In the latest session of Heart: The City Beneath that I ran with my every-other-Sunday group, they completed their first full delve (well, technically second, but the first one had training wheels on it and was more of a “learn to use the system” tutorial than a proper delve). Since they’d figured out the final puzzle at the end of the last session, they were able to do just a couple quick rolls to wrap it up. One of the players had a beat that required gathering resources in such a way that set the delve back and managed to roll the same number for both the stress they inflicted on the delve and the stress they added to the delve, which was hilarious to see. That note was immediately followed by a sour one (for the players) who emerged from their first delve to find out that the mysterious fallout one of the players had acquired in a previous session had caused the landmark they were heading towards to be transformed from what they were expecting into something they weren’t. Which, in our game, meant that they found an entire base of corporate goons where they were expecting only a handful hanging around the periphery of a thriving community of other delvers. This was fitting since the person who most wanted to avoid the employees of this corporation (called 3Q) was the one who got the landmark-transforming fallout, so it was a punishment for them specifically, but I managed to slip in a few things for my other players. All-in-all, it was a great moment to mark the start of the session.

After that, things went pretty normally. The party met up with someone two of the party members knew. This guard used to be part of a group the party’s Cleaver (a hunter who is being transformed by the warping power of The Heart/The Rot) and Vermissian Knight (an order of knights that was formed around monitoring or attending to the mysterious train system that seems to run it self) used to belong to, before almost all of them were lost when they encountered a dangerous beast and did not flee fast enough. This character, dubbed “Hanson” when I polled my players for an NPC (I’d assigned them all with the task of coming up with five NPCs that exist in the world so, when prompted, we could draw a quick connection to a character), had been transformed by the ordeal of surviving that horrible beast but was not aware that he’d essentially been abandoned by his once-allies. So he was friendly, despite having sold out, and offered to show the players around. It took a while to hammer out the specifics, since the players are still adjusting to the mechanics of this system, but eventually the players figured out that they wanted to casually grill him as he showed them around, all while doing their best to see more of the corporate goings-on within the 3Q base than he meant to show them. One of the players even used an ability to stare into the history of this place. They were very curious about why a place called “The Heap” had been taken over by representatives of a giant corporation.

What they learned, thanks to more excellent rolling, is that the corporation was doing something that was changing the energy of the place. And that they were monitoring the Pulses of The Heart for unknown reasons. All after doing a non-violent but definitely hostile takeover of the local community of delvers, most of whom had been bought out or pushed to the fringes of the new community built by 3Q. Something I reminded my players of frequently that, despite their dislike for the corporation and what it had done to the locals, they never actually went to visit. They didn’t even ask their tour guide about it. I had a thing all ready to go and it never game up! Which just means I get to save it for another time since now it’s too late. See, when they got all this information and realized that the message one of them was supposed to deliver on behalf of the Heart was supposed to wind up either at the strange derrick 3Q had set up OR in the control room of their onsite corporate office, they decided to figure out when the next pulse was going to be. Which is a fairly straight-forward thing to roll for, but since they wanted to get it right, a few players jumped in to assist. It worked, but it hit everyone involved with a lot of stress and two of the three players involved with a Major Fallout each.

Since one of the people involved was the same person who’d gotten the mystery fallout, I decided to pick another fun mystery fallout which will probably be revealed next session. The other immediately required picking an option off their NPC list since it turns out that someone from their past wasn’t as dead as they expected. In fact, they were buried in The Heap until that character dug them out. As it turns out, they even had a mission that involved going to wreck stuff! That’s one of the fun things about the Fallout system. The entire thing is “someone the character knew and thought was dead is actually alive and here right now!” There’s nothing about why, about the new character’s attitude, about what purpose they might serve. It’s just dropping someone in a scene who shouldn’t be there and it’s up to the players and GM to figure out where to go from there! So, when the players started spinning their wheels and weren’t sure what to make of this character’s arrival, I slowly spun them up into a tensioned crossbow pointed at the situation they were in and warned them that it would go off fairly quickly if left alone and would eventually go off even if they tried to slow it down. Thinking quickly, they scrambled a plan together and decided to act against 3Q rather than sneak around now that they had an NPC wrecking ball on their team.

The rest of the session was mostly combat as the Derrick Team started a fight that allowed the guards on the derrick to shoot off a warning flare. This brought all the guards running towards the derrick so that the Office Team could break in with much less opposition. A lot of combat rolling ensued and the fight went rather poorly for the Derrick Team, since neither player characters had the skill required to kill people (conveniently called “Kill”) and only one of them had any relevant domains. Eventually, though, with a couple new fallouts (and one beat) under their belts, they killed the guards with enough time left to prepare for the incoming wave of guards. The Office Team was doing much better, since they only had one enemy to fight, and managed to wrap up their combat encounter with almost no stress. Now, as we look forward to the next session, we’ve got one person with a major bleeding problem on the Derrick Team and a largely unexplored Main Office for the Office Team to navigate free of interference from actual guards. Which isn’t to say that there won’t be opposition, just that it won’t be as heavily armed and armored as the guards were. As for me, I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire, most of which will probably come out of it shortly after the session starts since I’ve been building to them for two full sessions now. And, with the new fallouts from the last session, I’ve got even more stuff on the horizon, some of which might even result in the first player character death! They probably shouldn’t keep trying to shoot stuff when they’ve got major blood fallout, no relevant skills or domains, and a large mass of incoming forces. It really isn’t going well for them, though it is definitely making for an interesting character choice given some things the player and I discussed that the rest of the party isn’t exactly aware of, yet.

Anyway, the next session is on Sunday (the 26th) and I’m SUPER excited for it! I can’t wait to see how my players choose to act and I’m looking forward to our first session with a map! I’ve been keeping us mostly in the theater of the mind since specific distances aren’t super relevant to this game and I’m pretty comfortable sketching things out quickly as needed. Its difficult to plan this stuff ahead of time, after all, since I’m making so much of it up as we go, but this time I know that they’ll be exploring an office building so I’m planning to slap something together quickly just so they’ve got a decent reference and so I can see how they choose to operate. The choices they make will potentially have a significant impact on what happens to them, in ways that aren’t super clear yet. Having a map in place will help make the stakes more clear when it finally comes time to show them the proverbial barrel of the gun, so I’ll use whatever spare time I can claim to put something simple together. It might wind up just being lines and text labels with some rough shapes to illustrate the objects in a room, but that should still do the trick. Regardless, it promises to be another interesting session and I’m genuinely loving how every session so far has been incredibly fun and there’s frequently been tons of unexpected developments that are taking the game in directions I wouldn’t have thought to go on my own. I really hope this continues.