I’d like to run a game of Heart, by Rowan, Rook & Decard.
Heart is a game of exploration, horror, doomed ambition and humanity to be found despite the circumstances.
In the land of Destera, below the city of Spire that juts out from the ground like a mile-high talon, where high elves rule over subjugated dark elves, lies Heart, the City Beneath. The City Beneath is settled by heretics, mad cultists, madder sorcerers, or just those for whom there is no place in the City Above. Dark elves, high elves, humans and gnolls, who would be enemies on the surface, struggle to build communities together in a hostile, ever shifting environment.
The deeper you go, the closer you get to the Heart, the red, wet heaven, a tear in reality that changes the world around it. From tunnels haunted by the ghosts of armies that fought there, the tracks of a failed mass transportation network settled by cults devoted to summoning the fabled Last Train, over caverns lit by the light of unknown stars to forests of meaty trees, the world keeps making less and less sense.
Those people that regularly walk between havens, the candleflames of civilisation in the unknowable darkness of the Heart, are known as delvers. They are seen with a mix of awe, fear and distrust by the general population of the City Beneath.
Player characters are doomed from the start. You don’t go down into the depths of the Heart, leaving the certainty of the surface or the relative safety of a haven, if there isn’t something fundamentally wrong with you. Whether you are looking for an adventure that can’t be found anywhere else, answers to questions burned into your mind, are called each night by the wet beating of the Heart, or are on the run from your previous life, the Heart will most likely take you in the end and turn you into a story whispered around campfires.
Delvers can be Cleavers (monster hunters/pathfinders who turn more and more bestial the further they go), Deadwalkers (who have already died once and are now caught in the space between), Deep Apiarists (a sect that tries to impose order on the primordial chaos of the Heart through symbiosis with crystal-producing bees), Heretics (descendents of the true dark elf moon cult, forbidden in the City Above, on a search for the Moon Beneath), Hounds (protectors of the people of the City Beneath, soul-bound to a regiment that fought unspeakable battles 100 years ago), Incarnadines (who have gone so deep into debt, that the goddess of debt has claimed them as Her merchants/priests/debt collectors/executors), Junk Mages (who ride the wave of magic stolen from higher beings; they could stop doing magic at any time if they wanted to, really), Vermissian Knights (wandering the old train tunnels searching for lost knowledge and protecting the remnants of the network) and Witches (whose occult flesh-shaping powers come from a blood disease unique to themselves).
The rules are a modified version of the Resistance System used in Spire. The focus is on generating stories rather than tactics or mechanical complexity.
