HeartQuest Diceless

Game: HeartQuest Diceless
Publisher: Seraphim Guard
Series: Active Exploits
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 7th, July 2003
Reviewer’s Rating: 7/10   [ Good ]
Total Score: 35
Average Score: 7.00

A match made in Heaven. Soul mates. It’s a perfect union and it’s so romantic. I’m talking about HeartQuest meeting Active Exploits. HeartQuest is the Shoujo Manga roleplaying game and Shoujo is the style of manga that’s targeted a young, teenage, female audience.

Active Exploits is the diceless roleplaying system. How many young teenage girls do you know who relish rolling buckets of dice? Active Exploits is particularly good as an Internet forum gaming system and that’s probably where most Shoujo roleplaying goes on.

The original HeartQuest game (available in both PDF and paperback) made use of the Fudge roleplaying system. This was a good choice at the time. Fudge is a solid set of mechanics, easy enough to learn and easy enough to include in HeartQuest without legal drama.

Active Exploits is a better choice. There’s less paraphernalia in Active Exploits. In fact, the Active Exploits system only kicks in for harder than normal challenges. More roleplaying and less rollplaying; well, actually, no rollplaying at all! Active Exploits is free. You don’t even need to download the rules separately as a copy of the mechanics is included with HeartQuest Diceless.

The mechanics are in a separate PDF and this makes it easy for a HeartQuest GM to let the players read the Shoujo bits and spare them from system details they might be best learning in play.

HeartQuest doesn’t just introduce roleplaying to the reader; it introduces Shoujo manga too. Shoujo is Japanese for girl. Shoujo manga’s most simple translation is “comics for girls”.

I think the most famous example of Shoujo manga is Sailor Moon but there are plenty of others and HeartQuest mentions dozens and then lists some more.

If you think this is a stupid idea, that a Shoujo roleplaying game could never work and that you’ve no intention of roleplaying a teenage girl or some schoolboy who hangs around with a lot of girls then HeartQuest isn’t for you. Simply put, HeartQuest will not win you over.

If you think that a Shoujo style game might work then HeartQuest will prove to you that it could work. If you like the idea then HeartQuest gives you all need to get you going.

Character Generation is in the HeartQuest side of the PDF package. It lists such skills as Flattery, Fashion Sense, Gossip and Shopping. The game needs to be more than just stereotypical teenage girls of today though – and it is. It isn’t just that the skills also include Doctor, Interrogate and Alchemy but that there’s provision for gimmicks (advantages or disadvantages) and special abilities too.

Special Abilities, an optional extra to suit the game, have a chapter of their own and gimmicks are part of the core character generation system.

Don’t expect these character gimmicks to be politically correct. It’s not because Active Exploits is published by Politically Incorrect Games but because the original HeartQuest had these gimmicks and Shoujo manga quite often has plot twists that would have a conservative grandmother tssking unapprovingly. Gender Bender is a negative gimmick. You could play a fourteen-year-old girl who looks like a boy. Lechery is a negative gimmick too. You could play a fourteen-year-old girl who looks like a boy and can’t resist using her flirt skill on the young men either. It’s quite a common plot twist to discover that one of the characters is male when you thought he was female or visa versa.

These gimmicks reflect Shoujo traits well. How many times have you seen a male character break into a running nosebleed when he finds himself (through accident or design) a “compromising situation”? – and I’m using HeartQuest’s euphemism there, not mine.

Sure enough, nosebleeder is another negative gimmick. We’ve also got Animal Companion, Guardian Angel, Blunt and Tactless, Clumsy and Glutton. These are all genre stalwarts. These examples are just a small selection.

Magic and supernatural powers (supernormal gimmicks) are available as Special Abilities if the sub-genre supports it. The Magic Girl story is fairly common within Shoujo. Active Exploits handles this subject well enough. It simply assigns a general level (-1 through 5) to the power and this again matches the broad strokes of typical manga and anime plots.

After teaching you how to generate a Shoujo character HeartQuest provides instruction on how to play the game. This is appropriate for people entirely new to the concept of roleplaying and perhaps those of us who are looking to see how Shoujo might be handled. An early example of “description and declaration” is what might happen if you declare you’re going to kiss Kasumi.

‘An example of a simple declared action is “I kiss Kasumi”. What happens next is up to several things. If Kasumi is a player-character, she might have an opinion about being kissed by you. If she consents to the kiss, there usually won’t be a problem resolving the immediate action – you and Kasumi exchange an intimate moment.

If Kasumi doesn’t want to be kissed, on the other hand, it gets more complicated. Her player can say “Kiss him? No way! I’m going to slap his face instead!” You have both declared actions, and the Director has to step in and resolve how the scene plays out. And the Director may have other tricks up his sleeve – maybe Kasumi’s former boyfriend (an NPC or “non-player character”) is watching all this and decides to barge in on the scene, posing a whole new set of problems.

If Kasumi is an NPC, it is up to the Director to decide if she will accept or reject your kiss. He’ll make the decision based on how well it will advance the story you are playing out. Perhaps he’ll make you roll to see if you can carry through on your intentions. Or perhaps he’ll throw in some other complication. If he’s really sadistic, he’ll do all of the above.’

The chapter goes on to offer advice on how to run the game. The GM term is (as you noticed) Director. HeartQuest remembers the most important point; it’s a game and games are supposed to be fun.

Chapter Four will make or break HeartQuest for many people; it’s here that the game addresses the issue of Teen Romance. We’re told about typical school life in Japan, what the exam system is like, that school uniform is universal and that until recently the age of consent was 14. It doesn’t say what the age of consent is now. Shonen-ai and Shoujo-ai are the terms for boy-love and girl-love. Homosexual relationships are also quite common in Shoujo stories.

I think HeartQuest’s matter of fact approach combined with plenty of references to manga examples works well. There’s an honesty here. If the RPG had tried to sweep the issue under the carpet then I’d have been suspicious, extremely suspicious given the character traits.

At the same time, by presenting a straight-faced description of life and love among Japanese teenagers, HeartQuest doesn’t make too big an issue out of it either. The mantra for HeartQuest is that if you’re entirely sceptical about this in a roleplaying game then you’re not going to be won over if you think it might work then this chapter will show you how it could work and if you’re already won over then chapter four is a valuable resource.

Shoujo isn’t about kissing friends; it’s about having loyal friends who stand shoulder to shoulder with you.

Chapter Five begins on page 35. There are 84 pages in the core HeartQuest PDF. Chapter Five describes the Magic Girl genre within Shoujo and the sub-sets within it. It’s not a campaign setting as such; rather it’s a set of observations on the trends and themes common to Magic Girl campaigns. “Campaign” is entirely the wrong word to use, let’s toss out the old military analogies and use TV or comic books ones instead.

You’d have a Magic Girl series and individual scenarios or adventures would-be episodes. The next chapter talks about Historical Romances as a series style as well as Out of This World style.

The next three chapters – which move us rapidly towards the end of the PDF – are sample adventures. Each adventure uses a different Shoujo genre. “Sendai Academy” is a teen romance set in a school. You’ll pick up on the strict rules and regulations in the education system here.

Ghost Tamer Miyaki also features schoolgirls but it’s more a Magic Girl styled adventure, with strong supernatural elements. Steel Heidi is a Historical Romance set in Germany, proving that you can escape Japan. Each of these three adventures come complete with illustrated NPCs. Illustrations in manga are always a strong plus point and these are of sufficient quality to count.

The sample character sheets are also a good indication of what sort of attribute level is right for different types of games.

If you want more sample characters and NPCs then you’re in luck. There’s more. These multi-paged characters show that a detailed and engaging background is vital to the genre. Shoujo manga is almost always character-driven – whereas others, like the Mecha genre, have the luxury of falling back onto special effects or high tension action.

HeartQuest concludes with a lengthy Bibliography and Resources section. If you’ve watched any anime you’ll probably find that you’ve seen some Shoujo.

This PDF could do with bookmarks. All PDFs, even short ones, need bookmarks and rarely a review goes by when I fail to point out the absence of bookmarks. If you read on-screen then you’ll obsess about them too.

Look to the bundled Active Exploit rules for an example of good bookmarking. HeartQuest is simply but effectively laid out; two columns of text, no irregular shaped illustrations to force the text into too narrow columns, full-page illustrations to divide chapters and discrete sidebars that shouldn’t gobble through your ink. HeartQuest is black and white but the front cover is in full colour.

The character sheets in Active Exploits are more like “character strips” since they’re only about a quarter of a page high and this makes it easy to include them at the top or bottom of PDF pages. HeartQuest uses this well.

I thought Shoujo roleplaying might work. HeartQuest proved to me that, if done right, it will work. I don’t tend to like cutesy characters anywhere near my roleplaying but once again, HeartQuest has convinced me that, if it’s done right, it could work.

I think HeartQuest is a good way to help ensure that the game is done right and I think joining forces with Active Exploits will help too.