Minerva here with another Voidheart Symphony blog! Last time we talked about the core ideas of the game, and why we’re making a new edition of it. Since then, circumstances convinced us to launch the crowdfunder a little later, but that time will only serve to make the revised edition even better. Since we decided on the delay, I’ve been hard at work on the game – writing more of the setting and metaphysics chapter, creating new playbook designs and digital tools, and testing out new rules and systems I’ll be putting into the book. All that might be meaningless if you don’t know how the game works – so it’s good that I’m covering the core rules of Voidheart Symphony today!

The Big Picture

Voidheart Symphony is a game about everyday folks who learn that eldritch forces are lending their power to their city’s worst abusers. These everyday folks – rebels – have found a way to break into the nightmare sentient otherworld that’s empowering their mundane tormentors, slay their inner demons, and steal that occult power and use it to heal their communities. In the process, they’ll have to work out what makes that bastard tick, muster real-world resistance against them, and deal with the mundane crises affecting their own lives.

The game presents this struggle as a series of investigations, each focused on a particular target – a vassal of the castle, and the accompanying castle-shard shaped by the vassal’s mind. Each investigation unfolds day-by-day, as the rebels try to juggle their mundane life, city-side sleuthing, and shadow-world action. Once they feel ready, they attempt to take down the vassal’s avatar within that castle-shard. If they succeed, they use the avatar’s power to heal their city or augment their own powers and hope that they can weather the castle’s retaliation. Finally, they enter peace and quiet, a span of breathing room that lets them put out the fires that have spread in their mundane life and recover from the fight – until another vassal crosses their radar, and another investigation begins.

Core Mechanics

“Okay,” I hear you say, “that’s well and good, but what do I, the player, actually do at the table?” Thanks to the wonders of the Powered By The Apocalypse system, the answer is simple: most of the time, you’ll be having a conversation around the table, rebel players describing what their character is doing in the world as the architect player describes the details of the scene and the way the world responds to your actions.

Occasionally your description of your actions will match the trigger of a move. At that point, the free-wheeling back-and-forth of the conversation pauses as you work through the move, working out what the consequences are for your rebel and the story you’re telling. Sometimes a move is very simple, an if-then statement:

Most of the moves in this game are more complex, though, using dice rolls and your rebel’s traits to decide what happens next. This goes one of two ways – depending on whether you’re resisting society’s pressures in the city or drawing on your inner strengths in the castle. 

Resisting in the City

In the city, your rebel acts and then sees how badly the society retaliates. The particular pressure that might crush them here is represented by one of their Stress Gauges:

• Blood: How much strain is your mental and physical health under?
• Lack: How precarious is your living situation?
• Infamy: Are you famed, tolerated or reviled?
• Heat: How aware is the castle of your rebel activities?
• Fealty: How deeply has the castle penetrated your subconscious?

Each gauge is a track six boxes long, with the first box permanently filled. If you’re doing well, you might only have that one permanent black mark to deal with; if you’re doing terribly, way more boxes will be ticked.

When you trigger a move in the city, you’ll be asked to resist a gauge (e.g. “Resist Infamy”). To do this, roll two six-sided dice and compare them to the ticks in that gauge:

• If both dice beat the number of ticks, that’s a strong hit.
• If only one die beats the number of ticks, that’s a weak hit.
• If neither die beats the number of ticks, that’s a miss, and the Architect will make a reaction.

Acting in the Castle

In the castle, nothing’s holding you back. Freed from society’s fetters, your rebel lives and dies on their own strengths – represented as Castle Stats:

• Swords: Your ability to take direct action against your foes.
• Coins: Your ability to make use of the world around you.
• Wands: Your ability to be quick-thinking and creative.
• Cups: Your ability to open your heart to the world around you. 

Each stat has a rating – as low as -1 if you’re terrible at that aspect, as high as +3 if you’re incredible at it.

When you trigger a move in the castle, you’ll be asked to invoke a stat. That means you roll two six-sided dice, add the named stat to the values of both dice, and get a result based on that sum:

• If the sum is 7 or above, that’s a hit.
  • If it’s a 7-9, that’s a weak hit.
  • If it’s 10+, that’s a strong hit.
• If the sum is 6 or less, that’s a miss: unless the move sets out what happens on a miss, the Architect will make a reaction.

Other Complications

There are a few other things going on – advantage and disadvantage changing the difficulty of rolls, conditions penalising certain moves in the city and the castle until they’re healed, occult bonds called covenants – but that’s enough for you to get a handle on how moves work. Once the move’s finished resolving, the architect player grounds the result in the fiction, shows the group how the state of the world has changed, and then the group returns to the freeform conversation – until the next move is triggered.

So – that’s how the core nuts and bolts of the game work. Next time, I’ll talk about how you put all this to work in the service of crushing tyrants and building a better world.