Petra is Playing: Heart: The City Beneath
Welcome to Petra is Playing, a hopefully recurring article series where I review a tabletop roleplaying game after running a campaign with it. My fifteen-session campaign of Christopher Taylor and Grant Howitt’s multi-Ennie winning dark fantasy horror RPG Heart: The City Beneath wrapped up in November, but it’s one that’s stuck with me in those next few months. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the narrative we crafted, the way its mechanics were so fine-tuned to support that story, and, of course, our amazing campaign finale.
Heart is a fresh and narrative-driven take on a TTRPG classic; the megadungeon, those colossal and complicated dungeons that can hold an entire campaign. But the Heart is different. Rather than being a hole in the ground that some schmuck put their money into, the Heart is something more eldritch and nightmarish; a tear in the fabric of reality, modifying and warping itself to try granting the desires of the people who delve into it. Heart is dungeon crawling played for horror, filled with delightful strange and disturbing locations, creatures, and people.
Heart’s core mechanics use the Resistance system, previously seen in Howitt and Taylor’s previous game Spire: The City Must Fall. Players will roll pools of d10s, the number of which is determined by any relevant skills or domains they have, as well as possible expertise, up to a maximum of 4d10. Depending on the highest dice result, they’ll succeed or fail and then take Stress, which is the game’s damage system. This could be the traditional Blood or Mind representing physical or mental injuries, but could also be running out of Supplies, or losing your Fortune, or taking Echo stress as you’re warped by the nightmarish environs you’re exploring. This can also potentially lead to Fallout later on, permanent consequences that could range from at lowest levels spitting teeth or panicking, all the way up to ropes snapping as your delver falls to their death, or getting petrified into a tower of crystal. The system allows for nuanced successes with a cost as well as putting a much greater focus on the narrative consequences of injury and harm. A character breaking her foot after running it over with a minecart, which actually happened in my campaign, will always feel more impactful than losing seven abstract hitpoints from it. An aspect that I also liked was how Critical Fallouts, the max-level Fallout that will guarantee a character dies or is otherwise permanently removed from the game, are always the decision of the player. There’s no chance of rolling badly on a combat encounter and getting killed by a level 1 goblin, death only happens when it suits the narrative best.
Presentation wise, both the core rulebook and the supplements are great. They’re clear to read, the writing is engaging, and the artwork by Felix Miall and Sar Cousins is phenomenal. It’s grimy and gnarly and horrible but with glimpses of humanity and tenderness beneath it.
Heart: The City Beneath is a game about desperation and obsession. Nobody would choose to journey into “red wet hell” without a reason, and that in turn becomes one of Heart’s core mechanics; your Calling. Chosen during character creation, a Calling is the reason you’re in the Heart. Maybe you’re desperate to become a hero. Maybe you made a mistake, and the Heart holds your redemption. Whatever it is, the Heart will give it to you - just not always in the way you want it to. Your Calling comes with an appropriate thematic ability, but it also comes with a list of Beats, which could range from minor moments like “kick someone off a tall structure” and “find a helpful text” to Zenith Beats, arc-completing moments like “be truly absolved of your sins by a higher power”. At the end of each session, a player picks two Beats, and the GM has to give them the opportunity to achieve them in the next session, because your Beats are also Heart’s system of progression. Achieve a minor beat, that’s a minor advance; a major beat is a major advance; and the zenith beat leads to a zenith advance.
This is an incredible mechanic that works on multiple levels. At the player level, it meant that session prep was a breeze where my players basically planned the key moments of each session for me, meaning that they get an explicit say in what happens to their character and the direction of their arc. But on an in-game narrative level it works great as well; the Beats represent a character’s desires, so the Heart will twist itself to grant them. Your character wants to fight a powerful monster? Pick the right Beat, and the Heart will make their wishes come true.
The structure of a Heart: The City Beneath campaign is divided between Delves, journeys from one part of the Heart to another, and Landmarks, the strange locations within the Heart that become weirder and weirder the deeper you go. Heart is filled with delightfully weird locations, monsters, and ideas that captured my imagination every couple of pages, and this is especially true of its amazing classes.
Heart’s character classes are just delightful. They’re incredibly flavourful with a diverse variety of fun abilities and great premises. My party consisted of a Cleaver, a hunter slowly being mutated by the creatures of the Heart they’ve devoured; a Deadwalker, whose death prior to the campaign didn’t stick and so they spent the campaign haunted by a spectral manifestation of that death; and a Hound, a forceful conscript in a regiment of supernatural soldiers slowly having her personality overridden by the initial bearer of her cursed badge. And this is just three of the game’s nine classes! Have you ever wanted to play as someone in so much crushing debt that the God of Debt has made them a saint? Or how about a wizard who replaced their internal organs with a hive of magic bees? Then Heart is the game for you.
The abilities are a lot of fun, with the absolute highlight being the Zenith abilities. These are massive, campaign-shaking powers that you unlock after clearing your Zenith Beat, that all come with a caveat: using this ability will kill you. The campaign finale, in which my players were setting off their Zeniths left and right while facing their final challenge was, without a doubt, my favourite session I have ever GMed. Two of them died, while the last player remaining was left to wander the depths of the Heart, alone, forever. This system is also great because it leaves your Heart campaign fully concluded; you play a story of about eight linked sessions as your players delve deeper into the Heart, try to get what they want, and then go out in a blaze of glory (although our campaign took a little longer; more on that later).
As much as I would love to use my first review as an excuse to properly bare my fangs as a critic, I really don’t have many complaints. My only real issue is the use of Mind stress; I think that mechanics like Mothership’s stress and panic system has shown great ways of modernising the “sanity damage” trope, and while some examples of Mind Fallout could lead to your panicking or losing your nerve, others (like “creepy” or “weird”) fall into some of the ableist tropes that are inevitable when dealing with “sanity” as a mechanic and left me less likely to inflict Mind stress compared to the other types.
Another issue was weirdly a self-inflicted one. I decided to let my players keep the abilities they picked a secret so that they could surprise each other, and me, with what new powers they had. While it seemed cool in theory, if I were to run Heart again I would probably not do it l as it meant I couldn’t set up scenarios that would properly take advantage of some of my players abilities. That’s more of an issue with me as a GM than it was with the system, though.
Heart: The City Beneath was a gnarly, blood-soaked delight. I had a great time running it, its mechanics excel at telling the types of stories it’s aiming to, and it’s easily my favourite dungeon. I can’t recommend it enough, and with the Ways and Means supplement just around the corner it seems like my return into the Heart is inevitable.
Interlude: What did my players think?
I wasn’t the only person in the Heart campaign, and I wasn’t the only one with thoughts. I asked my players if they had anything they wanted to add, and they responded with some great short reviews that I decided to insert in full rather than break up into quotes.
“The thing that I was most surprised by in Heart was how it balanced its tone.
For a horror game, Heart shockingly never took agency away from me as a player, and the beats advancement system and balancing really favored the "rule of cool." At the end of the day, TTRPGs are about living a player fantasy, and playing as a Cleaver made me feel powerful and capable the entire game, which made for some very cinematic moments. The DM may be in control of fallouts, but the player is in control of death, and because of the advancement system, my character was never under threat of dying. I was able to go on a full 15 session journey before my character's end. Though to be fair, as I'm sure my PC would agree, I died a little bit every session. Between the unavoidable TTRPG group comedy and cinematic moments, Heart (and Petra) placed my character in positions that made him gradually lose his humanity. That narrative progression was subtle at first, but made for such an amazing thematic conclusion.
Also, Heart is the first TTRPG that I've played that has narrative themes and commentary built directly into its system. This is a game about greed and longing, and I'm shocked by how much that was reinforced by the setting and gameplay” - Megan, who played Walleye, a Gnoll Cleaver with the Adventure Calling.
“As a player in Heart I was drawn in a lot by the setting, and actually once the campaign ended I even read through a lot of the places and monsters in the book just because I wanted to learn as much as I could about the setting. As a player I adored the Hound's gameplay of trying to take Fallout for a benefit and often having to weigh if I could reasonably roll a luck Fallout or if I should just eat the Stress normally. Using my own character's Stress as a resource was such a great mechanic and really informed where I took my character.
The only thing I could complain about is how I never felt very incentivized to take an expertise, especially with the Hound mechanic of taking fortune fallout to gain expertise anyway; it felt like something I would only do for RP and would otherwise be sub-optimal. I could just be undervaluing expertise but with how many of the other features blended RP and number crunching so well it stuck out a bit in my mind. Granted, that's a complete non issue and I do love a good way to enhance RP but snub viability.” - Mint, who played Found-In-Blood, an Aelfir Hound with the Penitent Calling.
“For me, my favorite thing in Heart was the beats, since I’m still fairly new at playing TTRPGs. It was nice to have the direction and it helped me shape my character a lot more than in other games. I felt a lot more like my character was part of the group thanks to the help from the beats. The fact that death was more in my hands also helped me overcome some of the risk aversion I have struggled with in the previous game we played. As for the gameplay of the Deadwalker, I’m not sure I had the best grasp on it, due to the Stress taking parts of some of the combat abilities. Also admittedly there was not a lot of sneaking around too, which meant I never used Marked for Death. (I think I used Shadow in Tollembrood but that was also the only time I saw an opportunity to use that skill).” - Reina, who played Therese, a Drow Deadwalker with the Forced Calling.
Dagger in the Heart
I love a good campaign module. If a game has a prewritten module, chances are I’ll use that as either my campaign’s starter adventure or to run my campaign, and there are some great ones out there. Reading Lancer’s No Room for a Wallflower made me cry, and Delta Green’s Impossible Landscapes unsettled me more than some horror novels I’ve read. As a result, it was a bit of an obvious choice to run Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan’s Dagger in the Heart for my group.
The basic premise of Dagger in the Heart goes that, two-hundred years ago, a machine was built to dig into the Heart Itself in an attempt to harness it as a power source. This attempt went horribly wrong and the Delving Machine was left near the centre of the Heart, so your party of delvers have to journey to find it while racing with various villainous Factions that want the Delving Machine for their own purposes.
A good campaign module is one written to suit the system it’s played in. Heart: The City Beneath is, by nature, a very improv-heavy game, so a more traditionally structured campaign wouldn’t really work for it. As a result, Dagger in the Heart takes the form of a loose collection of Landmarks and the Delves between them, organised by chapters as the party slowly descends deeper into the Heart Itself and united by a common narrative. The campaign-specific list of Beats is a really great decision too, letting players pick aspects of the campaign they’re interested in and rewarding them for following plot hooks.
The Landmarks are really interesting, and one of my favourite parts was how there are usually multiple locations where you can find campaign-specific information. It meant that I had a lot of freedom to craft the overall campaign narrative around my players, picking locations relevant to their Beats and interests rather than having to restrict them into going a certain route. There were a lot of interesting Landmarks that didn’t directly tie to the narrative too, making it a good resource even if you don’t intend to play it.
However this narrative looseness falls a bit flat when it comes to the campaign’s villains. There are three of them; the One Who Waits in Ashes, Ptolemy Bay, and Aramos Brightness-Sears-The-Eye, and my campaign had both the One Who Waits and Ptolemy Bay. On paper, these villains are great; they have interesting, varied motivations, a great cast of supporting NPCs (an encounter with Brother Shotgun and the Mendicant Procession, an NPC associated with the One Who Waits, was a highlight of the campaign), and the system of schemes and countermeasures is pretty interesting. However, while it might just be a skill issue on my part, I had a really difficult time with the schemes and countermeasures. Most of the schemes seemed to be things that my players would have no reason to learn about or intervene in without diverting the campaign completely, which made it really hard for me to insert them into the narrative. Likewise, the backstories are interesting, but I also didn’t feel like there was anywhere organic to put them without having one of their associated NPCs go on a motive rant.
Another issue was the length. While I’m glad that Dagger in the Heart has so much content, it also felt like so much that a shorter campaign wouldn’t have any time to breathe. Our campaign took fifteen sessions, and we could really feel Heart’s system being stretched to its limits during our final few sessions as my players started literally running out of advances and Beats to take.
That being said, I think the module overall was a great time and I’m glad I’ve run it, even if I’d go in a different direction when running a future campaign of Heart. Even if you don’t intend on running it, enough of it would work excellently outside of its narrative that it’s definitely worth taking a look.