Heart and Fur

 Heart and Fur is a new kind of tabletop RPG. It’s entirely social in nature and while it involves dice rolls it has no combat engine. Instead the players and Game Master work together to build a narrative that relies on cooperation. Characters’ personality traits are more important than their skills and they are rewarded for getting what they want out of life with experience points. This page outlines the core ideas of the game line, how it is built and how it interacts with the other game lines. Find the actual game in the Downloads section in its own folder.

Core Tenets

These are the three core rules the Heart and Fur genre is built on.

Consent is Sexy
The core and most important rule of writing the Heart and Fur genre is that the only way a character is going to enjoy a scene is if they wanted it in the first place, and the only way for the reader to enjoy a scene is if the characters in it are having fun. Consent rules and it’s darn sexy. A character in a piece of art that is smiling always gets more likes, regardless of what the art is.

Magic is Allowed
The long history of real life Earth magic, from Wicca to self-hypnosis, is full of ways of improving someone’s love life. This is most of what there is out there to read. Illusions to improve appearance, tonics to grow muscle, songs to attract a mate. This is the kind of stuff the Earth has been inventing its whole history. Any real life knowledge belongs in Heart and Fur so long as you can go on a date with it.

Action is Not Allowed
There are no sword fights in Heart and Fur. There may be the occasional duel or test by combat, but nothing is ever intended to actually harm someone. The game has no rules for wounds, injury, or recovery from damage. Characters engage in solely social conflict, often with the goal of enacting one of the other rules about consent or magic. Everyone ends up fine every time, no exceptions.

Goals

Heart and Fur has two main goals.

Practical Mechanics
Heart and Fur, while a tabletop game, also aims to provide tools and knowledge that are useful in everyday life including in a healthy relationship. Nothing in it is impossible and even the magic or supernatural elements are based on real life systems and practices.

Social Focus
The core design goal of Heart and Fur is to make a game where social lives, character interaction and relationships are the primary focus rather than combat or conflict. This game has mechanics to back these goals up and to portray a character’s personality, feelings and motives rather than their favourite weapon or combat tool.

Colours

These eleven colours are the costs of cards in Quantum and also correlate to the romantic preferences of characters and cards of those colours.

Ruby
Knights – Ownership – Elemental Magic
Ruby characters engage in consent based ranks in their relationships, assigning individuals leadership or subordinate jobs based on their desires and preferences. Intimacy is used as a reward for following their leader or as a constant fact of life in order to keep the subordinates happy. Obedience is expected and everyone has their own style of instilling it.

Amethyst
Berserkers – Size – Celestial Magic
Amethyst characters value strength, physical size and sheer muscle. They find larger partners attractive and seek to become larger and stronger themselves. Their intimate time is spent in long, hot massages to build and hone muscle, mostly on the upper torso and chest. They also work to increase skin sensitivity so simply moving exercises their muscles for them.

Sapphire
Archers – Discipline – Knowledge Magic
Sapphire characters desire to learn new skills. More than that, they desire to have new behaviours and knowledge enforced on them and be made a part of them. Their love lives are repetitive, using constant intimacy and enjoyment to reinforce and build behaviours that they otherwise would not be capable of. They often don’t care what they are trained to do so long as the process is enjoyable.

Quartz
Wizards – Living Objects – Arcane Magic
Quartz characters enjoy being living, inanimate tools and objects of affection. Seeing themselves as props, furniture, or toys, they exist to be useful and often do everything in their power to do away with their free will. The result is a cheerful, useful individual with one task they are good at that takes up the entirety of their life, such as picking outfits or reading books.

Topaz
Tribesmen – Gender – Nature Magic
Topaz characters rely on their genders as a source of power, whatever those might be. They are strongly their anatomy and have the most plain love lives, relying on sheer desire and enjoyment to make their lives work. Their magic typically does different things based on someone’s physical gender or pronouns.

Emerald
Witches – Mind Control – Song Magic
Emerald characters rely on real life hypnosis and spiritual tools to alter the mind and its emotions. The magic often wears off quickly but that’s only a chance to use it frequently. They can use normal social tools to manipulate behaviour or to reward certain actions. Often they are skilled performers or orators in other ways.

Alabaster
Priests – Worship – Holy Magic
Alabaster characters take the health and wellness of their partners seriously. They aim to make another person happy and this involves long, slow, gentle scenes of intimacy and serious attention paid to praise and the discussion of emotions. These calm yet emotional people enjoy making people like themselves better and don’t care much for whether they get anything out of it.

Silver
Soldiers – Toys – Technology Magic
Silver characters have thankfully simple preferences. Toys. All of them and often many at once. These promote overall health as well as provide their own form of exercise. Anything electronic will eventually burn out but solid material toys are usable indefinitely, especially sterile metal ones.

Onyx
Criminals – Corruption – Alchemical Magic
This preference is being worked on later.

Basalt
Tyrants – Assimilation – Infernal Magic
This preference is being worked on later.

Gold
Dragons – Love as Payment – Willworking
This preference is being worked on later.

Work Steps

Making any of this content requires a combination of research along with trail and error. The first step is to read books and find art as inspiration. Making anything in the Heart and Fur line requires a goal and that goal is always derived from fiction rather than real life. The purpose is to then make that fiction into real life as quickly and reliably as possible.

Next comes assigning the concept to one of the colours, which determines what crafting ingredients in Quantum the effect will rely on. Heart and Fur and Quantum are made parallel to each other for this reason as they need to learn from each other to work. Making a card mechanic is often the next step followed by writing it up in the game’s spell text format. Normally around here I find a way of doing the idea in real life using the tools built into the colours of gems.

The focus shifts back over to the slice of life game as the new idea needs to be tried out. This takes about three weeks each and from this a narrative is built of things I learn and unexpected benefits of the new lifestyle idea. Everything from better sleep, improved memory, or an increase in lifting strength is recorded and then eventually presented as a chapter in a game manual. By then I’ve already moved onto the next impossible thing I want to make real and I add the art for the previous concept to my list of things to draw.

C J Mcpherson