Heart: the City Beneath

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Some people spend their whole lives beneath the city, living as best they can in the undercity's more stable areas. The maleable nature of the Heart offers a fix for this as well, you just have to be flexible enough to take it. The question is, essentially: why would anyone want to go traipsing around in what are probably the guts of a dreaming god-thing? Set beneath mile-high town Spire - the setting of co-designers Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor’s 2018 tabletop RPG of the same name - the area of the Heart is described as a “rip in the holes between worlds”, with reality becoming increasingly unstable the closer to its centre you go. 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.

Minor beats revolve around the pursuit of knowledge despite the risks (or the destruction of knowledge that contradicts your theories).This meant the game had run its course, even though the third character still had goals to attain: with 2 of 3 characters retiring, we saw no reason to continue for another session or three with substitutes. Finally, you'll pick three Minor Abilities - small advantages and improvements, and one Major Ability, which is more character-defining. In the Heart, there is no subjugator or subjugated: both Aelfar and Drow stand cheek-and-jowl with Humans and Gnolls, outsiders who rarely come to Spire.

At this point, they have arrived, either in Sump Station or Hang Station, and have a chance for respite.My mind turns back to this great work of literature that I have never read, which I only know the broad strokes of, throughout this current crisis: as I do the dishes, as I bake more than I have in recent memory, as I try to focus on grading. Description: Trekking through walkways suspended over still lakes, or raging torrents – creaking at the wind that blows through them. You can consume the flesh of something or someone that you have recently killed and gain a skill associated with them for the remainder of the situation. 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 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. 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.Heart uses a modified version of Spire’s Resistance gameplay system and is set beneath the titular city, but is a standalone experience that can be played without any prior knowledge of Spire.

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. Just like combat, this is very swingy: normally you inflict 1d4 stress, with a typical delve having 8-12 resistance. She was thrown out six weeks later when she cracked open the skull of a teacher who repeated some nonsense about 'looking within' one two many times.Sucks-Down-Teeth is still more widely known, by those familiar with their mask, as 'Snow-White-Page'. Using the Resistance System first developed in Spire: The City Must Fall, Heart focuses on what player characters have to lose in pursuit of their goals whether that’s supplies, friends, sanity, blood, a way home, or spatial or bodily integrity. These stories help keep us safe because they help keep us sane and connected despite not being able to go outside and see our friends and family. 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. Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: The great Aelfir hunter Lady Salvatious Gryndel came to the Heart seeking the ultimate challenge.