Midnight Press: Ultimate Detective Noir TTRPG in Newspaper

🎥 Welcome to Midnight Press!

Midnight Press is a film noir TTRPG that drops you into fog-soaked 1940s San Francisco, where every clue, rule, and adventure lives inside a beautifully printed newspaper. 

Designed for quick one-shots with unforgettable stories, it invites anyone to step into a reimagined noir world and take the lead. Sink into cinematic depth, uncover corruption, chase leads, and shape the city’s fate before the presses roll at dawn.

🗝️ Key Features

💋 Everyone's Got a History Here 

Every character starts entangled in a web of social connections. You might owe someone a favor. You might owe someone your life.

The Social Ties mechanic weaves relationships  into gameplay, so even a quick one-shot brims with tension, secrets, and emotional fallout.

🎞️ Storytelling That Hits Like a Crime Flick 

Inside this smoky world, every punchline, promise, and pistol shot matters. Midnight Press blends physical and social conflicts using one streamlined d6 dice pool. 

Your archetype gives you an identity, your relationships give you leverage, and your endurance (mental and physical) keeps you in the scene or knocks you out of it. It’s a system where words cut deep and silence can win or lose a case. 

From the extravagant socialite to the hard boiled detective, your role shapes the way the story unfolds.

🌉 1940s San Francisco, Reimagined

Here neon lights still burn brightly, but the prejudices of the past are left behind. The fog’s thick, the drinks are strong, and everyone’s got a secret. 

The city’s setting is rich with actual historical locations and landmarks — rendered on a huge 22x17" historical map that guides your story down every twisting alley. 

Printed accessories like NPC business cards and GM pacing tools help the city breathe at your table.

🔍 GM-First Design

Midnight Press is built to make running a great game feel natural. 

Clear mystery guidance, zero-prep one-shots, fast rules, and an adventure generator that gets you running a full case in 20 minutes or less. You won’t find vague abstractions or rulebooks thick enough to double as doorstops. 

Plus, the game ships with two one shot adventures bundled in a "double feature" movie poster, with more adventure expansions available!

📰 Unforgettable Rulebook & Materials

Everything about Midnight Press is designed for immersion the moment you touch it.
- The rulebook itself is a vintage-style newspaper.
- Carbon paper character sheets let you hand your GM a receipt with all your character info. 
- NPC business cards bring every NPC to life. 
- Big 11-in by 17-in movie poster artwork intros every adventure module. 
- There's no game quite like this!

🕵️‍♂️ What's Included?

🎲How to Play

Midnight Press is a classic Game Master-led tabletop role-playing game. One player takes on the role of the Game Master (GM), describing the world, portraying its inhabitants, and presenting challenges and mysteries. The other players each control a character and work together to uncover secrets, survive danger, and shape the story through their choices.

Choose Your Adventure

Every game begins with an adventure. 
Play one of the official Midnight Press modules, create a case with the included adventure generator, or write your own story from scratch. Whether you're tracking a missing person, exposing corruption, or crossing the wrong mob boss, every case is uniquely yours.

Make Your Character

Players can jump into the action right away with one of the included premade characters, or you can create your own custom character in less than twenty minutes.

How the Dice Work

Midnight Press uses a dice pool system. The better your character is at something, the more six-sided dice you roll. 6s are full successes. 5s are successes with complications.

Example of Play

That's how every session of Midnight Press unfolds: Players describe what they want to do, the GM describes the world and its reactions, and together everyone creates a stylish tale of mystery, danger, and intrigue worthy of the silver screen.

👶 First time on Kickstarter?

🥂 Pledge Tiers

🥊 Stretch Goals

🎷 Add-Ons

✉ Shipping Information

Our goal is to have the game shipping out to you early next year, aiming for March 2027!

Because shipping costs vary depending on your location and may shift over time, your shipping costs will be calculated and collected after the end of our campaign and closer to our ship date. 

You will receive an email from our pledge manager, Hive, a few weeks after the Kickstarter campaign ends to confirm your pledge and add any additional items you would like. 

Then a few weeks before fulfillment, you will receive another email from Hive. In this email you will be able to: 
- Pay for shipping costs
- Pay for taxes and duties (if due)
- Add & update your address if needed

Please be aware that any shipping rate estimates provided are only approximations. Final charges for shipping and sales tax or VAT (where applicable) will be determined based on actual shipping costs incurred. 

Because our materials are light and pack flat, we are exploring the possibility to further reduce shipping costs (through media mail and similar options). That being said, in an effort to minimize surprise costs, these estimated shipping costs are without those potential price decreases. 

😎 Meet the Creator!

Hi, I'm Steph, on the left! I love design, old movies, making crazy projects come to life - and of course I love table top role playing games!! And on the right is my fiancé and partner of 11 years, Killian, one of the several talented artists behind the game's illustrations, and encourager of all my wild dreams - including this game!

I have been playing table top role playing games for over 20 years (when did I get so old!?), ever since my friend’s dad introduced me to D&D in high school. Since then I've run countless games, but one I ran in 2019 really stood out above the rest.

It was a design of my own, blending horror and classic detective noir (the very horror campaign in this Kickstarter!), and as we played it - it truly felt like we were in a movie. After that adventure, I needed more noir gaming. So I set out to build a system that captured that same cinematic feeling while staying simple, fast, and immersive. 

After years of refining every mechanic, Midnight Press is the game I always wanted: easy for new players to learn, deep enough for veteran groups to enjoy for months, and built for anyone who loves detective mysteries and noir storytelling. 

 I hope you love it as much as we do!

🧥 Our Partners

This project is promoted by Jellop, the ad tech power behind the best Kickstarters with 3,500+ successful Kickstarter projects with over $1B raised between them.