Heart - Session 3
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 Confidants
This week our delvers were:
- Bythebook, a gnoll cleaver who dreams of devouring the Heart and dragging it back to the surface.
- Hulf, human junk mage and penitent acolyte of the Stone Chorus.
The duo found themselves in a vine-snarled amphitheater. Behind pink-red lilies that bloomed from the wall, Bythebook had found a hatch going upwards. He poked his nose through, finding a dark opera box in the corner of a much larger chamber. Muffled voices could be heard somewhere below.
Hulf and Sova, the aged apiarist they had been hired to escort, preferred the "normal" exit from the room, a tunnel opposite the one they had entered by. Hulf peeked around the corner, finding along narrow hallway with pairs of doors at regular intervals down the left wall.
Bythebook agreed and they set off.
The Confessionals
Curious, Hulp popped open the first door they came to. It had a wicker window set into it. Bythebook immediately noticed a peculiar five-pronged pattern woven into the material that reminded him of the carvings left by the rat-teens above.
Inside was a small confessional booth. A low wooden bench had an unremarkable book under it. Another wicker window provided but masked access to the adjacent compartment.
Hulf thumbed through the book, finding a shockingly detailed account of a mystery meat pie he had bought from a vendor in the Tunnels of Wet Filth. Thinking this book must be linked to the magic of this place (and thus the Stone Chorus), he pulled some flash powder from his belt and drew a four-pointed star around it. He lit the powder, intent on offering the book as a sacrifice, and vanished.
Bythebook had been talking to Hulf through the screen door. After a long period without a reply, the gnoll tore open the booth revealing soot stains where the book and his companions boots had once been. He sniffed the air, trying to get a sense of what prowled nearby and caught something moving through the wicker. Was that... the silhouette of Jween (the acolyte Bythebook and Hulf had semi-accidentally annihilated not so long ago)?
The gnoll tore open the adjacent booth and found Hulf standing inside. For the Junk Mage, he had been caught in a reverie thinking about the meat pie. He didn't even seem to notice he had translocated. The duo poked around a bit more but, discovering nothing, decided to head on down the hall.
The Torrent
A long ways down, the delvers found themselves at a crossroads. One of the confessional booths had burst open. Torrents of water poured from inside, flooding the narrowing tunnel ahead.
Bythebook poked his head under the water, seeing a large chamber filled with kelp and deep, dark holes borrowed into the floor. Hulf looked into the torrent and saw that the water cascaded down a long hallway that curved to the left. They figured that route was safer than diving into the unknown.
They tried walking against the rapids. Bythebook and Hulf could make it with effort, their belongings strapped to their shoulders and balanced on their heads to keep them out of the wet. Frail Sova, however, could not.
The delvers doubled back and Bythebook quickly wrenched a door from a nearby booth. When he did, its partner-door threw itself to the ground as if in protest. Sova climbed on the makeshift raft and Bythebook tugged it through the surf.
The Oracle
Hulf led the way as the curving passage came to a larger chamber. Ahead, the room was lit by red flares that burned uncomfortably bright and disguised the ceiling with smoke. The waterway ran through a room with a raised floor. There a crowd of hooded figures were muttering over an upside bucket on a table.
The delvers extinguished their lights and listened closely. One of the hooded figures was haranguing another, demanding payment to ask another question of "The Oracle." Others waited impatiently for their turn.
Intrigued, Hulf waded up to investigate. The huckster did not seem surprised or alarmed, simply asking the junk mage to pay up if he wanted to ask a question. Hulf produced a small curiosity - a root vegetable carved in the likeness of a leering skull - which the man happily accepted.
Hulf leaned in as the man pulled back the bucket. Inside was a severed forearm, miraculously moving. It was Jween's. Hulf asked "what can I do for you?" (or some variant of this question...) and the hand extended as if for a handshake.
The junk mage grabbed Jween's hand and, casting a quick spell, summoned a portal to an ancient shrine to the Stone Chorus. Before anyone could react, he disappeared, knocking over the hucksters table and scattering coins and small offerings to the ground.
The Sages
Bythebook leapt from the water, carrying Sova like an infant. "Jween!" he bellowed. They thought the ritual had failed, but Bythebook realized they were mistaken. Jween hadn't been killed, he had been amalgamated into the Heart itself. He had to know more.
The gnoll looked for his companion. Not seeing him, he took the most likely exit - a flight of stairs descending down to the right.
After a short ways, he found himself in an open forum. Marble statues of drow in thoughtful poses adorned the space. A flight of stairs ascended ahead of him, flanked by doorways into studies and library annexes. The stairs were littered with debris, piles of books, and ragged looking scholars in tattered robes. At the top, a very tired looking dark elf was giving a lecture on the one- and many-faced nature of the Moon Goddess Damnou.
Sova recognized this as Athane, the Shrine of Sagacity, one of the six virtues of the Damnic faith.
The half-dead sage looked pleadingly to Bythebook, inviting him to say his piece. The gnoll was delighted, pulling out his two volume mystical thesis and began to expound on the true nature of the Heart. The sage looked relieved and, making active listening noises, slumped off to rest.
Hulf rejoined Bythebook an hour later, having waited in the hidden shrine for the scavengers to disperse. The gnoll concluded his masterful lecture with a brief discussion of Jween and the potential ramifications of his assumption into the Heart.
Another scholar, looking refreshed came forth and raised a hand to speak. Bythebook graciously gave her the floor. She explained that the drow of this shrine believed that speech created the world and that if ever this shrine were to go silent, a terrible calamity would befall the City Beneath. By giving such an excellent and long-winded lecture, Bythebook had earned the heartfelt esteem of this community.
The Labyrinth?
The brief respite seemed to have filled some of the tired sages with vigor. They got up to ask questions and share news with the delvers.
One young drow offered the delvers a tip: this Jween situation reminded him of rumors he had heard about Labyrinth, a haven close to the edge of the next tier below. Supposedly there was a "minotaur" in Labyrinth ("kind of on the nose, right?") that forced its way through the stone in pieces the same way Jween did.
He offered to show the party a shortcut. They could head from here down a quick road to Chollerous, the next stop on the Damnic pilgrimage, or they could circumvent the shrine and cut straight down to Labyrinth. The delvers seemed eager to do the latter.
GM Notes
Well, my sense of pacing was wrong. We had no character creation today, but still spent about two hours on a single delve and a single landmark. That might just be the pace, which means, again, if we're gonna get anywhere near the Heart, I'll need to truncate the City Beneath.
Offering shortcuts seems like a good way to do that. It does start to present a bit of an easy (and thus non-) choice, but that's okay every once in a while. I also think the next destination will depend a lot on our party makeup. If Hastus joins us, he might want to stop off in Chollerous for clues towards his calling.
I tweaked my prep again for this session. Instead of prepping locations and encounters, I made a schematic map of the different character beats that the players had requested. These beats had a fixed spatial relationship (with what I think were clear opportunities for the delvers to get involved or drink goo), but the actual topography was generated on the fly using spark tables. That led to the satisfying dreamlike shift from "long hall full of confessionals" to "fast flowing water sluice." Attentive readers might recognize that the former is temple-coded like Athane and the latter is sewer-coded like Wet Filth.
We talked a bit at the end about how much the game has foregrounded / facilitated character relationships. It's hard to say if that's just the initial bonds from character creation or if the callings are pushing in that direction, but I suspect both. These two delver sessions have made it easy to focus on a single dynamic, but it'll be interesting when we have more party members in the mix (fingers crossed!).
I definitely feel exhausted at the end of these sessions, but this one felt much easier to run than last weeks. Some of that is zeroing in on what prep is useful for this game and some of that is rules familiarity.