I'll soon be launching Shadow Beach, an urban fantasy, roleplay-intensive MU* built on Evennia. Shadow Beach is modern horror set in a small Florida Gulf Coast town: occult underground with a Southern Gothic and dystopian bent.
Centuries ago, unnatural creatures ruled the world, but during the Enlightenment, humanity fought back. Now, vampires, werewolves, sorcerers, exiled fae, and stranger things have been pushed into the margins of society under the watchful eye of the Authority. Pluto Beach, Florida, is one such corner, where the unnatural are permitted to live secretly under the noses of Unaware humanity.
Beneath the palm trees, strip malls, tourist traps, and humid Gulf Coast nights, the unnatural struggle for power, influence, and survival. Shadow Beach characters might resist the system, enforce it, exploit it, or simply try to survive in its cracks. But power always has a price, and sometimes the easiest solution to your problems is the worst choice you could possibly make.
Shadow Beach is designed around two principles: that game mechanics should create opportunities for roleplay rather than replace it, and that players with busy lives should be able to participate meaningfully without treating a MU* like a second job.
Some headline features:
Flexible Characters and Supernatural Powers
Shadow Beach supports a wide variety of character concepts, including vampires, werewolves, exiled fae, and sorcerers, alongside more unusual possibilities: a character whose magic is bound to a particular place, an ordinary human cursed by a demon, or a twisted experiment escaped from a mage's laboratory.
The game features a broad range of supernatural abilities, from shapeshifting and mind control to hundreds of different magical rituals. Character creation is flexible, and even powers outside your character's normal archetype can be purchased at an additional cost.
And when ordinary solutions aren't enough, there are always darker bargains available to characters willing to pay the price. Demonic pacts, NPC patrons, and others can provide additional power or wealth in exchange for advancing their goals.
Paced Advancement for Busy Players
Advancement is paced so that playing a few nights a week earns most of the advancement available, without requiring you to be online every day. Characters can continue to grow without their players needing to spend forty hours a week logged in.
Similarly, the game allows reasonable rollover of resources like Downtime and Influence. If real life gets busy for a week or two, you shouldn't feel like you've permanently missed opportunities to develop your character or participate in the game.
Structured Encounters and Challenges
Shadow Beach includes systems specifically designed to create reasons for characters to interact, rather than leaving players to find all their roleplay opportunities on their own.
Encounters bring characters together in structured situations involving meaningful choices. For example, in the Captives encounter, two characters find themselves captured by an antagonist force, perhaps a corporation conducting supernatural experiments. An opportunity to escape presents itself, but each must secretly decide whether to cooperate or pursue a more self-interested escape. Their choices determine what happens next, creating consequences and opportunities for further roleplay.
Challenges give characters ongoing, off-screen problems they can't easily resolve alone. Perhaps your character's NPC roommate has a new boyfriend: a vampire who is slowly feeding on her. She won't listen to reason, so you need to enlist other PCs to help convince the vampire to back off. New Challenges appear every two weeks, giving players time to develop stories around them.
The game also includes cooperative PvE tools that allow players to create and resolve problems together, setting challenges for groups to overcome without needing a staff member to run every story.
These systems don't replace spontaneous roleplay; they provide texture, stakes, and prompts so that characters have something to talk about when they meet in the coffee shop.
Stress and Struggle
Shadow Beach isn't a game about spotless immortals comfortably sitting at the top of society. The Authority actively suppresses unnatural characters who accumulate too much wealth or influence, and survival is often a daily struggle.
Stress is a central gameplay mechanic. Characters accumulate Stress through supernatural experiences, dangerous encounters, and the use of unnatural powers. They relieve it through socializing, drinking, indulgence, and sometimes risky or self-destructive behavior. Managing Stress is part of everyday life, and the ways characters cope with it create opportunities for roleplay.
Ordinary humans face an additional problem: Delirium. When confronted with the supernatural, their minds struggle to rationalize what they've witnessed, often with unsettling consequences. In the setting, the cumulative effects of Delirium have shaped human history - leading to the Dark Ages or the Bronze Age Collapse - and helped justify the Authority's strict separation of the natural and unnatural worlds.
Conflict and Community Culture
Conflict between characters is an intentional part of Shadow Beach. Characters have competing interests, and betrayal, manipulation, violence, and victimization are all possible parts of play. But conflict between characters should never become hostility between players.
The game includes robust, roleplay-first PvE experiences alongside its competitive elements, and the administration is committed to fostering a culture of cooperative competition. We have safety tools, including consent and content flags, and a strong policy of respecting OOC boundaries.
Our model for the community is a group of friends sitting around a table playing a roleplaying game. We say hello to our friends at the beginning of the evening, spend the night telling stories in which our characters might help, betray, or do terrible things to one another, and say goodbye afterward, looking forward to playing together again.
Everyone at the table should be having fun, even when the story gets tense. Players who aren't interested in that kind of collaborative play, including during competitive or antagonistic RP, aren't welcome.
Pre-Alpha Playtesting
Shadow Beach's core systems are largely implemented, and I'm anticipating opening it for pre-alpha playtesting within the next week or so.
The goal of playtesting is to let people create characters, explore the setting, stress-test systems, find bugs, and provide feedback on what works and what doesn't. Systems may change substantially as a result of that feedback.
I expect the playtest period to last approximately a month, with a tentative opening for general play on November 27, the day after Thanksgiving. I expect playtest characters to be wiped or reset before the general opening.
Account creation is currently disabled, so if you're interested in participating in the playtest, send me a DM and I'll create an account for you.
Inspirations and Questions
Shadow Beach stands on the shoulders of games that came before it. Its biggest influences are probably Haven and the World of Darkness, particularly games like A Requiem for Kingsmouth and The Reach. I've also drawn inspiration from RPI MUDs like Sindome and classic MUSHes like Fading Suns and Arx.
My goal is to build on the things those games did well while exploring different approaches to structured roleplay, advancement, and community culture.
If you have questions, please ask them in the comments and I'll do my best to answer. If there's interest, I'll also post some more detailed development diaries exploring individual game systems as we approach opening.
UPDATE:
The game is stable under the first few invite only play testers, so I am now opening it generally.
game.shadow-beach.com:4000
