Voidheart Symphony: What is it?

“There’s a wound in the world, and no-one cares.”

Those were the very first words I wrote for Voidheart Symphony, in the last days of 2018. Surrounded by inequality, tired and homeless and transitioning, I was tired of how unfair the world was,  and how nobody around me could see a better way. Those words poured from the heart, and as I wrote what became the game’s introduction I fleshed out that core idea piece by piece. 

The world is hurt and hurting more every day, but it’s really hard to just tell stories of mundane people in mundane struggles? What if I added in a dash of magical realism to the mix – made the people hurting my community supernaturally-empowered, but also gave the people fighting back their own occult ways to tipping the scales back a little in their favour? Add in the gothic combat of Rhapsody of Blood, the split-world gameplay of Persona 5 and DmC: Devil May Cry, and (for the upcoming revised edition) a few more years of game design and political reading, and you have Voidheart Symphony. 

You play rebels – a crew of folks who’ve found a tear in the world that leads into an eldritch castle full of monsters. Worse, each tear you find leads into a different castle-shard, bonded to one of your city’s mundane, human monsters. Its halls mirror their desires; its horrors blight their enemies; its shadows shield them from justice. 

To bring down this tyrant, this vassal of the castle, you’ll need to investigate and undermine them in the city at the same time as you delve into that castle-shard and find the inner demon at the heart of it. You’ll need to decide every day whether you’re diving into that otherworld, working in the city, or tending to your mundane life – and with every day that passes, the vassal gets closer to permanently harming those you care about. 

If you win, you can take the power the castle loaned them and put it to better use – healing your community, giving that vassal a conscience, redefining yourself, even risking your soul by infiltrating the castle’s hierarchy. And then life goes on, and your rebels get some breathing room to deal with mundane crises – until the next vassal surfaces, and you start again.

It’s a game about fighting for your community and forming it into a bona fide movement. It’s a game about breaking and entering the nightmare-castle that is empowering your city’s worst bastards. It’s a game about finding power in your hopes and dreams and turning them into a gun that can blast away the pillars of hegemony. It’s a game about how making a better world doesn’t pay the bills, and how you can come home after slaying a demon to find a leaking roof and overdue rent. It’s a game about balancing the possibilities of the void and the mundane cares of your heart, playing your own part in this symphony of revolution and trusting your crew to do their part too. 

All art is political, but while I was writing Voidheart I felt the limits of that keenly. Art cannot change people’s material conditions, cannot house the homeless and feed the starving. But what it can do – what Voidheart aims to do – is to celebrate the struggle, to model the forming of a movement, to provide a space for people to imagine how a better world could be created – and what they might become, in that world. And also, it can be sick as shit to form your will into a blade of shadow and flames and decapitate the avatar of your landlord.

One final question remains: what is this new version of Voidheart, specifically? As earlier mentioned, the first Kickstarter for Voidheart Symphony happened in a tough time in my life. All the homelessness and transphobia and so on made running a crowdfunder extremely hard, particularly as a solo operator. As a result, the final product was more compromised than I ever wanted. 

Now I’m six years wiser, safe and loved and supported. I’m very grateful that my colleagues in RRD saw the promise in this game and encouraged me to return to it. That’s why we’re making Voidheart Symphony Revised: new layout, new writing, new art, new form factor. This isn’t a full second edition, but it’s a game that looks better, reads better, has way better information flow, and has the full support of one of the best TTRPG companies in the world. 

I’m very excited to see what we can create together.

Minærva McJanda

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