“Beneath the city of Spire is the Heart, a rip in reality where a strange otherspace has crawled into your own.”
Heart: the City Beneath (page 121)
What is Heart?
Heart: the City Beneath by Rowan, Rook and Decard, is a tabletop roleplaying game about being a desperate explorer in a nightmare undercity. The undercity is called ‘the Heart’, and so as well as being the name of the game is also the name of the place the game is set. The Heart is directly underneath the Spire, the setting for the previous game by Rowan, Rook and Decard, and shares a world as well as some of the mechanics. The game is not about political revolution as Spire is, but instead focusses on the personal goals of the characters as they explore a strange and terrifying underground environment.
This isn’t a review of Heart, because I only received it a week ago, and I’m still going through it. Instead, this will be an overview, as well as a discussion of what I call “character objective mechanics.”
How do I play Heart?
Heart is a tabletop role-playing game, so you need a group of people to play with, first of all. One of these will be the Games Master (GM), who will set up the story, and describe the world. The others will take on the role of Player Characters, who set off to achieve their goals, whatever they are, by interacting with the places and characters described by the GM. Whenever they come to some difficult or dangerous situation, they roll ten-sided dice, and if at least one of them is 8 or more, they succeed. If they roll less than 8, they might might succeed partially or fail, but will certainly be taking ‘stress.’
The stress mechanic is where Heart and Spire are most innovative. Though it is similar to the ‘Forged in the Dark’ system, I feel it is superior. The gaining of stress (and potentially fallout) throughout the story places a timer on what the players do before everything suddenly goes wrong. The different categories of stress are ‘Blood’, ‘Mind’, ‘Echo’, ‘Fortune’ and ‘Supplies’, and this means that not everything is hit points. Some characters might be perfectly healthy at the end of a session, but completely broke (suffering Supplies fallout), suffering with psychological trauma (Mind fallout), or having been mutated by the otherworldly presence of the Heart (Echo fallout). All characters have resistance to different types of stress, and other abilities that they can use to remove stress and alleviate the effects of fallout.
What is the game about?
I guess the theme of Heart is: how far will desperate people go to reach their goals? In Spire, every character had roughly the same goal, which was political change in the Spire. In Heart, characters can have very different (almost exclusive) goals, but all of them will in some way be connected to the Heart itself. A good way to think about Heart is to consider the movie Stalker, or the video game Bloodborne. A stranger, seeking help, reward or enlightenment, enters an environment inhabited by strange and dangerous people and things, and where the laws of reality seem to breaking down. They are risking their lives for some strange purpose, with the rewards not immediately obvious.
The player characters are delvers – obsessive, dangerous people who venture into the Heart in search of answers.
Heart: the City Beneath (page 121)
What are “Mechanical Objectives”?
One of the most important choices you can make during character creation is your character’s Calling. This is the reason you have for venturing into the undercity. They have to do with what you are seeking, and how you will grow. They are: Adventure, Enlightenment, Forced, Heartsong, and Penitent. It was one of the things that differentiates Heart from other dungeon-crawling games.
Instead of experience points for defeating enemies, Heart has story beats, which are goals or objectives that your character has. D&D 5e has Personality Traits, Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws, but the ‘gamification’ of these things is pretty weak (you get inspiration if you play according to these qualities.) Heart requires you to declare up to two story beats in advanced, based on a list determined by your calling. So if your calling is Adventure, a Minor Story beat might be “Slay a beast that drops resources of D10 or higher.” If you achieve that beat, you can take one minor power as a reward. But the Penitent calling might have a different story beat, such as “Witness first-hand the tragic extent of your failings.” Heart effectively gives out experience points for roleplaying your character and advancing your character’s story.
Heart therefore has mechanical objectives. They are mechanical, in that they are part of the mechanics of the game. So the character objectives need to be declared in advance, and achieved, in order for the character to advance. Some other story games have this, such as Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition has Ambition and Desire, which allow the players to recover Willpower damage when they work towards it. But the advantage of tying player advancement to declared objectives means that the will definitely be trying to work towards them during the session. It adds that tone of desperation.
How does it end?
“If the Heart is just one big dungeon” you might be thinking, “then surely the players can just get to the end and win?” Well… no. Not at all.
Spire was described by the creators as a game about failure. The players will try to change the political landscape of the spire, but in the end they will die, be betrayed and end up imprisoned, or else break down and suffer complete psychological collapse.
But in Heart, there are story beats for each PC, that describe what will happen to your character next. These serve as important clues to the GM for how the game should proceed. And the most important is the final one, the Zenith beat. This is the point where “the character reaches the limit of their power and begins stumbling towards their eventual downfall” (Heart: the City Beneath, page 113). For example, if the PC’s calling is Forced, the Zenith beat might be “End the control your master has over you.” And you will be rewarded with some very powerful ability when you achieve that beat, but you will only use it once. Shortly after you achieve your Zenith beat, the game will be effectively over for your PC.
The game of Heart has a built-in endgame, so that the character can reach a satisfying conclusion to their story. In other TTRPGs, character advancement leads to “power creep”, where you become so powerful that the GM has to work harder and harder to provide a worthy adversary (the level 20 problem in D&D). But once your adventuring party gets to a sufficiently high level, most games stop being so interesting. There is very little threat or excitement, and there may not be a satisfying ending to the story. Heart is different (better, even), as it seems to be written with the endgame in mind.
Summary
I don’t have much left to write, because I need to read more. But I am very keen to run a game of Heart in the near future.
The Brain of Parky 