And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow - Session 27 - The Valentine's Soirée
Mann was back for this session, after having to be away for northern summer, so I was expecting a nice, slow session of explaining the Heart Engine and such. We started off wrapping up a conversation between Cora and Giovanna, solving a bit of the issue between them, when goth wizard Cellar went "oh we won't get to go through Valentine's? I had an idea for that" and I went "we are Absolutely playing through Valentine's."
Thus, this session was entirely improvised from that initial prompt, my knowledge of the characters, and leading questions to help set the scene and incorporate Mann back into the game naturally. It worked beautifully! I think the players are safe enough in their characters and know enough about the social expectations of the world that they don't freeze anymore when I ask about certain things - and even chime in to help others, Eterna (who plays Cora) in particular gives great suggestions.
A lot of the session came out of a throwaway line I sent in the DMs of the game about how their parents would likely be looking to betroth them to someone already, since they're around 16 / 17 and can start being treated as adults in this society. To that end, I set the parents of Fiorello and the parents of Alessa onto one another, deciding to marry them, and it was a sink or swim moment for the players as they tried to figure out ways out of this. This culminated with Alessa rattling off and escalating a gigantic lie which made her personal reputation worse, and threatened her family losing face.
Overall, this is the kind of session that really raises my self-esteem about running. Over the years I have ran entirely improvised sessions, but never by voice, where you have to think on your feet a lot more. This was, then, both a test of GMing (self-imposed, none of the players expected this to have been anything more than a diversion) and an expansion of my horizons, as now I know I actually can just zero in on an element and get a really good session out of it, so long as I have good players (and the Hearts Aglow are the best players) and confidence in the milieu.
