Heart - Session 2
Our micro-campaign group is playing Heart: The City Beneath by Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor! In these session reports, I'll share critical events and details from the game so far plus some notes on GMing. You can find the last entry here. While I'll keep these posts spoiler-free for players, I will share the occasional secret from Heart's canonical setting, so readers beware.
The Divide
This week, our delvers were:
- Bythebook, a gnoll cleaver who dreams of devouring the Heart and dragging it back to the surface.
- Blossoms-Falling-Like-Blood, a high elf "witch" afflicted with the rare blood disease that lets her manipulate the energies of the Heart.
Blossoms (for short) was a member of an old family of witches from Hallow, a haven far below. She had emerged to the surface to investigate the auspicious dreams she had been having and now joined for her trip back down.
She caught up with them as they came to a fork. The delvers decided to split briefly to scout in both directions for a route through.
Bythebook and Blossoms went south, entering a long vertical shaft traced by a maddening labyrinth of gantries and catwalks. Some snaked into the wall before reappearing a ways further down.
As they walked, the duo talked about their employer, Sova the Apiarist. They agreed he might be useful as a guide, but that they would not help him accomplish his goal of reinforcing Wardstone Nasyanov.
The way was dimly lit by the occasional green magelamp. Blossoms managed to extract one to use like a lantern at the cost of some tools from her bag.
As the duo descended, they began to see small figures scratched into the wall - first one, then a couple, then dozens of them.
The Encounter
Soon the delvers could make out the bottom of the shaft. It terminated in a small square room with an open sewage sluice running through it. Small structures with corrugated roofs were built into the support beams that held the path aloft.
As they passed through a final U-bending side corridor, they heard the sound of bare feet on cement from the room beyond. Bythebook tried to peek out stealthily to see what was there but had to pull back suddenly as a improvised javelin came hurtling out of the dark. From beyond someone yelled "Rat Law! Rat Law!"
Blossoms called out demanding the creatures disperse, but only got a hail of debris as a response. Bythebook brandished the corpse he had been dragging - the fragile, inhuman body of one of the rat-teens from above. He cackled as whoever was out there scattered in terror.
With the coast clear, the duo emerged into the room filled with outhouse-sized sheds. Each had the same asterisk like figure carved into the door as a window. Blossoms peaked in and saw that each was packed floor to ceiling with salvage - rags, bones, the occasional shiny trinket.
Bythebook, curious about the rat-teen corpse performed a hasty dissection. The creature seemed all muscle and no organs. It seemed miraculous this thing could even be alive, let alone move or talk. He left the things limbs in an X as a grisly warning to any would-be pursuers.
The duo decided to craft a raft from the salvage rather than brave a nearby side tunnel. Bythebook consumed some of the trash to get a sense for it, then together they made a small vehicle that could float along the near-solid sewage.
The Filth
Pushing their raft along with long sticks, the duo emerged in a larger cavern - the Tunnels of Wet Filth. Two huge pipes spewed constant streams of sludge that flowed into channels that led out of the far side of the chamber. Small hovels and lean-tos were scattered around the area. Locals sheltered under umbrellas as they panned for scraps.
The rest of the delvers caught up shortly after, having doubled back to look for the missing duo.
Blossoms confronted one of the locals as they fed what appeared to be a mishappen crocodile. She demanded to know what route led deepest from here. The guy snubbed her, but they were quickly approached by a (literally) unctuous man in a monks' robes.
The man told them there was a dangerous route to the apiarist holdout at Resonance Chamber 5, but for a fee he could show them a safer passage. Blossoms used her magic, touching the man's shoulder and reading his aura. Finding him greedy and deceitful, she simply shoved him aside into the muck and walked away. He got up cursing.
Consulting their charts, Bythebook figured there were two shrines relatively close by - Chollerous and Ranvess - and that pilgrims must pass through here coming to and from Derelictus. They decided to wait and see if any such newcomers arrived.
They were rewarded as a wealthy looking drow woman arrived, attended by two servants. As soon as she arrived she was swarmed by vendors and umbrella-bearers. Bythebook overheard that she was coming from somewhere known as Athane that was a short and safe journey to the east.
The Blossoms
The party headed in the direction the drow had emerged from, a hatch to the side of one of the sewage sluices. They travelled down a short corridor before Blossoms popped another hatch into a large unlit chamber.
The witch rolled her magelamp into the room, revealing a small, raked amphitheater lined by decorative columns. Each column was overgrown with clinging vines covered in red-pink lily-like flowers. An open tunnel yawned on the far side of the room.
The duo immediately decided to investigate the flowers. Blossoms touched one to see if it was reveal, but it pricked her finger. The back of each petal was barbed.
Bythebook began gathering them, tasting a few to see what he could learn. The flowers were clearly cursed, imbued with the energy of the Heart. As he did, petals began to rain - a scene that Blossoms had seen many times in her dreams, so much that it had become her namesake.
Disturbing the flowers revealed a wooden door, fully overgrown with vines. The duo agreed this was the more interesting route. They reached to open the door.
GM Notes
This session was tricky to GM! The "delve" is the central unit of play, a journey between two landmarks that has a "resistance" that works like hit points. Whenever the players roll dice, on a success, they reduce that resistance until they eventually arrive. This framework is pretty robust, but it necessitates an uncertain geography. There is no shorter or longer route to the next landmark once you are on a delve.
Based on the starter set and some of the GM notes, the authors more or less expect you to run this as a railroad - a railroad that twists based on the results of the dice, but a railroad nonetheless. I think if I were really embracing the game, I'd just roll with that, but I want to give the players more agency than that, thus my pointcrawl approach to laying out the City Beneath.
I'm trying to bring that same ethos to the delve itself. Rooms frequently have 2 or more exits or ways through them that might test different areas of expertise or lead to different threats. Since the layout is of indeterminate length, I've more or less just made an encounter table of potential rooms longer than I think we'll need and then I've been queuing them up as feels dramatically appropriate.
In practice this isn't that different from just running a dungeon, but its worth noting that I am the one doing this design work. Heart itself provides pretty nebulous guidance for how to structure your delve or what to stock rooms with between different landmarks.
That said, I think I am getting a better sense of pacing now. We still spent about 30 minutes making a new character this session, which throws things off a little but I think that in 3 hours this group will probably be able to complete two delves and visit two landmarks. This gives me a sense of how "deep" to make the City Beneath if we realistically want to get anywhere near the Heart in the timeline of our micro-campaigns. I might make some tweaks to the map below - a little more Jacquaysing and a little more vertical connectivity to help smooth the journey.
Finally, we spent a lot of time talking about "resources" this session. Resources are abstract treasures that have a tag corresponding to a biome type and a die signaling its value. For instance, Blossoms magelight is a d6 warrens resource. Again, the book doesn't provide a lot of insight as to where to put resources or how proactively the players can seek them. I am erring towards resources being readily available if the players do the work to identify and retrieve them. This provokes rolls that in turn risk injury or complication. So far it doesn't seem to have broken anything.