Session 28 - Autumn comes in like a lion
Another session, another play report.
I generally agree with everything WW says, and really don't have much to add regarding the game itself, as I've found these sessions eminently normal and pleasant.
What has been on my mind, however, is a different assumption. I've been reading and preparing a lot of HârnMaster recently, which rules and is extremely cool and a sort of "Havoc's Version of Pendragon" which already was my favourite game, and as I do, I bump into an assumption which Hearts Aglow has dispelled for me: that geographical proximity of characters and NPCs facilitates the exploration of such NPCs and increases player investment in them.
See, in many of my campaigns I have attempted to shave closer to a "static" type of game rather than trotting so that I could have repeating NPCs with little attempt at justification. I have come to appreciate that to just be untrue. I think the power of NPCs comes either from striking images, repetition, or both, but an NPC will absolutely not grow fonder in the minds of the PCs just because they're "around". Even repetition might not work perfectly, as you keep bringing up the same NPCs only for them to start fading into nothing. By the same token, an NPC can appear in a single session and be one of the most memorable parts of a campaign.
What tends to bother me is when the campaign feels too episodic, too much like an episode of He-Man, where they go to one place, meet with the ally, beat up the bad guy, then say goodbye and on to the next adventure. The thing being though that that is the natural flow of RPGs because it's a conversation, and you can only zoom into one moment at a time. You can never capture the entirety of someone's experience, only fragments, and those fragments are naturally episodic. Thus, in practice, there ends up being little difference between "That one NPC we helped 3 hexes north and is presumably still there" and "That one NPC we helped and lives in our property and our character sees every day, but which has nothing in particular going on right now".
If anything, in a trotting campaign the NPC might feel even more meaningful, as the players are only engaging with them along with their characters, rather than assuming the characters are interacting amongst themselves but not focusing on that, or even voicing it, as it is impossible and fruitless to try and bring up every friday that the character spends in the bar with his friend, or every wednesday afternoon which the character meets with the nice butcher lady at the market which always gives him the best cuts of meat. These things are brought up later, in hindsight, when something happens to the lady and she needs help, and it won't feel cheap or less valuable because... RPGs aren't TV shows, books, or any other sort of conventional linear narrative.
We don't have to introduce a character to "show" the relationship only to later do something with it. You can give a player a dog at the start of the session, say "He's called Buddy, you love him" and 10 minutes later say "You get home and Buddy, who always waits for you, isn't there" and it'll pretty much have the same impact as mentioning Buddy 3 sessions ago offhandedly and then making him disappear. In fact, almost this exact scenario happened to me once during a session (though instead of a dog it was an anomalocaris named Shrimp) and I was ready to kill and die for the damn dog.
Next session I'll be playing out an adapted version of one of MTB's Roslov Adventures, whose vibes are immaculate for Hearts Aglow as I move steadily away from having all fantasy all the time. It's good to lean and enjoy a bit the Regency vibes, even if I did sorta make the mistake (through an accumulating increase in details and oral worldbuilding) of removing most of the elements which could be used as stakes for something like a Jane Austen style plot. But eh, I'm not sweating it, it's not like I have any ideas for that either, just that the vibes aren't quite what they could be as a result of choices and instincts.
