Session 0 of the Heart: The City Beneath game went pretty well, I’d say. We got through the initial stages of character building, which has gotten us all pretty much on the same page as to what we’re expecting to see in-game. We talked through a bunch more stuff that might have made it into the Line and Veils list, since everyone now knows the sort of stuff that this game might introduce, but wound up not adding anything. I think I did a pretty good job, through my (just for the vibes, since they were originally produced for a very different game system) setting documents and explanation of the game, of setting the expectations for the group when we picked the game, since no one was surprised by what they found in the book. After that, we talked through our characters a bit more specifically, did a little bit of work to figure out what they’re all about, and then talked through the kind of game we want to play, the stories we want to tell, and what world we want to explore. It was a pretty thorough Session 0, if I do say so myself.

Since I wanted to get more input from my players before I went off to do my GM work, I suggested we do a bit of concrete worldbuilding during the second half of our session rather than complete character building. The idea was that something like this would help us all set the tone and establish what is going on in the world we’re playing in, specifically so we’d have a better idea of the kinds of people still around at the time our game begins, and I had three suggestions for how to do that. My first suggestion was that we could play a game of The Quiet Year focused on a small group of survivors following the tipping point of the world as it changed from a relatively normal fantasy-adjacent place to one that a horror-themed game like Heart would fit right into. We would explore what it meant for those people to be living in that kind of place before, eventually, some force showed up to sweep them all away again.

My second suggestion was to play a game of The Ground Itself to build the location that they were all going to start in. I knew this might not be the most interesting idea for the group since our initial discussion had shown that everyone wasn’t terribly interested in sticking to one location if they had the option to travel more broadly, but I thought it might be fun to have a place they could have as a sort of home base. I also thought it would be cool to have a place they cared for that I could occasionally put under threat as the ebb and flow of the Powers That Be in their vicinity responded to the party’s actions, goals, and drives. Without a guarantee that they’d stick to that area, though, I was correct that they were not interetest in spending a lot of time building something. My third suggestion was to use a slightly altered game of The Ground Itself to build an unknown location whose purpose would only possibly become clear through my end-of-the-rotation GM turns (something I would be hacking into the game). This would allow us to set some of the tone of the world and build a location that we all found interesting in a way that would allow us to not feel tied to it, like we would if we built the location where we started our game.

Reader, they picked the third option. They chose to place their trust in me and to start building this really cool place with a mountain made of bones, some kind of Beast Speaker people who all died out for as-yet unspecified reasons, some horrible, flat, monster frogs who are a significant threat, a strange obelisk, an expanding mire, and some fun tidbits of history that make this place seem incredibly cursed. I didn’t need to do anything to push it in the direction of something Heart-themed other than one establishing fact and then a note at the end that everything we thought we knew about this place’s history is only available through stories rather than any kind of historical or verifiable record. It’s a lot of fun, working with a group that seems to be on the same page already. Some of them are more or less comfortable with this kind of creative play, but we’re all people who have run games for other people before (with maybe one exception, but I know this person is a practiced storyteller through other means at the very least) so I’m confident that we’ll all adjust to this style of game as time goes on. After all, this extra game, interrupting Session 0, is a tool to get our creative juices flowing. It’s here to make us all equal owners of the world so that we all feel empowered to modify and change it as we play Heart.

Our next session isn’t until this upcoming weekend (the one following the day this post goes up on my blog), so I still have a while to wait until we really start digging into gameplay for Heart. I have less time to wait until I can dig into more worldbuilding and preparation for that first full session, but I’m really the most excited to get into the game so I can see how everyone handles the game system. I’m also excited to put together some mysteries for them to solve, some horrors for them to encounter, and to get more comfortable with Heart’s systems through play. After all, there’s only so much good reading the rulebooks can do me. Nothing can replace actual play when it comes to getting experience with something like this and I’m eager to try things out. All that said, since we’re only meeting every other week, I might use some of the ideas we didn’t pursue as something to fill the weeks we don’t play for anyone that wants something to do during our downtime. I won’t be able to do that, though, until I decide what I’m going to do about that Pathfinder 2e game I started a couple months back. It’s during an overlapping timeslot, but that won’t be a problem if I wind up withdrawing from it, something I’m more interested in doing now that I have a prospective replacement for it. As I’ve said before, it is easier for me to give up on something if I’ve got something else to replace it with than to just give it up entirely and do nothing with the time I used to spend on it. We’ll see. Regardless, I’m still incredibly excited and I can’t wait to play more with this crew. It looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun!