Heart - Session 5
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 Novice
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," 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.
They were gathered in the courtyard of Ranvess, theoretically a shrine to the Damnic virtue of Vigilance. Practically speaking, it was a snug back alley filled with boarded up and barred windows. Pink-red light spilled down from upper stories that loomed overhead.
Bythebook sniffed the air to see who was in charge here. He smelled the distinctive aromas of priesthood - oils, candle flames, and ink - but mixed with undertones of poison and steel. As he did so, someone barely perceptibly crept out of sight on an upper floor.
Hastus took it upon himself to say hello. He approached a nearby doorway and knocked, announcing himself as a devotee of Tenacity. After a pause, the delvers heard the sound of a dozen locks and bolts being unfastened, then the door slid open to reveal a young drow woman in street clothes. She urged the party to come inside before anyone saw.
The woman introduced herself as Cleophe. She said she wasn't a priest, but a newly arrived novice. She hadn't even met any of the actual clerics yet. Apparently, the delvers had arrived in town at a bad time. The high priest had recently been murdered and the killer was still at large. She suggested the party get whatever they needed then leave before they drew undue attention to themselves.
The delvers asked if there had been any other visitors lately. Cleophe mentioned there was a witch staying here at the moment, which immediately caught Blossoms' interest. She also said that Touchard, a delver from Labyrinth had left a few days past. The delvers debated whether that was Heart weirdness at work or whether someone (Cleophe or Touchard) was lying.
The delvers suggested that they could catch up to Touchard and haul him back here for questioning. Cleophe said her order would definitely be interested in that, and would be happy to reward the party in the resources they had - the locations of people and places that preferred to stay hidden.
The Witch
Blossoms asked to be taken to see this visiting witch. She might be able to treat the permanent stains that marred her and Bythebook's hands, plus she might be a member of Blossoms' coven.
Cleophe agreed and led them through a dizzying sequence of passages up to a small bunk room. Among a number of empty cots, an aelfir woman was seated cross-legged on a top bunk. She wore a large copper mask with a mane-like beard that obscured her face.
The witch and Blossoms greeted each other formally, spitting on their hands and binding themselves together in a magically enforced grip. The witch asked if Cleophe had led them here. When the delvers said yes, she slammed her free palm on the wall beside her, sending red shockwaves along its length. Someone could be heard staggering away in the hollow space behind.
The witch's name was Eternal Bitter Winters. Blossoms asked about the mask and she said it was an old affectation, a last shred of privacy in a world that constantly wanted to interfere with her. They negotiated a trade - Bythebook's mummified foot and a silver-burning candle Hastus had squirreled away in exchange for the removal of Heart-curse. The witch grasped their red-stained hand and with a flick, sent the blood splattering across the walls.
The delvers asked what had brought Winters to Ranvess. She said she wandered from settlement to settlement doing exactly this kind of faith healing, but she was here in particular to investigate the so-called Minotaur of Labyrinth. Plus Cleophe was an old friend.
She revealed two things. First, she had seen the Minotaur with her own eyes. It was an impossibly large creature, maybe 40' tall, that dragged itself through the halls of the City Beneath. It constantly dislocated joins and broke its bones as it moved and could be heard bellowing from far away. It was too coherent to be a simple Heartspawn, but too big to have journeyed down here to get corrupted, so where exactly did it come from?
Second, Cleophe was lying. She was definitely not a novice and the whole "the high priest is dead" thing seemed to be some kind of charade the denizens of Ranvess maintained. They spent all their time spying and counterspying, and the delvers had just stumbled into the middle of it.
The Answers
Hastus was curious. Was this a manifestation of the same phenomenon he had seen in Athane, the shrine of Sagacity? And if so, was this related to the missing virtue of Grace? He and the others intended to find out. They began a dogged inquiry, badgering everyone they met as they systematically searched the interior halls of Ranvess.
Their efforts were successful, but came at a cost. Hastus was becoming obsessed. The priests of Ranvess were engaged in the same tautological worship, venerating the act of veneration rather than the deity to which they were devoted. They had, however, kept tabs on the other shrines. Supposedly, there once was a shrine to Grace but it had gone dark. The priests had two theories:
- Damnou, the merciful Goddess herself, had withdrawn the temple into her fold in order to shelter it from the Heart.
- Someone who could claim to have Grace had sold it at the Red Market, the court of the Incarnadine God of Debt.
Under duress, the scholars produced charts pointing to both locations, not too much deeper than Labyrinth.
In the meantime, Bythebook followed acolyte after acolyte as they relayed the news of Hastus' passage. Eventually, a priest slipped into a secluded back room on one of the uppermost floors. There he whispered into the ear of a corpse. Just like the mummy the party had encountered on their way here, this was an embalmed drow in the robes of a priest. He seemed long dead and smelled just like the steel and poison the gnoll had smelled upon arrival.
Bythebook was swift, pouncing on and killing the young drow and quickly stuffing the dried corpse into his pack before beating a hasty retreat.
The Parting
Having collected all the information they could, the party gathered in the courtyard again. They were prepared to set off back the way they had come, then down to Labyrinth.
On the way, Blossoms stopped by the bunkroom to ask Winters if she wanted to join their delve. The witch was uncertain at first, but eventually agreed. Whatever the delvers were up to, it might satisfy her curiosity.
Bythebook and Hastus spent a moment examining the gnollish measurement device that the heretical priest had recovered on their last delve. It seemed to be something like a cross between a water clock and a seismograph. Its central urn was filled with metal beads that the duo hypothesized were somehow responsive to the Heart's energies. Bythebook suspected it was some kind of change sensor, designed to detect the heart without the senses of a living creature.
As the party stepped across the threshold, Sykalayon Sova made his presence known. The ancient beekeeper urged the party not to go towards Labyrinth. It was unnecessarily dangerous and they had taken every opportunity to stray from the course that would lead them to his destination already. He said that if they insisted on going towards Labyrinth and this Minotaur, he would simply stay here and seek other delvers to take him further.
The delvers, for their part, mostly shrugged at this. Bythebook actively disliked the apiarist and all his order stood for. Hastus offered some half-hearted counterarguments but even he wasn't too concerned to leave the aging beekeeper behind. They turned and left. Winters followed behind and gave Blossoms a knowing nod.
As she left, the witch leaned in close. "You'll never make it" she said as she began to flicker and twist. With a snick of a claw, she slit the old man's hamstrings and left him sprawled on the floor.
GM Notes
Okay, now we're cooking! This was a weird investigative session where we never actually engaged the delving procedure - the engine around which this whole damn game is built. We rolled dice to shorthand a couple longer sequences of legwork and for moments where real danger loomed (usually of discovery), but mostly I just roleplayed some thinly sketched characters and followed the PCs as they played to the hilt.
At the same time, we had a lot of meta-conversation this session about what the characters were interested in and how that differed from what the players were interested in. Folks expressed conflict between the obvious hook of discovering what was going on with the priests in Ranvess and a player level disinterest in what was clearly going to be a side plot that didn't directly contribute to their primary goals. I think we still had a fun session, but I'll keep this in mind for next time - time to cut to the quick for a little bit.
This session we really saw the party start to lean into their heel turn. Props to Blossoms' player for formally flagging the moment where we really shifted to a darker tone at the end of the session. I don't think Heart requires the players to be murderous villains, but it does seem like a natural outcome of a macabre set of character playbooks.