Spire
Ok, look, you do not need to have played Spire: The City Must Fall, before delving into Heart: The City Beneath, but it sure doesn’t hurt.
As it happens we finished a year long campaign of Spire earlier this year. We had a great time with it. It was a refreshing change of pace for us. As a group we had played a lot of D&D, a couple of Free League games and a bunch of Call of Cthulhu so this was quite a departure. The ruleset of the Resistance system was something we had to get to grips with throughout the course of that campaign but, once we embraced it, the speed, flexibility and the power of the fallout system, in particular, began to really work for us. Fallout is the consequences you have to endure when things go wrong. Like Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games, it works with a dice pool system, but in this case you roll a number of d10s dependant on your skills and domains in a given situation. The top roll is the only one that matters and it can give you a complete failure, a mixed result (a success with consequences) or a total success. There were a couple of niggling issues that we had with the system, mainly involving how you determined if you took fallout or just stress. These generally revolved around the stress/resistance protection mechanic.
I will not lie to you, dear reader, I was worried going into it. Spire does not encourage the GM to prepare much. I used a published campaign frame, so that helped, but much of the plot is supposed to be generated by the PCs. This was tough for the players too, at least for a while. The campaign frame and I put a stew of NPCs, locations and events in their bowls in the first session, asked them to separate out the individual elements and come up with a recipe for their own, different dish, using the same ingredients. It took a while and a lot of discussion to determine their preferred approach and that changed multiple times. But by the end of the campaign we all felt much more comfortable with this style of play and that stood to us going into Heart, which uses broadly the same system.
Still, I don’t know if we would have decided on a Heart campaign as the very next thing to replace Spire if it had not been for the setting. Rowan, Rook and Decard’s Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor brought to life a beautiful and terrible city-state in Spire. The high-elves, or Aelfir, came to the mile high city of Spire two centuries ago and took it from the dark elves, or Drow. The PCs in Spire are members of the Ministry of Our Hidden Mistress, the outlawed para-military wing of an outlawed Drow religion. They fight a losing battle to regain control of the city for the Drow while dealing with cannibal cults, dangerous human retro-technologists, demonologists and, of course, the Aelfir themselves and their loyal Drow.
The setting and the classes of this game are what drew us all back to the same world.
The Heart knows what you want
And Heart, as implied by the title, is in the same world. It is the fucked up and enigmatic city beneath Spire. The Heart itself, (the true Heart, the one at the centre of the City Beneath, the thing that imbues it with bizarre intelligence and a wish to fulfil the desires of those brave mortals who dare to tread it’s veins and arteries) much like Spire, could be whatever you and your table decide it is. Maybe it’s an alien intelligence stranded below Spire, maybe it’s a portal to an other dimensional world, maybe it’s the echo of a technological marvel from the future. In practice, I feel like answering that question is a trap you should avoid, even if it is the goal of the PCs.
The most important thing about the Heart as a setting is that it is, in some way, sentient, aware, alive. As well as that, as alluded to above, it would grant the desires of other sentients. It is clear, though, that the Heart has a different idea about what you want than you do. It will take your desires far too literally or take them too far or misunderstand them to comic/tragic effect. So what the PCs want overall and from session to session is especially important to the game and how it turns out.
Delvers
As for the PCs, unsurprisingly, they play characters with classes that are matched only by the Spire ones for sheer inventiveness and bonkersness. Unlike Spire, they are not rebels, they are not fighting the aelfir for control of the Heart, they are adventurers, or Delvers. They are drawn or forced to explore the Heart for their own reasons.
The Players get to choose a few important elements for their characters before they start, their Ancestry (human, drow, aelfir and gnoll,) their Calling and their Class.
Ancestry and Class are fairly self explanatory but Callings will be unfamiliar to most. A PC’s Calling is their motivation and their route to advancement and eventual death. You might have been Forced to travel the Heart by a master you dare not refuse. Or maybe you are a Penitent who feels the need to make amends by finding those in need in the City Beneath and aiding them. Perhaps you are simply in search of adventure or enlightenment or the echo of the Heartsong itself. Each of these Callings bestows on the PC a core ability but more importantly, it provides a long list of beats. A beat might be something you want your character to achieve or something they need to endure or have inflicted on them. They come in minor, major and zenith flavours. A PC has two active beats at any given time and together, the GM and the player are trying to make at least one of those happen every session. When you hit a beat, you get an ability of the corresponding type, minor, major and zenith. When you hit your zenith beat, you get your final ability, and when you use that ability, it’s curtains for that character.
In our game we have three PCs:
- A human Junk Mage with the Adventure calling – There is an element of junk to the junk mage, they can fix stuff with magic, but there is also an element of the junkie to the Junk Mage, so magic is their fix. Get it? They are on a mission to reach greater and greater heights of magic in the Heart and it draws them into some interesting situations.
- A human Deadwalker with the Heartsong calling – The Deadwalker has his Death, an aspect of a loved one, (?) which follows him around and, which only he can see. He can fold himself into another dimension called the Grey. This has led to some very entertaining moments and solutions. The Heart knows him and wants something for him. But what?
- An aelfir Vermissian Knight with the Enlightenment calling – The knight has a suit of armour that he personally constructed out of trains. He is obsessed with resurrecting the long defunct Vermissian subway network to serve The City Above. This is mainly because he is partly responsible for the disaster that rendered it, not only useless, but actively dangerous.
From Haven to Terminus
I started the party off in the City Between, Derelictus, making liberal use of the Heart sourcebook, Burned and Broken, for descriptions and ways to use this, lowest of Spire’s districts as a delve. From there they were sent into the Heart to retrieve a robot duplicate of a guy based in Haven Station. They have to check all the Vermissian stations on the way down to find him. So I called the campaign, “From Haven to Terminus.”
We soon moved into the events of the beginners’ scenario, Drowned, which is featured in the Heart Quickstart. We’ve been delving for six sessions and expect three or four more.
Mechanically, Heart has improved on some of the rules that Spire introduced. The stress/resistance protection mechanic has been simplified and is much easier to understand and apply now. Determining whether or not your character takes fallout is more straight-forward. Healing is a lot easier and more accessible in general and even combat feels like it flows a bit better.
In play it feels like a procedurally generated mega-dungeon with pockets of hardy civilisation, or havens, eking out a living until the pathways and caverns of the Heart warp and change enough to wipe it out again. The PCs go on delves for one reason or another but a common side-effect of delves is that they establish connections between havens, making it much easier for the PCs and others to travel between them in the future. This is a cool way to have them make a significant impact on the world and, dare I say, have them feel some sense of responsibility for it.
My overall impression so far is that I love this game. I love the weirdness of it and the horror of it, I love the dungeon delve theme that does not require a new monster or puzzle in every numbered room, I love how it has made us think on our feet and tell a story that we could not have foreseen at the start of each session. I love the beats that give me and the players something to aim for every time we play and I love the looming rewards/threats that are the zenith beats and abilities. And I do almost no prep at all. I might write a couple of notes of the kinds of things they might encounter on a delve but the rest is improv. The me that was shaking in my boots about running my first Spire session would not recognise the me that is improvising entire dungeons on the fly in Heart.
The Dice Pool 