Heart: The City Beneath is a game about delving into a nightmare undercity that will give you everything you’ve ever dreamed of - or kill you in the process. It is a dungeon-crawling, story-forward tabletop RPG from the designers of Spire that focuses on what characters have to lose in pursuit of their dreams in the chaotic darkness beneath the world.
Heart is a tabletop roleplaying game, and will be released as a 224+ page hardback book and a bookmarked PDF. You won’t need a copy of Spire to play Heart - it’s a standalone game.
RRD’s Heart is live today (and twice funded near enough). They’ve a history of getting proper lithograph printing and of hyperlinking their PDFs, and the layout here is done by the wonderful @jay.
I was one of the Heart playtesters and it was an excellent oneshot — I’d planned an inciting incident and a string of options on the way back to safety, but the players spent the whole of their time in the first haven. Our witch encased a monstrosity in the earth and forged it into a shrine; our junkmage was falsely elected as a puppet leader and summarily executed.
Heart has:
- small D10 dice pools
- abstract Stress into concrete Fallout
- lampshaded narrative beats
- beautiful bodyhorror