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So I've recently started running a game pretty much as-canon, although I'm trying to keep the weird paramilitary cult aspects of the ministry as much as I can - it helps a bit that none of the players have actually taken any ministry advances, and Better the Devil is sort of on my intended path. The way I see it, there's a certain amount of hatred in the Ministry for any authoritarian regime, and if you really push the nature of the aforementioned old drow house as being some entirely, objectively wrong, then it's not so much of a stretch. They're not going to plump for a new overlord just on account of them being drow, especially if they're likely to be as bad as the aelfir. At least the Aelfir are coming from a position of alien incomprehension. House Starys don't have that excuse.
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Nov 24, 2019 23:20
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Joe Slowboat posted:You can also frame House Starys as basically prepared to make friends with the aelfir, if you want to clear up that contradiction: They're in it to get specifically them on the same level as the aelfir, not end the Durance. Yup - they’d be happy to rule Spire and pay lip-service to the selfie there in order to use it as a power base to re-conquer the Home Nations. In a sense, they’re not part of the standard drow push for independence; they’re their own faction with quite separate goals.
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Nov 25, 2019 08:50
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JcDent posted:I forget to ask: sure, pistols exist in Spire, but what about other types of firearms? Like Gnoll trench shotguns and drow Moist Nuggets? Less the former - Gnolls seem to lean more heavily on magical weaponry - but there's a whole range of firearms, from cheap pistols that are as likely to explode in your hand as hurt someone to precision-crafted hunting rifles. In general (bearing in mind my firearms knowledge is pretty limited), we're looking at late 19th/early 20th century? Human-engineered galvanic weaponry is a whole other thing...
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Nov 27, 2019 09:21
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Aliette de Bodard's Obsidian and Blood trilogy is a pretty good take on semi-historical, semi-fantastical aztecs. Essentially, the take there is that the gods sacrificed themselves to create the current world for humanity, and require human sacrifice to replace what they've lost (otherwise star-demons come down to kill everyone).
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Jan 4, 2020 09:56
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So... Heart's backet PDF dropped today, and I'm put in mind of doing a long-read review of it, similar to how I treated Spire, albeit hopefully with a bit more of an opinion as I've actually been running the latter for a while. But it's still in PDF for now (although a quickstart is available) - should I wait until it's on general release, or just try to go through slowly enough that it'll be available before I finish?
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Apr 1, 2020 11:58
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That Old Tree posted:Since they're already selling the PDF and are pushing a discount on print books if you buy the PDF, I'd suggest now's the perfect time to start. Well then, better get reading :-D
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Apr 1, 2020 12:09
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 Heart: The City Beneath 01 - An Introduction Heart is an rpg by Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor, a sequel of sorts to their previous game, Spire, a game of murder and covert rebellian, which I reviewed in this thread some time ago. Heart's their newest release (PDFs dropped on the 1st of April), and it works as both a kind of sequel to Spire, and as a second iteration of the core mechanics. My review of Spire was a bit of just a read-through, but I've been running it for my ground for a bit, and so I'll see if I can add in my observations about Heart as I go. Before I start, however, I'd like to point out that if anything here immediately grabs your interest, the game itself can be bought here, or the (free) quickstart rules can be found here. The creators also have a podcast; Hearty Dice Friends, which is well worth listening to. Oh, and the excellent layout design was done by our very own Flavivirus, so you'd be supporting goon-adjacent projects there! So what's it all about? Whereas Spire concerned itself with the titular mile-high city, Heart goes deep beneath, down towards the crack in reality that sits under the city - bad enough at the best of times, but when enterprising engineers tried to use it as the basis of a mass transit system, things went from bad to worse. 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. Next: I'll give an overview of the system
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Apr 4, 2020 11:16
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Heart: The City Beneath 02 - Game Mechanics So the mechanical underpinnings of Heart haven't changed much from Spire, it's mostly a matter of clarity, and a bit more consistency. I'll note significant changes here in italics. Characters in Heart have four elements that tie directly into the core mechanics - Skills, Domains, Knacks and Stress tracks. Skills are the things a character can do well, and are binary - you either have them, or you don't. There's only nine of them, and given that characters will generally start with only a few (at least one, could be up to three or four at absolute most), you end up pretty specialised. 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). Obviously the main change is the available skills are mostly different, with the exception of Sneak and Compel. Heart doesn't have nearly as much of an emphasis on social interaction as Spire, and characters are generally much more pragmatically-focused - see Kill and Endure instead of Fight and Resist, for example. Also Heart PCs are much, much more focused than Spire PCs - a character in the latter can easily get up to 4/5 skills at creation. Domains are also areas of experience, and you also either have them, or you don't, but they're broad categories relating to different areas of the Heart (and the things that live there). The seven Domains are Cursed (places the Heart directly touches), Desolate (wastelands, abandoned settlements), Occult (any hidden or arcane lore), Religion, Technology, Warren (cramped spaces, twisting corridors), Wild (general flora and fauna). Once again, you're not likely to have more than one or two at character creation. 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. Obviously the Domains are very different, due to the very different setting, and I feel there's considerably less overlap between them in Heart. Knacks are very-specific specialisations that you pick up if you end up getting a given skill or domain a second time, or from certain class abilities, and are usually player-defined. No change from Spire, but Knacks are often handed out in class advances in lieu of giving access to entire Skills or Domains. So how do these go together? Whenever a roll is called for (and we're talking for actions that are important and/or challenging), you assemble a dice pool of one to four d10, roll them, and take the highest value, applying the result on the following table;  When situations are even more fraught, a roll can be considered Risky or Dangerous - removing the highest one or two results from the rolled pool, further reducing the chances of success (if you'd end up having no dice left, you only roll one dice, and can only succeed on a 10, albeit at a cost). This is generally unchanged from Spire, but difficulty removes dice after the roll, making higher difficulties much more dangerous. Also, in Heart you can't have difficulty 3 rolls or higher, they're just rated as impossible. So... Stress is the consequences of failing rolls, or succeeding only at a cost. It's also what you inflict on opponents or situations when you roll well, and it's inflicted either way by the roll of a dice; from d4 to d12, with some effects adjusting the dice type up or down (notably, rolling a critical success). 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. For NPCs, stress is generally applied against a single resistance value - once this is gone, the NPC is defeated/driven off/successfully persuaded. The same goes for less animate obstacles - notably forging a route between various landmarks of the Heart. 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). Players and NPCs will sometimes also possess a Protection value (for PCs this is tied to a single track). This simply reduces the amount of stress suffered by the amount of protection (this is usually no more than one or two points though). Obviously, stress tracks have changed - Reputation and Shadow are gone, replaced by Fortune and Echo, and Silver has been changed to the much more survival-orientated Supplies. Protection replaces the extra resistance boxes in Spire - a static armour value ends up being far less confusing than having extra boxes that don't count for fallout. Now Stress on its own doesn't do anything. 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. The other way to shed stress is to suffer Fallout. Whenever a PC takes stress, the GM rolls a d12 (note that this, and inflicting stress are pretty much the only time the GM actually rolls). If this is equal or less than the total amount of stress the character has, they suffer Fallout - if this roll is 6 or less, then it's Minor, 7 or more and it's Major (much more consequential). The former is generally easier to deal with, and the effects aren't too dehabilitating; many don't have any real mechanical effect.  Minor Blood Fallout  Minor Echo Fallout The latter start getting much more serious, causing ongoing stress, or locking away a character's Skills and Domains until they can be cleared, either through spending resources in a safe place, or certain magic.  Major Echo Fallout  Major Mind Fallout When you take Minor Fallout, it at least clears all stress from the associated resistence track. Major Fallout clears all your stress. Two Minor Fallout effects can be combined (with the agreement of player and GM) into a Major Fallout. Likewise, if the player accepts it, two Major Fallouts can combine to result Critical Fallout - this means that the character will shortly die or otherwise leave the campaign.  Critical Fortune Fallout Certain locations and NPCs will inflict their own fallout as well, not linked to a specific stress track. So, in my opinion, Fallout is much more interesting and varied in its effects than Spire. Also, a Heart PC will never die unless the player agrees to it - there's much more explicit narrative power in the hands of the players here; something that we'll see again when we get to advancement. Plus there's huge story potential in many of the fallout effects, and some Minor Fallout explicitly leads to specific Major and Critical Fallout. So that's it (messily) for the core of the system. Next: Character Creation Part 1 - Ancestries and Callings
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Apr 5, 2020 00:19
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CitizenKeen posted:Is this true? I feel like access to Domains and Skills is much higher in Heart. My bad, should have done the math correctly. Although it should be pointed out, Azurite isn’t particularly generous in terms of Domains and Skills - look at Masked for a contrast. Still, it remains that generally starting characters will have less access - Spire characters will have at least 2 of each from Durance + Class.
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Apr 7, 2020 09:01
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CitizenKeen posted:Fair. The Durances do help, giving about 1.5 Skills/Domains. Plus, Spire characters get more from their class (4, versus Heart's 2). That's a good point. Pedentry is welcome - just think of it as my really needing an editor :-P
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Apr 7, 2020 15:23
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Heart: The City Beneath 03 - Character Creation - Ancestries and Callings It's been brought to my attention that I am in fact completely wrong regarding the distribution of Skills and Domains in Spire as opposed to Heart, and I must apologize for that. It still remains that generally, a starting Heart character will tend to have less than a starting Spire character (2 + max of 3 from Minor abilities, as opposed to 4+ from Class and Durance, plus possibly another one from the starting advance), but as the game goes on, Heart characters tend to pick them up just as quickly. Don't know where I got the bit about Knacks from either - if anything, Knacks in Heart pretty much require double-purchase of a Skill or Domain, or are entirely transitory, which is a lot cleaner than Spire where you tend to end up with a handful of them. Annnyway, character creation! It's pretty simple;
I'll cover the first two in this post, as they're pretty simple, although the Callings are a brilliant bit of game design, and I'll tackle Classes over the next few posts as they're a bit more meaty. On a surface level, Callings sit in the same conceptual space as your Durance as Spire, but they tie in to the advancement system in Heart and are much more a driver of character behaviour, as well as a narrative tool players can use. Ancestries are just that. Whereas in Spire most PCs would be Drow as a matter of course, Heart broadens the options to allow for Human, Gnoll or even Aelfir as player characters - when you're making your way through a nightmarish semi-sentient hell-dungeon, race and skin colour become decidedly secondary considerations. When you're in a Haven (a slightly-more-safe refuge built around a stable landmark) there might be a bit of prejudice, but that's as likely to be about where you're from as whether you have fur or pointed ears. All ancestries have a choice of three questions the player can answer one of to flesh out the character a bit, as well as a d20 table to generate a couple of trinkets they start with, but no other mechanical effects. Drow are the same as in Spire - monochromatic elves who blister at the touch of the sun and worship a triple Goddess of the Moon. They're the underclass (and former rulers) of the city above, and are often driven down into the under-city for a multitude of reasons, from escape from the regime above, to pilgrimage to the Temple of the Moon Below. Humans in Heart/Spire have a reputation for digging up the past, often working as retro-engineers and tomb-robbers. They also invented guns, and, shortly after, the arms trade. So ending up in the semi-permeable reality below the city isn't an entirely unusual fate. Also they're canonically mostly welsh or cornish. Aelfir, the High Elves are the masked rulers of the City Above, alien with bizarre and baroque customs and tradition. 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.  Gnolls are the hyena-headed people of the far south; a nation with advanced technology built of their mastery of demonology, that's currently fighting an on-off war with the Aelfir. So in Spire, where their presence is generally forbidden, they tend to gravitate to the under-city. Obviously although Spire brought up the idea of being a disgraced Aelfir or a human, the emphasis was on playing only Drow and playing within the bounds of that culture. Callings are where we start to see some mechanical meat to the character. There's five of these, each corresponding to a different reason for a character to find themselves in the City Below. Callings give you four things; a Core Ability, three questions to answer about your character and how the Calling brought them out of the City Above, another random trinket table to flesh out your character and a list of Beats. Beats, which come in Minor, Major and Zenith forms are the core of advancement in Heart. They're little milestones in your character's story, and advancement is simple; you choose two at the end of each session (and at character creation); if you trigger the circumstances of each beat (usually taking fallout or doing things that get you in trouble), you get a Minor/Major/Zenith advance and check off the beat. Once you've hit a given beat you can't choose it again. This is so much clearer than Spire's advancement, and gives the player the opportunity to say "next session, can I have the chance of X happening?". Note that Zenith Abilities generally result in the death/retirement of the character so picking a Zenith beat is a signal to the GM to say "I think my character's arc is approaching a logical end". In fact this is one of the better RPG experience/advancement settings I've seen. Here's the five Callings; Adventure. You're so jaded that only in the living nightmare of the City Below can you really feel alive. Has the core ability Legendary which lets them remove stress whenever they hit a beat. Minor beats involve taking risky or dramatic actions; taking major fallout for example, getting into trouble with the authorities or having things named after you. Or kicking someone off a tall building. Major beats are more conventional heroism; slaying a might beast, saving a Haven, hiring a bard to sign of your exploits. 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).  Enlightenment. They all said you were mad! You'll prove them wrong! You're on a quest to prove that something that other have told you was impossible, isn't. Core ability is Unorthodox Methods - once a session automatically succeed with a 6 (succeed but take stress). Minor beats revolve around the pursuit of knowledge despite the risks (or the destruction of knowledge that contradicts your theories). Major beats involve sacrifice - either personal, or of others - whilst pursuing your theories. For your Zenith beat;  Forced. You don't want to be down here, but you've not been given a choice.  Minor beats revolve around either your relationship with your masters, how their orders make your life harder, and forging a life outside of their control. Major beats involve either directly fighting back against the powers controlling you, or carrying out their orders with significant consequences. The Zenith beat is simple; either escape your master's control, or enact your bloody revenge. Heartsong. You've heard the sweet song of the heart and are now drawn towards its fleshy red embrace. Your core ability is In the Blood - you gain Echo protection, and once a situation (i.e. a discrete scene), you can allocate stress to Echo instead of another resistance. 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. Major beats go further, tearing down Havens, or spreading your visions. And in the end you'll either become one with the Heart, or tear its connection to you from your body, severing the link. Penitant. You caused harm to your organisation through either malice or incompetance, and now seek to make amends by delving into the City Below.  Minor beats for the Penitant involve making penance for your crimes, and punishing others for their transgressions as well as performing acts to re-establish your bonds with your order or organisation. Major beats either escalate these stakes, or add ambuguity - further crimes you seek to hide from your order. Finally, for your Zenith beat you either find forgiveness from your order, or you betray them, intentionally this time. So quite a mix there; generally players should have an idea of what Zenith beat they're ultimately working towards after a few sessions of play. 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. Next: Character Creation Part 2 - Equipment, Resources and our first class; The Cleaver
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Apr 9, 2020 10:17
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CitizenKeen posted:Agreed wholeheartedly. Maybe one of the best XP systems I've ever seen. Well, it depends heavily on the actual Zenith ability you pick - some hit immediately, some need to be triggered, and some take time to remove you from the game. Plus there's abilities that explicitly assume that there'll still be other players around for some time later (the Vermissian Knight can become a rampaging train-golem that can, once in the game, turn up at a later point, thwack an enemy, and dissapear into the night, for example), so I guess the assumption is towards a campaign where you're likely to bring in a fresh character every so often, if it goes on that long?
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Apr 9, 2020 14:51
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CitizenKeen posted:I see it playing out two ways: Re-reading the bits on advancement in the GM section, it's more that character arcs (creation -> Zenith or Crit fallout) are decoupled from the campaign arc (whatever the overall goal of the party is). So the advice to the GM is to work out where the campaign is going to end up in terms of the group's goals as a whole, and aim roughly towards that, whereas beats relate to individual characters. So yes, some characters may survive, joined by newcomers, to the end of the campaign - but the emphasis behind the Zenith beats and Critical Fallout is what makes a good story for the GM and the players.
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Apr 9, 2020 16:17
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Heart: The City Beneath 04 - Character Creation - Equipment, Resources and the basics of Classes So, before I dive into the good bits (i.e. the classes, which are every bit as fun as those in Spire), I thought I really should go over equipment and resources. The book deals with them after the classes section, but there's quite a bit of interaction between the resource system and PC abilities, so it makes sense to talk about them first. Equipment This is anything that can augment character's rolls; usually by letting them inflict or heal more stress than the basic d4. It falls into three main categories, each tied to a Skill; Kill equipment is all weapons, which have a die value (d6 for run of the mill stuff, d8 for the good gear, d10 or d12 for exotic or legendary weapons), and a list of tags, such as Ranged (self-explanatory) or Dangerous/Expensive/Distressing/Loud/Wyrd which inflicts d6 Blood/Supplies/Mind/Fortune/Echo stress on the user if you roll the maximum stress. Delve equipment is used for going from place-to-place in the Heart. Inflicting stress on a delve is how you make progress through the ever-changing terrain of the Heart, so delve equipment includes anything that helps you get from Point A to Point B, without ending up at Point Z.  Obviously not all delve equipment is applicable to every situation, but otherwise it generally behaves like Kill equipment - including having tags that limit or augment their use. Finally, Mend equipment can be used to remove stress from a character's resistances, at least Blood (bandages, surgical gear), Mind (drugs, mostly) and Supplies (scavenging, good delving supplies, spare materials). Fortune and Echo stress is much harder to get rid of, short of suffering Fallout, and can often only be reduced at a Haven. In addition to this, the GM might hand out unique or single-purpose gear that won't directly inflict stress. This generally gives access to a Knack rather than having a dice type or any tags. 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. 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 addition of more game-facing mechanics makes sense given the focus of each game - in Spire, your gear is mostly cosmetic, plus whatever weapons you're carrying, whereas in Heart a delver's equipment is of paramount importance. You go into the Heart ill-prepared, and things are not going to go well. Resources Like Equipment, characters will also amass Resources. Like Equipment, each item of Resources has a dice associated with it, representing value and/or rarity - d4 is common, d8 is rare, d12 is unique or remarkable items. Resources, however are also linked to a specific Domain - a Haven d6 resource might be a pouch of coins, whereas an Echo d8 resource might be the organs of a Heartsblood beast, or scrapings of the edritch mould growing on the walls of a long-abandoned Vermissian station. They may also have tags, often acting as hooks for Fortune fallout to trigger - Fragile resources might get damaged, or you might find it hard to shift a Taboo resource. Mostly, characters will find, scavenge or steal resources from the people, creatures and places they find on their travels. They're spent on character abilities, to buy new equipment, or to remove stress - although whether the aforementioned bag of coins, or a string of teeth stolen from a graveyard is more useful depends on who you are, or where you're trying to buy stuff. Most doctors will take cash or medical supplies for example (usually Haven), but some more unusual services will accept more unusual resources as payment. The resources system is entirely new to Heart, along with a better indicator of how to buy/sell gear - once again this makes more sense in a game which is focussed around what is essentially dungeon delving. Classes The good stuff! Whereas Callings are why your character is even in the City Below, and how their arc will progress, Classes give them the set of tools they'll need to try to survive the experience. They're pretty simple in practice; your class gives you one Skill, and one Domain, some starting equipment and resources, as well as one or two Core Abilities, which are key to the class's flavour and mechanics. Finally, you'll pick three Minor Abilities - small advantages and improvements, and one Major Ability, which is more character-defining. The latter also each have three Minor Abilities that can be taken to customize them further, and are alot more varied in how they impact play. Standalone minor abilities are pretty simple, and there's some similarities between classes. Each class has a total of thirteen to pick from, included three semi-shared abilites, which grant either a Skill, a Domain, or +1 Protection to one of four of the resistance tracks (the missing one varies by class). These can all be taken more than once, and are generally not as good as the more unique abilities. Next, every class bar one (the Hound) has two Minor Abilities that each give +2 to a resistance - the 'strong' resistances for that class. The rest generally each give two things; usually a Skill, a Domain, or +1 Protection, plus a unique perk. The Minor Abilities attached to Major ones are less formulaic, and tend to alter how the Major functions, although some grant semi-related perks instead. But enough of this, and on with the classes (next time)! Classes in Heart are far more 'balanced', both in game terms and narrative weight, and Abilities seem rather more substantial than Spire's 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). Also the +1 Skill/Domain/Protection advances have been codified as abilities, and each class has one Protection value they can never increase through a repeatable buy. Next: The Cleaver, Deadwalker and Deep Apiarist
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Apr 11, 2020 23:00
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Heart: The City Beneath 05 - Classes - Cleaver, Deadwalker, Deep Apiarist So, now we get to the classes themselves. As well as a run-through the the class, I'll drop in a link to the design post Chris and Grant did over the months since the Kickstarter, as frankly they've already said most of what there is to day about the actual mechanical design, although some of the classes have moved on quite a bit since they were written. The Cleaver This is what you get if you take a D&D-style druid (with a touch of ranger) and shove them into the Heart (with a side-track into Monster Hunter). They're the ones who head out into the wilds of the City Below, pathfinders and scouts through the nightmare. They change themselves through illicit surgeries, taking a little bit of the Heart into their own bodies, giving them strange and unusual abilities. Cleavers start with Hunt and Cursed, along with a hunting knife and either a cleaver, bow or crude medical gear. They have two Core Abilites; Heartsblood gives them a minimum protection value for all resistances equal to the Tier they're currently on (0 for the City Above, 4 for the Heart itself), making them tougher the deeper they go. The Red Feast lets them eat a resource to gain the domain associated with that resource (particuarly toxic or non-palatable items need a roll), or a knack if they already have the domain. So they've already got the tools to let them survive pretty well anywhere. A Cleaver's minor abilities follow the common pattern; notably they can't get Mind protection through any of their class abilities - the path they take isn't conducive to sanity. Other abilities give them keener hunting instincts, natural weaponry or the ability to command simple animals.  The Cleaver's Major Abilities are; Bloodbound Beast - basically a cryptid animal companion, Chimeric Strain - wild-shape, basically; hulk out by taking Echo stress, Extinction Bow - gain a Monster-Hunter scale bow/siege weapon which can be upgraded to fire harpoons, Monstrous Appetite - heal from using The Red Feast and The Wild Hunt which lets you lead a group hunt or delve. As for the Zenith abilities, either you end up slaying the Beast; the Ur-creatue lurking deep within the heart, or maybe you die and the primeval Forest rushes in, creating a new landmark at your grave. Or maybe...  Cleaver Class Breakdown The Deadwalker Another ranger-analogue, with a touch of rogue, the Deadwalker is someone who nearly died, but for some reason didn't quite and now has their death sitting in the back of their head giving them (terrible) advice. Oh, and the ability to break back into the afterlife if needs be. They get Delve and Desolate and tTheir Core Abilities are Enter the Grey which lets them enter the space between the worlds of the living and the dead and move unseen and unheard, and...  Like the Cleaver, they can't get Mind protection. Their Minor abilities let them hunt prey they've marked, wield their death as a (one-shot) weapon or extinguish nearby light sources. Their Major abilities are Descent - using the Grey to break into one (or more) of the eight Heavens, either though ritual or brute force, Echoes which lets them see a ghostly recreation of the past, Invidious Spectre - their death manifests as poltergeist activity, Reaper's Strike - give up Blood protection to add it to stress inflicted and Sudden Death which let's them dive into the Grey without the prerequisite rituals. When they acheive their Zenith, it goes one of three ways, all of them fatal for the Deadwalker; they can draw a place, person or concept into a physical vessel, killing themselves and it in the process, drag a target into the Dark Place, dying in the process, or just die, tearing open a door to heaven and causing spontaneous miracles in the area (basically a full heal and massive buff to the rest of the party). They always go out with a bang. Deadwalker Class Breakdown The Deep Apiarist Do you like bees? Do you like little agents of order so much you would welcome them into your sinuses to make your body a hive-machine, to fight back the power of the Heart? That's who the Deep Apiarist is. They're a bit of a wizard/priest type; more of a support character than a straight-out combatant (unless fighting Heart-tainted creatures that is). They start with Mend and Occult and can never gain Mind protection - but this hurts them less than you'd think as they have The Hive; they automatically remove all Mind stress at the start of a situation and can never get rid of it any other way. They can also Release the Swarm, basically shooting bees at people. For Minor abilities, they can improve their ability to mend and heal (even if they don't have the right tools), cause someone to revert to their base impulses, see through the eyes of their hive, or even use the bees to highjack wild animals. Or have the swarm chew them up and reassemble them in order to pass through small gaps. The body-horror is much more apparent in this class. Their Major abilites include Blessed Toxin - secrete a healing narcotic and deliver it via a sting, Delirium Spike which boosts the use of their swarm as a weapon, Sacred Geometry - when you roll a 6 to inflict or remove stress, add another d6, Unchaos - coalesce probability, reducing the difficulty of actions, and...  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). Deep Apiarist Class Breakdown Next: The Heretic, Hound and Incarnadine
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Apr 12, 2020 21:47
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Night10194 posted:Oh, hi, gentle order bees! I liked you in Spire! The Deep Apiarist in Heart takes the one from Spire and cranks it up significantly...
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Apr 12, 2020 22:07
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Heart: The City Beneath 06 - Classes - Heretic, Hound, Incarnadine The next three! A bit less body-horror in this batch. I'll probably keep the D&D analogues for each class, as those are kind of our archetypical dungeon-delving roles, and the Heart is nothing if not a massive dungeon. Plus Grant and Chris have done something similar to Kieron Gillan's Die in that they've subverted the traditional party roles in interesting ways. The Heretic Within the City Below continues the traditional Drow worship of the Danmou; their triple-goddess of the Moon, now (mostly) outlawed in the City Above. Close to the Heart, however, this worship has twisted into belief in a Moon Below, of which the one hanging in the sky is a pale reflection. Priests and healers, they follow a syncretic religion which worships all three faces of the moon in a way that would likely now be unrecognisable in the Spire. 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. 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). Their Minor Abilities let them grant protection to their allies, and interact with the devout of the Moon Below, as well as seeing in the dark, or discrening lies (it's a bit of a grab-bag). As with other classes, they can improve their protection against four kinds of stress, and although they don't have a repeating way of boosting Blood Protection, other Minor and Major abilites grant it, making the Heretic pretty tough in the long run. The Heretic's Major abilities represent five of the six virtues of the Danmou (the sixth, Grace, is missing, possibly stolen by the Aelfir). Oath of Community lets you reduce the effects of Blood fallout and stress, both for yourself and your allies. Oath of Fury is more aggresive, letting you augment your killing abilities considerably, although failing to make a worthy kill causes Mind stress.  Oath of Tenacity increases the stress you deal for Risky or Dangerous rolls, Rite of Vigilance lets you see the souls of nearby creatures, even through obstacles. When they hit their Zenith, they may ascend as an Angel of the goddess, taking on great powers for a scene before being ossified into a bone-crystal statue, look upon the Goddess herself, become a beacon to the faithful and converting the secular (and triggering an elite kill-team of Aelfir Paladins to come mobilise and hunt you down), or die a martyr's death, creating a holy landmark where you've fallen. Heretic Class Breakdown The Hound Long ago, a mad Aelfir general sent the nine-hundred men of the 33rd down into the City Below in an attempt to pacify the Heart. A mere three hundred survived, cut off and besieged. In order to save the remaining troops, the officers did something terrible, and forgotten. The Hounds are those who bear the badges of those three hundred, protectors of all who draw breath in the City Below. The first of the two 'fighter' types, Hounds are somewhere between a Western lawman and Sam Vimes, with a touch of secular Paladin. They start with Hunt and Haven, and their single core ability is In The Thick of It - once per scene they can mark stress to Fortune in place of another resistance, and when they're hit with Fortune fallout, they roll with Mastery for the entire scene. Minor abilities let them survive the inevitable perils the Heart will throw their way, ferret out injustice, force themselves to be the center of attention, or just find a safe place to hole up and gain a brief respite. True to their nature they never get Fortune protection - Hounds are never lucky, but are otherwise pretty hardened to the more mundane dangers of the Heart. Their Major Abilities are Condemn - declare somone a wanted criminal, Forewarned and Forearmed - spend time to prepare for coming challenges, Stare Down, where your gaze becomes a weapon (it doesn't kill, just terrifies and demoralises), Trench-Fighter - you know how to hit where it hurts, and Unstoppable - when you're hurt, you're even more dangerous. At their Zenith, they either transform to become the original owner of their badge, eternally standing watch over a landmark, or resort to destroying their badge, freeing the 33rd to act out their final moments (destroying the landmark you're in in the process). Or they can become a...  Hound Class Breakdown The Incarnadine In the City Above, fortunes wax and wane, and sometimes someone will find themselves entirely indebted to their creditors. Rarer still is it to be so catestrophically in debt that you attract the attention of Incane, the Crimson God. Parts of your life and memories have been repossessed, and you bear Incarne's mark as one of their priest-merchants, wielding the metaphysical force of your own debt. Incarnadines get Compel and Haven as their starting skill and domain; they're merchants at heart, unscrupulous and desperate. Essentially, the nearest D&D role is the Bard - they've got a lot of utility, and make good faces, but aren't stand-up fighters, along with a touch of the rogue. They don't know what you need - they just make you think you want it. They have two core abilities; The Cost of Doing Business lets them consume a resource, roll and set aside its dice to use when they perform a later action or inflict stress. Also, if they go down, they explode;  Their Minor Abilities are largely based around trade and exchange, hurting those who've shed your blood, manipulating (or stealing) resources, and getting away from those you've wronged in turn. They can never get Blood protection, however - they're never going to be front-line fighters, although they'll happily knife someone in the back, literally and metaphorically. Incarnadines get the usual five Major Abilities; Backstab gives them a nice combat punch against unaware targets, Broker lets them pray to Incarne to remove stress from another (and eventually trade fallout), Crave instills a great desire in the target, Debtor's Reds - the holy robes of Incarne - inflict stress on your enemies whenever they see you act, and Karmic Ledger let's you know someone's deepest Karmic debt, and use it to your advantage. Finally Network lets you start to build out an actual trading network through the City Below, reaping resources as you do. (Theoretically, Heart is a traingame after all...) Their Zenith rewards are interesting. Either receive a favour from Incarne, being able to buy anything; physical, conceptual, whatever, but it'll cost your life (a couple of sessions later), or wield the weight of Incarne's own Debt against a target - you also use it to clear your own stress, but there's a 10% chance each time that this will kill you. Or finally, you can pay off your debt. Unlike all the other Zenith Abilities this doesn't benefit your party in the slightest; it's the single selfish one. But it does mean you can go back to a normal life, dying decades later surrounded by your loved ones. Incarnadine Class Breakdown Next: The Junk Mage, Vermissian Knight and Witch
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Apr 15, 2020 09:14
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Heart: The City Beneath 06 - Classes - Junk Mage, Vermissian Knight, Witch Now into the home stretch, with what are possibly my three favourite classes. An interesting thing to note is that nobody gets Kill as an automatic skill, and I quite like this - it's easy enough for pretty much any class to pick up the skill, but there has to be a conscious decision on the player's part. After all, your class skills reflect what you're doing day-to-day, and even the Cleaver, Hound or Knight are Hunting or Delving as a day job. Pretty much no-one is a Killer by profession (even a hitman would probably have Hunt or Discern instead). The Junk Mage There are great and powerful entities out there, beyond the world that we see and feel, and the Junk Mage has learnt to tap their power; stealing or bargining for mana from alien minds. They're basically half-mad magic-junkies, scraping together spells from bits of dream, half-formed true names and theoretically thaumaturgy, riding the bleeding edge until they burn out. Very much Heart's warlock analogue, Junk Mages start with Discern and Occult (pretty much as you'd expect), and a small selection of esoteric or just plain unsubtle weaponry. Their core abilities are Ravening Knowledge - they roll with mastery to cast spells when they have four or more Mind stress, and Sacrifice - they can destroy an Occult resource to protect from spell-casting backlash. As long as they can keep themselves just unbalanced enough, they can work wonders. Minor abilities for the Junk mage play up their packrat habits, letting them fix and improve their gear (making it more dangerous to use to boot), smell magic or avoid attention. Or just carry a whole lot of random arcana;  As could be expected, they can never get Mind protection - they embrace the insanity rather than hardening themselves against it. Major abilities are all spells, invoking one of the entities the mage is bound to/stealing from; the Minor abilities associated with them tend to grant access to additional spells, or alternative uses of the major ability. Curse of the Sky Court taps into an exiled fae court of the air, throwing those nearby into an orgy of hedonism. Frenzy of the Sky Court channels their mercurial energies instead, gaining protection, but hindering actions that need concentration. Greed of the Red King invokes an ancient spirit of greed and flame, letting you smell worth and see want.  Kiss of the Drowned Queen summons the power of that ancient Eel-queen, conjuring salt water into the lungs of a target. Sanctum of the Stone Chorus opens a path to a temple of the Old Gods; imprisoned parasite-deities which can remove Echo stress (and other forms of stress with upgrades). The Zenith abilities entail making a pact with one of these entities. Summoning the Red King, and either being added to his hoard or taking his place. Becoming the advisor to the Drowned Queen; her most loyal subject until you end up mad, assassinated or taken as her latest spouse. Or opening the prison of the Stone Chorus, adding your target as another captive. You become part of the lock on the door, however. Junk Mage Class Breakdown The Vermissian Knight The Vermissian is a wonder of engineering, a public transport system designed to grant free and easy access to all parts of the Spire. But the original engineers decided to use the Heart as a source of occult power, and everything went horribly, horribly wrong. The infrastructure is home now to the deranged and the desperate; heretics and fringe historians. The Vermissian Knights are the guardians of those who live in and near the tunnels and stations - often the largest pockets of civilisation in the City Below. Wielding good steel, and armoured scavenged from feral locomotives, they are a symbol of protection and order. A tank, pretty much literally, the Vermissian Knight is probably the toughest class in terms of straight-up combat, and is pretty good at protecting the rest of the party. They start with Delve and Technology and a single core ability;  It's expensive, but makes them very versitile. A Knight's Minor Abilities tend towards protecting yourself or others and tracking and delving around obstacles. They can't get Mind protection - there's just too much wierdness that they're exposed to - but they make up for it by being able to get very good Echo, Blood and Fortune protection; they know how to handle themselves in the City Below. Major Abilities include; Aetheric Field - discharge the occult energies in your armour once per session, Dragon-Killer - you get a Knight's greatblade which excels at killing anything bigger than yourself, Overclock - you learn how to boost your armour up to and beyond its limits, Trailblazer - increase the amount of stress you inflict on a Delve (and how much it inflicts on you) by forced-marching. Also, and possibly most iconic;  When they hit their Zenith, a knight may learn the location of a unique landmark, dying tragically or ascending to a protective spirit when they reach it, take a heartseed into their armour and body, becoming an engine of destruction (who can be invoked to turn up later by the rest of the party), or learn the rite that summons the Last Train (although it will kill you to call it). Vermissian Knight Class Breakdown The Witch Deep in the City Beneath, in the ruins of a burnt-out and forgotten cathedral, is Hallow. This ramshackle town is where the Witches congregate - carries of a blood-disease that bonds them with the Heart; an occult aristocracy with notable bloodlines and lineages. The disease may eventually kill them, but in the mean time it grants uncanny powers over blood and the creatures of the Heart. Witches are hard to pin down in terms of their party role - Sorcerer might be the closest, what with the social skills and magical punch, but they're no slouch in a fight. Along with Compel and Occult, they have a pair of core abilities; Crucible let's them roll a d6 against their Echo stress - if it's less, they roll with mastery on their next action, otherwise they take that much stress, and True Form lets them revert to a vicious, bestial horror; terrifying in combat, but bad at anything else (this triggers automatically when they take Major fallout). So maybe Noble/Sorcerer + the Hulk. This is basically Spire's Blood Witch, but in their natural habitat and without the restrictions placed upon then by having to live in a 'normal' society. The Witch's Minor Abilities let them ignore fallout, expand the scope of their True Form, read emotions and fix both bodies and objects. They can't get straight Echo protection - they're too open to the energies of the Heart, although even there they can get temporary protection. In a break from form, the Witch actually has six Major Abilities to choose from; Ascendancy - add the Occult domain to the local area for a scene, Crimson Mirror - see omens in a bloody mirror, Exsanguinate - exactly as you'd expect, Familiar - gain a bonded, warped animal that can soak up stress for you, Great and Terrible - get greater control over your True Form, and;  The Zenith abilities are what happens when their status in the City Below, and their mastery of the disease reach a peak; they bond themselves to the landscape, a nightmare creature for a time before fading into a haunting echo, they ascend to dominion over the Witches of Hallow (although after a couple of sessions they'll be interred in the Red Vaults beneath), or...  Witch Class Breakdown Next: Playing and Running the game
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Apr 17, 2020 11:46
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What people have said - the Calling is why you’re down here; past that it’s a struggle to survive and keep yourself going while you end up delving ever deeper and deeper. It’s certainly not got the broader (occasionally too broad) society of Spire, with so much going on, but mechanically it’s much better and much more focussed. Check the QuickStart adventure for an idea - it’s pretty standard “go to a place and fight off /negotiate with a powerful being”, but the flavour of it is distinctly Heart. I’ll get to the setting chapters in a bit, but it’s not wrong to say that there’s plenty for players to get themselves in even more trouble doing.
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Apr 17, 2020 19:52
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Next Heart segment should be up tomorrow - horrendous migraine over the weekend delayed things a bit.
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Apr 20, 2020 22:22
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Heart: The City Beneath 08 - The rest of the mechanics So, on to actually playing Heart. We've gone over the core mechanics, we've seen the tools players can use to interact with the system, but what else is there to see?  Rolling and Healing Heart, like Spire before it is goal-orientated - you're not rolling to see if you succeed on an action; the roll is to see how well you do in relation to your current goal; it's subtle, but the idea is to look at what you want to do first, then how your character's skills best apply to the task. The GM is responsibly for setting the stakes - the difficulty (Standard/Risky/Dangerous/Impossible), as well as the possible consequences in terms of Stress. If there's no reason to be mores specific, the latter is based on the Tier - how deep you are in the City Below. The GM is encouraged to make the difficulty and consequences apparent up-front so that players go in knowing the risks. After a brief foray once more into Fallout - which I talked about a few posts ago - we go into healing it (and stress). In general, this is either done through class abilities - serveral classes can remove one or more types of stress, and some, more major abilities can remove or downgrade fallout - or through resting or buying services from a Haunt. Haunts are locations found in Landmarks (the more static, unchanging parts of the City Below), which can be used to buy equipment or remove forms of stress; but this inevitably requires the expenditure of Resources. The amount of stress recovered is limited by the dice type of the resources you have at hand, and the dice type of the Haunt itself - a ramshackle shelter set up as a doctor's office might be listed as (d6 Blood, d6 Mind), and so could never heal more than d6 stress per visit. Ongoing fallout (i.e. fallout with a long-term effect) can be removed; either a d6 resource spent for Minor fallout, or a d8 for Major fallout. Critical fallout is usually the end of a character, but it is possible in some circumstances to downgrade it to Major fallout for a d8 resource, if you can get to a Haven with an appropriate Haunt quickly enough. As ever, all of this is in the service of telling a story; fallout is often the opportunity to throw a spanner in the player's plans, complicating them, but not preventing them. Combat Like Spire, combat in Heart is presented as any other situation - not just a series of Kill rolls. There's only a couple of special rules to consider; outnumbered players increase the size of the stress dice they suffer, and out-ranging your enemies can put you in a position of safety, reducing the difficulty of rolls, or negating some of the potential stress they inflict. Likewise, initiative is fairly fast and loose. Generally, the GM will just choose who acts at any one time, based on what makes the most sense, and NPCs are purely reactive; they don't get turns, they just react to what the players do (and may attempt to take advantage of any delays). Options are presented for alternative methods; going round the table in turn, or a player-driven initiative order. Bonds Bonds are another mechanic that has survived from Spire, although as there's less of an emphasis on social manipulation and contacts in the City Below, they're somewhat reduced in scope. In Heart, Bonds represent srong relationships with someone (or something) - not necessarily a positive relationship, but not an antagonistic one. Characters can have up to three at any one time, and they act as stress sinks - you can transfer d8 stress to the Bond whenever you visit them. Unfortunately bonds can suffer fallout too - Minor represents minor tasks you need to help them with, Major bond fallout indicates they, or your relationship with them is in serious trouble. Critical bond fallout removes the bond (and may have further repercussions). As an optional rule you can also get a bond to do stuff for you. They'll take the stress, and roll based on their expertise, and how close the job is to where they live. The basic use of bonds here is absent in Spire - you just used them to do stuff for you, and the fallout rules are a bit clearer in Heart. Then again, in Heart they're mostly used as stress-dumps, whereas in Spire it was much easier to get rid of stress. Exploration So this is what players will be doing a lot of; exploring (newly-unknown) territory, carving paths between scattered points of safety, and delving into the nightmarish unknown. As the Heart itself is a rift where reality itself breaks down, the landscape tends to be pretty fluid, changing behind your back. The pressure of a larger group of people; of their thoughts, beliefs and desires can calcify or scar a place into being more stable - the longer a place is lived in, or the more times a route is followed, the slower or less the likelyhood of changes. Landmarks are these islands of stability in the City Below and can be used for navigation (insomuch as one can navigate the Heart). Havens are Landmarks that are home to a stable, and at least non-hostile population - this is most often where the party will be able to get rid of unwelcome amounts of stress, heal, re-stock and generally try to forget their predicament. A journey between two Landmarks is called a Delve, and is statted out a bit like an opposing NPC;  This is the example given in the book - there aren't any other pre-generated delves as the character of each tends to lean heavily on the Landmarks at either end. Tier is how deep (from 0 to 4) the delve takes place, and a given delve may well bridge two Tiers as you go ever deeper. This determines the general difficulty, although sometimes a delve will be easier or harder - having a lower or higher Stress that will be inflicted if the players don't roll well enough. The Resistance of a delve is an abstraction of how hard-going it is, as well as simply how long it is. The Domains are usually those of the landmarks at either end, and affect what domains players need for those extra dice on their Delve rolls; progress through a given delve is generally a sequence of Delve rolls, although other skills may come into play as usual. Successful rolls inflict stress against the delve's resistance - d4 if you're doing it without gear, but usually d6 or d8 for decent or particuarly good gear - and when this reaches 0, you get to the other end. Events are the triggers for rolls against the delve; usually the GM will use them to flavour the rolls required, or to create the obstacles the players need to circumvent. Characters can also perform actions that make the journey easier or harder - such as fighting a clutch of monsters - taking these kinds of risk grant Boons, which inflict additional stress on the delve (up to d12 if the players are really clever). Likewise, resting for extended periods, carrying out rituals or getting side-tracked to harvest resources can generate Banes, which remove stress on the delves as the party take more time than necessary, and supplies start to run low. Finally, Connections are harder tasks that will either incur a significant Bane, or bring the party into conflict with something dangerous. Acheiving this, however, and completing the delve, renders it much more stable and much less dangerous; letting people and goods travel between Havens with relatively little risk. Spire has no such mechanics, but you can quite easily see how the Delve rules could be applied to any long group endeavour, like casing a joint or gathering blackmail on an authority figure... The Map There's a template for this at the back of the book - a blank hex grid, where landmarks and the delves between them should get filled in as a record of the campaign. It's not recommended that the GM pre-plan this too much; it's better to create and evolve it through the course of play (it can also provide a handy source of plot hooks as needed). If you really want to go all the way, RR&D will be selling a pad of maps and landmark/delve stickers soon. Next: GM Advice, and the World of Heart
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Apr 21, 2020 20:57
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Darkest Dungeons + high Insight Bloodborne is very close to Heart's aesthetic (albeit it tends to use the words 'red', 'warm' and 'glistening' a bit more).
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Apr 21, 2020 22:08
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Joe Slowboat posted:The Bloodborne soundtrack is listed as a major Spire inspiration/play aid. Yeah, Spire suffers a bit from being slightly less focused, and the Heart just originally being part of the main setting. Especially given that 90% of the time, Ministers have no reason to go down below Derelictus and actually engage with any of the real weirdness.
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Apr 22, 2020 07:41
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LupusAter posted:I find this line of criticism very weird, tbh. The sourcebook focuses on the city being a forced melting pot of weirdness, giving a vast sampler of places and things. It's the GM that decides where the focus will be, but the locations are there to be used if needed. I've co-ran a campaign entirely focused around the weirdness around the Heart, where the conflict between having to survive these eldritch interferences and trying to be good revolutionaries ended up being a narrative throughline, and we never went above the Red Row, but that doesn't make the upspire locations redundant or useless. That's fair; I just found it can be a bit tricky focussing on some of the weird without splurging out into everything; it does make it a bit harder to keep to a consistent tone.
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Apr 22, 2020 14:47
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Heart: The City Beneath 09 - GM's Section If this section feels rushed, it's not - it's just there's alot of good advice here, but it's quite hard to get across without writing it out in entirity.  Running the Game To start off (after that opening blurb), we get the usual 'first time running a game' tips, which is pretty good here; not just concerned with world-building, it also talks about how to arrange games and what everyone should have to hand - the little things that make the experience better. As Heart is a narrative game, it also talks about controlling the pacing and energy of play - players have a lot of agency, and the GM's responsibility is to guide it and make sure the narrative flows smoothly. Then we get into the full list of general tips. After the general tips, the section has a section for first time story game GMs - as Heart is very much a narrative experience, rather than any kind of simulation. In short; details aren't too important; they only matter when they come in contact with the narrative, and the GM is responsible for working out how the world reacts to the players, rather than being the arbiter of a simulation. Also, importantly, don't plan too much - you don't want too much friction between what you think should happen, and what the players actually do.  An example of how to adjudicate failed rolls Finally, we get into advice specific to Heart. In general, you should start with some idea of the framing for the campaign - the default setting is a ragtag group of explorers, but there's several other suggestions; setting up a City Below trading company, defending a Haven, intelligences agents burnt by their handlers (this last one will be feature in one of the upcoming sourcebooks). But the key thing is to give the player's actions weight - if they do something, the world should react and quite possibly change as a result. In play, as a GM your job is to ask questions of the players - let them add flavour to the world around them, and generally give up any kind of firm control (it's easier that way - the GM is never really in control at the best of times; just roll with it). Also take a note of their answers - if there's little tidbits either you or the players come up with, keep them and re-use them; it makes the evocation of the world easier if there's a few familiar or remembered elements. Atmosphere in Heart is important; it's a horrific nightmare-place, but there's people - actual normal people - trying to make a living there; however tragic their lives are, they're alive, and it's possibly better than what it was before. The City Below is a terrifying, but wondrous place; the Heart isn't directly malevolant per se, and deep down you might wander through a parasite heaven, or an impossible three-dimensional turntable at the heart of the Vermissian. Things get strange down there. Tension in the game is also important - this is, essentially a horror game - but it's not something anyone can sustain. Let the players joke, let them break the tension every so often and use that as a contrast with the more distressing elements (and it should be noted, this game is fully up front about use of the X card, and Lines and Veils - there's quite a lot here which could be quite upsetting if it's sprung on players without warning). Fundementally, your job is to give players what they want. If they have a skill or a domain, let them use it. If the Vermissian Knight takes Dragon Killer then give them something big and nasty to kill. The players' Callings and the Beats they choose are key here - when they're picking Beats at creation, or at the end of a session, these should be the heart of any planning for the next session - if they want to take Blood fallout, include a fight, if they need to claim a valuable resource, give them the opportunity to steal or otherwise acquire one. Zenith beats bear special mention, as these are the culmination of a character's arc; their redemption or downfall, and should provide a satisfying resolution (if they don't succumb to Critical fallout before then). Ideally players should have an idea of what Zenith beat and ability they're aiming towards after a few sessions; as a GM you should take this into account as you plot the campaign forwards. Characters aren't disposable in Heart, but they're not going to around for years of play; they're supposed to die or otherwise end. And the campaign shouldn't go on forever - the suggestion is about eight linked games (not sessions, I think, but think plotlines/adventures; it's a bit vague); after that it might be time to call time on the campaign, either for a break or a fresh start. The rest of the chapter is on general mechanical advice; NPC creation (give them distinct traits and mannerisms, steal from pop culture, don't be afraid to kill them off), Combat - adverseries and players should always have an out; pretty much no-one is going to be fighting to the death, and player should have plenty of information up front. Fights should be about something - the skill is Kill after all, and that infers some kind of stake - and consequences are often brutal. Landmarks and delves can (and should) be freely tweaked to fit the campaign - the list in the book are suggestions, not canon. Oh, and every GM is terrified of screwing up, but this is normal and might never go away, so try to have fun doing it. Next: The Setting (finally)
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Apr 23, 2020 08:56
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Heart: The City Beneath 10 - The World of Heart  So as previously-established, the Heart is a twisting, ever-changing warren of tunnels and caverns, where reality starts to fray and break down the closer you get to the center. But people still live here; it wasn't always quite this bad. So what made it worse? The usual - Aelfir and humans Digging Too Deep in the name of efficient public transport. You see, countless civilisations have laid claim to the Spire over the millenia (it's prime real estate after all), and all of them have, to some degree or another, dug down beneath the city. Every time, this has slightly weakened whatever mechanism it is that maintains the division between material reality outside the Heart, and the places within which are much more fluid, much more affected by thought and belief. And then some bright spark decided to use it as a source of power to run a train network. The resulting backlash led to the tracks and tunnels twisting around each other, warping through space and time, puncturing holes into other dimensions. Hasty wards and large amounts of concrete have served to stop too much of the Heart breaking through into the City Above, and the entire network was boarded up (and the Aelfir pretend the whole affair never happened). So now there's scattered settlements, some of opportunists, trying to exploit the energies and properties of the Heart as it is now, and some that pre-date the Vermissian experiment, and can remember a time when things were decidedly safer down there. The problem is, the Heart itself hears the thoughts, stories and prayers of those that live within it, and it tries, in a blind, incompetant way, to fulfill these wishes. There's never been a bear in the City Below, but if someone thinks of one, the Heart might try to make one. Pity it has no real idea of what a bear is. The Inhabitants The pressure of thought and belief can 'scar' areas of the Heart, rendering it stable and relatively save, and these Landmarks provide home to many of the settlements and factions in the City Below. The further you are from a Landmark, and the deeper you go, the more the landscape reacts to the very act of observing it, or telling stories about it. But within the settlements, you could almost believe things were normal, for a given value of the term, and this is one of the few things that helps keep the people down here fairly sane. Of course, anyone who was entirely right in the head would have left a long time ago, but everyone down here has something that keeps them here; poverty, obsession or religious obligation being common reasons. Amongst it all, there's still a sense of humanity (in the broadest sense of the term). Wherever there are people, there is art; settlements are carved and painted in a myriad of styles, books are horded, edited, re-mixed and songs are sung, with cartography held as the highest art of all; relying on drug-induced fugues and ecstatic states to try to map the City Below. Religion is another thing the inhabitants cling to; and many outlawed or exiled faiths have a nexus of worshippers in the Heart, from the Church of the Moon Below, the cult of Charnel, the gnollish carrion-god, Ishkrah; the spider-goddess, ally of the drow and protector of their children, to worship of the Many, a patchwork of half-forgotten deities from the drow homelands of Ys. Or there are those who just lose themselves to the Heart itself. There are even a few significant factions that have a presence across a large are of the Heart. AThe Hounds enforce a perilous form of order in the City Below, the remnents of a long-lost regiment of soldiers from the Spire. The Church of the Moon Below has shrines and missionaries in many settlements, often mixing with more orthodox worship of the Damou - the drow triple-goddess. The Vermissian Collective has roots anywhere the rails travel; outlawed historian-magi who use the stations and tunnels as a repository of the lost history of the drow, as well as a way to extract what might have been from alternate realities. The Gryndel Hunting Club on the other hand are just down here for the challenge; chasing down horrific hearts-blood beasts before retiring to their secret lodges for brandy and cigars. Even the Ministry, a paramilitary revolutionary cult who wage a clandestine war against the Aelfir have a presence here, digging up riches or secrets to help them in their secret conflict. Any of these factions can find a use for a team of delvers; desperate or insane enough to travel deep into the Heart. Time and Geography Time is fluid in the City Below, more so the deeper you travel. This, and the absence of the sun (or at least, the absence of the same sun that shines above-ground), mean that many settlements will maintain bells, rung on the hour, to keep track of days and nights. The Heart even has distinct seasons, called pulses, from Rot where the dirt is hungry, to Breath when strange winds sing through the tunnels, and half a dozen more beside, but even these are of varying and unpredictable length. The geography of the Heart can be divided into tiers. In general, the deeper you go, the weirder things get, and the more organic the landscape becomes. No-one knows, or can agree on, what the Heart itself exactly is, but its manifestations definately feel alive; red, wet and twitching. Tier 0 is the City Above, down as far as the upper reaches of Derelictus, where things are, broadly-speaking, normal. Tier 1 is the City Between; Derelictus, and the shallower parts of the under-city. Things are a little strange here, but nothing that couldn't be explained away by dodgy magic and esoteric occultism. Settlements here are fairly common, the people aren't too touched by the Heart. Tier 2 is where things start to get strange; landmarks wander and havens are few, and those that exist are unsettling to people from above. Monsters and things creep in when you're not looking and the song of the Heart gets stronger. Tier 3 is where things like time and gravity start to break down, and holes open to other worlds and parasitic realities. There is no rhyme or reason to space here; you might emerge under the light of an alien sun, or a forest in a pitch-black cavern. Nobody lives this deep, at least not anything you'd usually think of as a person. Tier 4. The Heart, the wet red heaven that beats at the center of the City Beneath. You can't come back from here - anything that does isn't you anymore. Fractures are other-spaces, shortcuts through the Heart, as well as stable doorways to other realities, or even to the afterlives of the cultures of the City Above. They're weird, but it's a logical, understandable weird. Next: Notable Landmarks
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Apr 26, 2020 10:39
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Heart: The City Beneath 10 - Landmarks, Tier 0 and 1 Bit of a delay again, but let's press ahead with the example Landmarks. You're encouraged to make up your own, and some that have been mentioned by name only won't appear in this section, but there's a healthy number to populate your campaign's version of the Heart with. Tier 0 There is only one landmark in Tier 0; Derelictus, the City Between. It, or whatever settlement occupied its caverns before it, have always been the point of intersection between the sunny world above, and the nightmare below, so it's no wonder that it was the planned home of what would have been the Vermissian's greatest station. Abandoned, along with the rest of the system, arching ceilings of broken glass tower above the bustling market that's been built up on the original station platforms. These are divided by the goods they offer, but all are there to cater to the needs of prospective delvers. Platform 1 has the best gear, way out of the reach of most delvers, who will find the basics to keep them alive on platforms 2 and 3. Platform 4 is a clearing house for those looking for work - several organisations recruit delvers at offices here, although only some are openly advertised. In game terms, Derelictus can be used to reset a character's stress as they spend a few days R&R here; it's also a good place to shift the choicest bits of loot from deep down in the City Below. Amusingly, it's also the safest place delvers are likely to find themselves (in contrast to Spire, where it's the archetypical wretching hive of scum and villany - for delvers, that's Tuesday). Tier 1 This is where you start to get into the Heart proper, and where many outcast sects and organisations make their home - deep enough that they're away from the eyes of the authorities, but shallow enough to avoid the truely weird poo poo. The God of Corpses is the corpse of some great, unidentifiable beast, and is home to a sect who worship the Seven Sacred Ailments, considering all other diseases to be unholy and the work of demons. As a consequence, you can find excellent, if erratic medical care here. There's a quiet war here between opposing cults who alternately seek to awaken the god-beast, and ensure its slumber. Grip Station was built in a cavern festooned with crystalline stalagtites and the aelfir constructors constructed huge spotlights to provide a wondrous vista for trains passing through. Unfortunately these turned out to be too expensive, and any trains moving faster than a crawl caused stalagtites to start falling from the ceiling, creating a truely terrifying experience. Labyrinth is the work of a couple of hundred sufferers of an occult disease. One victim might construct walls of cardboard around their bedroom, taking refuge in a cupboard, but get a bigger group together and they'll wall up streets, dig vicious pit-traps and generally make a nuisance of themselves.  There's not many druids in the City Above; it's not a place resplendant with nature, but in Redcap Grove they've found their niche. Realising that their arts gave them access to a) fast-growing plants and b) control over the dangerous wildlife, they're now behind the most prolific and best guarded drug farms in the City Above or Below. The Deep Apiarists maintain a number of settlements throughout the Heart, and Resonance Chamber Five is one of the shallowest, broadcasting the hum - the signal that the bees use to communicate - throughout the City Below, via the Apiarists' strange anti-chaotic technology. Sump Station would be a decent place to live, that is if the drainage pumps worked anymore. Something lives in the deep water and countless delvers have drowned here whilst looking for artifacts of the long-closed transport system. The Temple of the Moon Beneath has already been covered, four of the subsidiary temples, dedicated to the Damnic Virtues, are also located on this tier. The temple of Community is a nice enough place and the inhabitants are exceedingly friendly. It's not even a front for anything more sinister. The temple of Fury was founded by a particularly genocidal follower of Lekole, the red moon, and he's now bound in its catacombs, unable to truly die (the official story has him a saint for defending the settlement, the truth is significantly less noble). Sagacity's temple is a place of constant philisophical debate; indeed, the priests here believe that if the constant debate ever ends, a great catastrophe will occur. Finally, the temple of Vigilance was traditionally a training ground for spies, but there's not much call for that down here, so it's now a paranoid hive of constant misdirection and back-biting. The Tower is the product of a visionary architect, now exiled from the City Above after her grand vision of a perfect society where everyone had a place was rejected by the powers that be. Down in the City Below, free from critics, planning laws, or the fundemental laws of space and time, she's built her utopia; a miniature replica of the Spire. And it actually works - it's kind of empty, and the constant threat of monsters is an issue, but the inhabitants are truly content. And if you spend time here, you too might never want to leave. Finally for Tier 1, the Tunnels of Wet Filth are a convenient place for the City Above to dispose of the immense volume of sewage its population generates. And yet people still live here, wallowing in the filth, worshipping the great god who defecates on them from above. It's a good place to shift loot that other places won't even look at, but you'll stink for weeks after visiting. Next: Things get weirder
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Apr 29, 2020 22:54
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Heart: The City Beneath 10 - Landmarks, Tiers 2 Pressing on with the rest of the 'normal' sample Landmarks; the deeper reaches of City Below. This deep into the Heart, things start to get very strange indeed. Travelling takes longer - a day or two between Landmarks, and much more dangerous, and the landscape tends to shift and warp behind your back. People still live this deep, as long as you broaden your definition of 'people' and 'live'. Avulse is a rare thing, a Cleaver community formed around the remnants of one of their number who killed a Butcher (someone who's eaten too much of the Heart's substance) and become part of the landscape, feeding his new acolytes from his own flesh. They're not immediately hostile, but it's not really somewhere you'd visit without a very good reason. In Ghorryn a cabal of magi, rumour-mongers and 'scientists' are trying to solve the mystery of the Heart itself, under the eye of a serveral-centuries-old human researcher. The truth is he already figured it out long ago, but the revelation so shook his sanity that the memory of it is lost, locked away in his head. Everyone else in Ghorryn is really a construct, created from his research notes by the Heart in an attempt to make him happier. Grin Station was to be a tourist destination, an immense, improbable theme park deep in the bowels of the Heart. It's derelict now, but some of the exhibits show a distressing tendency to re-grow and regenerate in very odd ways. The home of the Witches of the Heart, Hallow is one of the more hospitable places in this Tier. The witches plot and scheme against each other; outsiders are tolerated, but might end up in the thick of things, especially if one Witch, then another shift to their true forms - they tend to set each other off in a kind of horrible chain reaction. Hang Station is suspended by rusting, creaking cables over an immense artificial lake; the home of some unknown leviathan the Aelfir shipped from the far north for their entertainment. It's not too strange in itself, but the general level of decay makes for a dangerous time navigating the observation decks and balconies of the derelict station. The Harvest Bazaar is a marketplace of ephemera; memories, skills and personalities are bought and sold here, traded by the cultists, pitchkin and sundry zealots who make their home here. It's pretty safe, but the more you deal here, the more it drains your positive traits and talents. Highrise is a great sea of tower-blocks, each twenty stories or more of grey stone, but only the upper floors and roof-tops show signs of habitation; lower down is filled with a sea of hungry ghosts. The inhabitants, largely death-cultists, sacrifice the bodies of the dead to the ghosts below, throwing the dead (and sometimes the living) from the roof-tops wreathed in charms and the feathers of the albino crows that flock here. There are predatory buildings in the City Below, which move around and actively hunt out prey. The Hoard is one such building, a wandering library that seeks out books and knowledge, feeding the maggot-like dragon-larva that dreams at its heart. Visits are discouraged - you're likely to end up as one of the wyrm's mind-controlled librarian pawns. Some such predatory sites are ambush hunters instead. The Last Orders looks like a pretty run-of-the-mill pub if you were in the City Above; in the Heart it's positively an oasis. But have one too many drinks and maybe when you head up to a room, or dissapear to take a leak the stairs will crumble beneath you, leaving you broken in the basement, to be slowly digested by the pub itself. The Machines of Dust are a shrine to the Hungry Deep, a nameless god of decay and entropy. Living beings are (voluntarily?) strapped to an ancient obelisk - the cultists here claim that they are responsible for the Heart's existence, and are the ones stopping it spreading even further. Correct or not, staying around the Machines is decidedly unhealthy. The Red Market is the home of the warring sects dedicated to Incarne, goddess of predatory capitalism. The Incarnadines in their fortress-towers oversee a great expanse of crimson market stalls, where mostly anything can be bought or sold. The fifth shrine to the Moon Beneath, the Temple of Grace is a place of worship for Lombre, the dark side of the moon. The Temple is a maze of non-lethal traps - they maim and wound, but never kill - which initiates must walk blindfolded, again and again until they can pass through without harm. Swinefall is the abbatoir of the Heart; countless sluices and hanging hooks, haunted by a court of pig spirits who may be bribed with offerings of food scraps to let travellers pass. The Trypogenesis Chamber is the great fortress-machine of the Deep Apiarists; the gateway to their Hive, the extra-dimensional megaconsciousness that fights the chaos of the Heart. Friendly travellers can find some sanctuary here, but if the Landmark is attacked, countless Apiarists will give their lives to defend it. Finally Well Station was intended by the Aelfir to serve as a model community for their Drow underlings. It's normal enough, but everything here is the same - every paving slab is cracked in the same place, every sign shows the same gibberish, and every street that leads from the station has the same buildings, pubs, and bars. Next: Tier 3
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May 3, 2020 00:30
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Heart: The City Beneath 12 - Landmarks, Tier 3 and Rogue Landmark The last of the 'fixed' Landmarks are those found on Tier 3. Here the laws of reality have long since been deserted, and the laws of the Heart hold sway - gravity fluxes any which way, time stretches or leaps forwards and notions of direction and distance are entirely arbitary. Safe Havens and Haunts are few and far between, and travel between Landmarks can take weeks or just a few minutes. Forgot to mention is before, but most of the sample landmarks also have potential plot-hooks listed for them, which are generally a good reason for one faction or another to hire the players to go there. The Tier 3 Landmarks tend to be particuarly rich. Briar is a twilit forest, dark and tangled and populated by countless beasts, strange and dangerous. Hunters from House Gryndel are a not-uncommon sight here and can prove a useful source of supplies - they consider this one of the finest hunting-grounds in the Heart, and drag many bizarre trophies up-Spire. When the advance of the 33rd Regiment ground to a halt, these veteren fighters did what they new best, they dug in. The Bunker is the Landmark where they made their eternal last stand. It's a forest of razor-wire, criss-crossed with trenches and the occult pseudo-ghosts of the soldiers of the regiment. The Hounds make pilgrimages here - this is where the commanders of the 33rd carried out whatever ritual left them in their current state of limbo. Cairnmor is the grand barrow of an ancient King, nameless and forgotten. The tree above the barrow fell some time in the distant past, its golden sap leaking into the tomb. The old King and his court now exist in a perpetual drunken revel as a bunch of pissed-up revenants. The Ghastling Plain is a sea of ash, beneath a ceiling of ever-burning embers. People live here, amongst the desolation; long-houses built on stilts support fisher-folk who catch the eyeless lizards and ash-squid that swim across the plains. It's a good source of trading goods - the ink sacs of the squids are especially prized upspire. The Maw is the ultimate place of devotion to the Hungry Deep, a shrine to decay and entropy. The cultists here, their lives prolonged by the blessing of the place, commune with the ancient obelisk at its heart, from which a pit and stair descends far, far deeper; maybe even to the Heart itself. The Moon Grove is a holy place, the resting-place of the truly faithful to the Moon Beneath; so blessed by their deity that they can no longer move, their bodies covered in unblinking black eyes. They are interred here, still breathing, beneath the eternal light of the Moon Beneath. It's a peaceful place, but it's easy to be overwhelmed by the sacred power and piety of the landmark. Grave-robbers are rare, successful ones even more so. See bloodborne for an idea of the Moon Beneath's 'blessings'. It's not a malevolent force, it's just not the right kind of benevolence for our reality. The Gnolls of the far Nujub are portrayed by their Aelfir enemies as bestial, violent creatures, but this couldn't be further from the truth - they are massively accomplished occult engineers with science that is, in some areas, massively more advanced than anything known to elf or man. The Plaza of Silicate Flowers, Misallocated is one such feat; a silicon construct that captures the sun's light, spreading it across the district in a multitude of colours throughout the night. The Institute of Celestial Ontolofy at the center was one of Nujub's great places of research and learning. Until they tried tapping the Source, the gnoll's artificial afterlife. Now it's been dragged into the Heart, and the inhabitants are just trying to survive, trading with whoever dares make it down this far. The deepest of the temples of the Moon Beneath, The Temple of Tenacity is a blasted place on top of an ever-burning fire. The few zealots who make their home here are really there because they just can't stand people, and take out their issues on visiting pilgrims. Terminus is home to one of the great Nexus Devices of the Vermissian - a turntable in three dimensions that can be turned right, left, up, down, strangewise, and other, less orthodox directions. Despite the fact that trains aren't running on the network, the Nexus Devices still operate according to some long-lost timetable, tapping directly into the Heart itself. Theoretically, you could travel anywhere on the Vermissian from here; even the parts that are otherwise inaccessible, or nonexistant. Wardstone Nasonov is the greatest acheievment of the Deep Apiarists; an island of stability place on the threashold of the Heart itself. Members of the sect travel here every year to sacrifice part of their hive; there's little food and the stress of keeping the wardstone operational is quickly too much for them to handle, so the swarm must be constantly refreshed. Rogue Landmarks These are sites that don't stay put, not even within the same tier, instead they wander throughout the Heart, turning up in all sorts of places. Magi-mal's Domain is the lair of the only Midwife to have survived also becoming a blood-witch. She's horribly powerful, and fortunately for the City Above, spends most of her time roaming around the City Below, her lair following along behind her. Woe betide those who cross her - at best you'll be eaten, at worst, she'll 'adopt' you as one of her children. The Room is a single, innocuous room - a simple bedsit, with clean, if tired furniture. But if you leave through one of the 'internal' doors, you'll end up in another copy of the same room, only slightly askew. These are actual physical spaces, and objects taken from one copy remain removed. It's a bad idea to do so, because things removed from the Room act as seeds - and there's a chance that they'll turn wherever they're placed into another copy of The Room itself. The worshipful Lady Salvatious Gryndel, before her eventual dissapearence deep into the Heart, aimed to set up a network of lodges; resting places for the members of her exclusive club. Budget and time contraints meant she had to fall back on the use of illegal human machinery and arcane sorcery - there is only one Salvatious Gryndel Hunting Club; it just has many, many doors. If you've got the key, you can enter this wood-panelled warren and mix with jaded noble hunters, utterly off their tits on brandy and illegal narcotics. Without a key, the doors will lead only to blank walls. Next: Fractures, sundry afterlives
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May 6, 2020 11:13
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Heart: The City Beneath 13 - Fractures and Heavens Fractures aren't actually in the Heart - they're very distinctly Somewhere Else - but the messy metaphysics attract unrealities like flypaper. Gates and rifts can be found popping up throughout the City Beneath, usually in very odd places (like inside a Carrion Pig). Knowing where stable gateways to relatively-safe fractures are is very valuable. Elsewhere is a city the size of a country, that exists in the gap between seconds. A nexus of countless realities, it's a place of wonders, at least in the day. A night, however, the darkness congeals into nightmare creatures, and the inhabitants stay indoors, sleeping in brightly lit rooms. Papilious is a library that can be reached by allowing a particular type of moth to probe your ear for secrets. Follow it, and you'll end up in an idyllic place, where the librarians harvest idea-pollen from the moths to fill the pages of blank books. But stray through the library, open the wrong door, and you'll enter the other Papilious, kindly librarians becoming twisted cultists, and the knowledge becomes dark, forbidden lore. The inhabitants of each version of Papilious vehemently deny the existance of the other. The Unspire is a pale reflection of the City Above, reached through the Vanishing Point where perspective flips, leading you into a paper-thin, but somehow more perfect copy of the Spire. See Vanishing Point from Spire, but it's possible to bring back crude copies of objects from here, that somehow work better than the real thing. Afterlives, with their close links to the faithful of many races, are particuarly attracted to the Heart, and it's far to easy to walk into heaven, even if it's not one you believe in. Try not to die in the afterlife - it's theologically dodgy at best. Long ago, people believed in an afterlife deep beneath the earth, a primal Forest where a hunter would never go hungry. Everything here is built on a bigger scale; deer ten feet tall, hares the size of dogs, and predatory beasts constantly at the edges of your vision. There are hunters here still, many speaking languages long forgotten. The Humans of the east believe that the afterlife is a road across a cracked and barren plain. The greater you were in life, the more real you are upon the Grail Road, the better your clothing and weapons, and the more likely you'll reach the end of the road and ascend to godhood yourself. The Grey is a catch-all afterlife, the destination for souls without belief in a higher place. It's full of scared, huddled ghosts, scarred by the memory of death. Its position as a 'default' heaven makes it useful - you could possibly break into other afterlives from here, and some people (including Deadwalkers, earlier) have the knack of stepping into the Grey, circumventing obstacles in the physical world. As the Drow believe in their three-fold lunar goddess, so their afterlife exists in three facets. In The Dark City the spirits of dark elves existing in a twisted metropolis on the dark side of the moon, waiting until they are permitted to step into the Moon Garden. This is the place where drow who have lived well, and kept to the goddess' teaching end up. Limye, the Glorious Lady of Community and Tenacity rules here enforcing a nearly-unnatural calm. Those who come here (without dying, that is) find it very hard to leave such a peaceful place. There is a third part to this Heaven, that exists once a month when the moon hangs crimson in the sky. The Red Moon is where the worshippers of Lekole, the warlike aspect of the Danmou end up after dying in battle (or a suicide bombing, to tell the truth). Her true saints sit here on basalt thrones, waiting for the calls of the faithful to ignite their flaming crowns and draw them back down into the world. The Palace Multifaceted is the afterlife of the Incarnadines of the City Below, and the Azurites in the Spire proper - a heaven that can be entered not through good deeds, but by buying your way in. It feels somewhere between a brothel and a theme park, and the more donated in life, the grander the luxury given believers in death. Both of the gods involved (Azure and Incarnadine), claim that running an afterlife is expensive, and this is why when you run out of money, you get escorted off the premises, and reincanated as a newborn. It's probably a really good target if you're looking for an afterlife to rob - the Heart equivalent of knocking over a Vegas casino. The life of the Aelfir is one, usually, of luxury and plenty, so you'd expect their idea of the afterlife to be that magnified. However The Slumbering Depths is a deep kelp forest, trapping thousands of elven souls in a fitful dream - they dream here of the life they will lead on the surface world, earning the life that is to come via torment in the after(pre?)-life. The Source is the government-mandated afterlife of the Gnolls of Al'Marah. Having no formal state religion, it has been dictated that any gnoll who dies within sight of the central ziggurat of the city will be absorbed into this artificial heaven. That this does indeed happen has been proven as scientific fact by specially-shielded teams of explorers. It's a strange, mechanical place, filled with autonomous constructs that patrol its halls. Next: Adversaries
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May 9, 2020 23:13
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Heart: The City Beneath 14 - Adversaries, Angels through Flightless Owls AKA, the monster bit of the book. Unlike Spire, which made it explicitly clear that the party's enemies were almost always people in their own right, the different emphasis of Heart means that most of what you'll be fighting and encountering is decidedly inhuman. NPC stat blocks are simple; a list of sample names and some descriptors for roleplaying flavour, along with some sample motivations - even the weirdness monster is probably doing what it does for a reason, and this can give the party some leverage. The rest of the NPC stats cover the actual mechanical details - Resistance is the amount of stress the NPC can take before being killed/defeated/charmed/driven off; they only ever have this single stress track. Likewise, they'll also have just the one Protection value that's subtracted from any stress done to them. They've also got a default Difficulty which is the base for any rolls against them, as well as Equipment listings - often just weapons, but sometimes tools that the players can scavenge. In addition to any choice gear, most adversaries will be guarding (or just made of) Resources that can be harvested by an enterprising party. Finally, all NPCs have an example Domain, but this isn't a strict rule, and the GM is pretty free to change it depending on the circumstances. In addition, some adversaries will have further special rules, or might impose unique types of Fallout on failed rolls.  As it's in alphabetical order, we start with one of the most terrifying and dangerous things a party might ever encounter. The Angels of the Heart are Dangerous, with 20 Resistance, doing d10 damage that ignores protection as they literally unmake you, and even looking at them for the first time provokes a roll against taking Mind stress. If you can figure out their motivation, they can be beaten - they're essentially fleshy automata, and it's possible to take advantage of their 'programming'. It takes a well-prepared, experienced and above all, lucky party to take down an Angel. Helps to have an Apiarist along as well for their anti-heartsblood abilities. Domestic beasts are hard to come by in the City Below, so Automata of Burden are a fairly common sight - cobbled together from scavenged machinery and imbued with basic intelligence via occult means (often using the mind of a horse or ox, but some designers use whatever they can get; a hive-mind formed from twenty pigeons, for example). Occasionally, the owner will die, or the automaton will just get lost, making them ripe pickings for scavengers. The Blighted are trees infested by a parasite, that both awakens them to sentience, but also drives them insane with an incurable, itching irritation. As the only way to stop this is to give the parasite something to eat other than the tree, they've become predators; increased control over their forms lets them lope through the forest, hunting for animal flesh. When the Heart's corruption works its way into the inhabitants of the City Below, it can sometimes be passed down to their offspring. Over several generations, the Blooded become stranger, with new organs and the ability to graft onto themselves bits of hearts-blooded beasts. Settlements of the blooded are scattered across the deeper reaches of the Heart, many decidedly unfriendly to outsiders. The Heart is a place of power, and to many, this power is intoxicating. Burnt-out Occultists are researchers and magi who've pushed it too far, too often, driven mad by the desire for just one more fix. Desperate ex-mages form gangs, robbing travellers in search of scraps of occult power, wielding reckless and unpredictable magic.  There are places in the City Below where the walls are flesh, beckoning with lipless mouths. Sometimes the desperate will feed on this sweet meat, and over time, turn into a Butcher. These gangling, warped creatures are extremely strong and very quick, and live in worship of the cave they ate from, fighting each other for terratory, and dragging hapless travellers home to push into the wall, replacing what they've eaten. The Carnival is an eternal dance through the City Below; a brain-wyrm forged by a misguided Aelfir Warrior-Poet that demands the sufferer dance until their feet are bloody stumpts, all the while trying to spread the meme-virus to unfortunate bystanders.  Carrion Pigs are swine that have grown huge and fat on the detritus of the Heart. Easily the size of a horse, they're a popular form of garbage disposal in some settlements; confined to a room and sluiced down regularly they'll eat anything thrown in there and produce foul, but effective fertiliser. The biggest issue (aside form the horrendously cruel treatment) is when mating season comes, and roaming herds of males beseige the settlement, trying to reach the captive females. When a dagger is used in enough murders, it starts to get a taste for it, to awaken into a killing-sentience. The Cult of Knives is a collective of awakened weaponry, a congregation 'borne' by the body of an unfortunate soul, stabbed through by thirteen or more blades. When interrupted, they take control of the bearer and seek to silence their discoverer, possibly even anointing them as a new host (which is eventually fatal, but only once the cult has moved on). The druids of Redcap Grove protect their farms and drug-labs with gangs of shapeshifting Legbreakers. They'd be tough enough just as they are, but when things get tough they adopt twisted, chimerical forms. The Heart attracts messiahs like fly-paper; they often wander through the warrens for a few weeks before dying of the myriad dangers, but sometimes they accumulate a cult around them. False Hallows are the successful ones, and the Church of the Moon Beneath hates them, as do the more orthodox religions from the City Above. It's easy to reach a heaven from the Heart; the walls between the real and the afterlife are thin, and sometimes things leak out. Feral Psychopomps are pathetic creatures - cut off from their divinity they run wild. Howling, mud-stained angels, dead-eyed, rusting valkyries and mad pegasi; they're all dangerous to be around, although they might be thankful if you could get them home. Flightless Owls are a common menace in the City Below, larger than surface owls and congregating in great hives. Packs of them can take down a group of travellers, and hunters can make a lucrative living cleaning out nests.  Next: Adversaries, Ghosts to Wretches
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May 14, 2020 20:47
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Obligatum VII posted:I like the possibility/notion that, for all the horror and unreality going on, The Heart may very well be benevolent but just incredibly, unbelievably bad at it because it is a gigantic, chaotic mess that doesn't understand the thoughts and desires of the creatures it is trying to help and also it's just kind of clumsy about it in general. This is just it - it's trying to fulfill the wishes and desires of every living thing that lives there. Unfortunately it's go no real concept of what creatures actually need, nor can it distinguish between hopes and nightmares. So it experiments, throwing all sorts of weirdness out. The Aelfir trying to turn it into a train network didn't help, and the various afterlives/parasitic realities just make the whole mess even worse.
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May 14, 2020 22:04
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Night10194 posted:I see the writers of Heart really enjoyed Bloodborne (I know this by it being listed as one of the inspirational materials in Spire) There's an interesting bit in the class design article for the Heretic - they originally envisaged the Lajhan in Spire to be a very Bloodborne-inspired cleric, but pulled back the weirdness there a bit, whereas the 'blessings' of the Moon Beneath wouldn't feel out of place amongst the Healing Church in Bloodborne.
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May 14, 2020 22:13
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Heart: The City Beneath 15 - Adversaries, Ghosts through Wretches In the Heart, full of weird energy, Ghosts are pretty much just a thing that happens when you die. They're tough to kill without using appropriate resources (protection 10), and finding the specific item needed to affect a given ghost makes banishing them much easier. Screw up, and possession is a distinct possibility. Gnoll Incursion Teams sneak into the City Below, evading Aelfir patrols to try and plumb the secrets of the Heart. They operate covertly, wearing suits of enchanted sandwalker leather to protect them from the energies of the place and recording their discoveries into rememberance-djinn. As there's a standing bounty on Gnolls in the Spire, they tend to keep a low profile. Sometimes, when a great hunter dies and their souls awaken in The Forest, the path is open long enough for something to step the other way. Godbeasts are the gigantic, enchanted creatures that come though; deer with crystalline antlers, dragonflies ten feet across or enourmous boars; none are particuarly friendly and all are very resiliant. And I mean it - they have Protection 3 and 30 Resistance. They're not going to hurt as much as an Angel, and don't have a difficulty until they've got 10 resistance or less left, but it'll take time to wear them down. The average PC is generally going to inflict 4 stress per round, less protection. Male Harpies are cat-sized corvids that like to steal sharp and shiny things, that they tie to their beaks and claws to increase the damage they do when they divebomb prey. They work in teams to hunt, bringing anything 'shiny' - anything with an occult resonance - back to their burrows, in order to attract the attention of a female harpy. The females are extra-dimensional creatures; humanoids with wings in the place of their arms, and the males' mating rituals summon them forth from whichever hell they normally live in. They'll then slaughter their way through the City Below, laying eggs in the carcasses of their prey before crumbling into dust once the energy they gather through fear and death runs out. Heartsblood Beasts are like the Blooded - creatures who have absorbed the energies of the Heart over generations, or even original creations of the Heart; constructed from the dreams of travellers and idle thoughts. In either case, they just don't work right - creatures with more or less limbs, inverted spines or the ability to extrude their stomachs to feed on prey. They tend to be just like the normal creatures in terms of motivation - seeking prey and mates - but like so many things in the City Below, they're far more dangerous.  The Heart is conscious, not sapient as we'd understand it, but capable of thought and experimentation. Heartseeds are a product of this; pallid maggots the size of a forearm, they bury themselves in corpses and detritus and pupate, warping the area around them and unwravelling reality. Eventually they bloom (treating the area as a Tier deeper), then finally die, when somebody kills it, or the press of normality withers it away. The Heart learns from this experience, adapting its approach for the next time. They're a potent resource if you can harvest them in time, too. The actual appearence of Heartseeds varies by their Domain; Cursed - a purply-black fleshy heart handing from a web of sticky red tendons. Desolate - a path of nothing, an impossible non-existance. Haven - a huddled drow child in fetal position, rooted to the floor and babbling incoherently. Occult - a book of pure chaotic nonsense; when read it allows the reader access to magic similar to the blood witches. Religion - an altar to no god, decorated by a vague attempt at portaying nonexistant saints and made of calcified bone. Technology - a clockwork device made from teeth, hair, skin and gristle. Warren - a carpet of all-consuming mould, eating organic matter. Wild - a lotus with sophoric perfume, luring animals with its scent, poisoning and rebuilding them in new forms. Market Serfs are the peons of the Incarnadine lords of the Red Market. Riddled with debt, they now act as petty thugs for their crimson-robed masters. Once there was a little god that fled into the Heart and shattered into a thousand spiders, each with a shard of mirror on its back. These Mirror Spiders seek each other out, consuming each other in an attempt to reconstitute the god, all the while accumulating a cult of devoted, but regular spiders. They're not much of a danger, except for the larger ones, but the suicide cults of mad insect devotees can be an issue. Pitchkin are the eventual fate of those where ejected from the City Above after becoming too ill to work in the factories. The Spireblack (a byproduct of the foundries in the City Above, somewhere between gunpowder and tar) in their veins has reacted with the energy of the Heart, leaving them feral but strong. Very territorial, very flammable. The Red Saints of Lekole sit upon their thrones on the Red Moon, until they're called down upon beams of scarlet moonlight by Her faithful. You can fight them, but it's better to run - they cannot be permanently harmed without forbidden rituals. Signal-box Cultists are worshippers of the Vermissian, clad in carriage-curtains, with rivits and valves hammered into their flesh. They're all quite made really (and are a generic template for any kind of zealot). The inhabitants of the Gnollish heaven-construct, Sourceborn Constructs rarely venture out into the City Below, except in search of resources. When they do, they manifest in a multitude of artificial forms; clouds of carbon dust that form hexagons in the air, hovering obsidian orbs, nests of razor-sharp wire. Generally they're not aggresive unless provoked... but are a rich source of unique resources. The Skelton Courtiers of Cairnmor are seldom found outside that landmark unless on a mission from their dead King. Wherever they are, they're still likely to be completely off their tits on the intoxicating tree-sap of their home barrow. Tunnel Brigands are your general thugs and desperados who make life difficult for (relatively) honest folk of the City Below. When the 33rd Regiment was sent on their ill-fated mission to pacify the Heart, it was only the lucky ones, those who went AWOL from their last fight who would go on to form the Hounds. The Walking Wounded however, still follow the last commands of their Aelfir officers, repeating centuries-old atrocities in their eternal fight against heartsblooded creatures, angels and the Heart itself. Ironically, they're now as much a part of the Heart as anything else, and you can occasionally see them, groups of 'injured soldiers' at the edge of a Haven. Look closer, and you'll see that each is fused to each other, and their weapons are part of them too. They're eternally trying to get home - which probably doesn't exist any more. Wretches are the mutated, melded and otherwise degenerate creatures found in the Tunnels of Wet Filth, whose inhabitants enthusastically breed and modify them, keeping them as pets.  Next: Legendary Adversaries
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May 16, 2020 23:43
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Heart: The City Beneath 16 - Legendary Adversaries So... a bit of a break there, but now we're onto Legendary Adversaries. These are the kind of creatures (and people, to be fair) that you could quite easily base a campaign around. Blight Unending: The Basilisk The Basilisk is a reprehensible, unlovable thing; light refuses to touch it, and rocks crack and shatter to be free of its gaze. It's a concentrated, pathetic clot of venom and entropy, that really just wants not to be alone any more. Scholars suggest that it's an experiment on the part of the Heart; an attempt to understand poison and corrosion. Whether this is true or not, every time it's killed (usually torn apart by those who can't bear its presence a second longer), it is reborn, more wretched than before. If you want to kill it (and really, you should, it's the merciful thing to do), it's easy - any success will do. Getting close is the hard bit - enduring the venomous degredation its very presence causes. The venoms of its corpse are valuable to the right people, and armour made from its skin would protect the wearer from any toxin - but the very world around you will start to loath you. Nicodemai Shadow-Damns-The-Seedlings: The Gorgon Once there was a sect of wealthy Aelfir in the City Above who convinced themselves that surely the faces of the High Elves reflected the glory of their gods, and that mortals looking upon them unmasked would be struck down by their radiance. Obviously, this isn't true - there's a multitude of evidence, but stubborn pride, faith and a hell of a lot of drugs (plus some casual black magic) made it true, at least for members of the cult. Eventually, excessive use of their abilities (and the wrong council-member's son getting petrified) led to their exile and decay in the City Below. Unable to bear the thought of their perfection rotting away, cult-members 'married' each other, gazing into each others eyes, leaving only statues. Pity there was an odd number of members... Nicodemai is a broken, wretched creature, spending his waking hours hunting rats for food and desperately, longingly trying to use his gaze upon himself, before it's too late. If a party of delvers could help him, he'd be very grateful (and has a hidden library of occult tomes ripe for the picking), but otherwise he's still dangerous in a fight thanks to his petrifying gaze.  Carotid Forest: The Hydra Everyone knows that when slaying a hydra, cutting off one head causes two more to sprout in its place. Usually a clever-enough hunter can get round this and slay the beast before it does too much damage. But once, no such hero turned up, and the lizard, stupid as it was, realised that it could cause its own heads to re-grow. Now it is a vast forest of tree-like necks, leading to a blubbery, immobile, and ever-hungry body; the Carotid Forest. It's eaten pretty much anything within reach of its heads now, but any animal or traveller foolish enough to take shelter amongst the 'trees' is quickly ripped apart. The main body, with its vulnerable heart would be pretty easy to kill; it's entirely defenceless, but there's more than a hundred heads in the forest now, so reaching the center could be a bit tricky. Lady Salvatious Gryndel: The Huntress House Gryndel is one of the great noble families of the Drow, who still rule over the Home Nations of Ys. Lady Salvatious Gryndel is a scion of that House, who came to Spire and the City Below as part of her search for ever-more dangerous prey to hunt. A good sixty years ago, she set up her Hunting Clubs throughout the Heart (or Hunting Club, as all the doors lead to the same physical space), and promptly dissapeared into the depths, never to be seen again. At least if you're lucky. She's long since moved on from simple animal prey; even the Godbeasts of The Forest hold no interest for her. Now she picks on sapient prey; she finds people she deems 'deserving' (although what that means is a bit vague) and re-works them into new quarry. Magical concoctions are slipped into their food, ancient beast-songs sung to them in their sleep. The fortunate retain some measure of their humanity (often the ability to use weapons), but in the end it just comes down to the hunt. Yes, she's a just a little old woman, but one with unparalleled hunting expertise, access to weird and occult magics, and a very big gun. That-Which-Escapes: The Minotaur The Labyrinth curse that afflicts the unfortunate of the City Below is a side-effect of The Labyrinth itself - a parasitical dimension grown fat and bloated on the energies of the Heart. It's not without purpose, as the great maze was build to seal away something even more terrible - the Minotaur. It can't hurt the Labyrinth, and there's no way it can fit down people-sized spaces, but every so often you hear it - howls of pain, the cracking of gargantuan joints dis- and re-locating as it constantly tries to get out. No one's seen the whole thing - maybe a scrabbling, hairy hand the size of a man, or a colossal eye pressed to a window. It's not malevolant; you're more likely to be crushed accidently by its flailings - you can't fight something that big anyway, just drive it off. Maybe, if you could get to its face you could reason with it, but that's no easy task. You could even try to help it escape... but no-one knows exactly what would happen, or why it was sealed away in the first place. Next: Wrapping it up, and the Sourcebooks
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May 22, 2020 15:52
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tokenbrownguy posted:God drat does Heart nail sympathetic, yet terrible things. The basilisk and minotaur are Of the Legendary Adversaries, it's probably just the Hydra that can't be reasoned with or circumvented without killing it.
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May 23, 2020 19:19
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