And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow - Session 21 - The Winter Tournament
Like I said last time, we took an involuntary break, as I had a stupid "dance" for my niece (1 and a half years old, did not dance, did not seem to enjoy it) and my cousin's wedding, so WW ran Lost Girls.
This was an EVENTFUL fortnight. I started using they / them pronouns, moved apartments to a much bigger one, got a cold for the first time since the pandemic, finished a book and started another one, made like 10 blog posts, etc. STUFF is happening, but it's stabilising now.
I described that I came to this session after so long away from ADHA like jumping out of a car crash and going "you fuckers ready for a tournament?" because the day before yesterday was spent mostly assembling boxes and boxing things, yesterday was spent mostly taking those boxes in and then out of a truck and then taking the stuff out of the boxes, and today was spent taking the stuff that didn't fit in the boxes inside the car and bringing them here.
Right before the session, which typically starts at 2 PM my time, my dad spent the entire morning with my grandpa trying to fix the sink and getting most of the kitchen flooded as a result - lacking towels, which hadn't been brought yet, he decided to staunch the water with clothing. I told the Hearts Aglow we would start an hour later, since he told me he was going down to the other place and be ready to help take stuff up in about 20 minutes. Instead he took an hour (understandably), and I scarfed down a microwave lasagna in under 10 minutes having just taken a carload of shit stealthily, because we technically weren't allowed to take the boxes in the elevator, so we had to load it up and out in the correct floor like a Formula 1 pit stop team. My mom arrived and was crying due to being overwhelmed with how much stuff there was still to do, me and my dad tried to calm her (though my dad is quite bad at this), and an hour later I was sitting down to talk about squires fighting one another.
A while back, right after knowing about the break, I thought I would come to the game with a heavy mind and a lot of pressure to put the best foot forward. I thought coming at the tail of Lost Girls, which is a game that matters to people, a labour of love that is so well-defined as to have people reflecting on their relationship to gender, ran by WW who came to the table determined not to die hungry having spent months away from the GM seat, I thought there was just no hope for Hearts Aglow.
It is an ill-defined game that changed what it is from a fighting game about squires, to an adventure game about young knights, to a dimension-hopping action game about supernatural teenagers, to an almost Austenian drama about the life and times of the gentry; a game which no one has ever made a post about how its impacted their lives, not even I; ran by the same GM from always who recently has found themselves an insecure trainwreck. I thought I'd come with that pressure, but I didn't.
Instead, I came in like I've always done, with four paragraphs of prep and a little pontification on edge cases, a few conversations with Nathan and Mann on the back pocket, and yelling "GENTLEMENT. START. YOUR. ENGINEEEEEEEESSSSS", because I got over those thoughts through the weeks between. I talked openly about it with friends, including WW, and through their strength I came to understand that this is a game. It has no ties to my value as a person or writer, or to how much my friends like me. So what that Hearts Aglow hasn't made people question their gender? My players don't want that. They want to play a good fucking game, and that much I can deliver.
And so I did. Just like any classic shounen tournament arc, this one had a twist: evil sorcerers with a vendetta wanted to kill two of the players, and were willing to turn one of the NPCs into a monstrous bear to accomplish this.
I was initially considering having hardcore seeding, making sure the players got to where they had to go, but I decided against it (with Nathan's help) because I figured "do I pass to the quarter finals or not?" was enough drama.
Thus, this session was a stress test of one of my biggest theories about RPGs: that the specific dice and mechanics do not matter at all so long as the fictional context is cool enough. This was, without exaggeration, about 3 hours straight of me and my players rolling opposed 2d6s with no modifiers higher than +1, occasional d20 under a stat if the mood struck us, and interpreting all of it under the fiction. And it was Hype as Hell.
There was no secret, this was just the Pendragon combat system, but it could have been any and it would have been hype in its own special ways. There was no "spice" to "break up the monotony" - I made a little table of special arenas but kept rolling "Normal arena", chances 5 and 6 of a d6 table. There wasn't even that much freeform chat about where exactly you hit and this and that, which I'm known for. We just hunkered down, rolled some dice, described it in a fun way, and let the world come to life.
Against best practices for GMs, I gave long descriptions of the fights of the NPCs, and did they get bored? Hell no, they were cheering the NPCs on, interacting with them before and after the fights and stuff, because those had been built as people they cared about.
And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow remains a weird ass chimeric game which even I have a hard time defining well; it remains less known, liked, and understood than Lost Girls; it still has the same ol' GM with the same ol' crew; but through it all it is still our game, both mine and the players', and that is good enough.
