#heart rpg

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played HEART : The City Beneath ?

By Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor

The game where you play beneath the City explored in Spire The City Must Fall, delving into a nightmare undercity that will give you everything you’ve ever dreamed of – or kill you in the process.

More dungeon crawling, more horror, great classes ( I mean Wizard as an addict to Magic ? Wonderful! Someone whose body is a hive for mystic bees ? Count me in! )

With a supplement running on Backerkit called Dagger in the heart

[monsterfactoryfanfic]

Heart RPG, Annihilation, & Sangfielle: Brainworms All the Way Down

My latest video essay is on Heart: The City Beneath by Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor, Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, and Sangfielle by Friends at the Table. (Transcript here).

This essay touches on the following subjects:

How climate change is giving moose brainworms

The ways parasitic infections FEEL intentional

Alekest, the Porcelain Knight

Realizing your husband came back wrong

Ambition (derogatory)

Happy Halloween.

Also a huge thank you to Terrence Hector and Connor Fawcett for letting me use their art, @superdillin for their incredible voiceover work, and Jack De Quidt for letting me use the music from the Sangfielle soundtrack!

[genderphage]

PALLAS comes soon!

So I recently looked at the first gdoc i made for this game and it was made on 8th november 2021, but we're getting achingly close to release so I thought it was worth doing some Posts to generate some small amount of Social Media Hype.

I am always thinking about non-violence in TTRPGs, and around autumn 2021 I had recently played a lot of Heart and Good Society, and we were chatting about Fallouts in the resistance system in Roll+Bond, and thus this game was birthed as an unholy fusion of those two games! Too many resistance games are just about Punching and stuff, so let's try something new. The name PALLAS just kinda came to me one day, unsure where exactly from... I ended up talking to my pal Alice a bunch about it all and so she came on as co-writer!

So this list of inspirations has grown a bit over the last almost three years but I think it's very fun! and felt like a good starting point to talk about the game. I'm hoping to commit to writing a bit about the design decisions as we finish off the ashcan version of Pallas, people have enjoyed it in playtesting but would love people to have a look at our weird surrealist comedy of manners RPG.

[kierongillen]

This week's newletter! Rise of the Powers of X #3! Capsule thoughts on stuff I've read! General yabber! Links! A crowdfunder you must NOT back!

[merelyroleplayers]

Tune in this time next week

Four delvers rove deep, deep into the unreality of the City Beneath.

Each seeks to achieve the unimaginable.

But in a city shaped by desire, it can be dangerous to want too strongly...

[flea-eats-bugs]

Having two elf friends is not fair when you are 4'11"

[quasieli]

So I ran the first part of a two shot today in the Heart system and in preparation for it, I wrote out these little passages introducing each of the characters. I’m very proud of them all, but I think this is my fave 🥰🥰

Pulling, pulling, pulling. Deeper, deeper, deeper. Sweeter, juicier, ripe for the picking. “Heyyyy, wake up, sleepyhead, we’ve got guests.” A pair of hungry eyes blearily blink open to the once haven of the Hellmouth Schism, now fallen silent aside from faint rumble of its constant tectonic shifting and the drip and splatter of viscous fluid falling from above. Empty homes lay in scattered wastes amongst this cave, some only very recently abandoned, they always end up abandoned. But you, you are a rarity, this place has been a home to you for longer than anyone you know. They always leave, they never come back. But you’re different. You too were once like them, yearning for the things that lay beneath. You got a taste of it, the sweetest ambrosia to ever grace your lips, but you came back. She told you it was for the best. She told you that you could not gorge yourself, she told you that that fullness would never sate you. She told you to be patient, she told you to wait. But now she tells you, “It’s time, my dear.” As your eyes finally adjust to the waking world, you see the cracked visage of porcelain that usually only graces your dreams. She sits before you, poised like a proud lioness after a successful hunt. She looks at you, her head cocked, “So, what do you want to do about it?”

[merelymatt]

Today: planned another Monster of the Week session for @merelyroleplayers

Tomorrow: planning a two-shot of Heart: The City Beneath for Actual Play UK

Wednesday: GMing my first session of Lancer (not for public consumption)

You give me a week off dayjob work and I fill it wall to wall with RPGs 😇

[sleebyfrogs]

Okay hear me out. The Bifrost Incident. The Vermissian Knight class from Heart: The City Beneath.

The Vermissian is cursed. Intended as a revolutionary mass transit system within the city – the first in the world of its kind – the creators attempted to pierce the Heart Itself in order to power its engines, and unleashed a nightmare unreality throughout the dark corners of Spire. Within the bounds of the Vermissian, time and space come unstuck – but it provides limitless potential for those brave enough to explore it.

Using THE LAST TRAIN summons The Last Train – the only remaining functional locomotive on the Vermissian network, which is unable to ever stop and is only loosely steerable – and it smashes apart everything in the area.

[curus-creations]

ESCHATON

[savevsfacemelt]

Post-game Musings - Heart

Back in December, when talking about Scum & Villainy, I said that I was also running a slightly intermittent game of Heart.

Well, 'slightly' became 'very', and 'intermittent' became 'sporadic', and faced with the campaign continuing to not happen for the next few months, I decided last week to pull the plug. It's a bummer, but that's how 90% of RPG campaigns end - not with a bang, or even a whimper, but the nagging whine of incompatible schedules and commitments slowly grinding into each other just below the waterline.

...but what the heck is Heart, anyway?

--

Heart's great: This game? This game fuckin' rules. It throws wonderfully evocative classes (Wizards made of bees! Train paladins! Debt priests! The Crow, from the movie The Crow!) into a nightmare world of meat dungeons, subterranean moons, gangster druids, blooddrenched angels, electronic hells and interdimensional subways. The art's great, the writing's great, the setting's crammed full of evocative ideas, and the system... reads slightly better than it plays, and the exploration subsystem needs clearer explanations for how to make it work at the table, but it's still pretty bloody good. If the opportunity comes up to run/play Heart again, I'll do it in a, well, heartbeat.

Meaty beaty big and bouncy: The strongest element of Heart are beats, which are the core of both its experience system and its approach to GMing. At the end of a session, each player picks two beats - events, consequences or choices - that they would like to happen (or at least start happening) to their character. These range from the minor ('kick someone off a roof') to the major (''convert an important NPC to your cause') to the extreme ('take final revenge upon your secret master'), and the character gets a corresponding minor/major/extreme power-up when the beat is fulfilled. The GM's job is then to set up all those beats in the next session - and that's how you design scenarios and sessions. No maps, no scripts, no big plans, but a focus on giving the players what they want while building on what came before.

Planning is my heroin: I, of course, fucked that up immediately. Not by pre-planning a big story arc or dropping in railroad tracks, but by getting caught up in the coolness of every character. I wanted to see where they would end up, which meant I started getting ideas about where they'd end up, which meant I planned (rough) arcs for each character and dropped hints and foreshadowing and plot threads for players to follow those arcs. And my ideas are good! The players seemed to like them! But they're my ideas, and I struggle to put my ideas to one side even when a game pushes the players' ideas to the forefront, or to let myself take a reactive GMing role rather than actively driving things. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle - me riffing on player inputs, the players riffing on mine, everyone being happy - and maybe that's how the game would have turned out in the end, who knows.

Everyone's busy again: Look, I'm not saying pandemic lockdowns were a good thing, but at least they meant everyone was home, bored and desperate for online interaction on a Thursday night. It was a good time for gaming - I think I was running 4 games a fortnight (via Zoom) at one point. But that's over now, and folks have a lot of things on their plates again, and I'm back to competing with things like jobs and children and sex for attention again, and I tend to lose those competitions.

Am I advocating for another pandemic? Yes No. But sigh.

--

What else is happening in gaming land?

I tried to get a Lancer campaign off the ground, but I have a limited number of friends interested in a tactical-combat-focused RPG, and most of them were busy, so I'm putting that off until autumn.

I've just started running facilitating guiding a Wanderhome game, and it's got lots of promise, but it's a challenge in some ways. A game with no conflict, no plot and little-to-no external drama? Just vibes? That's not my strong suit - but then again, it's been a long time since I had to learn new gaming skills, so I’m into it.

And I should (fingers crossed) be running a one-shot, maybe even a 3-shot, of Achtung! Cthulhu next month. That'll be fun.

Nothing is more fun than shooting Nazis.

[foggyoutline]

We haven't heard from Callum since last year ... he's finally back in the new chapter of A Net Too Wide to Break His Fall. Also, Matt's game of Heart: The City Beneath for Actual Play UK is finally under way! Watch part 1 on demand now and catch part 2 on Twitch on 8 March.

[prokopetz]

Dungeons & Dragons: Your character has contracted a disease which reduces your maximum hit points.

Heart: The City Beneath: Your character has contracted a disease which compels you to spend your downtime slots constructing a labyrinth; if the disease isn't cured before you finish building the labyrinth, a minotaur comes out of it and eats you.

[haro4869]

a normal museum visit

[baenuit]

ㅤ

ᘓ︵ꪒꪒ bunnⴗ c𐐼fé 🥕⃞ ♡ !!

sug𐐼r & drᧉ𐐼ms wꪱth @userlove

𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗶𝘀𝗲 ✿𝅼  重要な ৲ ৲

b⍺bⴗ, dᨻn't s⍺ⴗ "no" @userlove

⊹ 🥞 𑁯ᰍ 今. ꒰ ´ ` ꒱ ू

ε( 𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗿𝘆 𝗅𝗂𝗉𝗌 ㅋᩚ 𝗌𝗈𝗎𝗋𝗂𝗋𝖾 𝖺𝗆𝖾𝗋 )з

𝗆𝗂𝗇𝗂 𝖽𝗈𝖼𝖾𝗋𝗂𝖺 @y//n 𝗌𝗐𝖾𝖾𝗍𝗇𝖾𝗌𝗌

︵‿ Doux 백조 ꪆ 🦢 ?﹖

𝗃𝖾𝗅𝗅𝗒𝖿𝗂𝗌𝗁 🪼 명음 ꒱ ꭐ.  𝗆𝖾𝗋𝖼𝗂𝗅𝖾𝗌𝗌

𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗻𝖼𝖾𝗌𝗌 𝗈𝖿 ﹙🪸﹚ 𝖨'𝗈𝖼𝖾́𝗮𝗻

@group

soft──bios

[kayartee]