I ran what will probably be the final “downtime” session of my Heart: The City Beneath game. I put “downtime” in quotation marks because it was supposed to be a rather low-tension session that quickly became anything but that. Sure, our Descent Into The Rotting Heart campaign was split into two groups (last session, two party members stepped into a Fracture and the other two decided to stay in the haven adjacent to the Fracture), but they were both heading for some rest, some healing, and what was supposed to be a little bit of setup for their final delve. Instead, the party outside the Fracture went on a violent rampage that went so much better than it had any right to go, thanks to it being pretty much normal violence against our two tankiest characters while the group inside the Fracture started out following the program and then one of them quickly devolved into a series of bad roles and fallouts that not only sealed the Fracture off from the rest of the world but doomed their character to a cursed, ironic end. I’d planned to keep the session short, in the one to two hour zone, since I was super exhausted and didn’t want to tax myself, but then we wound up using the full length of the session instead. It was wild from start to finish and, in my opinion, the first time I, my players, and Heart were firing on all cylinders.

It makes me kind of sad to realize that we’re finally hitting our stride with this game right as we’re taking our first steps toward the end of this campaign. It is a little consoling that, since I’ve gotten a feel for the game, I’ll be more ready to get to this point for any future games I play with this system, but I do wish I could draw this campaign out a bit longer to maybe bring a couple of my fence-sitting players around to the game. On the other hand, I’m happy we hit this point at all. With three of my original five players still not entirely grasping how the game is supposed to be played (with the players driving the story just as much as, if not more than, the GM), I think we only hit this point because I was able to weave around a few of the sticking points my players and I have tripped on in the past. For one thing, I was able to work around some difficult moments with one of the less certain players so that we could do some interesting character development that set up his character’s dual Zenith beats (an either/or set). Probably the biggest contributing factor was that I finally figured out how to handle the least certain player. I was able to set up the scenes they’d need to do, ask the right kind of specific prompts, and then step in with as much extra narration and details as the player needed to get through their most uncertain moments.

What made this really hit home, though, was the third player in the group (we only had three players and the GM in our last session, due to our fourth player being incredibly jetlagged from an international trip they’d returned from the day before). The instant I turned the game towards his character (who was carrying along the missing player character in his wake) and he started to examine the ruins of the haven one of the players had helped destroy in the last session, things went off the rails immediately. Or on them, since his mission was to learn more about the weird, mutant/artificial trains that had been put into service by the corporation one of the players had used her character’s zenith move to dismantle (well, to dismantle the corporate headquarters building located within the sinkhole that had revealed the Heart). Instead of moving quietly–an option quickly cast aside since the character, a Vermissian Knight, was built for violence, not stealth and he had a fallout that meant enemies would keep coming for him until he managed to remove the fallout or kill his way out–he decided to preemptively kill his way out. A couple of rockets later (a prize he’d picked up in an earlier fight), he got to where the trains were controlled, killed his way into the control tower, scared the lone controller into telling him what he needed to know, freed these artificial trains as their screams reverberated in his head due to an older fallout, and then jumped out of the tower to join the trains.

While he was doing all of this, thanks to a mixture of high and low rolls, he never took more blood stress than his protection would prevent and the only time his ally, the character of the absent player, would have taken stress, the roll was lower than that character’s blood protection value as well. He went all out from the beginning and I was more than happy to keep placing stuff in front of him as I worked the other players and their characters through their downtime in a much slower manner. I was able to use the much more action-oriented side of the game to break up the slower-paced bits, giving the slower-paced players time to think their way through things when it became clear that they didn’t know what they wanted to do. One of them became a real struggle, which was unfortunate because that I meant I spent most of my time focused on them and the on-going fight/train escape rather than on the player who was quietly doing downtime stuff and setting himself up for the move into a zenith beat.

That side of the game was less pleasant overall, too, despite a bunch of good descriptions of some haunts and some fun reflections on the nature of the self and the way the body reflects the interior self in a game about unfortunate wish fulfillment. I kept needing to prompt that one player and work through what they wanted to accomplish, frequently repeating myself and rephrasing things until the player understood what they were supposed to be doing enough that I could cut away to give them time to think it through. Almost every time, though, I had to repeat this process multiple times for each moment since the player hadn’t worked all the way through it in the time I gave them. All of which wound up being moot since, the instant I was able to understand what the player and their character wanted enough to start providing it, they started failing rolls and didn’t stop until they’d accumulated enough Fortune fallouts to die (the exact outcome had, according to a calculator I used, a .02% chance of happening). It was literally nothing but failures on rolls that the player character should have been able to easily succeed, each then followed by a stress roll and a fallout as the player inevitably rolled at or under their stress number each time. Even the time they only got one stress! It was impressive. Clearly, the dice had a story to tell and they demanded the death of this particular character as the Fracture they were in began to separate from the anchors that held it there (locked in place by the corporation centuries ago, in the its infancy, and now loosened as the local headquarters was destroyed), as the light that illuminated this great city of quartz from somewhere deep within it began to dim, and then as it finally sealed it self away, the character trapped in a library that would never give them the answers they sought despite their bravado and unearned confidence convincing them that they were just one more book away from solving every problem weighing on them.

Like I said, the session felt like the game was living up to everything I’d ever hoped it could be. I’m sure I’ll be able to recapture that feeling in the future, especially with players who have a better understanding of how they’re supposed to drive things forward using the beats they’ve picked out, but it was nice to really get a feel for the game at its best. A train knight slaughtering his way through enemy forces in order to free a bunch of innocent trains kept locked up and painfully forced to follow instructions, backed up by an all-dead but still living ex-assassin while the other hunter learns a bit about the nature of the self–or at least about his “self” and what he wants that to look like in this twisted slice of reality–and the party philosopher fails to make a good enough impression to get anyone to help them so severely that the entire demesne they’re in decides to rip itself away from what kept it attached to reality. Just an absolutely stellar session. I had a great time.