Personally, I think the one quality that most GMs for TTRPGs have in common is that we are VERY self critical when it comes to the quality of our sessions. We over analyze player engagement, session pacing, and the overall “grade” of the session. If you’re a GM reading this and you say to yourself “I don’t worry about any of those things” then congratulations I’m jealous of you. When I look back at my Heart campaigns, I ask “what could I have done differently?” and “what were the main causes of my less than stellar performances from the GM’s perspective?”.
Getting The Tone Right
As mentioned in the Heart episode of WTTQ, I felt like I fell flat when it came to transferring the vibes from the core book of Heart: The City Beneath into my sessions. The pulpy grimdark absurdness looks great in the book but how can I best transfer these visuals into the theater of the mind of my players? The answer has to be, “show them more art from the book” and I think that’s totally fine. Felix Mihall fills the core book and supplements with plenty of breathtaking weirdness that you can show to your players. See some examples below:
My Struggle With Delves
The core driving force for Heart is that your characters will travel deeper and deeper into it until they ultimately use their Zenith abilities, get what they desire, or die on the journey to the center of the Heart. You will experience the 4 “tiers” of the Heart, which represent how close you are to the center and the deeper you go, the more strange and dangerous each tier becomes. Each tier has notable landmarks that you can use as key location points for your characters to experience and interact with. However, the distance between two landmarks will be covered by a “delve”.
What exactly is a delve? The core book introduces delves by saying “In mechanical terms, delves are an abstract method of portraying the journey between two points of interest.” It also says “In metaphysical terms, delves are less real than landmarks, so they give you a bit of room to experiment and try something different.” One last call out from the book to highlight is “Delves are a bit more freewheeling, and the already scattershot rules of time and space come further unpicked.”
Your game loop will typically look like this: Start at a landmark in tier “x” and begin a delve on the way to another landmark within that same tier, or delve deeper to a landmark in the next tier. Delves will be filled with events that test and punish your characters through the ever changing unmerciful weirdness of the Heart, and this was arguably my biggest struggle with my Heart campaigns. How can I come up with events between two mighty locations such as The Redcap Grove and Grin Station? With the power of hindsight, I could have used my players “beats” as events that occurred in between those two landmarks or sprinkled in related NPC inhabitants from those landmarks or creatures that would be interested in terrorizing those landmarks. The “delve edition” of Heart also provides three example delves between six landmarks, but they still weren’t enough to get my creative engine started. (Probably just user error on my part.)
The book does a great job of reminding you that the Heart is ever evolving and no location within it stays in the same place for very long and that’s what I think hurt me the most. In my own head I needed a map of heart with pathways connecting these tiers and their strange citizens and as I type this out now, I realize that I COULD HAVE MADE MY OWN FRIGGIN MAP. Something so many TTRPGs tell us is that their rulesets are just highly suggested frameworks for you to run the game with. There’s no master representative to chastise you or correct you on your changes to their game. Now if you’re someone like me who’s trying to experience these games “as-is” to see how they land for a first time user, you might forget you have the ability to do whatever you want.
The Heart could have always been “ever-changing” to my players because they never would have even scratched the surface of the 50+ landmarks that Rowan Rook and Decard provided me in the base game. I should have made my own map with pre-seasoned delves waiting to be encountered, or just had some pre-made delves ready to go for a connection between any two landmarks. This bolded section right here is the exact reason why I backed the new Heart source book “Ways and Means” because they have created a “Delve Deck” which will help you generate impromptu delves! So all you “non-prepping” GMs can rejoice!!
A Summary of My Failures And How I’ll Overcome Them
After self-reflecting in this blog post here are the main things that could set me up for greater success in future Heart campaigns. Maybe this could help you if you’re planning on running a Heart campaign for the first time!
- I will create a map showcasing connections between tiers and their landmarks.
- I will use player beats as the “events” that occur on delves.
- I will show more art from the book to help with immersion.
We Took The Quest 