Heart - Session 4
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 Scholars
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.
- Blossoms-Falling-Like-Blood, a high elf "witch," someone afflicted with the rare blood disease that lets her manipulate the energies of the Heart.
- Hastus, a devout drow dedicated to seeking the lost Oath of Grace, a divine magic of Damnou, the Moon Goddess.
The stragglers of the party caught up in the central forum of Athane. Bythebook was busy arguing to defend his points from the local scholar-priests while the rest of the party surveyed the disorganized archives.
Hastus and Hulf didn't exactly collaborate, but they did pool their finds. Each found something interesting in the motley collection of pamphlets, notes, and half-filled journals:
- Hulf came to the conclusion that if the Stone Chorus were as old a set of animistic spirits as they seemed to be, they should be godlike in their powers. The fact they aren't must be attributable to the Heart.
- Hastus realized that the scholars of Athane had become lost in their ceaseless oration. They didn't worship Damnou's aspect of sagacity, but rather worshiped a Stone Chorus spirit of sagacity.
The party discussed next steps. They debated stopping by Chollerous, but ultimately decided to take the longer route to Labyrinth, perhaps taking a stop in Ranvess on their route. Such a diversion would be risky, but would give Hastus a chance to scout out another Damnic shrine.
So decided, the party packed up. One of the priests (whose name I neglected to write down) led them through a back closet, then through a small door into a corridor that descended towards Labyrinth and points below.
The Tracts
As they walked, the party asked the priest about the delve ahead. He had little information to give them, except that the people of Labyrinth were frequent delvers and they should be on the lookout for the red thread they unspooled to lead them safely through their winding halls.
As they came to a crossroads, the priest bid them farewell. The route continued to spiral downwards towards running water, but also forked to the left towards a doorway swathed in sheets of paper.
The inspected the papers. There were dozens and each was scrawled with rebuttals to Bythebook's arguments about the nature of the Heart. They frequently quoted lengthy exchanges from the last few hours verbatim. A close inspection revealed that the handwriting was subtly wrong, letters muddy and often bleeding into one another.
Bythebook and Hulf began tearing the paper away, but with each sheet the door came away too, like they had peeled back the outer shell of a wasp's nest. Beyond, their lamps revealed a lumpy hallway that looked like stone blocks but droopy and soft, as if it needed more time in the oven.
The hallway descended so the party pressed on, keeping an eye out for more notes.
The Descent
The soft corridors looped around themselves like intestines, but eventually the party came to a vertical shaft descending into a large square room. Below were two altars, each with the mummified remains of a corpse on top. Hulf shined his mage lamp to reveal that each had been staked to the altar through a bound book. Unsettlingly, each seemed to emit a constant whispering murmur.
The party debated different ways of navigating the thirty foot descent. Someone produced a rope and Blossoms revealed that her spit could harden to form a tacky adhesive. Bythebook tried to pry up a chunk of the too-soft floor to serve as an anchor, but when he did, the cut welled up with blood. He and Blossoms both had their hands stained indelibly red and they realized the material wouldn't support their weight.
The delvers settled on a more direct option. Bythebook would lower a rope and the rest of the party would descend, then the gnoll would use his claws to try to descend hand-over-hand and drop the short distance to the floor. This plan worked and soon the party found themselves in between the two mummified corpses.
The Mummies
Each wore the hybrid robe-toga that the scholars of Athane wore. Each murmured as if talking in their sleep. Each had a book nailed to their chest. The altar to their right had a crack in it and a hollow space could be seen underneath. Blossoms noticed that the book on the left mummy was mirrored, opening right to left. From this the party deduced that it was a Heart-made mirror of the true mummy on the left.
Hulf volunteered to withdraw the stake from the corpse on the right. He pulled it out with a single quick gesture, the book scattering to the floor. The mummy rose as if disoriented, grasping for its book in increasing irritation.
Bythebook grabbed it and found that it was a gazetteer entitled Van Jastobaal's Outstanding Ledger. It appeared to record the travels of an expedition of nobles down from Spire on a safari into the City Beneath.
In the meantime, Hulf commanded the mummy to halt, holding it at bay long enough for Bythebook to try something. The gnoll grabbed the mummy and repositioned it so that it was facing the second corpse to the left.
The standing mummy began tugging at the pinned mummy's stake. Bythebook tried to take the opportunity to snag a quick sample, cutting off the pinned mummy's foot. He did, but not before receiving a nasty kick that battered his dominant hand.
Hastus took the opportunity to push the top off the cracked altar, revealing a ladder descending into a rectangular shaft. The heretic led the way as the rest of the party descended behind.
The Tavern
The party descended for some time before coming to another fork. The tunnel continued to drop below, but to the right was a side tunnel emitting a warm light and the sound of voices raised in song. The party discussed and decided this was likely the route towards Ranvess.
Bythebook scouted ahead. The tunnel continued a short distance before bursting into what appeared to be a small tavern - wooden floors, windows, bar, and all. Behind the bar was a bearded man in a purple cloak covered in spirals. He didn't notice the stealthy gnoll.
Bythebook returned to the party and eventually Hulf stepped forward to say hello. The stranger greeted them with distrust, brandishing a musket and bidding the whole party step forward. Eventually, he settled down and introduced himself as Touchard, a fellow delver. He asked them if they had news from the surface and said he was up from Labyrinth.
The party joined him in searching the tavern. Bythebook checked out a window and found that there was stone just inches behind the glass. Touchard poured Hulf a pint of ale but it turned out to just be hoppy, unfermented water. Blossoms rounded a corner and found a front door and a flight of stairs up. Hastus went up the stairs to check out the second floor.
Halfway up the stairs, the floor collapsed. Hastus only narrowly avoided plunging below. Blessed by Damnou, the drow could see in the dark as if it were candlelight. At the bottom of the new hole were broken beams like snaggled teeth, littered with skeletal remains.
At the sound of the crash, Touchard began to pack his things and bid the party goodbye. He said he didn't make it a habit to stick around once other delvers started "breaking things and pulling levers." He went whistling back the way the party had come.
The Basement
Hastus decided to descend below. He tied a rope around his waist and passed the end to Blossoms who lowered him down.
Two things happened as soon as he did. First, Blossoms felt a sudden pressure shift - the Heart was about to change pulses. Each pulse was like a season on the surface, but the results could be weird and dangerous for those outside of a settlement.
Second, the floor below her feet started to heal. Fresh boards extruded from the edges of the gap as if trying to seal the heretic below. She handed off the rope to her companions and quickly used her witch-spit to seal the edges of the hole and prevent it from contracting any further.
In the basement space, Hastus found the remains of at least a dozen figures. Many looked like they were prepared for long distance treks or heavy duty expeditions. One the bodies of a band of gnolls he found a well-stocked pack of medical supplies and a strange water-clock like device. He heard Blossoms call out that they needed to go before the Pulse hit, so he grabbed the latter and let himself be hauled up to the surface.
With that the party threw open the door at the front of the tavern and found themselves in Ranvess. The whole haven appeared to be in a single back alley close - tall wood-beamed buildings stacking upwards and leaning inwards till they formed an arch overhead.
The square before them was neatly manicured grass, but as they arrived it began to grow wild. Ivy clinging to the walls went from dead tendrils to heart-shaped leaves in moments. The Heart's pulses have many names, but this one was Bloom, when corridors expand and blossoms grow.
GM Notes
We realized a big error on my part this session. When a character takes stress, you roll d12 versus the sum of all of their resistances to determine whether they take fallout, not just versus one of them. As a result, we started to see some real consequences when the party failed some rolls.
It's a little tricky adjudicating dice rolls in this system. Success vs failure and safety vs harm are decoupled in the results, so I often found myself needing to interpret what it meant to fail a roll but not suffer fallout. In those cases, I opted to "advance" the room - moving whatever its gimmick was towards crisis.
As we move into what will likely be the latter half of the micro-campaign, it's time to stop thinking about the game in terms of what might be and instead to start identifying threads and wrapping them up. I suspect we won't make it too close to the Heart proper, but we've got narrative beats around Jween, the "minotaur," and the nature of Damnou to work through.