HeartQuest is, in brief, a game about playing in a shoujo magna. I’d heard of HeartQuest, off and on, mainly in the signatures of posters on RPG.net; the preview material on the website left me a bit cold, however. The idea of playing in a shoujo (that is, a comic intended for pre-teen and teenage girls) is an interesting one- such a genre focuses far more on the emotional states and relationships of the characters than on their powers, and I’d hoped for something like a lighter side version of Unknown Armies.
Instead, HeartQuest is a combination of excellent research (to my casual fan’s eyes, anywho) and system tweaks. As if torn between a stateless supplement (akin to Vampires Suck) and a more crunchy exploration of the genre via rules, the authors settled into a compromise which isn’t wholly satisfying to me.
As a description, the PDF is 160 pages long, easily readable in two columns, with a fancy font for section divisions. All of the art except the cover and back is black and white, middling to high fan drawn quality, and is almost universally an illustration of a character being written about. There are borders at the top and bottom of the pages, but not at the sides, and the text is fairly dense; you get a lot of words for your money. I didn’t notice any spelling or grammatical errors, and so was not distracted by them- I give my regards to whoever is responsible for the layout and the editing, as they did a good job.
The Good
- Lots of Explanation To someone unfamiliar with shoujo magna, HeartQuest does an excellent job in explaining the various subgenres (with particular attention paid to Teen Romance, Magical Girls, and Out Of This World, each of which get a chapter of their own), as well as providing a reasonable skimming of Japanese culture as it pertains to shoujo magna; thus, how teenagers are expected to act and interact with society at large, especially within those three subgenres.
- Lots of Citations A very comprehensive bibliography, broken down by subgenre, is provided in the back; each title has the production house responsible for it and a brief description. In a game as focused on emulating a particular style, such a resource is very useful to say the least.
- Example Campaigns A failing of many genre games is they are so focused on explaining the generals of their genres, they don’t provide enough ground to base an actual, sit around the table and roll dice game. This would have been a problem with HeartQuest- save that the authors kindly provided a set of four campaign, ready to run. One is Teen Romance (the most fleshed out), then a Magical Girls game, then two historical dramas, for excellent use either as Teen Romance in and of themselves, or as a place to set an Out Of This World game.
- Character Creation Not enough games have a Cool Attribute. More games should; it was good to see it included here, as such a quality is so important to many shoujo stories. And the skill list is extremely comprehensive, with every skill getting a sentence or two describing both it and how it’s used. Much as with Big Eyes, Small Mouth (a game which HeartQuest must inevitably be compared to), it’s not hard to recreate popular characters or create new ones who feel in genre and complete, without any need to invent wacky new Gifts or Faults.
The Not As Good
- FUDGE I don’t like FUDGE. I don’t dislike it really; it just doesn’t do anything for me. FUDGE is very generic, and I would have preferred to have seen some thought go into building a rules base that would actively encourage in genre play as well as in creation. Although some tweaks are made to the engine (specifically the combat resolution; the a death spiral now exists via the Damage Threshold, and the Offensive Damage Values and Defense Damage Values are tweaked- all to provide a more exciting and drawn out fight), the underlying assumptions aren’t tinkered with- although they are thoroughly and competently explained.
- Traditional Assumption in an Untraditional Genre HeartQuest is breaking new grounds in what it looks at, but not in how it looks at it. It assumes that the PCs are point balanced against one another (despite most shoujo having a very clear Most Important Protagonist), that socializing should be primarily covered through negotiation between Player and GM with some dice roll trimming while combat gets some more interesting tactical decision making, and so on. Given how Gossip is at least as important in most shoujo as Dodge, this is almost criminal, and emphasizes the ‘statless supplement’ feel of much of the game. An optional rule for Drama Points, here called Heart Points, exists- but the recommendations for their use are inconsistent (a single Fudge die reroll, or a flat +4 for just 1 Heart Point) and conservative (weird, player-instigated chance occurrences should cost multiple Heart Points, although the examples given were perfectly in genre and should have been encouraged).
The Bad
- Lack of Personality or Relationship Mechanics This is what I was really looking forward to; mechanics providing a guideline for a character’s emotional and mental state, as well as how they feel about others and how they perceive others as feeling about them. Although partially covered above, I feel this deserves special mention. Especially since, in the forward, the authors explicitly address this as a concern of the game, and a difficulty in writing HeartQuest over all. Such mechanics are totally lacking; it is assumed that the GM and players will subsume themselves into the characters. Which isn’t bad, but it does make me shed a tear for the could have been.
- Handling the Awkward I’ll admit; I’m spoiled. I’d expected something like Sex and Sorcery’s advice on how to handle some of the more explicit aspects of relationships; instead, the author’s simply advise everyone to do a fade to black and start a new scene elsewhere. Nothing about building an explicit social contract prior to the game’s start, nothing about advice on discussing comfort levels on friendship, romance and love.
Overall, I can’t quite recommend HeartQuest as a game in and of itself. It’s an interesting idea for a game, and the fluff part solid. But the document didn’t sell me on the idea, and- despite the campaign seeds, I’m left with neither a burning desire to start a game, nor a solid grasp on what play would sound like. It's not that anything was terribly bad; it's that nothing was good enough to really sell me.
