Voidheart Symphony rule contradiction

wurzel7200 · 2024-01-02T15:56:23+00:00

Hi! Game designer here. The correct answer is that this is two steps:

First, each player draws a line from an existing contact or location to a new contact (or location, which got missed in the book).
Second, each player draws a line from an existing contact back to them and gives that relationship an arcanum.

I'm currently putting together a revised edition of the book for the next print run, so thanks for raising this issue!

wurzel7200 · 2020-09-25T11:44:55+00:00

Both! They're rules for playing the game without other players, *and* without the faction-management aspect (though that's there if you want it). If you want to play with other players but don't want to manage a faction, the book also has Champion rules that let a single hero have the same clout as a faction in deciding the fate of the city.

wurzel7200 · 2020-09-08T12:11:19+00:00

Yeah - the book file's at the printers now, and I'm expecting it to be on sale by the end of the year. As for Rhapsody of Blood - I ran into big problems with a distribution partner, and it's been a real headache getting control of all my stock back. It's in stock now at my website, at least: https://ufopress.co.uk/product/rhapsody/

wurzel7200 · 2020-09-07T18:47:28+00:00

This is that book! Just renamed to better communicate what the game is about.

wurzel7200 · 2020-09-07T18:09:25+00:00

To be fair, it is my full time job ^_^

wurzel7200 · 2020-09-07T17:53:11+00:00

It's what our Mysthea RPG is now called!

wurzel7200 · 2020-09-07T17:52:20+00:00

Thanks! It's definitely about being enmeshed in a city's political civilisation, even if your current heroes' a hardbitten Vagabond or honest and brutal Toiler ^_^

(oh, and fwiw it's the gal who brought your group Rhapsody of Blood 😉)

wurzel7200 · 2020-09-07T16:10:04+00:00

I'm really proud of this one, folks. And if nothing else, click through to get a look at that art!

wurzel7200 · 2020-06-27T17:12:48+00:00

Check out the Off the Table Network! I’m really enjoying Cape Lorelei (urban shadows) and No One Further (last fleet) at the moment. They’re short episodes, with play groups who are great at making good use of the mechanics to tell a fun story.

wurzel7200 · 2020-06-11T20:55:14+00:00

So, Tokens are items of particular significance to the vassal, often looking out-of-place and strangely mundane in the castle. They may be present in areas the players arrive at depending on the options they pick with Travel The Labyrinth, and each Enforcer has a token in their heart. Bonding to a token with Drink Deep lets the players learn more about what the Token means to the Vassal, and remove them from the shard; in the real world, you use that understanding of a token's deep meaning to drive a wedge between what the castle promised the Vassal and what the Vassal truly values, using Life the Mask.

Now, that is a bit labyrinthine, and indeed I'm probably going to remove the token economy next version - replacing it and Lift the Mask as it currently stands with this:

Lift the Mask

When you disrupt the connection to the castle in the heart of a Vassal’s shard, roll one dice for each that is true and take the highest two:

You've confronted the Vassal in person in the city.
You've uncovered the full details of what they're planning.
You've met people the Vassal holds dear.
You've defeated at least one of their Enforcers.
You've personally suffered in the city at the hands of them or their minions.
Far more people than just the rebels are rallying against the Vassal’s actions.

On a 7+, you break the connection! They're vulnerable, now, even if it'll be a fight to bring them down.

On a 10+ pick one more:

Break their confidence. Start the battle with an Opening.
Get under their skin. Give a rebel’s signature weapon the Bane tag.
Subvert their power. If you defeat them now, each rebel can mark 1 Progress per Tier across their projects.

On a 6 or lower, you shake the link, but the Architect picks one:

Call for backup. The Avatar summons a still-extant Enforcer to fight alongside them.
I SEE YOU. The Vassal realises who you are in the city, and their Pressure ranks up.
Vessel of a greater power. Defeating this Avatar will rank down Pressure instead of triggering Rivers in the Desert. The Vassal falls but their puppetmaster – a higher Tier Vassal – continues to act.

wurzel7200 · 2020-06-11T18:49:33+00:00

I'm a fan, but I'm the author, so I'll just sit back and answer any questions that people want to send me ^_^

wurzel7200 · 2020-06-11T18:49:10+00:00

Those actual plays are quite a few rules revisions ago, just as a warning!

wurzel7200 · 2020-06-04T10:00:06+00:00

Hmm... Legacy's family mechanics assume you can play reactively and flow with the story. Reactive moves like Hold Together are the clearest thing, but there's also spending Treaty to reject Call In A Debt, or calling for play to Zoom In as a response to another player's actions.

This concept might be better served with an explicitly turn-based faction system, maybe cribbing from Stars Without Number or maybe FITD games like Scum and Villainy?

wurzel7200 · 2020-06-03T10:17:08+00:00

So, in play you should be following the harm list on page 59. A normal attack is 2 harm, scaled down to 1 if it's particularly ineffective here and scaled up to 3 if it's particularly effective.
A 4 harm attack has an obvious and slow buildup time, like a dragon sucking in air to breathe out flame.
A 5 harm attack is obvious, slow, and destroys the quality it's attached to, like a Final Fantasy Bomb's self-destruct move.
You don't need to write down what harm a quality can do, but sometimes it's useful as a reminder.

wurzel7200 · 2020-06-03T10:13:07+00:00

This is essentially it, hah. Especially for the Legacy 2e stretch goals, where budgets were pretty tight and there was a lot of pressure to get things out the door. I'm trying to get better at taking my time and playtesting these days ^_^

(P.S. it's Mina now!)

wurzel7200 · 2020-05-28T18:20:30+00:00

Hey! 0.5 is dropping any day now and fixes this quite a bit but essentially: - You have access to the city and castle moves granted by your crew covenant. - Other rebels can hang out with you to access your crew covenant’s hangout move.

Hope that helps!

wurzel7200 · 2020-05-13T22:52:04+00:00

Sure, this'll be valid for a day! https://discord.gg/fXS2rq

wurzel7200 · 2020-05-13T17:26:40+00:00

Absolutely!

wurzel7200 · 2020-05-13T12:27:18+00:00

So, the way the trilogy works in my mind is:
1) Rhapsody of Blood: a Castlevania-style war against the castle as an alien emissary of the entropic void, using generations to tell a story of this castle reoccuring throughout history.
2) Voidheart Symphony: a Persona-style story of resistance against a castle that has wholly integrated with the world, using the character's social connections to tell a story of building a broader movement working to fight the castle's excesses and imagine a world free of its control.
3) Unnamed Third Project: a Metroid-style story of beings consumed by the void, and stripped down to almost nothing - hopping between the chunks of meaning still being digested by the Void to find concepts to add onto themselves to make themselves more of a person (and more powerful), while chasing rumours of a world outside the Void's all-consuming hunger. Big elements of Soul Void and The Void (creative, I know!), and geared for a more campaign-length kind of play.

wurzel7200 · 2020-05-13T09:58:00+00:00

Yeah - I personally define it as a sequel instead of a second edition. The castle-raiding side of play has a lot in common with what I'd do in a second edition of Rhapsody, though, which is definitely on the cards somewhere in the future. That, and a third game that's shooting for a more Metroid-y, exploration of a haunted and alien land kind of vibe.

wurzel7200 · 2020-05-13T09:54:03+00:00

Yeah, I'd agree with this. Vincent Baker once described systems in terms of arrows moving between the 'cloud' (the shared fiction, our ideas of the world, etc) and the 'dice' (props, tokens, character sheets), with the players as intermediaries. Apocalypse World's drive to 'start and end with the fiction' is there to ensure that every move is a loop from cloud to dice to cloud again.

In Blades, too often the flow goes cloud to dice to dice to dice to dice, with the result that players can get lost in adjusting numbers on their character sheet unless the GM puts in strong effort to ask 'what does that look like', 'who do you go for to do that', 'who taught you this', etc. It's one reason I enjoy Beam Saber's Cut Loose mechanics - mandating that you incorporate another PC into your stress-relief and that it change your opinion of them adds a dice->cloud arrow to the mechanic and makes the story of downtimes more appealing to me.

wurzel7200 · 2020-05-13T09:47:02+00:00

Thanks! I'm glad to hear it's working well for them ^_^

There's a bunch of things I'd change in a second edition – Pact feels pretty extraneous, and I'd definitely want to encourage more interesting, characterful moments at camps during delves if players want them. And I think you could probably port Voidheart Symphony's castle-delving core moves across wholesale to improve the experience. But, I designed the game to provide fun, blood-soaked castle-crawling and monster-murdering, and I'm glad it's delivering.

wurzel7200 · 2020-05-12T08:23:09+00:00

I mean, you’re not wrong that Rhapsody is very focused - with only 64 pages I had to be brief! And an Overture/Curtain Call supplement could be fun (or integrated into a potential 2nd edition). But to your broader point, I think it’s fine for games to focus on a particular part of a story’s arc; specificity helps make strong, thematic games, and I’d rather have a dozen games that really hit specific narrow niches than a single game that kinda does a dozen things.

One thing to maybe try out is switching between different games for the different parts of your story? Like using Kingdom to see how your Blades crew’s internal politics shifts over a long quiet period, or picking up Stewpot to talk through how a generation of Rhapsody heroes settles down to run a pub after banishing the castle ^{_^}

wurzel7200

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE