Hey folks!

Now that we've passed the £60k threshold, I thought I'd tell you a little more about the Hideout Rules I've been teasing you with. But first: happy Trans Day of Visibility to all who celebrate it! Voidheart Symphony is a game deeply based in my own trans and queer experiences – not just because the game has pronouns on its character sheet or pride flags in its art, but also because my experiences as a poly plural lesbian trans woman have deeply shaped how I see the struggle to make a better world. Not just in the sense of 'the people in power don't respect my identity' or 'the UK health service is a transphobic nightmare', but also the way it showed me that a better world was possible – that I could become something the ten-years-ago me could never imagine and find a wealth of community and joy in the process.

That's what I'm trying to put in this game – that sense of realizing incredible new truths about your self and the universe, and making a beautiful, joyous, queer new world with your friends. That, and it being extremely cool to stomp a demonic tyrant into the dust.

So – I hope you have a great day, and end the day a little closer to your ideal self than you started.

In the 1st edition of Voidheart Symphony, the hideout was little more than a stub. It was a cool place to prepare for your battles, and you could put down entrances to it across your city, but in terms of what you could actually do there you were limited to these tiny playbook world advances, and one option to pick in Rivers In The Desert when you take down a vassal:

In the end it was serviceable, but not very compelling. As part of writing the setting chapter, I realized that the hideout could be so much more than this. Every space that your characters can visit in the game is built from a particular conception on the void/world relationship: the mundane world is the simple "the world is physical and real, the void is dreams and imagination", the castle is a growing cancer of "the world exists to serve you, the void can give you power". Wouldn't the hideout, then, be the nascent world that your rebels are building through their own philosophies and struggles? That's what these new rules expansions are all about!

Step 1: Claim Territory
Your hideout comes into existence as soon as you win your first victory. You've declared your rebel cause to the universe by standing up to one of the castle's chosen followers – and so the cosmos responds in turn. To begin with, this newborn realm is pretty tiny – one room, one exit to the real world – but it already shows promise. If you beat the vassal, the void predominates, filling the hideout with things that would make each rebel feel empowered, dangerous and free. If you lost your first fight, it's the world that comes to your aid, filling the space with whatever you need to feel secure, cared for and serene. Either way, this space also grows an exit – a portal that takes you to a mundane location significant to one of the rebels.

Step 2: Expropriate Reality
Your hideout is an inversion of the vassals' castle-shards – while those exist to funnel stolen reality into the castle's maw, your hideout is the conduit you use to return the avatar's spoils back to the people. Every time you do this, you bind the hideout closer to the dreams and reality of your city – letting it increase in size and share its blessings with your community.

What does that mean in-game? Well, every time you take down a vassal, you can choose to grab a Hideout Advance at your target's tier or below. Each advance is a permanent upgrade for the hideout, shared by all the crew. Take down a tier 1 vassal – a Knight hurting their family, their students, their neighbors – and you'll get small upgrades that help find your footing. Maybe you make extra hideout exits in other friendly locations, build an early-warning system if the vassals' minions are approaching a hideout exit, create a mystic marker of your membership in the crew, or one of the other options:



Take down a tier 2 vassal – a Noble pushing others to cause pain and misery – and you can claim Hideout Advances that start getting spooky. Maybe you build a Dark Portal that can take you directly into your target's mind, a DIY Cornucopia that can erase the scarcities you face in the mundane world, or a Genius Loci that grants sentience and personality to the hideout. Or maybe you use Secret Streets to begin stitching your allied locations together into a network of roads hidden from your enemies.



Finally, tier 3 vassals – Monarchs ruling systems of pain and oppression – hold the keys to the highest tier of power. As you reclaim what they've stolen from your city, you can use it to make the hideout more real than whatever the castle is trying to become. Maybe that manifests as the ability to teleport your crew and your foes directly to the hideout, no matter where in the cosmos you were before. Maybe it's investing your hideout with will and flesh, letting its nascent consciousness walk out of the doors and into the city with you. Or maybe it's pulling those Secret Streets together into a whole new district of your city, tucked safely half-way into the void and invisible to your enemies. With enough power, maybe you could even push the castle entirely out of your city – and let the city's people decide what they become once they're free of its shackles.

Even when you're using mystical power, it's always easier to break than it is to build. If you want to keep this new world together, you'll need to put the work in. The way this works in-game is that your hideout gets its own crisis at the start of each investigation – small hideouts will likely experience minor issues that you just need to keep an eye on, while city district-sized hideouts are more likely to give you major problems of governance and community management that become a major sub-plot during investigations.

Keep a lid on this crisis and you get to pick a boon between investigations – maybe one of your contacts volunteers unexpected skills, your linked locations experience a rush of good fortune, or a strange void-spirit takes an interest in you. If the crisis is still around at the end of the investigation, though, it's bad news for your hideout – its amenities might be damaged, one of its connections to the mundane world might be severed, or you might even face a schism as some of its residents lose faith in your revolution.

It's not enough to take power from your city's monsters – you need to be better than them, and build a structure that lasts. Only then can you reach your new world.



So! That's the broad idea of hideouts, and what I'm trying to do with them in this edition. This material isn't quite playtest-ready yet, but you'll get a draft of it once it's ready for your feedback. Let me know below if you have any questions or ideas about this stuff – and let's try and get that AP podcast at £85,000!

With love and power,
Mina

Actually, it's anywhere from 77 hours on down, depending when you see this notification.

£60,000 is behind us, vanishing as it chokes on our dust. Additional rules for your rebels' hideout are officially in the book!

Next one up is holographic foil on the cover at £65,000. We're both very excited about this and pretty damn confident we'll hit it. (If we don't, I will wrap myself in a holo, or at least iridescent, shroud and grieve loudly and visibly for the lost opportunity for several months.)

Look at that cast! Nathan Blades, Fiona Howat, Naomi Clarke, Candace the Magnificant, and Minerva McJanda herself! The story we could tell around that table!

It's going to take a big push over the next few days to get us to the £85,000 we need for this AP, but it's not impossible. If you haven't already, we would love it if you spread the word to fellow players online or in person. We've already told just about everyone we can but we'll be doing so again, louder. 

The last few days of a crowdfunder are like the final drop on a rollercoaster, in that I feel a little bit nervous and a tiny bit like my stomach's half a mile above me, and also I scream a lot. Stick with us: Mina's a lot more coherent and I'll see if I can get another update from her before we wrap! 

- Chant

With one week to go, either we unleash all our big announcements in one tidal wave of cool, or we forever hold our peace. Guess which we’re choosing?

You seemed to quite like the setting chapter Mina shared a couple of weeks ago, and we really like it. Which leads to our first big announcement: 

YOU CAN HIDE AN IN-WORLD REBEL ZINE IN YOUR PLAYERS’ HOMES

That’s right, we’re making the setting section as a real zine, with notes from real rebels, with staples and rough paper and a definite sense that it was produced by an art school dropout and printed in the local library. 

It’s a great way to introduce players to the setting of Voidheart Symphony (and in doing so tempt them into playing it), and it’s also just a beautifully designed piece of art.

The zine’s included in the Everything pledge level, and available as an add-on for £7.50.

Inspired by the stories of your games and rebels, we’ve figured out what the final missing piece of the revised Voidheart is. It’s you! 

We’re offering an extremely limited pledge tier that will get twelve backers featured in the core Voidheart Symphony book as a potential contact for rebels. We’ll need some notes on the type of person you want to be and a photo you own the rights to. We’ll develop a character concept out of the notes, and photobash the photo to fit the feel of the book.

We want an actual play. We just do. We want a bunch of really excellent players and a stellar GM to take this gem of a book and bring it to life in a story that gets its hooks into you and won’t leave you alone until you finish it. 

So we’re making a podcast. Featuring some of our favourite people to play with (and watch play!), we’re aiming for a 7-8 episode story arc that will be available wherever you get your podcasts. We’ve carefully balanced the cast for drama, humour, warmth, and emotional intensity; all the things we want you to experience when you play Voidheart Symphony yourselves.

We’ve got Fiona Howat (What Am I Rolling? RPGeeks) GMing and Naomi Clarke (The Secret of St. Kilda, What Am I Rolling, Til Death Do Us Heart) producing. Naomi’s also playing, alongside Nathan Blades (Til Death Do Us Heart, Skyjacks), Candace the Magnificent (Scattered Choices, Unlikely Heroes) and Minerva McJanda who I assume requires no further introduction.

Now, APs are quite expensive. We need to get to £85,000 to do this – so please help us get the word out about Voidheart Symphony. Tell your fellow players, tell your friends, tell your gran (she’ll love it, we promise), tell your Friendly Local Game Store, and tell every social media platform you’re on, as often as you can bear to. We’ve only got seven days to shoot for the moon. 

Until next time,

Chant

Hey folks, Mina here!

Today is the start of the second half of this campaign – there's 14 days remaining, and I just want to thank you all for your enthusiasm and support! I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do in the back half. We've got plenty planned still to announce, but on the advice of my cunning and wise producer I'm keeping quiet on that for now.

What I can announce is that we've passed £55,000! As well as being a great milestone of support – over twice what the original crowdfunder raised 5 years ago – we're applying Spot UV to the book's cover to make certain elements pop both color-wise and texture-wise.



As a reminder, at £60,000, we're adding expanded Hideout rules to the book letting your crew fully grow and customize their own extradimensional pocket realm. Want to turn the hideout into a proper home, with all the amenities you need to live off grid? Want to open a doorway into the void and gaze into its darkness for strange insights? Want to give the hideout a mind, a personality, even a body that can leave this realm and help you in the mundane world? Then you should look forward to this expansion!

And at this point I'm also announcing our £65,000 stretch goal: holographic foiling for the cover! Let me tell you, here at RRD towers we've been going feral for foil ever since we saw what's possible once you go beyond the boring, passé gold or silver or red. So: imagine the cover, or more specifically the title region:


But instead of being standard, simple block colors it's one of these:

To be clear, these aren't the final selection and we haven't made any decisions on the foil type – maybe we'll have a poll once we hit this goal – but I'm very excited to get to use this holofoil treatment on my book!

Best wishes,
Mina