Heart: the City Beneath

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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. There's two Zenith beats, either lead a Haven to prosperity, or reach Tier 4 of the Heart (more on that when we get to delving, but that's entering the Heart itself). What’s the most dangerous beast or individual you’ve heard tell of, and why haven’t you defeated them yet? So it's delving deep into the earth, rather than conspiring against the powers that be, and the PCs are the kind of people who'd end up doing this for a living; the obsessed, desperate or forced. In Heart, you clear all stress from the track you just took a hit to on a minor fallout, and all stress from all tracks on a major fallout.

This is generally unchanged from Spire, but difficulty removes dice after the roll, making higher difficulties much more dangerous. Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: The great Aelfir hunter Lady Salvatious Gryndel came to the Heart seeking the ultimate challenge. Plus there's huge story potential in many of the fallout effects, and some Minor Fallout explicitly leads to specific Major and Critical Fallout. Minor beats involve sacrifice, and taking the Heart into your body by eating things it creates, or graft parts of the flora and fauna of the City Below onto yourself, as well as seeking to strengthen your connection with the Heart itself.

If you’re a Patron, feel free to message (on here or twitter) and I’ll send you the pregens I did for it as well, giving you a fully ready-to-run game. OSR, generally speaking, wants to establish the dungeon, draw the map, provide random encounter tables, then watch the characters deal with the problems as they come, in a “fair” fashion. 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). But sometimes they too fall, and by the point they've ended up in the City Below, they've adjusted to no longer being on top of the heap.

And if that involves slipping to the Grail Road a bit early and stacking the deck in his favor he has no problem with that. Heretics start with Mend and Religion as you might expect, and tend to take more of a healing/supportive role in a party of delvers (although they can power up for combat very effectively if they need to); they're literal clerics, just a little strange.It’s a shame, then, that my biggest issue with the game is the way it handles the actual journeys between the landmarks, the delves. The beats are various accomplishments, and range from “charm someone with tales of your exploits” to “find the final secret you have so desperately sought and use it to solve your impossible task”.

Their single Core Ability is Ministrations - they can lead a group in a ritual that will clear Minor Blood or Mind fallout, or reduce Major fallout to Minor, but it takes time (and makes a Delve harder if you're part-way through). A genius bit happens here, a ludonarrative assonance: players tell the GM what they want their characters to experience, the GM, as the Heart, does their best to match these desires, warping the reality of the game in the process. Heart takes place beneath it, in a space into which the eponymous alien dimension has begun to bleed. A final note is that there is no armour in Heart - the most you can get is a single piece of equipment with the Block tag, which gives +1 Blood protection - it's assumed all characters have protective gear anyway, and armour is baked into the class abilities.Each resource has a die rating measuring its potency, from d4 to d12, a domain it belongs to, and sometimes a tag.