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.
Building a Better World
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.
Step 3: Holding It Together
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.
What will you create together?
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!
