Heart: the City Beneath

Product Information

It is a dungeon-crawling, story-forward tabletop RPG that focuses on what characters have to lose in pursuit of their dreams in the chaotic darkness beneath the world. They're pretty simple in practice; your class gives you one Skill, and one Domain, some starting equipment and resources, as well as one or two Core Abilities, which are key to the class's flavour and mechanics.

One of the games that ended up on my radar a while back – due to the Modifier podcast (the episode itself is missing from the podcast’s own page, which is strange,) which has pointed me towards more interesting games than just about any other source thus far – is Heart. Humans in Heart/Spire have a reputation for digging up the past, often working as retro-engineers and tomb-robbers. But while a combat taking an extra roll or three to finish is not a big deal, a delve requiring more obstacles than you have prepared means you need to rapidly improvise. Oath of Community lets you reduce the effects of Blood fallout and stress, both for yourself and your allies. To the world where spirit and thought fall away and all becomes flesh, free of birth and death and all the fiddly bits in between.Other abilities give them keener hunting instincts, natural weaponry or the ability to command simple animals.

Heart: The City Beneath has no canonical geography, with players building up locations and discovering the map as they go.What’s the most dangerous beast or individual you’ve heard tell of, and why haven’t you defeated them yet?

The same goes for less animate obstacles - notably forging a route between various landmarks of the Heart. When you use THE RED FEAST ability, you may choose to have your attacks gain the Brutal tag for a number of actions equal to the amount rolled on the resource dice instead of gaining a domain. The one that “ascended” first did use their zenith ability to help out the other, but it was mostly to show off. To family they began to refer to themself as Sucks-Down-Teeth, a name that was never openly acknowledged. Characters in Heart have four elements that tie directly into the core mechanics - Skills, Domains, Knacks and Stress tracks.Take your first steps into the City Beneath with this streamlined version of the rules for the Heart RPG.

This is generally unchanged from Spire, but difficulty removes dice after the roll, making higher difficulties much more dangerous. There's only nine of them, and given that characters will generally start with only a few (at least one, could be up to three or four at absolute most), you end up pretty specialised. She outlived multiple Captains and stayed right where she was: head bruiser and principle bouncer of The Fish's Finger. If the immortal is killed, the Heart will recreate them (or, at least, an entirely perfect copy) within a month.Played straight with Signal Box Cultists, hostile fanatics who modify themselves with fragments of Vermissian materials and technology. The Minor Abilities attached to Major ones are less formulaic, and tend to alter how the Major functions, although some grant semi-related perks instead.