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(+5)

The growing microgenre that is Carly Rae Jepsen ttrpgs (see also: LA Hallucination) continues to deliver both on lush designs and cool premises.

Black Heart  is a decently crunchy one-shot game about being cultists in a small farming community preparing the way for their god (Carly Rae Jepsen)'s arrival. It tracks stats and time and is pretty structured, to the point where it has an almost boardgame-like or werewolf-like feel to it, while at the same time maintaining plenty of freedom to interact and roleplay.

It also has lovely, thematic illustrations and extremely immersive layout, and the design is deeply solid. The mechanics and gameflow are pretty clear, there's hidden snippets of Jepsen lyrics, and it's a really fun book to read.

I think my only major critique of Black Heart is that it's definitely not low-prep for the GM. If you're GMing this, you should sit down in advance and write out (or at least outline) a module. It *is* possible to seat-of-your-pants a game of Black Heart, but it's not heavily supported.

Fortunately, Black Heart's GMing advice is good, and will point you in the right direction for running it.

Overall, Black Heart is a great game for folks who like character drama, the occult, community-focused games, dark and atmospheric stories, and Carly Rae Jepsen. I would absolutely encourage folks to pick up a copy and check it out.

Minor Issues:

-Page 3, Blacksmith, "They masterworks all" they're?

-Page 5, Weird, "your meeting will increase by 1" your weird will increase?

-Page 5 says you get a mutation at 5 Weird, page 6 says you get it at 6

-Page 7, Gold Veins, "you made of gold" you're

-Page 9, Assist and Visit feel pretty unclear. Assist uses 'visit' as part of its text, but Visit is a better version of Assist. Also, when you Visit, do you go to your own matching location, or someone else's?

-Page 9, "as you face a challenge to difficult" too

-I'm not at all sure from the explanation on page 9 how your Weird stat comes into play on challenges.

-Page 14, The Archon, "This person is responsible is to prepare the ritual and maintain" responsible for preparing the ritual and maintaining

-Page 14, The Emissary, "and watches too much weird" and watches out for too much weird

-Page 14, Emissary and Hanged Man, missing italics from their bottom sections

-Page 16, "failing challemges" challenges

-Page 17, Partial Success, "The God has taken a different for" form

(+3)

Thank you for this very in-depth review! I really appreciate you taking the time to write it and document everything.

I have plans to re-do the writing and interiors soon, to clean up the mistakes and clear up some of the mechanics. Thanks for the list for small changes so I can make sure I don't miss anything!

Also: Did you take a look at the Tome of Knowledge? It has some stories to help guide a new GM and cut down on some prep, but I also plan to expand those for new GMs even more in the update!

Once again: thank you!!

(+1)

No worries! I'm trying to work my way through reading everything that was in the bundle, so I haven't checked out the Tome yet, but sample stories definitely sounds great.

Thank you for writing Black Heart! It's a really cool game.

(+1)

Just realized Tome was in the downloads and I missed it. Downloading now.

(+2)

Okay, I've read through Tome.

It's really good, and fills in a lot of lore. The thing I was sort of hoping it would do would be to provide a list of locations in the village / events and event progressions that can happen at those locations, but I also recognize this would take up a bunch of pages.

Minor Issues:

-Page 8, 1st para, "that leads to them to leave a note" leaving a note