When I start building out a world for a tabletop game, if there’s a particular feeling that I’m trying to achieve as part of that build, I will usually create a playlist to help me zero in on it. I’ll do the same thing for villains, sometimes, though I tend to avoid it since I generally want my villains to be a framework with some goals and ideals that will be given greater detail and a final shape through their interactions with my player characters (however remote or limited those interactions are). I make playlists a lot more as a player, usually one for every major step along the path of my character’s journey that go from being vague ideas to solid, smaller playlists as I hit those major beats and see what shape they’ll take, but the practice that started as a player in a D&D game has grown far beyond that point. I’ve relied on it as a part of my worldbuilding and NPC development more heavily in recent years, as I’ve moved away from standard fantasy worlds and instead built worlds to reflect past failures (from when my weekly Sunday game had a Total Party Kill and we decided to start a new game in the distant future of the world they failed to save) or to reflect specific themes (like the one I built and adapted to first a Heroic Tragedy D&D campaign and then to a game of Heart: The City Beneath). For these more thematically focused worlds, the playlists have been super helpful in reminding me of the tone I’m supposed to be setting as I flesh out bits of the world my players are about to encounter or create things out of whole cloth on the spot as I run the sessions.
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Celebrating The Holidays In Heart: The City Beneath
Well, there won’t be my usual “Descent Into The Rotting Heart” post this week. We didn’t play last weekend, so I have no new story of adventure, horror, and the prices of each to share. What I do have is some thoughts about my approach to creating a “holiday special” since our next session was going to be on Christmas Eve and our previous session was in the middle of Hanukkah, both of which are major winter holidays and very good reasons for my players to not attend a session of Heart: The City Beneath even if I don’t really celebrate either of those holidays myself. So, instead of starting the next leg of the game and having to stop it partway through a Session for at least twice as long as usual, I’ve decided to take advantage of the fact that the party has gotten split up to do a bunch of smaller one-off sessions with each player. It will also help me solidify the narrative since we’re now about twenty percent of the way through the first (and possibly only) arc and I need to start pulling some of the threads a bit more tightly than I have been up to now. I’ve got a pretty solid base for what I think is going to happen and I’ve sprinkled in enough stuff for each of the players that I THINK I know where they want to take their characters’ stories, but it never hurts to solidfy this stuff hand-in hand with my players [the time between writing and posting this has proven this instinct to be correct since one of my player’s goals for their characters are super different than what I expected].
Continue readingWhen It All Falls Out In Heart: The City Beneath
In my most recent session of Heart: The City Beneath with my every-other-Sunday group (our campaign is called Descent Into The Rotting Heart, which is what I’m gonna use to refer to this game from here on out), things finally came to a head and then blew up. A bit literally. Turns out the “message” one of the players was supposed to deliver was a bit of a weird cursed energy bomb meant to disrupt the efforts of a capitalist extraction machine masquerading as a public benefits science corporation. They, unfortunately, went to deliver the message first and then went looking for other stuff, so they got a bit caught up in the blast as it went off. They survived, thankfully, one of them without even getting hurt in any way (my players roll their own stress and the result the delivery peron rolled was equal to the amount of protection they had, so they took no stress) and the other was only hurt in a way that made a great plot hook. This was, if you remember my last post, the Office crew, who were down their most capably violent member because the player couldn’t make it to the session and he had a beat that was going to take him out of the action anyway, so they’d just come out of a situation that should have gone very poorly for them but didn’t go TOO poorly. One of them picked up a bunch of fallouts, but they were all fairly minor things that should be fixable. I will definitely need to make sure they get more loot, though, since they did a lot less body-looting than I expected them to do.
Continue readingCorporate Takeovers And Vibe Shifts In My Game Of Heart: The City Beneath
In the latest session of Heart: The City Beneath that I ran with my every-other-Sunday group, they completed their first full delve (well, technically second, but the first one had training wheels on it and was more of a “learn to use the system” tutorial than a proper delve). Since they’d figured out the final puzzle at the end of the last session, they were able to do just a couple quick rolls to wrap it up. One of the players had a beat that required gathering resources in such a way that set the delve back and managed to roll the same number for both the stress they inflicted on the delve and the stress they added to the delve, which was hilarious to see. That note was immediately followed by a sour one (for the players) who emerged from their first delve to find out that the mysterious fallout one of the players had acquired in a previous session had caused the landmark they were heading towards to be transformed from what they were expecting into something they weren’t. Which, in our game, meant that they found an entire base of corporate goons where they were expecting only a handful hanging around the periphery of a thriving community of other delvers. This was fitting since the person who most wanted to avoid the employees of this corporation (called 3Q) was the one who got the landmark-transforming fallout, so it was a punishment for them specifically, but I managed to slip in a few things for my other players. All-in-all, it was a great moment to mark the start of the session.
Continue readingThe First Descent Into The Rotting Heart
One of the things that got me through this past week of exhaustingly busy days at work was thinking about my game of Heart: The City Beneath. I admittedly did not have much time to let my mind sit idle or even concern itself with anything other than the project I’ve spent thirty-six of the last sixty hours working on, but what time I did have that included free conscious thought was directed toward that game and the fun place we left it after our last session. True to form, we spent a lot of time roleplaying and only a little time on an adventure. We did get some major fallout, though, since the one player who’d managed to avoid any kind of fallout the first time around wound up getting a wee bit stressed the instant the party started their adventure. It worked out pretty well, though, because I got to do something super fun for me AND the character who got the major fallout had an ability that allowed them to make progress in their delve despite the horrible failure that resulted in said fallout. Everybody won!
Continue readingTelling Human Stories In Heart: The City Beneath
I’ve now run two sessions of Heart: The City Beneath and I think I definitely picked the right game for this group. We’re moving at a glacial pace, compared to how the game is built to run, but that’s because we’re doing some pretty heavy roleplaying. We’re also still getting used to the game and I’m still introducing my players to the various systems and rules involved it, along with carefully setting expectations as we go, so I’m really not that worried about our pace. I’m making sure to separate the game’s mechanical concept of “a session” from the actual runtime and pacing of our gaming sessions since it would really undercut the utility of several moves and the pacing of the beat system if we completely abandoned our rate of play and strictly adhered to the period of time on specific days that we gathered to play the game. I mean, I had a powerful figure in the world give my characters “An Answer” as part of their payment for the tutorial mission (meant to help them all solidify their character’s goals and provide them with a bit of information they could use to kick off their character’s journey) and we spent almost half the session roleplaying through everyone’s answers. A quarter of the session went to talking about how the game worked and translating the things we were discussing into more concrete terms for the players and the last quarter was smaller bits of roleplaying and the final stages of the tutorial delve. We filled almost four hours in the blink of an eye and we were even down a player.
Continue readingThe Best Tabletop Session I’ve Ever Played In
Last night, the occasional D&D game I’m in on Thursdays (we’re supposed to be weekly, but we have an average of four sessions every three months) finally became the longest campaign I’ve ever been a part of as a player. At twenty-one sessions I’ve participated in out of a twenty-three total for the campaign, I’ve finally broken the record of twenty sessions I’ve been sitting at since 2016. Now, I’ve run a handful of campaigns that have broken past this number. I’ve routinely broken past fifty and even hit the triple-digits once. Every single campaign I’ve participated in as a player, though has fallen apart fairly quickly. One campaign made it to twenty sessions and naturally concluded (it was a limited run that just happened to hit twenty sessions) and then every single other one of them fell apart in the single digits save two that just faded away in the early teens. Most of them never made it past five. Any other multi-sessions games that ended naturally were all one-shots that ran long. This has been going on since my very first days playing Dungeons and Dragons in 2010 when I went from my third session of Dungeons and Dragons to being the GM because the person running the group didn’t have the time anymore and that has been the story pretty much ever since then. Almost all of my tabletop groups prior to 2020 were groups I joined as a player and then became the GM for since the GM couldn’t keep running and I stepped in as a temporary stopgap so we could keep meeting until, eventually, my role as the group’s GM became permanent.
Continue readingMy First Session of Heart: The City Beneath Is In The Can
After so many months of preparation, it finally happened. I ran my first session of Heart: The City Beneath. As far as first sessions go, it was a bit rough at times, but considering this is the first time any of us played the game and was the first time our group was roleplaying together (since we never played our icebreaker game), I think it went pretty well. We may not have made it through the entire mission I sent them on in order to give them something to do as we all settled in to the game, but we made it through most of it. They killed a nasty beast, made it through their first delve, and started to repair a bit of magic integral to the Haven they were going to be passing through. We also learned about fallout, about stress rolls, about using the character sheet for Heart in Roll20, and about risky and dangerous actions. I’m hoping sessions will move a bit more quickly in the future, so I can attempt to stick to my goal of getting all five of my players through at least one beat per session (or one beat equivalent of progress since Major and Zenith beats take a bit more setup and work to be met than a Minor beat would). I know they’re all on track to get at least one met by the time the “session” has ended when they return from their mission, get paid, and rest up a bit, but I think it’s possible that my players might not bite at the opportunity for some of the less mechanically-oriented beats and I might need to help cajole them into it.
Continue readingPathfinder 2e Finally Clicked For Me, Thanks To A Friend’s Game
After many months of discussion via the comments on Facebook posts and, eventually, in Facebook chat itself, I got to play a game with the person who convinced me to give Pathfinder 2nd Edition a shot beyond the unfortunate group I’d begun playing it with. Which isn’t to minimize the work another friend did, but they just fell short of a fully compelling argument. The other friend, though, managed to convince me that I should keep trying by absolutely nailing why I was struggling to understand the game system without me even knowing that I was having one specific problem (well, one problem that functioned as the root of all my other problems). So, when she offered to run a game for me, to help show me why she loved Pathfinder 2e as much as she did, I made a promise to myself that I’d find a way to make the scheduling side of it work. Plus, I’d never gotten to play a game with her before this and tabletop games was most of what we talked about online. I wanted to meet some new people, play some new games, and try to expand my horizons a bit.
Continue readingWe’re Finally Starting Heart: The City Beneath Next Session
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!
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