“Some say the heart of communication is to find and share truth, but I wonder if those who make such ludicrous suggestions have ever actually spoken to another of God’s Children. Self-deception, opinion-seeking, obfuscation, flattery, exaggeration, and fearful equivocation are so integral to the human animal that we cannot help but add them by instinct to our words even when we do not do so by design. Therefore, authentic observation reveals that at the heart of communication lies miscommunication”
-Cyrieu
It has been with tremendous glee that I’ve watched Cloak and Sword plant its flag onto a new generation of gamers. Those discovering its charms for the first time will be retreading the many paths walked by some of my first and most beloved RPG characters. Though I may have been too young at the time to really appreciate L’Amor the system offered, the imagined moments of L’Action will always stick with me as some of the most dramatic moments in my twenty years of gaming.
“The Heart of Communication: A Cloak and Sword Romance in the City of Long Knives” has a well-earned reputation as perhaps the best module produced for Cloak and Sword in its tragically short run. While it seems most players best remember CaS for its long list of badass character options, I want to make sure this nearly forgotten gem doesn’t go unheralded. I’ll be doing my best to recreate this introductory adventure here, but unfortunately I won’t be able to include many maps. A familiar tragedy to anyone buying the books secondhand, they printed the maps on perforated paper so gamerunners could pull it right out of the book and slap it on the table. Naturally, this means any copies that have survived the last 49 years invariably have none or nearly none of the maps in them anymore. The map I have of the Mauve region is a basically unreadable photocopy or a photocopy, so I’ll do my best to recreate it by hand (complete, see below!).
Unlike many of the later adventures, Heart doesn’t rely on long scripted dialogue or fixed set pieces that the players are forced to interact with if they don’t want the story to come screeching to a halt. Instead, it provides brief but sufficient descriptions for a status quo that is moments away from quoing something else real quick, a chaotic jumble of overlapping motivations and agendas that the players couldn’t avoid getting tangled in if they wanted to. The name of the adventure comes from the invented quote above, and from the fact that each major figure has at least one social hiccup meant to encourage miscommunication. Let me know if I condensed too much!
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