It’s a dark dark game, so I guess that it’s … artistic? for me to have borked the video and arrived an an all-black-void recording.

I hope it can be fun listening anyway, but I really regret losing the explicit attention we were paying throughout this session. The player-characters did not interact at all, so it will sound like three soloists trading off, but the reality of play was far more social, attentive, group-ish, and generally engaged with one another.

Looking back over it as I was editing, I think this session is mostly “feel our way” and results in a fairly vague or undirected result, for several reasons. Part of it was fictional; this is the point where the setting and the various NPCs began to “push back” and contribute to situations, and I suspect it’s an important moment for Monsterhearts in general, when the naturalism tends to slough away in favor of outright surrealism or horror for the whole setting, not just isolated in the player-characters.

Olek seems to me to have done the heavy lifting, as nearly the whole time sees him rejecting help, retreating, undergoing fits of angst, vomiting amazing amounts of stale blood, passing out, breaking a mirror … that sort of thing. It kept going every time we focused on him, to the point of almost absurdity – and right then, the breaking moment arrived and yet again, Piotr turns out to be the most human of the three of us. This session is definitely “his” in those terms.

In my case, I struggled at first with arriving at a new Hunger for Dagny, which is a big characterization shift for a ghoul, and then with deciding on a new Move when she hit 5 XP. (The one you’ll see me take here, Watchful Golem, didn’t come into play or work for me at all, and we switched it to something else in a later session). I arrived at an idea or the properly motivated sense of “yes, I will now do this” quite late in the session.

This was our fourth session, and we’ve played six, so look forward to more, and uh, more active, climactic stuff in it coming up.