As I’ve mentioned many times before, I absolutely love the beat system in Heart: The City Beneath. Being able to take the choices my players make about where they want their character to go next and spin them all up into a larger plot for us to run through over however many sessions it takes is truly a gift, especially when I’m playing with five other players who are more closely aligned than they realize. I try to avoid calling attention to the beats each of them are picking, since I know some of the players want to be able to surprise each other and I don’t want all of my players thinking about the best way to build up each other’s beats or whether or not something has come up is for them or for a different character. I have no problem talking them out, of course, since we’re playing a horror game and good communication is key, but I generally don’t prompt my players to do that. At the mid-point of our last session, though, as we came back from everyone’s mini-sessions and the party reunited after being separated for almost in-game two weeks, I had my players read out their beats because it turned out that not only had several picked the same beats as at least one other player (with one major exception, but his journey is very different from everyone else’s right now), but they all picked beats that complimented each other. As it turns out, everyone (even the player with unaligned beats) wants to burn down the city they’re in or otherwise destroy the massive corporation at the center of said city, and they’re all picked beats that aligned with that goal.

I’ll be the first to admit that my players didn’t arrive at this position in a vacuum. One of the things I did in my one-on-one sessions with each of them was talk about the beats system and how it functioned not just as a way for them to tell me what they wanted to do but to serve as the tools they needed to build their character’s path from beginning to end. I talked them through what they saw as their goal for their character and what they wanted out of the story and gave them some examples of how they could get there. I didn’t suggest that they all focus on the massive corporation, 3Q, that had emerged as a common enemy of the party, but they’d just fought it in our last Session and had quite a few consequences from that fight that they were still dealing with (both those represented mechanically as fallout and some softer ones). It was a pretty logical step and was helped a bit by the way I’d painted the lead up to our one-on-one sessions. I was, of course, responding to the things my players had been doing and had indicated they wanted for the future, but I was also super interested in telling an anti-capitalist story. While I’m not super far down my anti-capitalist rabbit hole yet, I did pull the reins a tiny bit in the direction.

It looked like it was going to get there eventually, but I figured I might as well help it get there a touch sooner since I’m a player in this game as well and want to make sure I’m participating in telling a story that I’ll enjoy. Plus, as much as the body horror and eldritch terror elements are fun, the things that are really terrorizing the world around us players are coporations and capitalism. Unequal power dynamics are terrifying and while you can represent them as a creature that just won’t die no matter how many times you remove its head, you can also represent them as corporations that are too big to fail . How can you strike down a decentralized company with autonomous divisions that all play into a larger whole while still taking care of their own operations? There’s a little less wealth concentrated at the top of corporations built like this, but that’s probably the only way you can actually build and maintain a multi-dimensional corporation. You gotta give up a little bit of the wealth in order to squeeze it out of even more realities. So, while there isn’t much moment-to-moment horror in the idea of taking down a massive corporation, I know exactly where I’m going to find the horror and how to present this whole story to my players so it stays in the realm of horror we’ve chosen to explore together.

That said, I have to make it realistic. I have to set the world up so it can respond to the whims of my players. They have indicated that they want to be in positions that would give them the opportunity to burn down at least this one segment of the giant corporation, so I built in that direction. Which means as my players snuck in and set about their nefarious plans, I put some of my own into motion. As it turns out, they’re not the only ones thinking about burning things down. As the characters were led into an ambush by a nasty fallout from some bad luck, I unveiled the plans that others had laid, throwing explosions, smoke on the horizon, and distant yells of people attacking this facility to the tableau of armed guards (who seemed a little too heavily geared up for a normal day) aiming their weapons at the player characters. So now they’re deep in enemy territory, have to face down an ambush, and get to avoid getting crushed by a multi-dimensional evil corporation’s full might since that full might will be occupied elsewhere. It’s great. Plus, since none of them dug into what’s going on in the town or what the company had planned beyond announcing some new innovation, they were all surprised when a group of acolytes and a young Witch of the Heart ran up to one of the player characters who is now an Unwilling Leader (another bit of bad luck Fallout) of this little group of freedom/anticapitalist fighters. It’s going great and will continue to go great since now we’re in the thick of it. I’m VERY excited to go back to playing this weekend. The weekend following when this post goes up, anyway. The version of me writing this has to wait a week and a half, unfortunately, and they’re too excited to want to be patient.