In my most recent session of Heart: The City Beneath with my every-other-Sunday group (our campaign is called Descent Into The Rotting Heart, which is what I’m gonna use to refer to this game from here on out), things finally came to a head and then blew up. A bit literally. Turns out the “message” one of the players was supposed to deliver was a bit of a weird cursed energy bomb meant to disrupt the efforts of a capitalist extraction machine masquerading as a public benefits science corporation. They, unfortunately, went to deliver the message first and then went looking for other stuff, so they got a bit caught up in the blast as it went off. They survived, thankfully, one of them without even getting hurt in any way (my players roll their own stress and the result the delivery peron rolled was equal to the amount of protection they had, so they took no stress) and the other was only hurt in a way that made a great plot hook. This was, if you remember my last post, the Office crew, who were down their most capably violent member because the player couldn’t make it to the session and he had a beat that was going to take him out of the action anyway, so they’d just come out of a situation that should have gone very poorly for them but didn’t go TOO poorly. One of them picked up a bunch of fallouts, but they were all fairly minor things that should be fixable. I will definitely need to make sure they get more loot, though, since they did a lot less body-looting than I expected them to do.

The other group of players, the Derrick group as I was calling them, had similarly mixed results, though they’re mixed on a different axis. One of the players was doing very well, mostly succeeding at his rolls and dealing a fair bit of damage. The other, who did not have skills or domains appropriate to the situation, mostly failed their rolls and wound up ducking out of the fight when it became clear that they were only going to get more and more hurt as time went on. I was able to use their character to set up a clock, to warn of an impending danger from a fallout still unresolved from a previous session (that was sitting as “???” on this particular player character) so that all of the player characters could flee, but they wound up getting caught in the collapse of the cavern, leading to our party’s first character death. Which is somewhat undercut since the character was built with the idea of dying multiple times in mind. We’re playing with a sort of post-Zenith concept for one of the characters, doing a bit of a twist on one of the mechanics mentioned, to create someone who can die multiple times in order to explore the character’s core concept of what does it mean to be dying or to be alive “again” in a world where there is a force that causes everything it touches to rapidly decay except for sometimes where that decay actually fuels different forms of life instead. That’s a part of the original idea that spurred on this whole campaign world (decay as an extant form of life), so of course I’m going to let my players explore it alongside the world development I’ve done to explore it myself.

It was a bit of a rough session, still, with all that. We ran for almost the whole four hour period we set aside to play and though I did my best to keep things moving, we’re still operating in a zone where the party is frequently outclassed by their enemies and where the right kind of enemies can inflict a great deal more stress than the players can. Which, you know, is how the game is supposed to work, since its a horror game, but it still feels pretty harsh. Even to me. We had a talk during the last half hour or so of our scheduled game time, about how magic in the world is supposed to work and what the limits on things are and what people should expect going forward, which I found useful, but I could feel a bit of frustration at the end of the session. It had been rough, not just mechanically but thematically as well. Given that one player character was MIA since his player couldn’t make it to the session and another player character was MIA because it was in the middle of respawning in a new location (digging itself out of its own grave as a part of the process), the party was feeling rough. Almost half of the five-person team was missing and while the half remaining was plenty capable of doing whatever the party needs doing (and SO MUCH EASIER TO BALANCE ENCOUNTERS FOR), they were still missing people that some of the characters and all of the players cared about. It’s a rough spot for them to be in, even if I’m excited about the potential for the next chapter of our game.

Now, over the next couple weeks as my players pick their next beats and I figure out what the player character who ran off did while the cavern they left behind was being drawn back into The Heart by a super-charged Pulse meant to wreck the shit of the capitalists trying to extract value from what was The Heart’s gift to lure delvers into its depth. I’m confident in the player’s ability to come up with something interesting when we work on it since he is my longest-running player at this point (the only one left from my original Sunday crew that started playing together in early 2017) and we’ve got a good creative rapport. I just hope it’s interesting enough to sort of smooth over some of the burrs that will remain from how rough the last session was. I’m not exactly down on myself about how that all went since I feel like it followed the chain of events the fiction established as people did things, suffered fallout, and the world around them reacted to their intrusions, but I do kind of wish I’d done a better job guiding things so they weren’t so abysmally rough. I mean, this is only my second Session of running Heart (and my group’s fifth three-hour-on-average gathering to play Heart), so I’m sure I’ll improve as we go and I get a better sense of how to properly set things up for my players, but I still feel like I could have done better to project some things and get my players and their characters into more interesting positions.

Which all just means I’ve got stuff to work on and improve at. I’d be a lousy GM if I wasn’t looking out for things like this and keeping communication open with my players, but I’m glad they felt comfortable enough to bring things up after we played because as long as we can keep the conversation going, I’m sure we’ll figure it out eventually. Or decide the game isn’t for us and move on to something else! The world we built has a lot of potential, so I’m sure we’ll be able to find plenty of other games that work within the bounds we’ve created and will hopefully want to continue exploring.