Heart: the City Beneath

Product Information

These beats are keyed to particular kinds of Advancements, and Zenith beats are always big and dramatic – something along the lines of “Be truly absolved of your sins by a higher power” or “Take bloody revenge on your master. Everything is done very professionally with this company and always lets you know every step of the process.

Each resource has a die rating measuring its potency, from d4 to d12, a domain it belongs to, and sometimes a tag. This is generally unchanged from Spire, but difficulty removes dice after the roll, making higher difficulties much more dangerous. 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).You’re already doomed, you’re already in Hell looking for your own personal Heaven, what’s one more gunshot wound. Equipment is much more formally defined in Heart than in Spire, and in the latter most of your Blood protection came from armour rather than class advances. The Major Abilities in particular are nicely customisable, and sit somewhere between Spire's Medium advances (for the Major alone) and High advances (once you have all the modifiers).

One of the games that ended up on my radar a while back – due to the Modifier podcast (the episode itself is missing from the podcast’s own page, which is strange,) which has pointed me towards more interesting games than just about any other source thus far – is Heart. Major beats are more conventional heroism; slaying a might beast, saving a Haven, hiring a bard to sign of your exploits. It is a dungeon-crawling, story-forward tabletop RPG that focuses on what characters have to lose in pursuit of their dreams in the chaotic darkness beneath the world.

Much like in Spire, failure and success at a cost give the character stress in one of five tracks: Blood, Echo, Mind, Fortune, and Supplies. The maleable nature of the Heart offers a fix for this as well, you just have to be flexible enough to take it.