Heart: The City Beneath is a fantasy TTRPG set in the world of Spire, a companion TTRPG about segregated, downtrodden rebels revolting against their cruel, high elf overlords. Heart is set beneath that city, in a “nightmare, unreal labyrinth…of infinite possibility that reforms itself anew with each generation that explore it”. It’s not your standard dungeon exploration game – while there are facets of that, the emphasis is on exploring your characters’ ongoing traumas, fears and the bizarre horrors to be faced in the city beneath.
Heart: The City Beneath is a 224-page rule book by Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor with thick glossy paper and cartoon-inspired gothic artwork. It uses a modified dice pool system (usually D10s, although that can vary based on whether a die steps up or down to a D12, D8, D6 or D4) from the Spire game. You base your dice pool on your skill, domain and mastery; roll the pool and remove high dice based on the difficulty; take the final highest result, with failure taking stress (like hit points) and determining fallout (effects and conditions that can affect characters in the short or long term). Stress affects one of five resistances: Blood (physical damage), Echo (twisting of the mind by the unreal energies of the heart), Mind (sanity), Fortune and Supplies (resources and money). Equipment and abilities can provide protection to reduce stress. There’s more to it than that, but the systems work well and are some of my favorite of any TTRPG I’ve read.
There are plenty of callings (reasons for adventuring that provide abilities and development “beats”), classes – Cleaver (wild people); Deadwalker (death obssessed); Deep Apiarist (bee controller); Heretic (outlawed cleric); Hound (lost soldier); Incarnadine (luck and magic scryer); Junk Mage (addicted magician); Vermission Knight (cursed ranger); Witch (crimson-powered magician) – and ancestries (drow, human, aelfir, gnolls) for players to get their teeth into.
Exploring the Heart and mapping it is difficult, to say the least – the strange world beneath the Spire shifts and warps in accordance to its own desires. GMs are encouraged to plan less and let the players drive the story based on their callings and relationship bonds. This is a game of true GM-Player collaboration, fulfilling characters’ personal stories in their quest to discover the heart of the city beneath and within themselves, a game of haunting and surreal atmosphere. Role playing rules the day, and although there is exploring and fighting (as one would expect in any dungeon-driven game), it’s character beats that rule the day.
Heart: The City Beneath is one of the best TTRPGs I’ve seen in ages. I bought this book from a games shop in Sydney (it’s painfully expensive to buy online) and am eagerly hunting for Spire so I can engage with the full cityscape (note: Heart and Spire are independent games, you don’t need both to enjoy either of them). This is a game I heartily recommend (bad pun intended).
Check out the preview video below to see the book.
