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I love this cast and I'm excited about the things I've got planned for them! It's a while since I've had the chance to run Heart – the campaign I ran in lockdown is up there with my best ever roleplaying game experiences.

Characters in Heart choose a Calling – the reason they're down in this extremely hazardous place – and the rulebook has this note saying that having everyone choose the same Calling can give you a nice focused campaign. That note has intrigued me for ages, and when better to give it a try than in a two-and-done game? So all four of our delvers for this game are seeking Enlightenment: they believe that somewhere in the City Beneath lies the means to achieve an otherwise impossible goal.

Tune in this time next week

Four delvers rove deep, deep into the unreality of the City Beneath.

Each seeks to achieve the unimaginable.

But in a city shaped by desire, it can be dangerous to want too strongly...

Twitch

ActualPlayUK - Twitch

Tune in this time next week

Four delvers rove deep, deep into the unreality of the City Beneath.

Each seeks to achieve the unimaginable.

But in a city shaped by desire, it can be dangerous to want too strongly...

Twitch

ActualPlayUK - Twitch

wait wait hang on, when did Tony start actually saying "Brian" instead of it the VO inserting "BRIAN"

I got to play Grant Howitt's Fucked Up Little Man at the last Indiemeet / London Indie RPG Meetup! I have never played a darksouls so every choice I made in this game was influenced by cultural osmosis. My fucked up little guy was a tooth enthusiast with a wet cough who knew a lot of gross and dangerous shortcuts. And I took the record for fastest death of The Damned One – I tried diving straight back into the acid pit we crawled out of post-resurrection and rolled a 1, perishing immediately

And I was pretty proud of the map area I drew, a broken staircase guarded by a phalanx of soldier mummies! Drawing is not a skill I've put a lot of points into, but maps are stylised and so is Dark Souls, and that helped, and I feel like I found creative ways round my own constraints

I wanted to let you guys know how important this story has become to me in light of the war in Israel. There’s no way you could have intended this, but your meditations on the callous disregard for human life in favor of capitol and the way governments side with power over their people are hitting me so hard it’s unreal. Carpenter in this recent episode worrying about the idea that people are just people who still choose to ignore and perpetuate horror made me legitimately tear up.

Thank you very much - that's really kind of you and it genuinely means so much to hear it.

Yeah, that line really whacked me back in the face when I was working on the sound design, too. (It really helps that Méabh so magnificently captures the quiet, angry, wondering humanity of Carpenter so well in that moment.)

It's a very minor thing in the wider context, but it's been swimming in my head all day and all night; yesterday we had the Prime Minister of the UK briefing to the press that it is inherently "provocative and disrespectful" for people to march through London for a ceasefire in Palestine during WWI's Armistice Day next weekend - because the "sanctity of the day" must be protected.

On one hand, that feels a breathtakingly obvious and cynical strategy to defame, misrepresent and (I think crucially) exogenise dissent against the government's foreign policy.

But it also feels, in a way that I hope we've always been clearly trying to yell about with TSV, like a real symptom of how deeply fucked-up our country's narrative-building around itself truly is; the bewilderingly successful extent to which strong, emotive, reassuring stories delivered from positions of authority continue to be used as a cover for base hypocrisies, inhuman cruelties, and selfish interests.

And the invocation of "sanctity of the day" to mean "pure and unchallengeable supremacy of a century-old war in our hearts, minds, and newspapers" really speaks to that. (I guess it feels like an inverted version of that Dr Strangelove quote, doesn't it? 'Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room.' / 'Armistice Day is no time to call for peace.')

Our media and political classes can lead a call to worship the 110-year-old icon of peace, the half-fled and semi-religious memory of it and the comforting traditions and rituals surrounding it-

-and they can use that icon, in turn, as a weapon to condemn hundreds of thousands of their own citizens from all faiths and all backgrounds who are marching for peace right now (while continuing to ignore the three-quarters of the population who want them to call for a ceasefire).

They can use that icon of peace to callously dismiss the lives and livelihoods of Palestinians suffering right now under a brutal succession of atrocities, and to downplay Western complicity right now in allowing those atrocities to continue unchecked, all in favour of the reassuring idea of showing respect for and paying silent obeisance to a ghostly Tommy soldier in a Brodie helmet with a plastic poppy tucked into his lapel.

A man who was sacrificed, and who must be forever remembered for his sacrifice.

If the superstructure is big and loud and hungry enough, maybe we won't pay too much attention to the screams coming from the base.

Anyway, to find a grace note - we know that we're writing often quite bleak and cruel stuff at a very bleak and cruel time. And while we of course didn't intend a direct comparison to current-day events, it really means a huge amount to hear that someone's finding it meaningful rather than, as we often fear, just too much of reality. So thank you again very much.