About Midnight Sandbox

I played D&D for almost ten years. And for most of that time, I wasn't just playing. I was designing. I built Mass Effect 5e, a full conversion of D&D 5th edition set in the Mass Effect universe, and maintained it for years. It had a community, a subreddit, a changelog that goes back to the very first version. I loved the work. I loved watching people play something I made.

Then the OGL debacle happened.

Here's the thing most people won't say out loud: I wasn't actually that mad at Hasbro. They're a company. They have to make money. I get it. But watching the industry react, watching designers I respected jump ship, forced me to sit with a question I'd been avoiding. And the answer, when I finally stopped circling it, wasn't anger.

It was boredom.

I'd been playing one system for a decade. I'd been designing inside one system for a decade. And when the OGL shook everything loose, I realized I didn't want to rebuild Mass Effect 5e on new foundations. I wanted to build something entirely new.

So I went digging. I read source books the way some people binge TV. System after system, looking for the one that would click, still half-thinking about a Mass Effect clone running on someone else's engine. Most of them were fine. Some were clever. None of them were it.

Except Blades in the Dark.

John Harper's game did something I hadn't felt in years: it made me jealous. Not of the setting (though Doskvol is brilliant), but of the design philosophy. The way it trusts players. The way failure isn't a dead end, it's fuel. The way the GM doesn't roll dice. I kept coming back to it long after I'd moved on to other books.

Why do campaigns have to take so long?

I kept thinking about all the stories I wanted to tell at the table, and all the ones I'd never get to because a single campaign ate two years of weekly sessions. I wanted players to experience more. More stories, more worlds, more endings that actually felt like endings. Even if the ratio of my design time to their play experience was a million to one, I wanted to make something that respected everyone's time. Short campaigns with real arcs. Novellas, not novels.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn't want to borrow someone else's system anymore. I wanted to build one from scratch that supported everything I'd been chasing: faster play, tighter stories, simpler rules that anyone could learn (not just ten-year veterans), and a core that could bend into any setting without breaking.

That system became Midnight Sandbox.

The system needed a world. And the first Midnight Sandbox theme, Progeny, didn't come from a solo brainstorm. It came from my regular D&D group.

I told Daniel, Grant, Cam, Hugh, and Brian that I was going to make a game and I wanted their help. Everyone pitched settings. Some of those pitches (martial arts animals, dual-reality fantasy) are settings I still want to build someday. But the one that got the most votes was the most absurd one: Greek gods in space.

We used a reskinned version of The Quiet Year (Avery Alder's brilliant map-drawing game) to build the history and timeline of this universe. We ran lore sessions to figure out why Earth was dead, where 48 million survivors ended up, and what happens when gods come back to a civilization that's been getting along without them. Those sessions gave Progeny its bones.

Then I went to ground.

For over a year, I iterated. I wrote rules and threw them away. I wrote them again. I playtested when I could get people around a table and agonized over mechanics when I couldn't. Stephen Fry's Mythos (and later Heroes, Troy, and Odyssey) kept me anchored in the mythology, reminding me that these stories have survived thousands of years for a reason and I should probably stop trying to outsmart them.

Somewhere in that long middle stretch, AI tools started becoming genuinely useful. And once I figured out how to work with them (not just poke at them and hope for the best), everything accelerated. What had taken years to reach a certain point suddenly leapt toward a release in about six months.

I'm going to finish this thing so I can play it with him someday.

I also had a kid during that stretch. Which, paradoxically, made me work harder. There's something about holding your son for the first time that makes you think: I'm going to finish this thing so I can play it with him someday. (And also: sorry to my wife, Ali, for all the nights I was half-present because I was mentally redesigning the talents for the Gigantes lineage.)

I need to be honest about something. I almost abandoned this project.

Daggerheart came out, and when I read about how it was designed, what problems it was trying to solve, and the philosophy behind it, I felt like the Darrington Press team was saying everything I'd been feeling about D&D. No initiative. Narrative-first mechanics. Failure that feeds momentum. A GM who responds to play rather than dictating it. It was uncomfortably close to what I was building, backed by the most recognizable name in the hobby.

I seriously considered scrapping Midnight Sandbox's rules and just turning my lore into a Daggerheart setting.

Hugh talked me out of it. He told me to keep going. So I did.

And the more I compared the two systems, the more I realized that while Daggerheart and Midnight Sandbox share some DNA, they're solving different problems in different ways. Daggerheart is a love letter to the fantasy genre. Progeny is Greek gods piloting steampunk warships through a dead solar system. There's room for both.

Games don't get made alone, even the ones that are mostly one person in a room at midnight.

Progeny is the first theme built on Midnight Sandbox. A solar system full of dead planets and living gods. An arena system that keeps the peace by turning war into entertainment. Eight supernatural lineages carrying the blood of Olympus through a civilization that's barely holding together.

But it won't be the last. The whole point of Midnight Sandbox is that the system bends to fit any world. Greek space opera today, martial arts animals tomorrow, dual-reality fantasy after that. One ruleset. As many stories as I can build.

If you've read this far, you probably like stories. Progeny is yours now. Grab a d12. Learn the rules. Play the story.