Last night, after several months, many delays, and little bit of ad hoc scheduling, my remaining two players and I wrapped up our campaign of Heart: The City Beneath. Both remaining players hit their zeniths, we wrapped up the last trailing bits of story, and then did a post mortem since the player whose character had died/zenithed-out last session was around and available. It was a long night for all of us since we moved back our planned start time an hour, used up the the entire hour and a half of game time we’d set aside, and then wound up talking through the end of the game and what we’re going to do next for another hour. I was thoroughly exhausted by the end of all that and still am a full day later. Still, I’m glad we got to do it and I’m looking forward to a relatively quiet weekend without needing to run any games (though I will be playing in one, most likely, and doing some preparations to play in yet another game). I could use a bit of a break this weekend, after the last few weeks I’ve had, especially because I’ve got a new game to start preparing.

In the session itself, the final two player characters–a Deadwalker and a Train Knight–made their way to the origin point of the trains. It was a long and largely quiet journey, aside from a conversation between the two characters about what they thought was coming for them down the line (literally and metaphorically) since both of them don’t have much tying them to the surface or the world at large anymore. It was a conversation of deep metaphor and loaded meaning between two characters (and two players) that seemed to not land as deeply as they each intended it to, which felt appropriate given the fractures forming in the party and the Critical Fallout the Train Knight suffered that had, unbeknownst to the rest of the party, twisted his final purpose. This fallout had originally meant that the Train Knight was going to be the final boss, but then two of the remaining player characters died in the two sessions between that moment and the final session, so there weren’t enough characters left to actually do that fight. When they finally arrived at the deepest part of The Descent they’d ever heard of, they found a bunch of much messier tracks and, at their end, a turntable of the sort used to move trains onto different tracks, except that this one had a single line leaving back the way they came and an infinite number of them stretching away from the way they’d come. At the turntable, they used some of the equipment they found to help give the trains they’d been guiding–a collection of warped trains created by the evil megacorporation that had been slowly bending all of reality to its will–the shapes each of them desired before setting them free.

After this was done, the Train Knight felt compelled to go closer to the point where all this magic was happening and discovered that he could make himself into a train as well. He could go from being a dwarf-shaped “Trainborn” person to being whatever kind of train he wished. As the character considered this, the Deadwalker spoke with his ghost and realized this was probably the end of the line for the two of them as well. After all, there wasn’t much life left in them and they’d already broken all the chains binding them to this world, so they started reflecting on the last thing they wanted to do before they died. What they wanted to destroy with the last vestiges of the power that held them to this world. As the Deadwalker considered, the Train Knight told the Deadwalker it was good that they’d been prepared to let go, since no one could be allowed to live who had seen this place. Who might use it to control the trains or gain access to the infinite possibility of the nearby heart from which the Trains’ source drew its power. As the Train Knight transformed, the Deadwalker used their powers to summon the entity of the massive evil corporation that wanted control over the multiverse into a vessel make from the mask the Deadwalker used to wear when they were a hired assassin for said corporation. With the life quickly draining from them, the Deadwalker formed the corporation’s body over the train tracks, just in time for the Train Knight, now a full train primarily made up of a single powerful blade with no way to attach cars to it, cleft it in twain. The corporation died, killed in both effigy and totality thanks to the Deadwalker’s zenith move (which let it kill anything by forcing it into an appropriate vessel, even things like corporations or concepts) and the camera began to fade out, the credits rolling, as we saw the afterlife of the Deadwalker and its ghost and the power of the new Axehead Train as it protected the trains from all who wished to control them.

After a few minutes of decompression, I called in the final remaining player (the group of one GM and six players is now down to one GM and three players) and we talked through our experience with Heart: The City Beneath. I stand by my assessment that I really enjoyed this game and would run it again in a heartbeat, but that maybe playing it with this group wasn’t the right choice. There’s just not enough people who are used to that kind of narrative drive or who are willing to take that kind of narrative control. One of my players, as we talked through this and what to do next, literally said that they didn’t want to do the narrative work involved in games like Heart. Which is why we’re moving back to Dungeons and Dragons 5e eventually. There’ll be a few other games mixed in here or there, as they feel appropriate to introduce (Beak, Feather, and Bone for cities, The Ground Itself for places over time, The Quiet Year for small communities of survivors, and Sanctuary and Sentinel for the ruins of once-grand places, to name a few), but it seems like I’m largely back to running Dungeons and Dragons 5e. Maybe I’ll find another group that will play other things with me, or set up a new time in my usual mix for playing other games with interested parties, but I’m really starting to wonder if I just don’t know anyone who is interested in more than Dungeons and Dragons other than my long-time player and fellow GM (who has decided to stay with the Sunday campaigns for now, but I suspect that might yet change since he’s even more tired of D&D 5e than I am).

I don’t mind playing D&D again (it is kind of comforting, still), but I just wrote about playing widely and I’d really like to continue playing more games. If I had some kind of local group, I’m sure I could convince them to try new things but all my attempts to reform an old group, now that two of its members have returned to my city for longer than the warm seasons, have failed since the only person who even responded told me he was probably going to be too busy to play anything and didn’t even bother to suggest a day (nor had I even suggested a day or time yet since I was just polling interest). I’m no longer willing to work at convincing people to play tabletop games with me, so I gave up on this group pretty quickly. After years of trying to make games happen, of trying to work with people’s schedules, being accommodating, or meeting people where they’re at only for them to walk further away, I’m done putting in lots of effort. If people don’t respond or don’t even try to participate in making things work out, I’m just going to assume they’re not interested. It’s easier for my mental health that way, even if it still kind of sucks that I won’t be getting the game together that I was trying for. For now, though, I have this group, our eventual conversion to D&D, the new players we recruit, if any (which I say knowing that one player has already suggested someone to me), and the short little games I can fit into thematically appropriate moments in a D&D campaign. I will take what I can get, I guess.