, or you go into a dead defense or even try to run away. The combat system is being modified and improved, the final version will be different from what you see in this video.

In the next text, we will talk about social mechanics, which will be an important part of the gameplay. Deduction, betrayal, and intrigue performed by live players and artificial intelligence.

The post Magic Rituals – From Lovecraft to Crowley appeared first on October Night Games.

Whenever thou would’st call forth Those from Outside, thou must mark well the seasons and times in which the spheres do intersect and the influences flow from the Void.
Thou must observe the cycle of the Moon, the movements of the planets, the Sun’s course through the Zodiac and the rising of the constellations.

Al Azif also known as Necronomicon

This is a game about the Game or rather about Games. We break the wall between board and computer games, between games, literature, and cinema. Sooner or later, the game’s magical rituals may even enter the real world. They even may be effective.

The plot and rules of the game (and the Game as well) are largely inspired by Roger Zelazny’s book “A Night in the Lonesome October”. However, many characters are borrowed from other sources. In addition to Zelazny and Lovecraft, we plan to pay tribute to Abraham Grace Merritt, Gustav Meyrink, and many others. Sooner or later, the monsters by Edgar Allan Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Nikolai Gogol will also join our setting.

When the full moon falls on Halloween, the boundaries between the worlds become thinner and the gates protecting our World from the Ancient Ones may be unlocked. A complex and dangerous magic ritual called the Great Game will decide, whether the Gates will be opened wide (and then the Ancient Ones will be able to walk the earth again), or sealed until the next special full moon. The strongest occultists, witches, magicians, mediums, and even mythical creatures (such as vampires and werewolves) flock to the place of the ritual to play their part in it. The ritual involves the coordinated participation of two warring parties, and each Player has different motivations to choose the side. 

Is that true that the Ancient Ones so evil, cruel and inhuman, or is it a lie by those who overthrew them and expelled them from our world? Players who want to change this world at all costs are ready to take risks and appeal to the Ancient Ones for the sake of knowledge and freedom, even if there is a risk of plunging the whole world into bloody madness. For others, hecatombs, mass slaughter, blood, death, and the collapse of humanity are the true goals. There are Players, who are ready to sacrifice everything to preserve this world and prevent it from slipping into the abyss of chaos and cruelty. Some believe that the world is already mired in cruelty and sins, but they find it to their benefit and pleasure. Both supporters and opponents of changes can be cruel and noble, vile and selfless.  

However, it’s unlikely that anyone can do without cruelty. Magic at this level needs sacrifice, both figuratively and literally, and it is very difficult to keep your hands clean. Unless you have gloves.

Players traditionally have Familiars, animal companions, whose unique abilities help to prepare for Great Game. The preparation itself takes thirty October nights, as players acquire the ingredients for a great ritual and perform small rituals that allow them to gain power. In search of ingredients, they will have to dig up graves at the cemetery, look for rare plants in the forests and swamps, and walk along the streets of a small provincial town, looking for man-made things that could be useful in magical affairs.

Monsters will be waiting for you in every location, be it ghouls devouring dead flesh, vengeful forest spirits or drunk townspeople, who do not like suspicious strangers. However, any such encounter can turn out to be good for you. A person or a monster can be subdued to the Player’s will and turned into a useful servant. Or just be killed and used in a ritual, the decision is up to you.

 It is also very important to get to know other Players, to identify who of them is the enemy, and who is the ally. You will have to rely on logic, intuition and a little bit on magic. But remember: any information you receive can be misleading, right up to the climax you won’t know for sure who is your friend and who is your enemy.

Battles between Players are possible, but even after killing the enemies, you are unlikely to get rid of them. Any death before the night of October 31 does not end the game, it only changes the rules a little bit. A dead Player may return as a vengeful ghost.

In addition to your health, you should be aware of your sanity. Dark magic can push you onto the path of madness, and if you go too far along this path, the consequences can be unpredictable. It is also worth taking care of your reputation because you do not want a crowd of locals with pitchforks to burn your house down, destroying everything that you gathered.

Next week we will talk about the Hexagram, which is the heart of the game’s magical and combat systems.

The post Introduction: October Night Games appeared first on October Night Games.

“October Nights” are going to visit Gamescom in Cologne.

Contact us via wolodarskij@octobernight.games if you want to meet.

The post Gamescom 2019 appeared first on October Night Games.