This upcoming weekend (the one following this post going up), I’ll have my first session with a group of people playing a game of Heart: The City Beneath. I’m pretty excited to play it, since I was so inspired by the game (and the seventh season of Friends at the Table, Sangfielle, where they played it) that I wrote an entire setting for any number of games full of cool decay and horror themed stuff. This group will be playing that setting and we’ll be doing our Session 0 to talk through what adaption work we’ll be doing to get the base game to fit the flavor of the world ni which we’ll be playing. This setting is one I’ve written about here (or at least shared the introductory short story for the Dungeons and Dragons 5e Heoric Tragedy version of it), so I’m excited to get to use it with a group interested in exploring the more creepy, horrific side of things. Don’t get me wrong, I’m absolutely delighted to eventually continue the Heoric Tragedy game when all the players are available again, but I wrote this setting with mild to moderate horror and dark fantasy in mind, so it’ll be tons of fun to explore those a bit more directly with a game designed for horror like Heart.

Honestly, I’m mostly just excited to be playing a game that isn’t super crunchy or Dungeons and Dragons (which is still fairly crunchy even in it’s least crunchy form). I’ve been trying to get people together for a different game for well over a year now and struck out every time, due to scheduling conflicts, the dissolution of the gaming group, or just a lack of interest. Now, I will finally be able to experiment with a game that puts less work on the GM to provide all of the up-front world creation and splits the narrative work amongst all players present at the table. Plus, it’s just such a cool sounding game if you want to experiment with body horror and characters who don’t necessarily make good decisions. I love a game that incentivizes good storytelling and narrative prompting through mechancis rather than setting up situations a player (or their character) can “win.” After all, in Heart, every character is doomed. Every character is spiraling toward some kind of terrible (in both the “this is very bad” and the “and mighty” ways) end, driven there by their obsessions and drives.

My favorite mechanical feature of Heart is the “beat” system. Characters advance by completing beats instead of gaining experience and powering up. These beats are usually narrative or action-oriented things, such as acquiring a rare item, kicking someone off something very high, defeating a specific type of enemy, or damaging a place of safety to let the madness/power they support worm its way into an otherwise protected settlement. Each beat is marked as being one of three types, either a minor, major, or zenith beat, the completion of which allows the player to select an advancement or power of the same category. These beats are fun because they are an explicit note from the player to the GM that indicates what kind of stuff the player is interested in or how they’d like to go about addressing whatever situations they’re into. There’s plenty of beats to chose from, but there’s also nothing preventing players from repeating beats if they’re interested in focusing on a particular style of play. While I normally do this kind of checking-in with my players in any game, I’m excited to try out a system that actually mechanizes it. It will also be fun to challenge myself to incorporate all these beats for up to six players each session, which might include a bunch of radically different styles of play.

After that, the fallout system, and the way it lends to narrative building, is also super interesting. After all, if you get shot at, you don’t take damage outright. Instead, you take an amount of stress based on the thing dice associated with the thing shooting you (and what kind of thing they’re shooting you with). After you add your stress, you roll against it to see if you get a fallout or if you manage to avoid any consequences beyond the stress. The fallout of something like being shot at can include all kinds of things, depending on how you narratively interpret the action and the kinds of stress you’ve already got. If you didn’t get hit, it could be stress and then fallout to your “fortune,” implying that your luck has run out. It could be stress and fallout to your “supplies” to represent something on your person taking the hit for you. It could also be to your “blood” to represent you being shot by an actual bullet. These fallouts can be anything from “limping” (which means you arrive last if you’re going anywhere with other people and that creatures hunting your party will target you first) to losing an object because it was in your pack when the bullet went through it to any number of wild things like a sense of foreboding that something bad is about to happen. All of which are “minor” fallouts. The major ones get incredibly intense and half of them would require me to put content warnings on this post if I talked through them. The critical ones are permanent ends to your character.

I’m just really excited to play a new game with people. I hope it goes well. After the rough experience I’ve had with Pathfinder Second Edition, I’d love for something to go smoothly and easily. Sure, I’ve come to realize most of my issues with the PF2e campaign I’m in have to do with the group, compounded by our collective inexperience with PF2e. Some of these issues might be resolved in time, but it’s still exhausting to play that game with those people. It’s also still exhausting to level up as I read through dozens of potential options and have to figure out what I want to do, but then again, I’m also incredibly exhausted already and have been for months now, so maybe some of that will also fade as I finally cut myself some slack and rest up. Only time will tell. At least now the time will come faster since I’ve got this game of Heart: The City Beneath to look forward to on the weekends I’m not playing PF2e.