It's (Not) Dangerous To Go Alone: Hiria, the Eternal City

Welcome to the first entry in It's (Not) Dangerous To Go Alone, my hopefully ongoing series about playing and critiquing solo TTRPGs! Today I'm talking about Hiria: the Eternal City by Peter Eijk, which I backed in ZiMo 2023.

I live in Washington, DC, which sometimes feels like it has no particular character or culture, but at the same time has a deep and rich Black culture that I, as a White person, often am not privy to and/or do not seek out. Conversely, when I visited New York City earlier this summer, I was struck by how...city-like it felt. Not only were there taller buildings and more people on the streets, everything just felt more connected with restaurants, parks, and museums more integrated with apartments and public transit.

Now of course a large part of this is because Manhattan has a population density of nearly 73,000 people per square mile compared to DC’s 11,000, as well as 150+ years more history with which to develop a particular character. And of course there is the issue of gentrification, which raises the question: who is allowed to enjoy the benefits of this integrated city? But beyond that, these differences make me wonder: what makes a city a city?

Hiria: the Eternal City by Peter Eijk grapples with this as you travel through a multiversal city in all its strange permutations in search of an elusive quarry. The rules are simple and the art incredible, both working together to create elegant and interesting mash-ups of disparate ideas.

Cover art by Jean Verne

One of the best parts of the game was trying to figure out how the hell I was going to make sense of the new city I had traveled to, and the random tables that gave the Color, Flavor, and Weird of the city delivered in spades. What exactly does an abandoned city of flying cars and shining towers where the buildings are alive look like anyway? I don’t know but I’m certainly about to find out! And find out I did, working my way through 11 distinct versions of Hiria as I chased down my quarry.

But how much did I actually explore each of those versions of Hiria? Well, how much of Manhattan did I see in a weekend? How well do I know DC after living here for 5 years? The answer is always going to be: not all of it! Not even most, or half, or a tenth of it. In the case of Hiria, though, I definitely shortchanged myself. And it was my own doing, because no one was forcing me to move on. I could have arrived in each new version of Hiria and played an entire game of i’m sorry did you say street magic (which…stay tuned perhaps?) without losing steam, but that’s not really the focus of the game. The focus is on the quarry…or is it?

Art by Phil Jensen

Creating your Quarry is the first thing you do, but that’s practically the last time you actually interact with them. You find Traces of them throughout Hiria, each of them potentially giving you more information about them, but I didn’t find myself having enough of a baseline to feel confident diving deeper into their character. I chose one of the predefined Quarries, so maybe if I had come up with my own I would have had a stronger foundation, but the one I chose (Balthazar IV: deposed king, failed farmer) had a good description that made me giggle. Yet his Traces (a photograph with writing on the back; a telegram, wrongly addressed; a statue in an abandoned square) at once contained my imagination by being too specific and were too vague to give enough guidance. So who was this person I was chasing down? And who was I to be doing the chasing?

Well unfortunately I did play the game wrong by not answering additional Background questions when I rolled duplicates on the Events table (instead my Quarry transformed something like three or four times oops), but answering these additional questions would have given a better picture of my character and not the Quarry. It became decidedly lonely, chasing this mysterious figure through Hiria without much of a past myself and little context to what I was doing. While I had an initial reason for the chase (bring Balthazar IV back to face justice), that faded into the background the more time that went on.

Art by bertdrawsstuff

But if it’s not about the chase and it’s not about the city, what is it about? For me, it ended up being about the people (despite them being almost conspicuously absent from the game book). There are tables for putting together Hiria, rules for traveling between versions of Hiria, events that can happen in Hiria, but never any consideration of who lives there and would be affected by those events. And this is perhaps simultaneously the game’s biggest strength and weakness, that it does not dictate what kind of people you find in Hiria. You can backfill what kind of people would live in a decaying city of parched plants and rolling blackouts carved in a glacier, but you don’t have to. Each version of Hiria you go to might as well be abandoned, and that just leaves so much interesting flavor on the table. It also fails to account for how cities come to be in the real world, which is that people decide to live somewhere and build it up over time. Buildings and monuments don’t precede the people that live around them, they emerge from the needs of the inhabitants or the imposition of foreign influences.

To bring it back to my own experience of living in Washington, DC: it feels not dissimilar to my perception that there is no defined culture here. It is all too easy to look at the monuments, the federal buildings, the corporate downtown and declare: this is the city. But that’s not the city. Or at least, not all of it. To do so would miss out on the fabric that undergirds all of that. So to anyone interested in playing Hiria: the Eternal City (and I do recommend you play it), I just ask that you not forget the people who live there.