One more session of Heart: The City Beneath behind us and now we’re down to the last two players of a group that originally had six. One fell by the wayside immediately, before we even began the second session of our worldbuilding game. The second left after she realized this game was not for her and that she needed more time in her weeks. The third left when her character died a single session after the second left and she decided to reclaim some time for herself rather than carry on. The fourth has now stepped aside, one more session later, as his character finished a transformation that has been brewing since that first worldbuilding game. The final two players are both on the cusp of their own ends, each carrying a Zenith move they have either already used and are seeing play out or are saving to use at the right moment, whatever that might look like. Things are coming to a head and every single roll holds the potential to spell the end for each character, as it did for the fourth player’s character. Still, the story holds us all bound and determined to see it through and. at the very latest, in just another week from when this post does up, I will be writing about how it all came to an end.

This latest session was not nearly as loaded or portentous as the previous one. Things started calmly enough, with a bit of discussion about the structure of what I thought would be the last two sessions (an hour later I was convinced that this was the last session, but things shook out enough that we’ll get at least once more rather short session out of the campaign) and how everyone wanted to set up the final stages of their characters. This was followed by the party arriving at a little town where I introduced the last major faction the party hadn’t dealt with: the Train Knights. They were interested in the strange trains–which the party had rescued from captivity and enslavement just the session before–the party was guiding toward a destination one of the characters had learned about through the Vermissian Knight Zenith move the player had chosen. The party played it cool and stepped into town to gather supplies and information so they’d be prepared to either run or bust away from the Train Knights when the time came. Instead of doing any of that, though, one of them built a shrine to The Heart so they could commune with it and cast off the shackles that held them to it, another found a terrible secret about what the local Train Knights where doing, and the third decided that it was time for him to leave his order of Train Knights behind because they were no better than the corporation that enslaved the trains he’d just rescued. All of which culminated in them blowing the top off the Train Knight’s magical laboratory, them all getting tons of echo fallout as I built toward an encounter with a Legendary Beast (by modifying the Ravening Call/Beast fallouts so they’d only trigger when more than half the party had them and involve a MUCH more difficult fight), and the party absolutely destroying the leader of the local Train Knights as the party’s Cleaver was fully transformed into the beast he’d been slowly becoming this whole time.

It was a great session. In addition to all of the excellent characterization by my players and the advancements of their personal stories, I really got to feel how much more smoothly the game ran with only three players instead of four to five. The somewhat open-ended narrative structure of the game makes the pacing difficult to manage for five players and while I’m sure I’d have been able to figure it out eventually, I was grateful to hit a point where the game just ran as expected, with me mostly cutting between players as they needed a moment to think or reached a place where it made sense to check in on the other action unfolding around the party. It really is too bad that we’re moving on from this game (or possibly ending the group altogether) given how well the game is working right now. I think I’d do things very differently if I could do it all over again, now that I’ve stopped trying to lay out the mechanics of everything the way I thought they needed to be done and just focused on my honed storytelling skills with the mechanics slipped in every time things come to an inflection point. The game runs so much better when I stop putting it in its own way.

We’ve got the last session planned. Since I suspect it will only take another hour or two to wrap things up (we absolutely did not have another hour or two of play time left in us by the time the party escaped the haven they had turned to chaos), I’ve told the players that we can try scheduling something at a different time. It would be nicer to bring things to a clean end this week than to wait another two weeks to wrap up the last bits of play, after all. We’ll see if that works out since I’ve probably got the busiest schedule of the group and I’ll need the energy to run which, if you’ve been following my blog lately, know isn’t something I’ve got that frequently on week nights (and I’ve already got one game I’m committed to running this week). So we’ll see how it goes and, if we can, say our final farewells before the this post even goes up. After that, though… I suppose there’s no knowing yet what will happen. Maybe I’ll find enough additional players to keep the every-other-week game going. Maybe I’ll just leave the weekend empty and save the day for one-shots or rescheduling missed sessions from my other game. Who knows? Anything is possible when it comes to tabletop games.