One of the things that got me through this past week of exhaustingly busy days at work was thinking about my game of Heart: The City Beneath. I admittedly did not have much time to let my mind sit idle or even concern itself with anything other than the project I’ve spent thirty-six of the last sixty hours working on, but what time I did have that included free conscious thought was directed toward that game and the fun place we left it after our last session. True to form, we spent a lot of time roleplaying and only a little time on an adventure. We did get some major fallout, though, since the one player who’d managed to avoid any kind of fallout the first time around wound up getting a wee bit stressed the instant the party started their adventure. It worked out pretty well, though, because I got to do something super fun for me AND the character who got the major fallout had an ability that allowed them to make progress in their delve despite the horrible failure that resulted in said fallout. Everybody won!

That also wasn’t the first fallout of the session, either. The first one showed up when one of the players challenged the ghost haunting their undying friend to a glare-off and lost. I didn’t want to come down too hard on what had been mostly a goof, so the character just spent a little bit in time out, banished there by the ghost since said ghost is part of the reason the related, undying player character has dimension-traveling powers. Figured it was thematically appropriate, on top of being something that takes care of itself once everyone’s had a turn. Plus, it opened the door to a lot of fun characterization from the players AND allowed me to crack the whip a little bit on the roleplaying, so they’d push forward a little more. Because, despite it being a mostly free-form roleplaying session, they did all have a goal they needed to accomplish along the way. They were supposed to be planning their first group delve into The Rotting Heart (the name of the massive pit the game is going to be centered around) or working towards character beats that required them to talk to people, but I could barely get all of them to show up concretely enough to ask if they were all sitting at the same table or different ones. This, it seems, is the downside to have so many self-centered characters.

When they did finally start the delve, they were heading towards a destination the player character acting as the party’s guide was familiar, a place that was supposed to be a relatively safe, easy to find landmark in order to find treasure and equipment after the junk heap that formed the center of said landmark was refreshed by a pulse of energy coming from below. As I already mentioned, we immediately had our first major fallout and then didn’t run into a single issue for the rest of the session. There were a few stress-inducing rolls towards the end, as the players came upon one of the hazards along the path, complicated by their need to roll at least once more to finish the delve, by some decisions I’d made earlier, and as an opportunity for a character to meet a beat they’d picked out. The delve itself was nothing terribly complex, just a lot of little ways for things to go wrong or to introduce complications into the player characters’ lives should they roll poorly enough. Which is a lot of fun for me. Not the players doing poorly or anything, just that the beat system, combined with the general methods of producing delves for the players to work through, means that I can work off a system of tables I’ve created rather than feel the need to plan everything out ahead of time. Plus, since not every violent encounter needs to turn into an actual fight, the stress system means we can abstract away most minor physical conflicts so that we can save the actual fighting for when it will be most interesting.

I really hope my players are enjoying themselves or finding ways they can enjoy themselves. I really like the mechanical systems of Heart and while I know it can take some getting used to, it can prove to be an incredibly versatile system if everyone spreads out their abilities, skills, and domains so that there’s always someone who can do a little bit of everything. Plus, so long as there isn’t TOO much overlap, overlapping on skills or domains just means that the party can more easily help each other on their core rolls (and roles). I’m still trying to figure out how I’m supposed to wrap everything up in about eight sessions, at least for this first part of a potentially larger story. I can’t really count on that, though, since this was a bit of a test run for Heart and we might wind up switching to a different system as a group if we’re not all enjoying this one. There’s plenty more games to try and while I’d love to try them, I’m a bit concerned about how I’m going to wrap things up in Heart if we don’t play at least two little campaign arcs. I’ve yet to introduce any major story details or anything (that might be coming in the next session, though), but I can feel it all building as we play, collapsing from the massive potential of our early worldbuilding into the reality of the story our in-game choices is creating. Regardless, I’m sure I’ll figure something out. If nothing else, I can always have the group play another Everest Pipkin product–World Ending Game–to wrap things up in a way that will hopefully feel fulfilling to each of them. Maybe both! I’m pretty good at this stuff, if I do say so myself, even if I feel a little uncertain right now, playing in a new game as I am.