The Bloggies 2024

The Dicepool

At the start, 87 posts ago, all the way back in July of this year, I wrote this:

I think I’ll write how I feel about some of the things I consume as a way to digest them (not the food and drink, I’ll do that in the traditional way.) But, mostly, I’ll be writing about my main creative outlet, playing, running and making things for tabletop role playing games. Let’s not be coy about this; the internet is not lacking for nerds going on about their games, or someone else’s games or games they watched other people play or games they hate or games they actually quite like, surprisingly enough. So, even knowing this, why would I have the gall to add to it? Good question, good question indeed. Maybe I will figure that out as I do it. The adventure is the journey and all that.

And, that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing. I am still doing it. I have learned a lot by doing it. This blog has genuinely been an enjoyable and useful outlet for me. It has allowed me to work through some game-related ideas that might otherwise have floated freely around my brain, temptingly close but always oh-so frustratingly out of reach. It has also given me the opportunity to express my feelings on more personal matters. Mainly, though, it has provided me the chance to write regularly about one of my favourite subjects, RPGs.

I have made a few changes over the last six months. I went from posting daily to every two days to every three days and then to twice a week. I feel like I have found the ideal schedule now and hope to continue with it. Thedicepool.com joined the woodpanelled.org web ring. I hope to see Woodpanelled grow even more in the new year. I started posting some of my own fiction pieces as well as the RPG-related posts. I’m hoping this will encourage me to write some new fiction soon! Finally, I have been sharing my posts more on social media, both Instagram and Bluesky. where I have made some connections with other people in the TTRPG sphere. I have had some great feedback from some of these interactions and that has encouraged me to put the blog out there a bit more.

The Bloggies Awards and a request

So here we are, it’s the end of the year and a good time to consider some of the things we liked from 2024. In this incredibly niche corner of the internet I find myself tucked away in, there is a way to show your appreciation for those things you liked, or that you found useful or inspirational or that just tickled your fancy. You can nominate a blogpost for the Bloggies Awards, which originated in 2022 on the Prismatic Wasteland blog.

The 2023 winner was Sacha (or sachagoat.) He won for the first part of an excellent series of posts about Re-inventing the Wilderness. You can check it out here along with an introduction to the Bloggies themselves. Basically, people nominate their favourite TTRPG blogposts within four categories:

Theory – I don’t really get into this area too much on the blog, although I may in time
Gameable – I also don’t have a lot of this sort of thing here. I have considered sharing some of my home-brew stuff, but I would need to do some more work on most of it first
Advice – I have a fair few posts of this kind. I’m thinking of those on world-building, beginnings, endings, combining systems and mechanics, session prep, building community, etc.
Review – I would hesitate to call myself a proper reviewer of RPGs but there are several posts that fit into this category. I am thinking particularly of the posts on Liminal_, Cthulhu Dark, and the series on Between the Skies and Dragon Age. But a lot of my other posts dealing with games I have played would probably fit into this category too.

Sacha has introduced a couple of new categories for this year too:

Debut Series – This is me! Despite having 87 posts under my belt, this is still my debut year.
Blog Series – I have several of these, including my series of character creation posts, the Between the Skies and Dragon Age series as well as those on combining D&D and Blades in the Dark mechanics

I won’t go into any more detail here. Sacha explains it all on his blog. Suffice it to say, if there are any of my posts from the past six months that have resonated with you I would appreciate a nomination. You can use this Google form to do it before December 31st. It only takes a couple of minutes and is pretty straight-forward.

Thanks

I appreciate all your support during the last six months, dear reader. At the start, I pretended like I would do this whether or not anyone read it, but the fact is, I do take great encouragement and motivation from the fact that others have read and gotten something from this blog. I would like to extend my gratitude to all of you who have taken a few minutes out of your day to read even a few of my words since July.

Happy holidays!

Flash Fiction: Anthropology

Funerals

I used to have a hard time keeping a straight face at funerals. When I was young, the only kinds of funeral ceremonies I ever attended were Catholic ones. They are almost entirely devoid of light-hearted or even poignant moments, in my experience. Instead, such occasions are concerned mostly with priests warning you about the danger your immortal soul is in if you continue your sinful ways and telling you about Jesus. Anyway, the build-up of emotion caused by this unsatisfactory vehicle for sending off your loved one would inevitably explode in titters and giggles over silly little things. So this story is about, what if a time-traveler from a future free of permanent death attended a funeral like that? Without the necessary context? What would they think? Also, what if it was an assignment for an anthropology class?

Flash Fiction: Anthropology

By Ronan McNamee

Attendance at a funeral was felt to be the ideal introduction to a society. It was a shock, that’s what it was. Why did the man in the robes spend so much time talking about this Jesus fellow? I thought the death-victim’s name was Gary. Why did everyone keep sitting and standing and kneeling? Why was no-one attempting to revive the deceased? I honestly felt as though I should intervene when I realised they had locked the poor man in a little box. Call a Reviv Team!

When they informed us all we were to proceed to the graveyard outside the pointy building I grew truly scared. They intended to bury the poor man! Perhaps he had been a criminal; perhaps this was his punishment. What sort of crime could warrant such barbaric cruelty, though? How could these people (some of them
called themselves Gary’s family for crying out loud!) sustain such a desire for vengeance once the man had already died. He must have been a terrible dictator or CEO of some kind, like Aldorf Hipler or Donal Drumpf? Perhaps he deserved it?
Outside, I discovered many marked graves. By the dates of death many of the incarcerated had been buried for decades. Far past their sell-by dates; no chance of reviving them anymore. I felt sick. I gave my left clavicle a rub to release some Calm. I relaxed and smiled at the woman next to me. “Did he steal something valuable?” I asked her as we shuffled together out of the pointy building into the rain. Her eyes, previously quivering with sympathy and sadness, turned hard and grey, her mouth drooped and she shook her head, turning to speak to the man beside her.

“What did you say to my wife?” said the tall, shiny-headed man to me. I looked to either side but he was definitely looking at me. I pointed at myself. He glared, tears streaking his face.
“What did you say about Gary?”
“I simply wished to understand his crime,” I wished I had read the preparatory pamphlet before I got myself into this.
“Crime?! You little toerag,” said the man lunging at my face with his fist, his fist! I had been struck by a human being at a funeral. I felt that I was beginning to understand the culture. It was one of violence and vengeance and lies.
“I just wanted to understand this funeral ritual!” I screamed. I feared for my own life now. The bald man was gaining allies from the crowd of brutes collected there by the graveyard.
“Understand it? I’ll give you one of your own, you fucker!” I turned and ran down the lane with the mob following. I rounded a corner and whispered, out of breath and scared witless, “Return, please, please please, Return.

And here I am, making this report to you.
What do you mean, failed? You can’t fail me for that! They were out for blood! Unfair test!

Flash Fiction: Kitsune

Japanese inspiration

I lived in Japan for a few years. I actually studied Japanese language, history and culture in university as well. I got into it through my love of manga and anime when I was young. A recurring motif in several of these stories and in Japanese mythology in general is that of the fox spirit, the trickster god who worked their magic on foolish humans for whatever unknowable reasons, or just for laughs. This story was a take on that. It is not particularly unusual to have this sort of story translated to the modern day. In fact, you can still visit shrines to Inari, the fox spirit in Japan today. But I liked the idea of pairing the fox spirit with the common phenomenon of dodgy looking recruiters in shopping districts of Japanese cities, looking for girls. This story is the result. I hope you enjoy it, dear reader.

Kitsune

by Ronan McNamee

The Galleria: home to predator and prey alike, wimp and bully, shyster and mark, the girls and the recruiters.
Over the Sega-Zone-din the boy in the suit called, “Oi, O-nee-san, are you alright?” He had dyed hair, tanned skin, a kind face. Michiko Minami had been stood up by her friends; not for the first time. She shook her head, long black hair curtaining her face.

“Call me Jun. I’ll be your knight in shining armour today.”
She smiled.

Later, they sat near Inari Shrine and she told him her dreams; her ambition to write songs and sing them. Someone clapped twice in the shrine. Michiko glanced. No-one was there but the two fox guardians. Everything paused. Michiko bowed towards the shrine.

“Can I hear you sing?” he asked. She suggested a local karaoke box. He clapped once and led her by the hand.
He bought her a couple of chuhai to loosen up the vocal cords. She was too young but she didn’t want to upset him.
“You’re very beautiful Michiko. You know that, right?” She reddened, turned away, but performed the next song with vigour.

“You could make more money than you’ll ever need, you’re so beautiful, Mit-chan. I could help you!” This time Michiko shuddered, closed her eyes, felt a squirming in her belly, a tingling sensation.
She opened her eyes to see Jun: a rat in a suit.
“Your eyes! What ar-?”
“They see you now.”

She ran outside to the alleyway in the back. The sensation enveloped her. She twitched and shifted; her breath caught and her muscles spasmed. Her mind and spirit rushed. She transformed.

Michiko sniffed the wind and, catching Jun’s scent, darted up onto a recycling bin; further up: top of a vending machine, corrugated roof. Behind an unlit snack-bar sign she hid.
He rounded the corner after her, scanned the alleyway.
She swished her fiery tail and blinked her golden eyes. An image of Michiko the girl appeared near the other end of the alleyway; uniform slightly bluer, hair a little longer than true: what she wanted him to see.

“Oi! Mit-chan!” Jun shouted, shoving shades onto his head. Michiko the girl turned, winked at him, then danced into the night. He broke into a run, passed right below her snack bar sign, calling her a “dumb kid.”
On four slender, white-socked legs she sped after him, all diamond grin, magnificent tail and golden eyes. Odd, watching herself lead him on. She made sure the image remained tantalisingly out of his reach all the way back to the shrine. It was… easy.

The fox guardian statues turned, eyes glowing, as Jun passed between them. He followed her heedlessly through the darkened doorway. With satisfaction, Michiko watched a golden luminescence begin emanating from the building. The kami kept its promise and she delivered what it wanted. She swished her tail and sauntered off into the night humming a tune that had only just occurred to her.

Games I Got to Play This Year Part 2

Wrap-up

It’s an end of year wrap-up. Everyone’s doing one. Check out the last post for the campaigns I have been playing in the last few months. This one’s for the one-shots.

One-shots

Pirate Borg – the link above will take you to my post mortem on this one shot. It was a great time, in all honesty. My first foray into running any kind of Borg, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy and instinctive every part of it was, even the ship-combat, which was new to everyone at the table. If you are interested in pirates, light cosmic horror, or just gnarly old school gaming in an alternate history version of our own 18th century, you’ll enjoy Pirate Borg in all likelihood. By the way, I also did a character creation post on this one.
Troika! – Whalgravaak’s Warehouse – Ok, look, full disclosure, this is supposed to be a list of one-shots but this is technically more like a really spread out short campaign where we get together to play a one-shot of the same game every once in a while when we can all afford the time. Know what I mean? Anyway, in the first one-shot of these two consecutive one-shots, the PCs found two different ways into this warehouse, abandoned by its wizardly owner centuries previous. After crawling this “dungeon” for a bit, they made friends with a thin mutant, and their monkeys got to play with the worm-headed hounds that lived in a nest in the warehouse somewhere. They made short work of the Cacogen they’d been sent to murder and we wrapped up the session. In the second one-shot in this series of one-shots, three of the band decided to continue to explore, making more friends, this time with a large cadre of mercenaries who had been sent to deal with some cultists. They then set fire to some rope, captured some minuscule soldiers in gremlin-jars and climbed a mountain of onions. This is the kind of nonsense the PCs get up to in games of Troika to be honest. This is standard. If this sounds too gonzo or weird, you are in the wrong place. The Eternal City of Troika is not for you. You should probably try somewhere more normal. From my point of view, and, I think, that of the players, if you lean into the bonkers aspects of the setting and you are willing to go along with the more outré elements of the system (the random initiative mechanic stands out) you will probably have a very good time with this game. It’s great for one shots. Or two shots if that’s your thing. Might turn into three shots, actually.
Honey Heist – this was another one of Isaac’s games. He ran it on a night when another game fell through. It was very last minute but we were still able to get a crew together. Jude, Tom and I rolled up some friggin’ bears with criminal backgrounds and went to do a heist at the biggest honey convention in the UK, in the NEC in Birmingham. We tried to do a TED talk, we disguised ourselves as massive bees and we crashed a van. You know, typical bear stuff. Another absolute belter of a one-shot, this one. It’s the definitive one-page RPG by Grant Howitt of Spire and Heart fame. Isaac and Tom had picked up the printed form of a bunch of these one-pagers at UKGE and Isaac had been looking for the opportunity to run one of them. This game was obviously made to create wild swings as you use either you Bear or Criminal stat and try to avoid going too far on the bear side or too far on the criminal side. This forces you to take risks and do stupid things to drive the heist forward or, more likely, sideways. Tom did a brilliant write-up of the session on their blog here.
B.D.S.M. Below Dwelling Sewer Mutants – Yet another game run by Isaac at short notice. It is a mutie-eat-mutie game by Neonrot and you can get it here. The premise is pretty straight-forward. You are a mutant. You are probably unpleasant in some way. At the start, you have a mutation that may or may not be useful in certain situations. You can progress and grow by eating other mutants to gain new mutations along the way. If you like that idea, you’re in for a treat. I think it is probably a game that works best in one-shot play. We had fun with it and I think most tables will.
Cthulhu Dark – Roadhouse Feast – I went into quite a lot of detail on this one in the post I linked above so I won’t go through it all again. Suffice it to say, I really enjoyed running the Cthulhu Dark game for the first time. The scenario itself was great but, to me, it is the simplicity and the ingenuity of the system that really shone. If you are into cosmic horror games and you haven’t tried Cthulhu Dark, you should give it a chance.
Liminal_ – I promised a report on how this one-shot went some time ago and here it is. We had four players (known as the Disoriented) for this one-shot plus me as the the Architect. As I thought we would, rather than have the players play themselves in this Liminal Back-Room nightmare, I had them use the character generation tables in Death Match Island. This worked really well to come up with some distinctive, memorable characters quickly and with no fuss. They started off all in the same public building. Since one of them was a district attorney, we agreed it should be a court house. One of the others was there as a witness in a case and the other two were, in an unlikely turn of events, cousins who had been called for jury duty on the same jury. That is pretty much by-the-by, although it did come up in conversation later. Thy all stepped into a room together and found themselves in a building of nightmares. Now, you have to roll up the rooms as they open the doors. There are a couple of d100 tables in the book that are crammed with inventive and horrific room descriptions. The first door they opened led into some sort of creepy, dank cave system; the next into a mouldering bowling alley that was was canted at a 45 degree angle; the next opened onto the abandoned bridge of a ship, rocking in a dreadful storm and with a trail of blood leading off through one of the other doors. I made a mistake at the very start, where I allowed the players to open a couple of doors and then decide which one they would go through. The rules state that, if you open a door, you have to go through it. This felt a little restrictive to me, in a role-playing game, but we proceeded in this way and the players were good sports about it. As we progressed, rolling on the Room and Entity tables, it felt as though, at times, they really wanted to see what the hell was going to come next. Isaac said afterwards, that it felt a lot less subtle than he had thought it would and I have to agree with that. When you think of liminal space horror, it often is just empty corridors and abandoned hotels and the like. Sometimes a strange entity might make an appearance, but it’s the spaces themselves that are supposed to be innately creepy. Some of these rooms we rolled up on the tables felt that way, like the corridor with missing persons posters of the PCs on the walls but a lot of them were straight-up horror like the one with nurse-entity (I think?) chopping a guy up on a slab (it was ok, he was into it!) Also, I think this is something I would be careful with: when you roll a random entity, they sometimes don’t seem to fit, thematically, with the room that you just rolled up. I think it is ok to re-roll if that happens. I didn’t do that and once or twice, felt like they collided awkwardly. Now, these are nitpicks, really. In general, we had a good time with this, the players loved playing their pretty normal characters in these horrific scenarios, just running blindly from threat to dreadful threat. We used both the regular room table and the guest room table (the entries here were written by some industry luminaries like Johan Nohr and Tim Hutchings.) One of the best things about that experience for me was that I was just as surprised, horrified and disgusted as the players were! One of the challenges then, of course, was that it was my job to quickly read, interpret and present the room to the players without taking too long, stumbling over the words, reading them too much or generally fucking up. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite make it to the end of their mad dash through the back-rooms. The PCs still have a few squares of fatigue to be filled in. Hopefully we’ll be able to pick that up and finish it off someday.
Mothership – Moonbase Blues I wish this wasn’t in the one-shot pile but heigh-ho. Sometimes your GM moves away and leaves your characters stuck on a moonbase that is probably trying to kill them. I mean, there was someone or something there trying to kill us. I was under no illusions that we were likely to all die out there, I just wanted to know how. Anyway, the one session we had of this game was great. Full props to Joel, our GM, for putting so much time and effort into he prep for it. He had a series of recordings that he played for us at key moments, he had handouts and provided us with cheat-sheets. It was a great experience. Also, I loved playing my character that I created in the post I linked above, Victoria Ibanez, the Corps’ finest. I’d love to get to play her again. Mothership is a great system with compelling mechanics and one of the best character creation experiences out there. If you need any more convincing, you should go and check out Quinns’ review of it.

Conclusion

So, that’s it. Those are all the one-shots that I got to play in the last few months. I didn’t get to play many of the games I wanted to, but I sure did have fun not playing them. Next year, I am continuing the theme of not playing the games I listed in that post by starting the year off with a one-shot of After the Mind, the World Again, a Disco Elysium-inspired, GMful mystery game and, Dragon Age, which, I have at least discussed at length on this very blog here and here. Honestly, I think it was useful to set out goals for the games I wanted to play. I may not have gotten to play any of them if I hadn’t done that. So I will continue to write about things I want to experience on the blog and see what happens.

I will be posting more intermittently as we come into the holiday period now. I will be travelling to visit friends and family a lot and won’t always have the chance to post as regularly as I would like. So, in case this is the last post before the end of the year, I wish you the very happiest Winter Solstice/Hogswatch/Western New Year.

BTW

Here are links for where to buy each of these games:
Pirate Borg
Troika!
Honey Heist
BDSM
Cthulhu Dark
Liminal_
Mothership

Games I Got to Play This Year Part 1

A game at the table is worth two on the shelf

So, in the last post we discovered that I had played only three of the ten games I had wanted to in the last five months of the year. But, as everyone knows, it’s not about the number of games you play, it’s about the quality of them and the fun you have while playing (even if the fun is terror or sorrow.)

In this post, I’m going to get into the games I actually took part in in the last few months instead (apart from those I wrote about in the last post.) There were actually quite a few, mainly one-shots and mainly GMed by Isaac of Los t Path Publishing. By the by, Isaac is blogging again on his own site, linked above. Go and read the words he writes.

Ongoing Campaigns

D&D 5E – Spelljammer. I’ve written quite a bit about this campaign. I like to mess around with the rules and try new things to keep it fresh. Here’s a post about hexcrawling the Rock of Bral. Here’s one about using an engagement roll type mechanic to improve the dungeon experience. We have recently finished a major campaign arc and it looks like the crew is about ready to take off into Wildspace again. They’ve had an extended shore leave on the Rock. After a short hiatus through the holiday season, the next session we play will be number 30 and they have been on the Rock since session number 11…that was over a year ago in real time. One of my players recently dropped the timely hint that they did not want to end up stuck on the Rock of Bral for the rest of the campaign and that prompted me to get them spelljamming again. Listen to your players, GMs!
D&D 5E – An Unexpected Wedding Invitation – Finished. My first foray into D&D as a player in many years was a murder mystery set at a wedding populated with beautiful and complicated NPCs. We had some issues with the use of 5E as a system for this one but we had a ball role-playing our characters. The link above will take you to my post-mortem of the game.
Heart: The City Beneath – Home game, GM. Finished. Man, I miss this game already. The PCs all activated their Zenith Abilities in the last session and it was a thing of beauty. After 12 sessions of delving, the android they were searching for turned up in Terminus, and they discovered that he was a sort of proxy for the Heart. He was trying to make their Heart’s desire come true. But he was bound to do the same for another denizen of the City Beneath, The Drowned Queen, whom our heroes had trapped in the Grey in session 8. The Android freed her and released her into Terminus, which she quickly began to drown in salt water. The PCs realised she could drown, not only this one Landmark but both the City Beneath and the City Above as well, linked as it was to every line in the Vermissian network. And so the delvers combined their newly acquired Zenith abilities to defeat her, imprison her and ensure themselves a place in heaven afterwards. So satisfying.
Black Sword Hack – Three of Blades. This is one of Isaac’s games. It is another long running campaign. I went into some detail about it in the post I linked above. Recently, it has been hard to find time to get together for more sessions of this. Can’t wait to get back into it. In the last few months, our group has discovered that if we recover three legendary weapons from the most unlikely of places (one of them is on the friggin’ moon, but that’s OK, because we nicked a spaceship/big sphere off a bunch of cultists a while ago) we can use them to defeat the Queen of the Dead. As players, however, we have realised that, if we want to advance, we have to complete more “stories,” or adventures, so pursuing these weapons has taken a back seat recently. Instead we had a moral crisis about killing a big ol’ wyvern, we dithered over how to rescue a town of people from the mercenaries we were, ostensibly, working for and we argued over how to deal with a native woman who was summoning harpies to murder the invaders who had killed her lover (apologies to Isaac if I am misremebering that one.) Isaac says we’re the ones inventing the ethical conundrums when all he does is lay out the situations, but I’m pretty sure he plans them that way.
Blade Runner – Electric Dreams – Finished. The link will take you to the first post I wrote about this short campaign. I was enjoying it immensely at that time. Once we got to the end, I feel like it really shone, though. That last session had a proper climax. Both of the players found the ending satisfying and sort of unexpected and I found it fascinating to see how they dealt with everything the case file threw at them. It’s hard to go into specifics without spoilers here, so I won’t. Suffice it to say, the investigation took some twists in the best way. I wrote a bit more in this post, where I compared the experience of playing this game with the Unexpected Wedding Invitation. TLDR, I think Free League have done a great job creating an investigative game that is a lot more that just a cop simulator and that works significantly better than the 5E system for this sort of thing.

New Campaigns

The One Ring – The Star of the Mist. I wrote briefly about this one in the post I linked above. It’s a shame that we have not played much more of it since that first session. Basically, unless it is not entirely clear from the long list of games in this post, we have been busy in Tables and Tales! Sometimes it is hard to schedule sessions around all the other sessions. Anyway, session 2 brought us very, very close to a TPK. We learned a few things about this game. Thing the first: it’s not like D&D 5E, your characters are tough, but they are not super heroes. Thing the second: some times you should run away when you keep getting knocked prone and you can’t seem to hit anything and you are surrounded by marsh zombies. Thing the third: use your head. We beat the zombies with brains instead of axes in the end, partly because Isaac, who also runs this game, was very generous to us. I think the next session, we’ll be a lot more circumspect about approaching encounters and I can’t wait to see how we get on.
Mörk Borg – The Great Borgin’ Campaign. Isaac sure is running a lot of campaigns, isn’t he? The ones I have listed on this page aren’t even all of them, just the ones I’m in. This has been great fun. We have a regular every-second Wednesday game of Mörk Borg going now. It is a sort of a drop-in, drop-out game but the playership has actually remained fairly consistent. My character is a Sacrilegious Songbird, a class from the Heretic sourcebook. Coincidentally, that’s also where our first adventure was from. Merkari the Magnificent and his weird companions managed to survive Graven-Tosk, the sprawling graveyard setting of “Graves Left Wanting.” I loved this module. It was dark and filthy and involved some brilliantly shitty situations. I mean, we started the game by waking up in a charnel pit. Anyway, once we got out of there, we moved on and played through “Death Ziggurat.” This was a (mostly) hex-crawl that I found equal parts foul and hilarious. This was partly due to Isaac’s amazing character work and partly due to the non-stop comedy from the other players at the table who included friend of the blog and local Media Goblin, Tom, in one of their most brilliant roles yet. The wildly unhinged scatological, pyromaniac shit from Shannen and Jude has been an absolute delight too.

And I haven’t even gotten to the many one-shots I was part of in the last five months. If you have been hanging around the dice pool for a while, you have probably read about some of them, at least. But they deserve a proper review in this series as we approach the end of the year so tune in to the next post, dear reader.

Games I Wanted to Play this Year

Review

So, how have I done with that list from earlier in the year? At the time I wrote that, on the 28th July, I thought, Time-shmime! Who needs it?! Not me, that’s who. I’ll breeze through this entire list of ten frikkin’ games. But, of course, that was assuming a lot.

Assumptions

The first assumption that was happily crushed was that we had a smaller number of GMs willing to run sessions in our little community, Tables and Tales. Up until then, only three of us had run anything so I assumed that would continue. When a fourth and even fifth GM raised their hands to take the helm, I was delighted. That’s what I had always wanted in our space. From what I can see, if GMs were water, most RPG communities would be dying of thirst. Even in the much larger Open Hearth community, you tend to see the same dozen or so members announcing new games all the time, despite there being a membership in the hundreds. Given the size of Tables and Tales, five active GMs represents a pretty large percentage of our total player-base. On top of that we have had a couple of board game nights too. The long awaited and pretty fun Darkest Dungeon board game is, honestly, very close to the video game (actually, I’m told by friend of the blog, Media Goblin it’s closer to Darkest Dungeon 2 in rules) but also pretty close to an RPG so we gave it a go.

Assumption number 2: I have a pretty stable schedule, which meant that I could run games almost every night of the week if I had the wherewithal. And there were weeks there when I was playing, either as GM or player, in four or five sessions. Turns out that was not sustainable. For one thing, obviously, I started writing this blog, dear reader. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love doing this and it’s not like it takes that long, but if I want to blog, I need to do it in the evening (even though I am typing this on the train to work right now because its a busy week for me and my evenings are taken up with pre-Christmas socialising.) Between that and various other work and family commitments that came up, it was simply impossible to maintain that sort of schedule.

Reality

Even taking these points into account, I managed to play a lot of games in the last few months, just mostly not the ones I expected to. So, let’s have another look at that list:

GM

Tales from the Loop – Mascots and Murder – Short Campaign – Nope, didn’t happen. This one is still simmering away on that back-burner, ready for promotion to the front of the stove-top any time now. It had to be shelved to make way for other games and other GMs. Like I said earlier, I was perfectly happy to do it.
Dungeon Crawl Classics – individual modules – Haven’t managed to get any of these to the table yet, I’m afraid. But, I have a plan for this one. I have had to re-arrange my schedule a bit to allow it. Our local game shop, Replay, has been undergoing a big refurbishment in the last few months. Once it’s done, they will expand their number of gaming tables a lot and I am hoping to get in there on a Wednesday night to run some DCC Level 0 funnels. My preference would be to get some newbies to sign up for these sessions and hopefully gain some new members for Tables and Tales in the process. The new year will be the perfect time for this, I think.

More Troika! – one-shots – Achievement unlocked! Although, technically, it was more like two sessions of the same game, rather than multiple one-shots. I did a blogpost on it! We went to Whalgravaak’s Warehouse, one of the Location based adventures made for Troika. So far it has been very fun. It’s a dungeon crawl, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s a warehouse. And the rooms and creatures and general vibe are beautifully weird in the way only Troika can do it. So far, the PCs, a Monkey Monger, a Wizard Hunter and a Gremlin Catcher (there was also a Landsknecht who has since moved to Spain) have murdered the Cacogen they were sent there to murder, made friends with a thin mutant, captured entire detachments of microscopic soldiers in gremlin catching jars, discovered a desert other-world on top of the warehouse and, um, set fire to a load of old rope. Brilliant craic altogether.
Death Match Island – one-shot – You know what, I just completed a rewatch (maybe not “rewatch” since I never watched the entire thing in the first place) of Lost, the whole thing. All six seasons. All 5000 episodes. I think I was in mourning for the lost Death Match Island one-shot that should have been. This one was a scheduling issue. Those of you out there who play RPGs (and if you don’t and you’re here, welcome! You must be confused…) will be aware of the difficulties one often encounters in getting four or five adults together in the same room at the same time. Honestly, I am surprised this problem doesn’t come up more often in Tables and Tales. Anyway, having just finished that Lost marathon, I am 1000% ready to play this game. It’s not quite the same and it would definitely not run for 678 sessions like Lost would if it were an RPG but it has the same heart and the same mystery box feel to it. And I want that. That’s what I want.
The Wildsea – campaign – Just go read my blogpost on My First Dungeon’s campaign of the Wildsea. I desperately want to play this game. Honestly, whether I got to be a player or a Firefly, I would be excited. But, really? I’m not sure when I was going to fit this one in this year. Another campaign? Dunno what I was thinking.
DIE RPG – one-shot – I finished listening to the My First Dungeon Wildsea campaign and just started listening to the DIE one. They have a great episode that is mainly Kieron Gillon being effusive for an hour about his, admittedly very cool, game and I enjoyed it. But then I got into the Session Zero episode and I immediately wanted to play it. I want to run this for my friends and have them play real-world people with real-world problems working it all out it in a fucked-up fantasy world of their own creation as characters of their own creation. I really want it. Maybe next year.

Player

Old School Essentials – campaign I think – So this one has not happened yet. I think it is, at least partly, due to the fact that Isaac, of Lost Path Publishing has been running other shit like crazy in the last few months instead. I hope it wasn’t my OSE character creation post that put him off running the game (I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. I’d really be flattering myself to imagine I had that much influence on anyone.)

Heart: The City Beneath – Open Hearth campaign – Our GM, Mike, brought a whole bunch of us together (There were six PCs at the start) to hopefully save the landmark known as Nowhere from being consumed by the Heart. This was a real learning experience for me as it was only my second time as a player in the Resistance System (see the section on Magus, Pike and Drum below for my first experience.) I discovered that, if left to our own devices, players (for “players” read “Ronan” but not just “Ronan”) are apt to take the hand when there is no form of initiative to govern the order or frequency of actions in combat. It was a lesson learned early in the campaign due to one player’s proper and timely use of Stars and Wishes after the very first session. Saying that, I had a brilliant time playing my Incarnadine, Priest of the God of Debt, alongside a Heretic, a Cleaver, a Deep Apiarist, a Vermissian Knight and a Deadwalker. We often had opposing desires and drives, which made the role-play fun, and the GM came up with lots of weird and interesting situations, NPCs, enemies and locations for us. Forgotten-Frost-Remembered, my Aelfir Incarnadine, got to reach Tier 4 of the Heart and retire(!) at least in his head.
Call of Cthulhu – Masks of Nyarlathotep – campaign – Not really sure if this was anything other than wishful thinking when I wrote this, to be honest. This post explains that it was always going to be a long shot to get this campaign started again. But someday, I would love to get Grant Mitchell back on the trail of the mystery in this thoroughly classic campaign.
Magus, Pike and Drum – Playtest – This is Isaac again. He has a great basis for a Resistance System game set in the English Civil War that never was, and this is it. There were four of us gathered around the table for this playtest at the end of the summer. I genuinely had so much fun with it. Gráinne was my character. She was an Irish noble and she had some very fun abilities (some of them were a bit too fun with a few too restrictions, it was decided, as a result of this playtest.) What was important in the game is that we solved the mystery in very short order, after scaring the shit out of the mayor and not blowing up the town. But what’s really important is that we provided Isaac a lot of valuable feedback to feed back into his new game. Can’t wait to play this one again, hopefully in the near future. I hope to write a lot more about this game as it develops.

Conclusions

So there you go. Three out of ten. Not great. But! I experienced so many other games instead of the ones I didn’t get to in that post! And I got something out of all of them. I’ll tell you about them in the next post (or the one after if I don’t have time to write the rest of the week and just post some more old fiction on Sunday instead.)

Flash Fiction: Potential

Competition

I used to love to take part in the flash fiction competitions held on the Escape Artists Forums. I think I have mentioned that before. I would read and re-read every entry, and vote in each round. The work of writing the actual flash fiction stories was instrumental in my development as a writer but reading and critiquing literally hundreds of flash stories over the years also helped me understand what to avoid and what to emulate. If you are an aspiring writer, you could do a lot worse than to take part in contests like this. It looks like the last one they held was a couple of years ago so they are about due for another one soon. Also, if you win, they reproduce it on one of their podcasts! Check them out at the link above.

Anyway, this is one of my more successful efforts. “Potential” got to the semi-finals of the contest for Escape Pod in 2018. I hope you enjoy it, dear reader.

Potential

by Ronan McNamee

“Do you remember the Earth, Momma?” Kevin bounced between ceiling and floor. Liberty couldn’t watch without nausea nibbling. She stood before their darkened porthole, preparing silver-packed lunches.

She sighed. “How many times, Kev? Why keep asking this question?”

Kevin’s reflection shrugged in the porthole.

Liberty knew why: he didn’t believe her answer. To her son, Earth was Heaven, the Happy Hunting Grounds, Valhalla; but he believed in it utterly. Of course he didn’t believe her.

“Did you ever see a bison, Momma?” Kevin performed his final dismount from the ceiling, not with a flourish but with a fart.

“Kevin!”

“I couldn’t help it!”

Shaking her head, suppressing giggles, Liberty rhymed off her standard response: “The bisons are all gone, my love, just like the pandas, turtles, codfishes. That Earth is dying, but we’re still here, L’il Kev. Our future is out there.”

Kevin shook his head and smiled wide. Wink! And he pushed off to the back of their cozy capsule. He began boxing a teddy in the face.

She would never convince him.

No need, she thought, in two more years, we’ll be out of here and escaping this graveyard. He’ll have to believe it. Or will he? Even then? Is there anything I can show him, or anything those scientists can say to make him understand the truth.

“It’s my own fault,” said Liberty softly into her panini. “I shouldn’t have told you this was a spaceship. But you’re my only company: had to console you somehow.” Louder, “Come and eat your lunch, L’il Kev.”

Kevin looked upon his defeated enemy, nodded once and floated over to her.

She handed him his panini, “I’m sorry, my love. I’m sorry I got us into this but it’ll be worth it in the end.” He gave her a cocked head and a scrunched-up puzzled face, grabbed the package and flew off again, laughing, waving his lunch at the porthole. Globs of mayonnaise and molten emmental exploded from it. Liberty winced. She knew the equipment was delicate but Kevin’s potential energy was often released in damaging ways; he was a bored six-year-old. Knuckling her eyes, she began her mantra, “It’ll be worth it in the end, it’ll be worth it in the end, it’ll b-“ Liberty’s nostrils twitched: smoke…

Kevin had abandoned his sandwich mid-capsule while he pretended to shoot her with a defunct thermoglue gun. “Pchew! Pchew!” He noticed nothing.

Liberty floated around, sniffing. She strained to listen but Kevin was too loud. Pleading was futile.

Liberty retrieved the extinguisher and flew about, blindly. The cabin filled with smoke. She began to panic when she heard, “Simulation ended.” Her son bawled. She looked around at him in the next booth.

A white coat loomed above her, “The trial is over, Liberty.” She shook her head, tears stinging.

“You were unable to maintain your capsule… your ticket off world is revoked.”

“No,” she whispered.

“You’ll be staying here on Earth. We thank you for your time.”

My First Dungeon

Actual Plays

My experience with actual plays comes from an unexpected angle. D&D is for Nerds by the Australian Sanspants Radio network was the first one I listened to. I had heard tell of Critical Role but, even then, it intimidated me with its sheer length and the fact that it was in a visual medium. Listening to podcasts while out walking or commuting is one thing, sitting down to watch a four-hour episode is something entirely different. Although, during lockdown and the long period where I was working from home and didn’t go out much I did start to get into Dimension 20 on Dropout.tv. Honestly, it was the clips on Tik Tok that got me started on that. I’m glad I did get a Dropout subscription, in fact; it’s still the best value streaming service I’ve got. Anyway, The D&D is for Nerds nerds put together something much more manageable in length, that I could listen to on my pod-catcher of choice. It helped that it was funny and that I quickly developed an appreciation of the characters and the world that they inhabited. I don’t listen to these so much anymore. In fact, I don’t listen to a lot of actual play podcasts these days. I am far more likely to stick on a show about TTRPGs instead. I have introduced two of my favourites in the past, in a blog post. But here’s another, Talk of the Table is a production of Many Sided Media, who also produce Bitcherton.

Talk of the Table is presented by Brian Flaherty and Elliot Davis. These guys are RPG professionals and creators in their own right (Elliot Davis has a game on backerkit right now! Go check out, The Time We Have) but they use this platform, normally, to interview other creatives in the industry, whether they are game makers, artists, actual play performers or something else related to the hobby. Some of those I have enjoyed recently were episodes where they interviewed, Mörk Borg design genius, Johan Nohr, TTRPG video essayist and creator, Aaron Voigt, and Blades in the Dark forger, John Harper. Flaherty and Davis have a pleasant, approachable style and a genuine and excited interest in the works of their guests. It makes for a great “podcast hug,” as Blindboy Boatclub would put it.

My First Dungeon: The Wildsea

The Cover of the Wildsea Corebook by Felix Isaac

Anyway, listening to this show made me aware that they had an actual play podcast called My First Dungeon on their network. So, I thought to myself, I could listen to these guys playing RPGs, probably. It turned out they had a few seasons available when I went looking. These include seasons of DIE (which I will definitely be going back to listen to,) Orbital Blues, the sad space cowboy game, and Paint the Town Red, their most recent offering. But the one that caught my eye was their relatively recent season of the Wildsea.

If you have been around for a while on the blog, you might remember that the Wildsea was one of the games I was hoping to play before the end of this year. This vain hope has been utterly dashed at this stage of the year, but I am still interested in running it at some point. I have been reading through the book, on and off for a few months. What I have discovered while doing this is that it’s got a lot to it! There are so many different parts that go up to make each character, and each one of these parts brings with it a whole plethora of aspects and there’s a lot of new terminology to learn and the world is so wild and different… So, it has felt daunting to even know where to start with it.

Now, there’s one thing I think a good actual play can do, and that is teach the game. If they do it well, they can even tell a compelling story at the same time. Or maybe the compelling story is what helps you to learn. I feel like Dimension 20 had that effect on me when it came to learning to play 5E better. I knew it pretty well before I started watching those shows but by the time I had consumed like two or three seasons, I had a much more intimate knowledge of minutiae like spells and abilities that I did not previously feel I needed to have a keen grasp of as the DM. So, I went into My First Dungeon thinking I might, at the very least, get that experience from it. And you know what? I did.

From Session Zero of the Wildsea campaign, I was taking the elements I had only read about, the things that had seemed quite abstract, and I was applying them to the frame of the characters and the basics of the world.

From Session One, I already felt like I had a pretty good grasp on the way the mechanics worked. Tracks, aspects, dice pools, advantages, cut, twist: I understood them at a more than intellectual level.

And here’s the other thing about this series that grabbed me from the get-go, I liked these characters! I was invested in their rolls and the ways in which they used their aspects to express themselves and to succeed. I appreciated the players’ willingness to play to their characters’ weaknesses as well as their strengths, and the way they used the mechanics to bring about their failure when they thought that was narratively appropriate or necessary.

Finally, I think that each of the players in this actual play brought this game to life together. All of them put a lot of effort into building not only their characters, but also the shared world, through dialogue and backstory and by narrating the outcomes of their actions or negotiating with the other players for the best Twists. They do all this while maintaining a seemingly instinctive focus on the overall themes of the game, past lives, secrets of the lost world and secrets of the characters themselves, resurfacing.

I’m sure editing and production have a lot to do with this, too. If every table had an editor we could make it feel like our narrative beats and adherence to theme were foremost in our minds at all times. But seriously, I have to give a lot of credit to producer, Shenuque Tissera and Brian Flaherty who did the editing and sound design, while also being one of the players! There’s additional music and SFX courtesy of Artlist.io too. The voice effects and leitmotifs for the various characters are incredible and really work to spotlight individuals when that’s needed. Interestingly, this is a core part of gameplay in the Wildsea that has gone unmentioned on the show, as far as I remember, at least. Focus, “a sort of narrative spotlight,” according to the book, is a basic element of the Wild Words Engine and it is there to make players remember to pass the torch on to other players. I am sure the main reason it’s not mentioned is that these pros don’t need the reminder and that the sound design, editing and production are to such a high standard that it renders the concept unnecessary. Speaking of sound, there is also a musical surprise in every episode that I won’t spoil…

Here’s the full cast:

Firefly (GM): Elliot Davis

Go check them out!

Short Story: Commute

Submission

This story is one of the few I submitted to a magazine. It didn’t make the cut but I still like it enough to share with you, dear reader. It’s a short story with a pretty clear collection of themes and what always felt to me like a pleasing format. I hope you enjoy it!

Commute

by Ronan McNamee

The train doors beep beep beep behind me. I stand on the slick floor and liberally drip. A clunk and a peep signal the train’s readiness to depart. I sigh.

The carriage is half full of half drowned suits and sodden hairdos. Ill-placed umbrellas release their gathered torrent in streams. It’s safer in a seat so I seek one out. All the usual faces, the grumps and the chatterers, the sleepy-heads and the readers, the men and the women. I’m looking for a woman. I get chatted up enough in work. There’s Sophia, eyes closed, head back against the headrest, lips pursed, breathing regular. That’s what I named her, of course. I’ve never even spoken to her. To me, she is the epitome of ‘Sophia,’ perfectly turned out, black hair, sallow skin, sophisticated. Too sophisticated, in fact, to even be fazed by the goings-on on the train. I’ve never seen her so much as open her eyes, though I’m certain she’s not sleeping. Distant cymbals can be heard from her earphones. In my mind that’s the percussion on a Zucchero song. I sit next to her and sigh another sigh, anxiety creeping up my oesophagus. Every moment is a moment closer to another eight hours in hell.

I wipe the last crumb of sleep from my eye and look around. The seats are all packed with familiar commuters. A holidaying couple corral their luggage in the space in front of the doors at one end of the carriage, a cyclist obliviously pisses off regulars at the other end. Debs is sitting across the aisle from me. Debs plays games all weekend long. It’s her only escape from a life that is otherwise unsatisfactory. She works in a game store where her boss leers at her and the customers joke about whether they would or wouldn’t as though she were a lewd selfie. Not my finest character to date. Swap the game store for a music store, her leering boss for my lecherous one (Greg has been ogling me since the interview) and her gaming for my vinyl collection and Debs is basically me. A little one dimensional, maybe. I notice she’s looking a wee bit uncomfortable with the attentions of the guy across the table from her. She pretends to apply her makeup, glances once anxiously at him over her compact. I watch as her irises widen and her mascara applicator pauses mid-stroke. She’s rocked by a shudder, almost drops the mirror, but her eyes are captured by his.

I take a look at her captor. The man is grey, not of hair, which is more like stringy, dry rice noodles, but of complexion. He seems ancient, mostly dust and brittle bones wrapped imperfectly in paper. His suit is a pigeon-grey that was once a raven-black. A black orb shifts under his bald brow, tracking Debs’ movements. I shiver involuntarily but I can’t keep my gaze from him. He fascinates me. He’s a physical manifestation of “Swordfishtrombones.” The train jolts to a stop. Debs breaks his hold on her. Then, heels and umbrella thrown out behind her, she click-clacks through the train car and out the beeping doors as fast as her bejegginged legs will carry her.

Swordfishtrombones just sits there, eyes in his lap with his gathered hands. The top of his head is blackened and blemished with sores and liver spots beneath his noodle-hair. I look away, out the window past Sophia, and turn up the volume on “Hazards of Love.” He doesn’t even look up when I pass him on my way to alight at Central.

Next morning and I’m taking off my shades to get a better look at my seating options as I step on the 08:09. My sun-dappled mood darkens as I spot all those usual faces. I struggle past Mrs Costello’s enormous handbag, sprawled in the aisle as per usual, Tuesday to Saturday. Mrs Costello I named for Elvis (‘Every Day I Write The Book’ Elvis, not ‘Suspicious Mind’ Elvis.) It’s her thick, black spectacle frames and spiky, black hairdo. She blabs away on her mobile, unaware of the commuter trauma caused by her oversized hand luggage.

My seat is the same as yesterday, right beside Sophia. Debs is missing, though. Odd. She normally applies her make-up somewhere on my carriage between 8:09 and whatever time she gets off, Monday to Friday. Maybe she’s on holiday, maybe she’s sick. Swordfishtombones is absent today too. I name the resulting emotion, “relievappointed.”

I fill my ears with Joanna Newsom. “Caaas-i-o-p-ah,” sings Joanna as I stew yesterday’s memories, mixing Greg’s lewd condescension with a dollop of Fallout-Boy-kid’s breast-obsession and a healthy twist of my own pickled bitterness. By the time I step onto the platform it has been stirred up into what I can only describe as a reddish-brown anxiety bisque. I sigh hard and march off to my doom again.

Black vinyl hair hangs in front of my face. Rain water falls from it in a sheet. I feel like bawling. I’m sick of this fucking train and all these assholes being herded to their shitty jobs in their depressing offices. I’m sick of this fucking country and its roulette-wheel weather not to mention its cheap, plastic umbrellas. I stand, fuming for a minute as I wipe my face and then check out my raccoon bandit mask in my reversed phone camera. Great! Fucking Wednesday! I pull a wipe out of my bag and stomp to the nearest free seat to sort my makeup out. My seat is at the same table that is occupied every week day by Indian Lou Reed (I assume this needs no explanation.) Indian Lou Reed nods at me but does not smile. I glare at him. Indian Lou Reed’s day job is as warehouse manager of a mid-size office-supply company where he attempts to ignore his colleagues’ casual racism all day long. But by night he is front man to tribute band, “The Velvet Underworld,” which cleverly mashes the music of his two favourite bands. It looks like he had a hard night on stage last night but the worst signs of it are hidden by his trademark shades.

Across the aisle… My breath actually catches. Directly across the aisle from me sits Swordfishtrombones. A spider crawls up my spine and another one skitters around my brain. He looks different, not younger exactly but more filled out, a starving man who’s had a good meal. On his head the dried noodles have become more like greasy squid ink pasta, plastered thinly to his worm-grey scalp. In profile I can make out the frayed end of a smile. I am staring now and I have no shame. His one visible eye, a marble shifting around in its pallid socket, draws me in. It reminds me of an old cathode ray tube television that has been switched off, dark and distortingly reflective. I glance away from his eye to see even his suit is a little more raven and a little less pigeon today. This time the object of his attentions is Sophia. Sophia has her eyes open. They are bloodshot and rheumy. This startles me more than Swordfishtrombones’ trip to the mortuary’s make-over artist.
Sophia’s face is almost unrecognisable. Gone is the sophisticated lady. Here sits an alcoholic bereft of hope. I can see a sob struggling to escape her throat as her lip trembles. She’s watching Swordfishtrombones. In fact, she can’t rip her bloody eyes from his. I want to reach out to her, touch her arm and comfort her, tell her he’s just some weirdo, tell her she’s too classy for this sort of behaviour. Instead, I keep my hands folded in my lap and watch their psychic battle over the table. I watch them until my stop is announced. I rise, feeling a hard, little bubble of anxiety squirming up from my belly. I back away down the aisle, all the while watching Sophia’s eyes. The doors beep, I start to turn to leave, Sophia’s eyes flicker my way, irises like bullet holes in her vein-cracked eyes. She fixes me with that gaze, pleading, then terrified, then resigned, then they flick back to Swordfishtrombones and I run. I’m weeping freely by the time I hit the platform.

“Why don’t I just quit,” is the question of the day. It is the question of many days, honestly. “Money,” and “fear,” are the usual answers. I’m on the train again. Preoccupied, I shove my sunglasses up on top of my head and sit opposite Mrs Costello. Auto-pilot. I’m on auto-pilot. That bastard, Greg. That fucking bastard. Did I lead him on? Did he just get the wrong idea? Maybe I said something to make him think I wanted to fuck him in the dirty old fucking shitty storeroom. Fuck that! This is not me! I don’t think this way! I’m beginning to understand why people do think this way, though. My stupid brain repeats this loop or something very similar every few minutes. Finally, my stomach lurches as the train pulls into Central. I close my eyes, clamp my jaw shut and rise.

Friday! I wish the Cure song were true. I’m not in love though, I think I’m in hate. My head pounds and I feel sick. One more day with that bastard. The sky roars as I mind my step through the 8:29’s sliding doors. I turn to watch the first tentative drops. I’m not even seated before a psychotic drummer starts to beat out a cacophony along the roof. My eyes are drawn to the darkening world beyond the window as I take a seat across a table from Mrs Costello. I choose it so he can’t sit opposite me. I can’t deal with any further existential terror this morning. My life is doing a good enough job providing that all on its own. Once I’m sitting, Sophia occurs to me. I was so wrapped up in my own shit yesterday I didn’t even look for her. I grip my armrest and whip my head around, the better to check out the carriage. No Sophia. I turn back knowing he’s there across from me. I keep my eyes closed, as if mid-blink. He comes with the rain. He comes with the misery and the end of the rope. He comes when you need him. I open my eyes.

Today he looks more like a rakish undertaker. His hair is slicked into a cow’s lick across his maggot-coloured forehead, the ghosts of black eyebrows have grown above his eyes, right above his… dark, quarry pool eye…

The Heart of the Matter

Not entirely seat of your pants

A portion of the inside cover of my copy of Heart: The City Beneath from Rowan Rook and Decard. Illustrations by Felix Miall

The philosophy for some Heart GMs seems to be, don’t you dare plan your Heart campaign or sessions. Like, just sit down with your players, make some weirdos to do some delves and then decide on a starting place. That might be in media res, as the PCs meet one another while hopelessly lost in Labyrinth or it might be at home in their shabby-chic apartment in Derelictus. From there you might just ask them what they want to do next and, when they tell you, just try to keep up with them! This is a valid way to play the game, I think, as long as you have either an exhaustive knowledge of the landmarks, adversaries, plot hooks and people of the Heart, or an effective and suitably weird set of random tables. If you approach it from this direction, the players are going to have the most input but the GM is going to have to improv a lot and do a great deal of work on the fly. It also presupposes a certain degree of setting knowledge on the players’ part, I think. This can be stressful and a lot to expect of everyone but I am pretty sure this is the preferred method of a lot of Heart GMs.

A portion of an illustration of Derelictus, the City Between by Felix Miall. Heart: The City Beneath, page 136.

Another option, of course, is to plan everything, start, middle and end. This is totally do-able. The book provides plenty of fodder to feed your hungry campaign. It describes dozens of landmarks and provides you with lots of plot hooks to get the PCs interested in pursuing the thing you want them to. So you can have them all meet in a Derelictus tavern where they overhear something about a plot by some Gryndel to pursue a valuable quarry into the Heart, plan the first delve to take them after the Gryndels only to find the quarry in Grip Station, near death but with a dire warning for the whole city that an army of Angels rises from below and a request for the delvers to spread the news to the Temple of the Moon Beneath, plan out the next delve to there, etc. etc. This sounds very much like a traditional adventure module for the likes of D&D. And that is all well and good. It allows a very strict control on the part of the GM and makes for a plot the PCs can uncover. But it will certainly lead to some railroading and could well make for potential dissatisfaction for the players and the PCs as they feel they have taken a back seat to the narrative planned out so perfectly by the GM. This method will ignore the great strength of Heart, it’s freeform potential, the loose structure inherent in the Beats system and the story being told by the delvers’ choices and their rolls and the Fallout that comes out of them.

A portion of an illustration of delvers planning a delve by Felix Miall. From Heart: The City Beneath, page 103.

So, how about somewhere in between? It seems sensible to meet in the middle. You make your weirdos, then you all discuss what sort of game you would like for them, GM and players together. Or you could take those two steps the other way around. Either way, you have an idea of the sort of story you all want to tell together and you all take responsibility for making that happen. This is with the understanding that what you think you want at the start might very well change after one or two or five sessions. That’s when you realise that, while you thought you wanted to help out that Haven you came across at the end of your first delve, it turned out what you actually wanted all along was to physically explode in such a way as to take out as much of the surrounding entities as possible so you could all travel to the afterlife together, an offering to your Goddess. And in pursuit of these elastic goals, the GM comes up with a loose web of places, people and objects that the PCs might have a chance to interact with. The GM will probably do this, at most, in between each session, with several ideas of where the story might go in the two or three sessions afterwards, but with no expectations.

A portion of an illustration by Felix Miall, of Grip Station, a Tier 1 Landmark. From Heart: The City Beneath, page 138.

Here’s what Messrs Howitt and Taylor have to say about it under the section entitled, “Stop Planning” on page 109 of the Heart core book:

Flexibility and adaptiveness are the keys to success. When you prepare, think in terms of characters, broad concepts, motivations, snatches of ideas that you want to play with. The world doesn’t exist until you speak about it at the table. Sure, you might have thought about it – you might even have written it down in a notebook – but until the players interact with it, it’s in total flux. The players just turn up every week and make it up as they go along. Why can’t you?

The quantum campaign made up of Shrödinger’s delves. And this about sums up the type and degree of prep I have been doing before each Heart session more recently. It’s more fun for me to do it this way too. I get to be surprised by what the players do and I get to discover the Heart along with them a lot of the time.

From Haven to Terminus

Yeah, that’s the name of our Heart campaign. It’s coming to an end this week. I guess the name gives away quite a lot of my thinking behind it. I was finding it hard to let go of the traditional module style of prep at the start. Yep, I decided to make a bold statement about, not only where the campaign would start, but also where it would end up. Now, this wasn’t as bad as it sounded. I had a very vague idea of a Campaign Frame for the game, that’s all. I used one of the plot hooks described in the Derelictus section of the Heart core book. Verrex, a retro-technologist with his tumble-down workshop situated on one of the platforms of Haven Station wanted the delvers to track down his robotic double, V01. The construct had expressed an interest in visiting all the Vermissian stations in the City Beneath, so he suggested the PCs use that as a guide to finding him. That was it. Everything in between was entirely up in the air, but it gave them a loose path and a potential final goal.

A portion of the illustration of a Gnoll Incursion Team by Felix Miall. From Heart: The City Beneath, page 188.

That was, of course, until I decided to employ the adventure presented in the Heart Quickstart guide, Drowned. Now, I am not going to spoil any of this adventure here but what I will say is that it lays out a very particular path ahead of the PCs, with the havens they will reach at the end of each of the numbered delves, the NPCs that will push them on from one place to the next and a big old final set piece. Now, since all I had before making this decision was a loose Campaign Frame, a little concreteness was actually welcome. It allowed me to see how to do things like come up with my own delves, use Haven NPCs to best advantage to help drive narrative and try to attach the PCs to someone or something only for them to find a way to betray or deceive them. But, after five or six sessions of following the adventure, I became aware of how the campaign had ended up on rails. I wasn’t providing them with options, I was forcing them down the path laid out by Drowned. I have found it hard to get out of this frame of mind since then, although I have tried to follow the advice from the book that I quoted above.

The delvers just reached Terminus, having taken a near-lethal shortcut through The Source, one of the Eight Heavens. The Junk Mage is banking everything on a meeting with a gnoll in Terminus who can teach them how to use the Nexus Device there to enact their will upon the entire city, The Vermissian Knight has pumped his mystical train armour full of soul power, the better to resurrect the entire inter-dimensional subway network, and the Deadwalker has just had his Zenith wish to combine his essence with that of the Heart itself thwarted by the Vermissian Knight who says he will not stand for his “human servants” abandoning him until his work is done (he’s an aelfir obvs.)

How will it end up? We’ll find out soon. But whatever happens, I am now pretty sure that these amazing players are going to surprise me yet again.