I Played it: Hearts of Wulin

Leaping into the Wuxia Melodrama RPG

Some game conventions ago, I played Pasión de las Pasiones a telenovela RPG Powered by the Apocalypse by Brandon Leon Gambetta. It was fantastic. So much over-the-top melodrama! I have never played a game that leaned so hard into mechanizing the drama, making it easy for players to know where to go next in the narrative unfolding at the table.

Then Hearts of Wulin comes along. It’s a PBTA game wrapped around Chinese Wuxia, martial arts, factions, secrets, unrequited loves, and shape-changing tengu spirits!! Well…that last part is about my character Ren Jin. There’s a playbook/role called the In Human Guise, my Tengu spirit has taken the form of a human. We discover through session zero player choices that this human form is the slain son of another player, Aunty Oak. Aunty Oak mistakenly declared her love for Pale Cricket, the same Pale Cricket that Ren Jin is in love with and has followed through her previous reincarnations. Oh, and there are TWO more players with drama-bombs! This. Is. Hearts of Wulin!!

We played for two sessions. Expertly MC’d by Lowell Francis, the game’s designer. Character stats are represented by five elements. These are associated with the basic game moves. Playbooks have their own special moves and three “sub-classes.”

The game is easy to hop into for folks familiar with Powered By The Apocalypse designs. Hearts of Wulin also makes it extremely easy for new players to follow the fiction and let moves trigger as they make decisions. I feel the two entanglements each player starts with are a strong play component. Players get a romantic entanglement and a general one. Entanglements involve two other characters. Better if one of them is another player character! These entanglements act like a holding environment for the PCs. They are situational, not social, like a gang or team. Players leaned hard into them, and because it involves, ideally, another player character, it pulls on them too.

My two entanglements were (PCs highlighted):

Romantic: I disguised myself to get close to Pale Cricket, but Aunty Oak, their lover, suspects and hates me.

General: Withering Ash and I both seek revenge against Ninth Raven, but I must be the one to strike the killing blow.

Two sessions. Not. Enough. I would play this game again. Or even run it. Lowell Francis’s love of the genre and the design shows through, would that he came packaged with the book!!

Traveling to attend a wedding that will join two warring houses together,  our heroes face supernatural peril and the dictates of their passions. At the wedding, our protagonists uncover secrets about their past and present-- leading to a fatal confrontation with love, the taunting of ghosts, and a final battle against forces with deeper connections than anyone knew.

Play Fearless