And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow - Session 24 - The Royal Ball
If you can believe it: Weird Writer has made a recap of the session. It understandably doesn't cover all of it, such as the plot points that happened to other characters, but it mentions them at least so it gives you an idea of the thing.
This time around, unlike the past 3 sessions, I came to the game without any nervousness at all. It might have been that I spent all of my anxiety by going out before the session dressed in a way I never had before, but I just felt very self-possessed and confident about the game.
My working theory is that I have a difficult time starting events in RPGs without a very functional structure. For instance, in the Arden Vul Weasels campaign I don't have to stop or start anything, the entire campaign is one fluid motion, everything I've prepped 3 months ago is still relevant and still paying dividends; and in the Delta Green Sunsetters campaign I already knew to rely on the mission structure, so while I had to restart a new "plot" every time, I also knew exactly what they would be doing in that mission: investigating something. With Hearts Aglow I don't have either of those benefits, scenarios are almost always fully new, and what you do in them is fully unexpected. This isn't a bad thing necessarily, but it does make things much much harder to prep whenever we break away from the Heart Engine, and I don't have a good way to "fix" it.
Anyway, the experiment with the royal ball was a very simple one: has Hearts Aglow become a self-moving context machine? And the answer was a resounding and exciting "Yes". Like I mentioned last time, my prep for this wasn't just sparse, it was semi non-existent. I spread the characters over rooms that had no name, mapped the rooms to Versailles, and had about 9 random events that could fire off, one of which was "a hunting dog or horse has gotten inside the house", reinterpreted on the spot to mean "the king's favourite warhorse comes galloping from the gardens and towards the palace, Cora and Giovanna you're on the way".
Unlike the broader world and potential quests or whatever, I know the characters very well and can make judgement calls for them easily, and since the ball was mainly a social venue, it was very easy to just pass the mic to the players and let them figure out what to do; which led to some sorta "boring" exploration here and there, but those sorts of lulls are good for pacing, especially in a session that exploded with emotion eventually.
It was a successful experiment and I'm optimistic about the next few sessions too, as I have the next one prepped (and it might take 2 sessions), and after that we'll go back to the Hearts Aglow formula, so there's no secret to it. I'm also happy to see the players all torn up about their characters and - most importantly - each other's characters. A prolonged 10 minute dialogue between an NPC and a PC is the kind of thing they tell you not to do in the academy, but the entire table was gripping their seats and deeply interested to see what came of it, so not even that can be taken as dogma.
