Hearts

[theharvestmods]

HEART PENDANTS

There was something shiny at the bottom of the pool. Your character reached in for it and took a tumble in.

When they landed in Goddess Grotto, your character found themselves wearing their Heart Pendant - a smooth, polished heart-shaped stone set in a silver frame, on a silver chain. It'll be obsidian black at first, but as your character forms new relationships with the people on Cape Beryl, it will change color depending on

The colors it changes reflect their Heart Level for a person - their level of closeness and affection for that person. Heart Level colors, in order of progress, are:

Black - Essential strangers, or disagreement or hostility. The less positive a person's feelings for another, the less the luster of their pendant when they have them on the mind.
Purple - Friendly acquaintances. Two people who talk from time to time and enjoy seeing each other.
Blue - Friends. Two people who are happy around each other and who like and might actively seek meeting in their spare time.
Green - Close friends. Characters who wouldn't mind confiding their more personal feelings for each other or making sacrifices for each other.
Yellow - Very close friends, perhaps even with the beginnings of a crush if one is attracted to the other. Two who have each others' backs and would happily spend a whole day or two together.
Orange - Best friends or falling in love. The two are on the same wavelength, trust each other with even the personal, and know each other well.
Pink - Best of best friendships, or "platonic soulmates", or "hetero lifemates." Call it what you want, you two, the point is that you love each other!
OR
Red - True romantic love.

You can picture the way hearts change this way - say A walks to meet his new friend B at the beach. He's thinking of something he was told by him last time, and his heart pendant turns blue. At the beach, A meets both B and C, who B has a crush on but who A hasn't actually spoken to before. While A and B are greeting each other, both of their heart pendants are blue. When B introduces C, his heart pendant turns yellow; when C says hello to A, his pendant goes black.

Your character's hearts will not change for NPCs, and none of the natives of Cape Beryl's world seem to wear them.

Feelings/Heart Levels also need not be requited and returned. Your character cannot remove their pendant - somehow there's no clasp to undo, and the chain is just too short for them to pull it over their heads. Shapeshifting by magic, should your character have the means to do it, won't help that, either - the chain will just scale its length. They can, however, hide or obscure it if they want. If your aloof loner-type doesn't want to admit to all the new friends he's making, he can always walk around town with his pendant tucked under his shirt, though people might start to suspect something.

If you're stuck on finding and advancing CR for your character, we invite you to participate in the Heart Event Meme posted once an OOC month, at the start of each new activity period, to our meme community (forthcoming) - post your character along with some information, what they do and where they go and such, for a bit of moderator matchmaking and scenario engineering!

To officially increase your character's Heart Level for another, come to a post for the purpose that will go up each month along with activity check, and submit your character's activity with relevant characters - threads that qualify as proof for activity also qualify here! Progression between each pair of levels has its own thread number requirements:

Black to Purple - 3 threads.
Purple to Blue - 4 threads.
Blue to Green - 6 threads.
Green to Yellow - 8 threads.
Yellow to Orange - 10 threads.
Orange to Pink/Red - 12 threads.
The threads will then be reviewed to judge whether or not the characters' relationship does appear to be developing appropriately.

You may present a number of threads greater than the minimum needed to progress from one Heart Level to the next if you'd like to - for example just in case you want to provide a bit of extra proof that the characters are getting closer. However, threads from before the approval of one Heart Level cannot be used toward the next one - if you present four threads for advancement to a purple heart, you'll still need to present four threads, not three, for a blue heart with the same character.

Also note that characters with canonmates in-game with whom they already have an advanced, close relationship will not have an according heart color with them automatically. However, they may advance their Heart Level with that character once each month with a show of two threads of decent length until they reach the appropriate level. All the while ICly, a character's heart pendant around the canonmate's will have a tinge or fuzzy glow in the center of the appropriate color and slowly "warm" to it fully, like a mood ring.

Approved Heart Level advancements will be listed here, tracked and viewable for players' reference and for easy handling of...


HEART REWARDS

What good is it to pursue Heart Level advancement?

There are keyholes around Cape Beryl. One may turn up in a box under a tree in the forest, in a wall of a cave, or strangely even in a trapdoor in the attic of a newly-built house, heart-shaped with fancy silver borders and inlays of glossy colored stone - purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, pink, or red.

You can see where this is going, can't you?

Heart Rewards are secrets and treasures unlocked by heart pendants - if a character happens on a keyhole, if they can, if they summon feelings of another at a Heart Level to match its color (either by thinking about them or by having them with them) and press in their pendant (the chain can pull out into a Y-chain in the presence of a lock and retract afterwards, to make unlocking easier), the reward it's locking away is theirs.

A Heart Reward can be any number of things - rare seeds or even animal eggs may turn up in boxes hiding under beds in farm cabins; your scientist character may be in for a pleasant surprise when a green-heart trapdoor they found in the woods takes them into a snug old-fashioned laboratory, or your warrior missing their custom sword might unlock a cabinet to find plans for forging another one just like it. And, of course, bigger and maybe even particularly personal rewards may be in store for those who manage to open locks of more advanced colors.

Note that each level in each of a character's relationships can only be used for one Heart Reward. If A and B are at mutual blue hearts with each other and no one else, each one will be able to open one blue-locked reward. To unlock other blue locks, they'll need to make more friends, and they'll be unable to open any other locks together until at least one of them reaches a green heart with the other.

Also, characters with pre-established relationships with canonmates may not unlock anything with those relationships until their pendant finishes "warming up"! That is, if a happily married couple are in-game together, after an OOC month has passed, the little red glow in their otherwise purple Heart Pendants will keep anything from happening if they try to open purple locks. Once their pendants are fully warmed up to solid red, they're still not going to get whatever was behind those purple locks themselves, but they will be able to release one red lock each.