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A Crown of Hearts, by Tory Root

It is a balmy summer evening, full of magic and mystery, and the gates to the Palace of Storms have been thrown open. The lord of this towering castle, perched high amongst howling winds and rocky hills, looming over the fertile southern fields of the Kingdom of Alshen, has decreed a ball to be held upon this night. Here shall gather kings and queens, princes and princesses. Here shall lurk secrets and disguises, love and sorcery. And here they shall revel, waited upon by invisible servants, until the stroke of midnight. And upon the stroke of midnight, who knows what strange wishes shall come true?

A Crown of Hearts is a fairy-tale evening for sixteen players, full of passion, drama, adventure, and metamorphosis. This game deals with some disturbing themes and dark subject matter, and is recommended for mature players.

"My name is Bluebeard
I'm a pretty-prince-princess
My name is Bluebeard
Show me tits or GTFO!"
- Sarah, making props

This game was a solo project of Tory's (who swears she will never do a solo project again), inspired by some particularly densely-plotted games she had played in, and deliberately trying to create a free-ranging sandbox world rather than a locked-room story. The PCs, who Tory tried to saddle with dense and twisted backstory whenever possible, can potentially travel anywhere in the known human lands, and the game is full of secret locations, sidequests, NPCs, etcetera. Tory also went for maximum immersion through elaborate propping. Tory has a tendency to try to do insane things as solo projects, y'see.

The current version of A Crown of Hearts, version 1.0, is a game for sixteen players (seven male, seven female, two neutral) which runs for four hours, in three or four rooms, under the direction of many GMs.

Version 1.0: April 8th, 2011, at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. For a premiere where Tory finished the character sheets at 9 am that morning and was working with bravely volunteering strangers as last-minute GMs, it went pretty well.
Photos of this game! Unfortunately, Tory was able to get only a few scant photos, as she soon got swamped with GM stuff, because this was the Festival of photoFAIL. Which is sadface because people looked awesome. Sadface. Photos may contain vague spoilers.

No future runs are scheduled. Tory has some rewrites to do, but first she must recover from writing the majority of this game in a few sleepless weeks.