Heart: the City Beneath

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And in the end you'll either become one with the Heart, or tear its connection to you from your body, severing the link.

Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: The great Aelfir hunter Lady Salvatious Gryndel came to the Heart seeking the ultimate challenge. The nine skills in Heart are Compel (persuasion and intimidation of any kind), Discern (general perception), Endure, Evade, Hunt (track stuff down), Kill, Mend (healing bodies, fixing equipment) and Sneak (all kinds of stealth). The Heart quickstart provides you with basic rules, a selection of pre-generated characters and the introductory scenario "Drowned". Their Minor abilities let them hunt prey they've marked, wield their death as a (one-shot) weapon or extinguish nearby light sources. It’s a bit of an issue, as every fallout suffered pauses the game as the GM flips through the book looking for one that fits the situation.

Once again, characters are a bit more focussed here, with respect to Domains, and this helps, I think, define party roles a bit more cleanly. In addition, some places and creatures have their own custom fallouts associated with them, like a mind-controlling location seeping deeper into your brain, or a ghost possessing your body. Some fallout is simple – a broken arm – some is more complicated and narrative – being mistaken for a divine being and getting kidnapped by cultists who want you to lead them to the promised land. Sir Ysalda has spent a lot of time slowly piecing together various parts of her revolutionary bender, and the energies she gained form the spaces between.

Hound is a fighter that’s joined a loosely associated citizen militia of the Heart, while Vermissian Knight is a fighter that likes trains so much they wear one. Absolutely anything can be found here: predatory libraries, assorted heavens and hells, mythic beasts, wild forests, the True Moon. Description: A tramp through foot-deep, the knee-deep, flooded tunnels, in fading light and with labyrinthine corridors.Using the Resistance System first developed in Spire: The City Must Fall, Heart focuses on what player characters have to lose in pursuit of their goals whether that’s supplies, friends, sanity, blood, a way home, or spatial or bodily integrity. While other fallout categories are fairly straightforward – your Blood is spilled, Supplies run low, etc. These stories help keep us safe because they help keep us sane and connected despite not being able to go outside and see our friends and family. It’s obviously possible for the GM/Heart to pull out some greater calamity to threaten their success or someone they came to care about, but to do so without it feeling cheap takes more skill than I had mustered for our campaign.

For players, however, stress is applied to one of five tracks; Blood (physical injury and exhaustion), Mind (madness and coping with weirdness), Echo (the Heart's twisting and corruptive effects), Fortune (luck, over-confidence and incompetence), and Supplies (loss of resources, broken equipment, debt). Now, the Heart fills to the brim day by day with warping, angry godsblood—ichor—and the denizens of this nightmare realm are beginning to change along with it. The drow doctor the family employed knew of the changes, of course, but the family would not hear it. Usually, advances that grant you a skill come loaded with some kind of flavourful side benefit, like the ability to see in the dark or harmlessly fall from significant heights. Two Minor Fallout effects can be combined (with the agreement of player and GM) into a Major Fallout.If you enjoyed reading this, consider following our writing staff on Twitter, where you can find Cameron and Edgar. From their location, they need to venture deeper into the Heart, to Hang Station and the underground lake. Generally, something not particuarly dangerous causes d4 stress, using appropriate gear tends to inflict d6, and exotic weaponry and specialised tools deal d8 and upwards. You can consume the flesh of something or someone that you have recently killed and gain a skill associated with them for the remainder of the situation. Spire took place in the eponymous tower-city, a single monolithic structure that jabbed up monumentally at the sky.

Humans in Heart/Spire have a reputation for digging up the past, often working as retro-engineers and tomb-robbers. The end of a Apiarist's arc can lead to them entombing themselves and a taget in perfect, eternal crystal, dispersing into a cloud of bees which will spread your consciousness across a Landmark, warding it from the Heart, or surrendering to chaos, and manifesting the Heart itself (fatally for the Apiarist, and likely everything around you).It's a pain to get rid of - I'll go into that later, but it generally requires the sacrifice of various resources, or some class abilities to get rid of it. Aelfir, the High Elves are the masked rulers of the City Above, alien with bizarre and baroque customs and tradition. This does also put a bit of a time limit on a campaign of Heart - it's not intended to run past around a dozen sessions or so before all the characters have been retired one way or another, but this is hardly a flaw - it lets the game focus on the narrative of the group, rather than serving as an open-ended sandbox. While it uses fundamentally the same system and setting as its predecessor game, there are some mechanical tweaks that have been made to produce the desired experience, which I feel are remarkably well-constructed game-mechanical apparatuses aimed at producing a very particular sort of story. In Spire, you cleared an amount of stress depending on the severity of fallout you suffered, and could engage in character-specific activities to relieve stress or even hide away and let time pass, clearing it all.