We finally finished The Ground Itself. Our final ten showed up as our second draw and then, as we wrapped up the game, I moved us into talking about what our first session of Heart: The City Beneath would look like. I checked in with my players, asked about some thematic stuff, and then pushed us into talking about characters and how to tie all the excellent worldbuilding we’d done to the systems and nouns of Heart. While Heart was in our minds the whole time we played The Ground Itself, we were still using a bunch of the nouns that I’d come up with for the core worldbuilding proposal, not to mention the plethora of nouns we produced in our game, so we had to slowly work through the mechanics of Heart and lace the disparate elements together. It required some careful work, since we were also pushing through character creation at the same time, I had a hard out an hour before our session was typically done, and I had some other stuff going on that was distracting me, but we got through most of it. I’m sure there’s plenty more that will need to be done on the fly as we play, but that’s just part of the game. Can’t have it all built out beforehand or else we’re not leaving room for us to play the game!
As we talked through all of our characters, worked through what tied to to what, and finished developing who our characters are, I got more and more excited about playing the game eventually. We opted to stick to the area of the world we developed, rather than forcing the players to go on an adventure to find it, and I’m very excited to start figuring out plot hooks, adventure items, and the various NPCs that they’re going to encounter. It will be difficult to create JUST enough, because I’m excited to continue developing this cool chunk of the world we mapped out, what with its bone mountain, bubbled city half-floating at the peak of that bone mountain, sinkhole-turned-festering-pit-of-The-Rot, mysterious origin of trains somewhere deep below, forgotten/abandoned city of magic crystal, living silt that can keep The Rot (our equivalent to The Heart/Heartsblooded things) at bay, and mangrove forest full of strange moths that sometimes glow. It’s going to be a great time, playing through all of that and figuring out how to tie it all together and then to the characters. I mean, I’ve already got a dozen ideas, just from typing this paragraph, so it won’t be difficult. It’ll just be fun.
The cast of doomed characters is already stellar, too. It will take us some time to really work through them and settle in to them (some of the players were still working out their final details in this session and one of them only decided which of his character concepts he wanted to play right as we moved into character finalization). I think there’s going to be an excellent mix of mild party conflict, plentiful party support, and so much endless stress (the game mechanic kind, mostly, but also some of the person kind) as they attempt to pursue their individual and collective goals. Three of the five players have the same calling but vastly different interpretations of it and the other two players have the same calling as each other but again incredibly varied interpretations of what it will mean for them. We have a grisled guide who wishes to become the terrifying, fantastic creatures he has seen. We have a stalwart knight who cannot remember his origin beyond the train ticket he held as he stepped of a train in his first memory. We have a host of innumerable moths who believes it is her destiny to bring order to the chaos of the world, but is it her destiny or the whispers of the moth hivemind within her that says so? I can’t forget to mention the ancient assassin who won’t stay dead no matter how hard he, or the spirit that haunts him, tries, nor the corpse flower witch who might be responsible for the assassin’s unkillable nature as a result of an “accident” on her quest to become one with The Rot at the center of it all. Absolutely stellar cast, that.
We’ve yet to determine what has brought this entire group together, but we went through enough of the character creation work to figure out how most of them know each other. There are some clear preferences for character ties, so far, but since most of the group are weird loners, it makes a certain amount of sense that they’d have a difficult time making new friends. And that they’d be tied to the more social, group-oriented characters (who, cannonically, are in need of a new group after some pre-game events broke up their old group) who might more actively recruit people. It’ll be fine, I’m sure. Absolutely no problematic dynamics. Zero unhealthy connections. Pure friendship all around. It’s going to be so much fun watching this group either come together in a spectacular way or fall apart like an atomic bomb. I’m even more excited to watch that happen than I am to do this worldbuiling. I can do the worldbuilding on my own and I can always start over again with these worldbuilding pieces if I’m not satisfied with the work I do. This group, though, is a singular thing and the story we tell together will be just as unique. It’s so very exciting. I can’t wait.