One of my favorite parts of preparing for the start of a new tabletop game is the moment when everything crystallizes. Whatever errrant thought, subtle influence, or bright flash of inspiration you needed arrives and suddenly it all makes sense. You can see the strings the world dances upon and understand the way everything moves within it. It is the moment when you go from wondering what might be and pondering unknowns to knowing what is and looking for what might change. In the world I ran in a few Dungeons and Dragons campaigns starting back in 2019, this moment came as I was taking a break from my then-panicked preparations to do something fun and relaxing. I was watching Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse on Blu-ray not long after it was finally available for purchase and the whole campaign setting crystalized around the idea of missing heroes. It was a fairly simple idea, but that last piece of information fitting into the puzzle meant everything else clicked into place as well. Suddenly, I knew what was going on and what everyone was motivated by. It was a relevatory moment and something I’ve enjoyed every time something like it has come up any time I’m considering a story, be it something I’m writing, a tabletop game I’m putting together, or even just a video game I’m playing.
As I’ve prepared for my upcoming game of Heart: The City Beneath, though, I’ve avoid getting enough of the puzzle put together for a moment like this to happen. One of the major aspect of this game is that the world the players are exploring shifts and adapts to the characters within it, always giving them a little bit of what they’re looking for and extracting a price from them in return. If I were to have a crystallizing moment, where everything made sense, that would defeat the purpose of this game. It is supposed to be horrific, unknownable, and reflective. It should not be something I could pin down and write out ahead of time. I need to be producing it as the players signal what they’re looking for, always with room for them to add their own touches as we paint a picture together. It needs to feel alive and breathing, like it could twist at any moment and turn from supplying the characters with what they desire to ruthlessly hunting them down. Sure, it needs to make sense, but not in the orderly way of most worldbuilding. It needs to exist and to have things within it that want their own things. After all, the characters are not the only debatably living, thinking beings within this world, with whatever equivalent we have to “the Heart.” There are other things in there, pursuing their own goals and desires that the world is reflecting back at them.
Most of the conflict in this world comes from two opposing desires or someone unwilling to pay the demanded price for their desire. The game itself is set up to only call for rolls when there is a risk of failure that has consequences. For the most part, this plays out predictably. You don’t have to roll to get food and drinks in a safe place. You probably have to roll if you want to barter down the cost of getting treated for your various stresses and fallouts (damage in this system is measured via the accumulation of stress that crystalizes into fallouts rather than through petty HP or a concrete amount of damage you can take), or to convince someone else to cover those costs. By the same token, if you must pay a price of blood to perform a ritual, there’s no need to roll if you’re just willing to pay it. You can simply roll to determine your stress, check for fallout, and succeed at the ritual (so long as the ritual itself has no chance of failure). You’d only need to roll for something like that if you want to perform the ritual without paying the blood price or by paying with something other than blood.
Trying to build a world like that ahead of time is entirely possible, but it closes off a lot of its potential for surprise or sudden twists. For instance, I just made up a blood ritual and determined a cost for it in my head (which I didn’t write down because I’m not here to dive that deeply into the mechanics). If I’d tied that to anything in the world, sure, I could change it in the moment, but then I’ve had the idea that there’s a blood ritual or even just any kind of ritual tied to a place and an event. I could just toss it aside entirely of course, like I often do with a lot of my worldbuilding for other games when it never becomes relevant, but that still means I’m operating in a world where people perform blood rituals in exchange for something. It is too early to know if that’s the kind of world we’ll be playing in. I’ve got some idea of what my players want to see, of course, but all I’ve got is incomplete thoughts, partial conversations, and ideas in isolation. We haven’t come together to develop this world as a team and even small, inocuous details like that are steps along the path to that crystalizing moment. As much as I know not to move in that direction, an entire lifetime of worldbuilding habits is pushing me down that path. I need to keep this world open and flexible, not just so I can build it with my players, but so that whatever odd ideas they have can be implimented without friction even as we’re playing the game.
The synthesis of this idea, at least as it applies to Heart: The City Beneath in my mind, is a moment from one of the first adventures from the seventh season of Friends at the Table. In Sangfielle, one of the players built a Junk Mage, a character who collects bits of everything and figures out how it can be magically useful as he goes. He is, perhaps, the player and character who get the world and mechanics of the game the best, since the entire system runs on accumulating and spending stuff. He seems to be the only character who is pursuing the accumulation of odd trinkets and powerful objects as thoroughly as the game suggests a savvy character would. In this early adventure, though, the character is offered a selection of drinks and he asks for all of them, including a throwaway joke about “ghost water.” The GM has the NPC return later with all of the beverages for this character and an empty cup that they pretended to pour water into. The character seals the cup away in a pocket for later, marking down that it is full of ghost water, and then eventually uses it to dowse for the mysterious power source they’re trying to find. This moment of comedy and improvisation turns into what I think is a really cool idea that would have been entirely off the table if the player and GM had figured out if there were ghost fluids of any kind or if there was power in pretending to do something but not really doing it. If they’d figured out the limits and nature of the world beforehand, they might not have even thought to push at the borders of what someone might consider rational in their world. And sure, the character might have known to ask for it then, but it would likely not have proved as useful as it eventually dig since it would have been a discrete object that was part of an ordered system rather than a largely undefined quantity with nothing but potential.
So, as much as I want to, I am avoding a crystallizing moment. I have plenty of ideas and a ton of understanding about the various pieces of the world that I introduced to me players to garner their interest, but nothing concrete. There are no details, no massive vision. Everything is disjointed, broken, and sitting in isolation as I continue a second read-through of the rules and consider anew what parts the worldbuilding fragments I’ve already created might play in steering the collective vision of our group. After all, we united around this idea. Even as we work on our own ideas, as we find what interests us in the rules and produce a world that reflects that, we will all be incorporating the elements I presented to the group to guage interest (admittedly to a somewhat troublesme level since I keep needing to stress that the documents I offered were a specific reflection of the world through both the rules Dungeons and Dragons and the thematic lense of “heroic tragedy,” but were not actually canonical for the game we’re about to play). It feels weird to be thinking and expanding my understand while also avoiding the moment where it all comes together. It’s definitely fun and novel, though, which is the point of this whole thing. To try something new. I just hope the rest of the game lives up to the simmering excitement I feel right now, as I imagine the scope of what we might build together.