One of the most difficult moments as a game designer is when a potential customer walks up to you and picks up your book. They turn it over in their hands, flip through the pages and then ask “Can this run D&D?” Designers Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor likely had this scenario in mind when they set out to make Heart: The City Beneath, the follow up game to Spire: The City Must Fall. These two sibling games exist in the same, Mignola-inspired fantasy world but spread out in different design directions, concepts and themes. Rowan, Rook and Decard sent along a review copy for this article. Does Heart: The City Beneath beat to its own rhythm? Let’s play to find out.
Heart: The City Beneath takes place beneath the city of Spire in a strange energy nexus that could be many different things.The book opens up with several explanations of what it is but the point is that there are rumors of people journeying deep into the twisting tunnels, battling the unknowable monsters and coming out changed with their heart’s desire firmly in their grasp. There’s no real evidence of this, and plenty of evidence of ruined, dead adventurers who didn’t survive the experience but when has that stopped the obsessed and the desperate from embarking on a dangerous endeavour before?
Character motivation is one of the main pieces of character building in Heart: The City Beneath. Players choose a heritage, calling and classes to build their character. Heritage is the least essential of these choices with four choices of dark elf, high lf, gnoll and human that provide some shade for character choices.Calling is why the character is here in the Heart and they range from being sentenced for a crime (or your own guilt) to seeking a truth of the universe that you can only find inside. Classes provide special abilities and an idiosyncratic throughline for a character, such as a priest of the God of Debt called an Incarnadine that can only pay off their marker by going deep inside the Heart or someone that’s died at least once already which gives them some insight to the weirdness of the dungeon.
The game uses the same Resistance engine as Spire. Players roll a handful of d10s, take the highest to determine success, failure and how much blowback they suffer from stress or fallout. The game also applies a more abstract system to things exploration and treasure hunting. Gear and loot are classified in die types which go up when you improve them and go down when they wear out. Players also get to steer their personal arcs via the beat system where they choose from a list based on their class as to the next plot point they want to resolve. When they do, they choose an ability of an appropriate level. That includes zenith abilities, which, when used gives a player a chance to make their character go out of the campaign with a bang. For example, the Incarnadine can buy something, anything, like a dragon or the concept of death, and own it for a couple sessions before their god comes to collect that debt. The Deadwalker can truly, finally choose to die one last time and take anyone they want screaming to Hell with them.
Though Heart and Spire share a setting and a system, the games are not particularly suited for a combined game.They share common themes and concepts but they are expressed in very different ways. It reminds me of how the original World of Darkness could combine games but they often seem at odds with each other whenever someone would bring in a character from a different supernatural calling. At best, Heart seems like it could be a fun sequel campaign to Spire focused on whatever characters survive the inevitable fall of their resistance cell, rebuilt as new characters with the players of dead drow getting a chance to make new personalities to continue the story.
Heart: The City Beneath follows other Howitt designs in being built as short experiences focused on giving characters full arcs through beginning, middle and end. It gives interesting power in the players hands by letting them choose their goals and picking between a handful of big flashy endings for their character. The game uses the concepts and structures of dungeon crawling but all of that is window dressing for players to explore their characters, their backgrounds and how they came to be in the dark tunnels of the Heart. Most dungeon crawls bury these character motivations deep. Heart pulls them to the surface in messy, bloody ways which gives the game a feel like a D&D campaign written and directed by David Cronenburg.
Bottom Line: Heart: The City Beneath puts players on a surreal journey through a nightmare dungeon that focuses on character arcs over loot.
