Voidheart Symphony - What Are You Fighting For?

Hi gang. Maz here. My job at RR&D these days is mostly to be the person who sits in meetings and says “yeah but what about global shipping”, and I’m sorry to say I’ve been saying that a lot recently.

Our original plan for Voidheart Symphony was that we’d launch in January, and aim to fulfil your books to you in July. As it stands, we’re still hoping our production schedule will be the same, but we’re choosing to delay launching the crowdfunder until things are a little more settled.

There are a few reasons for this. One is that global shipping lanes are a little on the spicy side right now, and that makes our shipping estimates hard to nail - we’d prefer to give you as real a number as possible, rather than just a gif of our logistics folks shrugging and going “tariffs?” As well, we’ve got other projects in flight (literally) right now; giving Dagger in the Heart specifically a little more time to land, and the whole situation time to settle, means we’ll be better placed to be clear about how Voidheart Symphony will go.

Another reason is that we’ve got some team members unwell right now–including me–and we want to avoid loading more work on top of folks already working incredibly hard: it’s better to hold off a few weeks while everyone gets well and gets other work finished, so we can give this the fanfare it deserves.

And one consideration is particularly apparent today: we don’t want to cut across or into events in the USA, especially in this first week when it’s likely that a lot of people will need to focus on reality rather than escapism. 

The good news is that, as a result, Mina has more time to work on more of the new version of the game. We’ve had some fantastic guidance from Melody Watson, our development editor on Voidheart, and that’s resulted already in some new features and new design ideas for this new release (stay tuned for more on that from Chant soon…). The development work is continuing as planned, especially now we know so many of you are excited to join us in this journey–thank you to everyone who’s already shown support. You make it all possible.

So: Voidheart is coming. It’s going to be a little longer to launch than we’d hoped, but it’s coming. Tell your friends, and watch your inbox for more updates.

Since there are over 1,000 people here now (hello, this is mildly terrifying)... how well do you know Voidheart? Are you long-time fans, or is this your first contact?

Polls are nice and all, but we'd love to hear your actual answers in the comments.

OK, if you got this far you've probably got a rough idea - but Voidheart's a really personal game for its creator, Minærva, and we think it's important to share why and how it came to exist. So here, in her own words, is how she came to create Voidheart Symphony.  


"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