Six weeks after our last session, my game of Heart: The City Beneath has finally come back around again. We even got through a full session, even if our metaphorical table wasn’t entirely full. One of the players couldn’t make it, since they have been firmly knocked out by a pair of sicknesses that have left them unfortunately unable to do much without needing to take a nap to rest up. We didn’t get much further through the delve than we were before, but I think we made some good progress overall, especially after being away from the game for so long. In total, they dealt with a difficult fight (which was the result of a fallout one of the players gained right at the end of the previous session) and then started in on the rest of the delve. They have not made much progress, so far, since they’ve rolled incredibly poorly on every single one of their delve roles save the very last one. They’re not super happy about that, either, since that delve roll brought them right up to another difficult fight and they no longer have the moves they used to make the earlier fight less potentially hazardous. Plus, due to the player missing the session and their character having a fallout come due right at the end of the session before, they party is once again split up. There’s a group of three and two isolated party members wandering around on their own, hoping to eventually meet up again. It’s a rough spot for them to be in.

Not as rough as it could be, though. I anticipated a little bit of fracturing, as the party got into this delve, so I’m very prepared to run this split-up group. They all have very specific beats they’re pursuing, after all, and while they’ve got a lot more in common than most of the players initially thought, their specific versions of meeting those beats are probably going to require them all to go to very different places along the path to their destination unless they’re willing to surrender narrative control completely and check their boxes based on someone else’s narrative drive. None of them seem the type to do that, though, so I expect them all to continue pushing to advance their own stories, to find their own information and reasons for doing something like burning it all down. I mean, none of the characters care about the evils of capitalism, even though that’s the main villain of this horror-adjacent story, but this is turning into a fundamentally anticapitalist game just as a result of the things the players have focused on, the way the dice have rolled, and the way the fallouts have either accrued or been discharged. It just might take them a while to see it. Their players too, for that matter.

That said, I need to get better at giving life, a voice, and character to the various NPCs they encounter. After all, no matter how many times they and the corporation they’re fighting against callously end lives, it won’t ever make an impact if I can’t make them see how horrific it is that they’re just as callously killing people as the company does every time the corporation uses explosives and kills their own people without so much as a warning. I mean, it makes sense to the players to kill the guards they’re encountering as they bust through the corporate headquarters they’ve invaded, especially considering how new they are to the system and the genre space it takes up, but I really need to find ways to remind them that all of these people they’re killing ARE people without it getting cloying or saccharine. I mean, it’ll be tough for me to do since this place can just keep throwing people at them and not care what happens to the guards who get sent out in drips and drabs (which is part of the Corporate/Capitalistic Horror we’ve landed in). It’s incredibly easy to run a fight and manage the relevant numbers, but coming up with names and a means of humanizing these people on the fly is much more difficult. Its difficult enough trying to make sure things are running smoothly and that I’m prompting my players enough to get them out of the “I attack with my sword/ax/gun” mode of thought and get them into a more narrative and descriptive mindset, so adding on the extra layer of “NPC dialogue in fights and paint a portrait of their pointless suffering” is a lot of things to balance.

Still, we’re having fun and that’s what matters. I think we’ll be able to meet again in a week (two, as of writing this, unfortunately for me) to continue down the paths we’ve picked and that we’ll maybe be able to go for a while without needing to skip a session. It would be really nice to get some consistent sessions under our belts while we go through this large double-delve I’ve concocted for my players to work through. After all, this ends with a character death or Zenith moment, so it has to be at least kind of a big deal and I’d hate to string it out because of multiple skipped sessions again, especially as tension starts to build while pieces of the greater plots of massive corporations and the amoral assholes who run them begin to fall into place. Or into view. It’s difficult to say when the scale is that different, between these singular player characters and the massive, multi-dimensional companies. I just have to make sure it stays on the horrific side of things rather than the futile side of things… Endless waves of foes can really land on either side and it’ll take some serious work at depicting this to make sure it all ends up on the side I want.