As I’ve mentioned many times before, I absolutely love the beat system in Heart: The City Beneath. Being able to take the choices my players make about where they want their character to go next and spin them all up into a larger plot for us to run through over however many sessions it takes is truly a gift, especially when I’m playing with five other players who are more closely aligned than they realize. I try to avoid calling attention to the beats each of them are picking, since I know some of the players want to be able to surprise each other and I don’t want all of my players thinking about the best way to build up each other’s beats or whether or not something has come up is for them or for a different character. I have no problem talking them out, of course, since we’re playing a horror game and good communication is key, but I generally don’t prompt my players to do that. At the mid-point of our last session, though, as we came back from everyone’s mini-sessions and the party reunited after being separated for almost in-game two weeks, I had my players read out their beats because it turned out that not only had several picked the same beats as at least one other player (with one major exception, but his journey is very different from everyone else’s right now), but they all picked beats that complimented each other. As it turns out, everyone (even the player with unaligned beats) wants to burn down the city they’re in or otherwise destroy the massive corporation at the center of said city, and they’re all picked beats that aligned with that goal.