CrystalHeart
is a tabletop game/ fantasy webcomic by Aviv Or and Eran Aviram about the campaign of three friends and their GM, running on the Savage Worlds system. It has two layers - one following the players Rotem, Guy and Lily and their GM Nadav in their efforts to create the most engaging playing experience possible, and one following their characters.
These characters are agents for a rather new, but powerful organization - Syn. Syn consists of people that had their hearts replaced with crystals that give them special powers and spend their time searching for new crystals as well as solving problems that were created by crystals gone feral. The story follows a team of three novice Syn agents, warrior princess Muna, tech-guy Macintosh, and rogue Raffaela in their first missions, where they learn that not everything about their world and their organization is as it first appeared...
Crystal Heart contains examples of:
- Abusive Precursors: The Foxes almost certainly count. It was their plot that ended the Bygone Age and reduced the Beasts into humans, and when the Foxes woke up from their slumber and saw the new dominant species, they hatched a new scheme to get rid of the humans simply because they found them unsatisfactory.
- Adventure Guild: Syn could be regarded as such, since they give their agents dangerous missions to investigate unusual phenomena and find crystals.
- After the End: The setting takes place around 800 years after an unknown catastrophe ended the previous, incredibly advanced civilization, with new cultures rising from the remains. No one knows much about said civilization or what ended it, save the ruins with advanced technology and Crystals that were left behind, though there are archeologists who study the "Bygone Age."
- Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Muna's first crystal, Good Fellow has this effect - it allows her to sense emotions and even read minds, but makes her easily distractable.
- Blessed with Suck: Overlaps with Cursed with Awesome. Syn agents can gain considerable power from the crystals they socket in their chest, but the process involves removing their original heart to surgically install the equipment necessary to use the crystal. Not only that, each crystal affects the person mentally in one way or another depending on their theme, and some of them can be pretty negative (e.g. Solid Stone makes its user tongue-tied, and is described as somewhat depressing by Raffaela). How much this is a blessing or a curse depends on the individual, who may see the trade-off as worth it or may get lucky and get a crystal that agrees with them.
- Speaking of the equipment, the "harness" that's installed in Syn agents to allow them to use crystals requires frequent maintenance, apparently several times a year, meaning that once you join Syn you're pretty much stuck for life.
- Bow and Sword in Accord: Muna fights with a longbow from the distance, and a scimitar in melee.
- Complexity Addiction: The Foxes' biggest flaw - it's not enough for them to be clever, they need to outsmart, regardless of whether the more straight-forward plan would work better or not (e.g. manipulating the Snakes into building the device for removing the planet's core, when the Foxes could easily do it themselves).
- Corporate Conspiracy: As the Crashing Eagles find out in chapter four, some higher-ranking Syn Agents seem to have a different agenda...
- The Chief's Daughter: Muna had this as part of her backstory, referring to herself as a Princess a few times. This changes when her father remarries, resulting in him stepping down from the position of chieftain due to the rules of their society. This comes as a shock to her (mainly because the original message informing her of this didn't reach her until she had already returned home due to terrible postal service), but she quickly gets over it, placing more value on her abilities as a leader than the actual title.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Raffaela's backstory. She was part of a group of orphans turned pickpockets. One day, they found a crystal... and then a Syn agent showed up and murdered another child to get the crystal. Raffaela joined Syn to get revenge.
- Didn't Think This Through: Part of Lily's plan to screw over Raffaela's nemesis "Cowboy-Hat," a.k.a. Arman, another Syn agent, involves using the Requisitions rules to take said nemesis' crystal from them. This succeeds, with the help of Guy, but it doesn't occur to her until the crystal is in Raffaela's hands that the thought of socketing a crystal that was used to murder Raffaela's friends would disgust her. By that point it was too late to reasonably back out, but while the crystal (Dominion, which has the ability to command others to a certain extent) does prove useful at times, Raffaela still looks to replace it at the first opportunity.
- Discard and Draw: Syn agents can swap their power-set by replacing the crystal in their chest with another, although adapting to a new crystal and learning about its quirks still takes some time.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture:
- Bogovia seems like a stand-in for eastern/Slavic Europe, especially Transylvania, with titles like the official madwoman of the village being called "Baba", and being the side for both a werewolf- and a vampire-themed adventure.
- Maseia seems to be quite similar to the great American plains, with frontier towns, and Muna's clan living like stereotypical Native Americans.
- Gem Heart: All humans in the setting have gems for hearts, while animals have normal flesh hearts. It's later revealed that the eponymous crystals were the remains of the Beasts who attempted to resist the Foxes' efforts to "reduce" them but failed, leaving behind a gem that represented one of their aspects.
- House Rules: All the time, as Nadav and his players adjust the rules to their wishes for the setting. Originally, the game was based on Savage Worlds, but there has been the addition of crystal rules as well as many others. One can now buy a rulebook with the Crystal Heart rules!
- Justified Title: The title of the comic, as well as the titles of the individual chapters each have "heart" in the title, and the theme of (crystal) hearts features majorly in the story. In the case of the chapters, the names are proverbs, such as "Heart of Stone" "Wild at Heart", or Heartless" - all refering to something that happens in the chapter, such as a crystal heart that can literally turn people to stone.
- La Résistance: The revolutionaries in Fjordstad. First, they protest for better rights for miners, but it quickly escalates from there...
- Literal Change of Heart: This happens to Syn agents when they remove their original hearts and replace them with crystals, though the change is usually less drastic than normal for this trope, and can cross over with Heart Trauma. This can also happen with regular people who receive a heart transplant, due to the personality being determined by the heart as much as the brain in this setting. This happened to Macintosh's younger brother, who received a new heart from a recently deceased miner to save his life after his own heart developed cracks. Afterwards, he began to sympathize much more with the downtrodden workers, leaving his noble background behind to help lead the miners in a revolution.
- "Not So Different" Remark: A hero to villain variant. One given by Raffaela to Arman of all people, with her noting that they've both loners by nature, prone to acting despite their allies instead of with them. The biggest difference between them is that while Raffaela eventually grew to care more about other people and realized that her grudge was not as important as saving the world, Arman was extremely dedicated to his duty but he never really gave a damn about other people, including the harm he caused them.
- Personality Powers: A sort of Inverted example, where the personality is enforced by the power - the crystals granting the Syn agents their special abilites also have a Disposition, causing the agent to feel a certain emotion or display a specific habit. The specifics varies from crystal to crystal, usually matching the theme of the crystal in some way (e.g. Good Fellow grants empathic abilities but makes its user easily distracted, while Survivor grants some powerful defensive abilities but makes its user stubborn). These Dispositions can be resisted, but it's not always easy.
- Power Crystal: The eponymous crystals hearts that grant their bearer special powers following a specific theme.
- Power Trio: The Crashing Eagles, consisting of Muna, Macintosh and Raffaela. They may occassionally have some problems, but they are True Companions and have remarkable teamwork skills when working together.
- The Rival: Muna has one in Contessa, another team leader of a novice team. They've been trying to one-up each other since their days in training.
- Rules Lawyer: Guy. Seen especially in one case when he helps Lily's character to get a crystal she wants from another agent by citing a probable interpretation of the rules - he is portrayed with a wig like British lawyers wear them and stops his argument with an "I rest my case".
- Taken for Granite: This is the ability of the crystal at the center of the chapter Heart of Stone (later revealed to be called Solid Stone in the RPG book). It allows the user to harden their skin to a stone-like texture, improving their defenses considerably, and it grants them the ability to create stone constructs like walls. It's incredibly dangerous in its feral state, as it instead converts anything that touches it without protection, or even just lingers too close to it for a while, to stone. This includes people as Boss Honda finds out the hard way when he grabs the crystal with his bare hands in a fit of unthinking greed, turning into a statue within seconds.
- Talking the Monster to Death: In the final arc, the Crashing Eagles decide to try to convince the Council of Syn to stop their plans instead of fighting them directly, reasoning that not only would the party be outnumbered in the fight (the three party members to the five Council members), they also lose out in terms of experience and overall strength, seeing as the Council members are all Legendary rank, with crystals to match. It seems to start working, as the antagonists were more a Well-Intentioned Extremist group than actually evil, but subtle sabotage by the Foxes have messed with the council's own plans, which does at least convince them that the Eagles are telling the truth.
- To Be Lawful or Good: Macintosh is the one most loyal to Syn, partly for their help in saving his life from a heart condition and partly because he found comfort in the rules and regulations, seeing them as beneficial for everyone. Upon the discovery of the true purpose of Syn and the plot by its leaders, he sides with Good, deciding that the comfort he had in the rules previously couldn't last now that he's aware of the corruption behind them.
- True Companions: The Crashing Eagles are teammates, but they are also best friends and willing to risk life and limb for each other.
- The Unpronounceable: As noted in an early strip, Lily's real name is Havatzelet, which is somewhat hard to pronounce for English speakers — hence the name change for the comic.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Council of Syn. They're aware that their plan would almost certainly kill off most of the humans currently alive, and would definitely end the present civilization, but they feel that it would worth the price if it freed the future humans from the influence of the Foxes. They only change their minds when it becomes clear that the Foxes have sabotaged their own plan.
