Pocket-Sized Play

Pocket-Sized Play is an actual play RPG podcast, and the table stays in the recording. Moves get read aloud, dice totals get announced, and players pause mid-scene to ask whether they can invent a detail. You hear the story being built, jokes and all. One thread is Hearts of Wulin: Deadly Melody, numbered from episode 00 and run by Lowell Francis, the designer of Hearts of Wulin. The game is a PbtA take on wuxia melodrama, and this actual play leans hard on both halves of that phrase. The melodrama centers on the magistrate Lin Gongxin, whose family is a side branch of a clan and has pinned its hopes on the magistrate's work. A father, Lin Huo, wants a meeting between clans to go well enough to win favor, and an engagement strains an old friendship. The wuxia comes through mooks, blades and camera directions. In one scene the GM asks a player what gives away a group of flower sellers as killers. The answer is hairpins that are really long, sharp needles, and the order came from Auntie Silver. Another scene ends with the camera circling four characters frozen in a shared glance while a man named Rao escapes down the street with his men. The dice decide feelings too. Under emotional pressure one player marks earth instead of fleeing, and another rolls hearts and minds to talk a character into rethinking a course with a woman named Sue before her reputation is ruined. A confrontation over a bloodied blade draws out a confession that Auntie Silver has been orchestrating events, and a declaration of sworn brotherhood comes soon after. When a tense scene lands, the players trade loose asides, including a jab about who plays the erhu better. Conversations about the game sit alongside the play. In episode 00, Jason talks with Lowell Francis about what Hearts of Wulin is, since it was still in development and could not yet be bought. A Kickstarter special adds co-author Agatha Cheng and ran across the Gauntlet Network podcast feeds. Those talks get concrete: a training montage written into a move, opponents at a higher scale, a tournament-of-assassins setup, duels between player characters, elemental chi that feeds many kinds of action, and damage that matters without a separate harm track. The other table here is Monsterhearts: Return to Mercy Falls. One episode opens with its GM pointing to Margo's heightened sense of smell as a texture running through the saga. The GM also admits to a change of heart: reminding a player how to use their strings once felt like cheating, and now seems like fair use of rules that exist so a table can tell a story together. Then a player rolls Volatile to run away, gets an 8, and chooses to cause a scene by bolting out undressed.