Voidheart Symphony is a tabletop roleplaying game about seeing all the ways the system is broken and fighting to make it better. The world’s hard and cruel, and it seems like it’s run by the worst people – and those people have help. They’re backed by the castle, a predatory reality latched onto our own. To fight back, you'll use a Powered by the Apocalypse framework with additional inspiration from the Resistance System (Heart, Spire) to build relationships with allies, investigate and undermine the influence of the castle and then step into a psychic otherworld to tear down the castle brick by brick.

Influenced by stories of occult revolution like The Invisibles and The Matrix, and split-world games like Persona 5 and DmC: Devil May Cry, Voidheart Symphony combines action and empathy for a game about holding onto hope in the face of overwhelming oppression.

Voidheart Symphony was first released five years ago. Some of you reading this probably supported its first crowdfunding run. If you're one of them, thank you from the bottom of our hearts. If you’re new to Voidheart, feel free to skip to the next bit.

What we’re making now is a revised edition, reworked with the benefit of another five years of experience and the additional expertise of Rowan, Rook & Decard – specifically Grant Howitt (Spire: The City Must Fall, Heart: The City Beneath, Eat the Reich, Royal Blood). We are: 

If all goes well and we hit our stretch goals, we’ll be adding the glamour Voidheart Symphony deserves, with luxury finishes exclusive to Backerkit and additional content to expand the book, and the potential of the game, even further.

If you already know Voidheart and you want to know what else is new, skip to What Are We Making.

Voidheart Symphony takes place across two distinct states of reality, the city and the castle. The city’s the real world; the castle is the greedy, twisted, parasite reality latched onto it. 

By day, you live in the city. It’s hard here, especially for people who don’t fit in. You have needs, and those needs have to be met: maintaining relationships, making rent, all the mundane requirements of holding your life together. The city is also where you see the effect of the game’s antagonists, the castle and its Vassals. Hardship, exploitation, disenfranchisement, environmental devastation – these are Vassals’ agenda. You’ll spend a lot of time in the city investigating these ills, understanding what, and who, is at the heart of the problem, and gathering information you can use when you storm the castle. Speaking of which…

By night you infiltrate the distorted reality of the castle. That’s where you take direct action. Delve into another shard of the castle and try to bring down one of its servants. You’ll explore nightmare otherworlds shaped by the psyches of the Vassal who occupies them. They’re monsters here, with all their fears, hate, and spite manifested around them as weapons and traps. But you’re stronger here too: you’ve got new powers, even new physical forms, with which to fight back. 

Then, because these problems are way bigger than you are, you’ll do it again. And again, and again, watching your work bear fruit as the city changes in response.

Voidheart Symphony’s player characters are rebels. You’re outsiders. You have to be. You need that perspective to even see that there’s a problem let alone fight to change it. When you create a rebel you’ll figure out what makes you different, what compromises you’ve made to live in the city, what matters to you, and what makes your life easier – and what obligations that imposes on you. 

In the city, you can be anyone: community leaders and nurturers, embittered fighters for change or fuckups striving to make amends, icons blessed with fame or fortune, or survivors or emigres from the castle. 

In the castle, you change. Your form shifts and you gain supernatural powers to help you bring down the castle – but you won’t know what powers you’ll gain until you step into your first castle shard.

Voidheart Symphony isn’t a game about lone heroes. You can’t operate without a crew of fellow rebels – you’re under too much pressure, up against something much too big to face alone – but your crew is part of a wider community, too. Every rebel has a covenant with their crew: principles that guide their role in this collective effort. Every rebel has relationships – more covenants, both Major and Minor – with other people, who you can call on in times of need and share your life with outside of their fight. 

Voidheart Symphony takes place in two distinct realities. Those realities use different but interlocking game systems. 

In the city, rebels resist life’s pressures and keep their shit together by resisting Stress Gauges inspired by Heart: The City Beneath. They’re under stress from Blood (mental and physical health), Lack (money, a roof over their head), Infamy (how entangled a rebel is with society, how close to being shunned), Heat (how much the castle knows about them) and Fealty (the castle’s grip on the way they think). Each time they do something important, they’ll need to roll to see if they resist pushback from society – the higher the stress track, the greater the chance of reprisals. Stress ticks up whenever things don’t go their way, and if a rebel doesn’t find a way to manage it, it will eventually take them out of action: they’ll experience a health crisis, lose their home, go to prison or just… become the passive participant the castle wants them to be.

In the castle, the void frees you from society's fetters and safety nets, and so you triumph or fail solely on the basis of your own personal strengths and weaknesses. Each rebel has four stats, used for both exploring and fighting: Swords (direct, head-on action), Wands (quick-thinking and creativity), Coins (making use of the world around you), and Cups (insight and empathy). In addition, their rebel’s heart manifests as a powerful Signature Weapon, and their form shifts and warps with their growing power to give them strange and unique capabilities.

Whichever state of reality you’re in, you’ll be using the Powered by the Apocalypse framework: you’ll run your character from the same choice-driven playbooks, building the narrative together in free conversation or triggering a Move and dealing with its more specific options. You’ll roll the same six-sided dice, too.

The longer a rebel fights the castle, the more potency they acquire, drawing closer to the World of bricks, wires, and the people who matter to them – and to the Void, the powerful but isolating force of their own potential. 

This is the main event. The revised edition of Voidheart Symphony, re-edited, redesigned, and with new material. Text is clearer, we’re adding more setting-building detail, and we’ve shifted the structure around to fully bring Voidheart Symphony to life.

The more stretch goals we unlock, the more luxurious the book gets.

Kill Or Cure is a scenario about how the healthcare system fails and exploits those who need it. It comes with rules tweaked for one-shot play and a set of pre-generated characters. We’re printing it for the first time, as a result of this crowdfunder.

The GM Kit is brand new. It’s another way to dive into Voidheart Symphony really quickly and easily. Learn as you play using a set of 16 A5 cards that act as tutorial and a play aid.

Turns out, games where you have to build a city, change it, get to know its people and maintain relationships with them need a lot of notes. The Burn This City notebook contains tips, guidance, useful rules reminders, and space for you to map and track your campaign, your network of allies, and the tensions between members of the rebel crew.

We’ve got couple of ardent bullet journalers on the team, and we’re designing the notebook to provide that high-end, really satisfying, journaling experience. 

Designed by our cover artist Marie Enger, we’re offering two patches, exclusively for this crowdfunder. Declare your opposition to the castle wherever you are with either or both.

The core book, quickstart, and GM kit will be available in PDF form. All physical rewards come with a free PDF version, and if you just want PDFs you can pledge for them separately.

The more people get behind Voidheart Symphony, the better the book gets. All our stretch goals either improve the core book or one of the other rewards.

MET! Playbook Sheets

First up is a big win: a set of printed playbook sheets packaged with the core book. We’ll print these on high quality card so you can reuse them (unless you write all over them in pen, but that’s kind of on you). They’ll be neatly stored in an envelope inside the back cover of the book.

Digital backers won't miss out, either: when we hit this stretch goal, we'll also make a full set of interactive character sheet PDFs. (No, not just form fillable - Mina's gone to town on these.)

Just a little bit of flair, you know? A silk ribbon to mark your place.

Met! The Union
A new playbook for this new edition, bringing the total count up to 10! The Union is a playbook about a person who's multiple people – it explores the wounds repression can leave on a sense of self, and the way solidarity between selves can become a potent force in your fight against the castle.

£55,000: Cover Spot UV
The first of many planned upgrades for the cover, this stretch goal applies an extra layer of gloss to the cover to make the colours really pop.

£60,000: Hideout Rules
The next of our "book get bigger" goals: at £60,000 we include Minerva's new section on using and upgrading your rebels' hideout so that the longer they use it, the more it reflects them. Make a house a home, you know?

We’ll reveal a new stretch goal every time we unlock one. Keep watching…

This is the single most dangerous phrase you can say in a crowdfunder: this won’t take long. 

We’re expecting to finish the redesign by the end of April. We’ll then print, pack, and ship the books out to backers. Our best estimate is that we can do this by the end of summer 2025. We'll be able to provide a more detailed timeline as work continues.

What we do know is: backers (whether you're an individual customer or a retailer) will get their Voidheart at least 4 weeks before anyone else does!