Thanks so much for all your support! We'll be in touch soon about what happens next (and I think Maz is writing a big post about the current US tariff trash fire), but for now we're going to take a bit of a break. Thanks again – I'm so happy that we're able to do this together!

Best wishes,
Mina

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

20 hours to go and I'm feeling optimistic about that AP stretch goal! But that's not what we're here to talk about today. Instead, I'm going to talk about the members of your revolution that you don't get to play – your contacts and your covenants with them.

If you've played previous versions of Voidheart Symphony, you'll know that only a part of your abilities come from the playbook your rebel is using – the rest come from your relationships with other people, and specifically the relationships you've invested with occult significance and turned into covenants. Your crew covenant is your most reliable of these; you're already holding up your side of the bargain by committing to a new target, and so your crew covenant starts each investigation intense and ready to use. This revolution won't go far if it's only limited to your crew, however. That's where contacts come in.

What are contacts? Simply put, they're NPCs – characters controlled by the Architect or the group, instead of any individual rebel player. But it's more than that: every contact is someone your rebel has met, someone who might be interested in and useful to your revolution. They might be someone you meet while fighting the vassal in the city, a recovering victim or repentant minion of a vassal, or a chance connection your rebel makes when you Let Your Hair Down or Connect with someone. Contacts don't offer you powers just yet, though: first you'll need to perform the ritual to form a Minor Covenant.

This ritual is key to breaking your contact out of the mindset the castle wants to force on them, and convince them to put their faith in the new world you're building. It's pretty simple to do: you hang out and get comfortable with them, and then just ask them what they most need right now. The magic is that they'll tell you truthfully and honestly, asking you for something that – in the castle's paradigm – would be way too big or risky or weird to ever ask for. They've done their part, and now it's your turn. You put in the work to get them what they need, even as their internalized castle-mindset subconsciously warps reality to make it harder than you might have expected. Break through that barrier, meet their needs, and you've broken their chains and showed them that a better world is possible. That's when the real magic happens.

As a side note, this ritual is pretty much completely new to Voidheart Revised. I've never been completely comfortable with the idea that you can draw power from a contact without them having an inkling of what you were using the power for. In this new version of the game, every contact you have a major covenant with is aware of your shadow revolution, and has invested their hopes and dreams into your bond.

Major covenants are potent sources of power, each giving a unique kind of strength. To group these bonds, the book uses the major arcana of the tarot: a Wheel of Fortune bond lets you navigate life's ups and downs, a Chariot bond helps you get places fast, a Moon bond taps into the power of nightmares. Still, I'd encourage you to tweak them at the table so that your Sun covenant is distinct from another player's, even if that's just tweaking how the powers look in the story.

Your access to this power is contingent on the contact having faith and trust in you – you can't take these people's support for granted. That's why each major covenant starts the investigation faded. This isn't because they suddenly hate you, but because maintaining that level of investment in a relationship is hard. It's on you to Check In with the contacts whose covenants you want to access and intensify the relationship by spending time with them. That comes with benefits, as every major covenant also comes with a Hangout Move that triggers when you spend time with them: the Sun offers you answers to your questions, the Magician teaches you new skills, the Oracle shows you your city's hidden beauty.

Another side note: this also helps players keep their options at a manageable level instead of starting each investigation with half a dozen or more powers to juggle. You can pick which covenants you want to 'activate' in the early days of the investigation, letting you decide on a build that's useful for this particular vassal.

Once a covenant's intense, you can call on its powers during this investigation. At the base level, its City Move and Castle Move give you powers you can call on for as long as it's charged up. For example, the Gardener lets you nurture and heal your allies in the city, while in the castle it lets you consult the accumulated wisdom of everyone who has ever cared for you. Beyond that, intense covenants are also a useful safety net – if a roll goes badly, you can fade any of your intense covenants to re-roll the dice, though you open the contact up to danger if you do so. Similarly, a charged-up crew covenant lets you lend you dice to other rebels when you act in concert, vastly boosting your chance of success. Particularly important relationships can become committed, letting you exhaust them twice before they're fully faded.

Finally, it's not just your intentional actions that can affect covenants. As you end a session, you look over each covenant's 'nurture' and 'betray' triggers, seeing if anything you did might have affected your relationship. Even if the contact was never on-screen, your perseverance against great odds might have intensified your Strength covenant – or your willingness to spurn tradition might have robbed your Sage covenant of power.

While the tarot typology of covenants is default setup, there are many other ways to conceive of your bonds with others. The book has guidance on building new arcana, or even constructing whole new systems to use at your table – maybe you want to give characters power based on star signs and planets, comic book heroes, favorite animals, whatever you desire. There's even a worked example of an alchemy-inspired system where different locations are the mystic tools you use to transmute your contacts up and down the ladder of reagents towards your magnum opus.

Whether you're using the core covenant system or making your own, the key truth remains – your rebels will need the support of their community to win, and by the time you've played a full Voidheart Symphony campaign you'll have built a vast, thriving, interconnected web of people you can rely on. And that's my cue to thank you all for your support on this campaign, thank you for reading this far, and celebrate the final day of this campaign!

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

£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