Well, we finally did it. My players in Heart: The City Beneath hit their first Zenith beat (the one I’ve been working toward with the player who wanted to withdraw) and another got assigned the group’s first Critical Fallout, which we’ve altered just a tiny bit from its as-written description because the player and I agreed it would be more interesting to give him and his character something to work on as a potential end/major alteration to his character that he won’t be able to remove. It felt more fun than just killing his character off, anyway, though I suppose we’ll see how that goes when we next meet in the middle of April. Our next session was due to happen on Easter Sunday and while none of use are impacted by the holiday, two of the players will be traveling that day and largely unavailable, so we’re skipping that session and picking up in three more weeks from the “brushing off the dust” moment we left the game at during our last session. It was fun to bring an end to the Corporate Invasion moment, given how it all played out, but I’m glad we were in the middle of that arc/delve since it allowed me to provide my players with all of the information and impetus the players would need to move their characters towards the final stage of their arc. So now we’re gearing up for this final push, to see where everything comes to a close.

I really like this game. I think I’d do things very differently now, if I ran it again (maybe don’t do as much outside worldbuilding, for one thing…), but this wasn’t as horrible as a first-try could have gone. I had fun, even if it a bit of struggle most sessions, but I think I’m ready to move on for a while. Maybe I’ll come back to it again someday, when I’ve got a local gaming group that can meet weekly for a wider variety of games or something like that. It would be nice to give it another try with far less ambitious goals for worldbuilding and storytelling. My reach tends to exceed my grasp most of the time, after all. I tend to live my life with that goal in mind, always pushing myself harder and further than I think I can manage. It works out well for me more often than it doesn’t and it never seems to fail in a horrible fashion when it doesn’t work out, but I think that I need to be a bit more judicious in my applications of this personal philosophy. I was dealing with a lot of new stuff as a part of this game, after all. Not only was the game system itself new to me (listening to Friends at the Table play it is great exposure but not super great for understanding the game as a GM), but I was playing with a new group of players and trying my hand at a longer-form campaign meant to be run every-other-week. I typically aim for weekly games and that just wasn’t an option for this group. Which means missing a session put a HUGE gap in our game time which always required more than a little bit of time and effort to overcome.

Anyway, there was a lot of fun narrative moments as the party’s Witch blossomed in a horrible mixture of Koh the Face Stealer and a Corse Flower Made Of Meat before cryptically answering questions and then sucking the life out of every single living being that wasn’t a member of the party that was within its now quite extensive grasp. I didn’t even have to cut in on the player as they answered the questions to make them usefully vague or just portentous enough to influence the other characters. It was as good of an ending for a character as I could have hoped. It also opened the door to finishing a few other tricky beats for players who hadn’t been pursuing them as actively as the other players had been, so that was incredibly useful. The whole area they’d been in during the last bit of pre-zenith action was a messed-up place removed from the space around the larger world that held a lot of very fun little nooks and crannies for them to explore if they felt up to it, but they mostly seemed content to wait when they were told to wait and then follow the character marching toward her end when the moment arrived. I diverted the party briefly to shove their face in some beats a little bit, to really push them towards the last possible resolution, and one of them still almost missed it because they wanted to wait for the Landmark-altering event from the Zenith Move to change things enough to allow them to “easily” do some stuff.

It is difficult, sometimes, to get this group used to the idea that they need to be the characters driving the story. I prepare sandboxes for them and then they mostly wait to see what I’m building rather than take any narrative control of their own. The one player who was best at this is, unfortunately, the one withdrawing from the game, so I think we’re going to continue on our path back towards something more codified. We talked about stopping off for at least a little bit in the newly opened beta for the game Daggerheart, which is funny since the people who made Heart: The City Beneath are crowdfunding a module for the game called Dagger in the Heart, which I backed in hopes of having THAT beta available in time for me to run once we finished the campaign of Heart that we’ve accelerated. Just a very interesting coincidence, is all. I was the one who brought up Daggerheart, since it seems like an interesting medium between the more narrative-focused games I’m interested in trying out and the more rules-heavy games my players seem to desire, so I’m content to give that a shot whenever we manage to actually finish this game. Which will probably be May or June at this rate, given player availability and the group’s general pacing. Regardless, as I mentioned above, it’ll be at least a month before I have more to say about this game of Heart so I’ll have to find something else to fill my Sunday that I can write about here. I depend on my weekly games for blog ideas! It’s difficult coming up with something at least moderately interesting to write about five times a week!