Heart - Session 6
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 Spiral
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.
The delvers had set out for Labyrinth with the witch Eternal Bitter Winters in tow. Their goal was to investigate rumors of a "Minotaur" that prowled the regions around the settlement.
They left Ranvess by way of the door they had entered through. The collapsing tavern beyond seemed to have been cast in stone and reduced to simple geometry. On the far side, instead of a ladder, they found a spiral staircase that descended down a 40 ft wide shaft. There was no sign of a way back up.
As they went, Bythebook put the finishing touches on a huge blunderbuss he had been crafting - the skull of the high priest of Ranvess fit just so.
About four stories below their starting position, their was a side passage. Below that, yawning darkness too deep even for Bythebook's nightvision. As they descended, they began to make out a forest of huge, ear-like mushrooms that bristled below.
The side passage was blocked by a locked door with a small barred window set into it at eye level. The room beyond was lit by a campfire and the delvers could see someone's traveling pack leaned against the wall nearby.
Hulf pushed to the front to attempt to pick the lock. He set aside his pack and, as his pick broke, he accidentally jostled it. A vial of cursed ink went tinkling down the steps. As it bounced, the surrounding mushroom fronds echoed the sound until the shaft was full of a cacophony of clinks.
The junk mage chased after the precious vial, but found himself dazed by the overwhelming sound. He held up a finger to his mouth and shushed the mushrooms and, against all odds, they fell silent.
In the meantime, Blossoms and Bythebook set themselves to bashing down the door. Blossoms gestured for some space and transformed into a flickering, zeotropic horror before merging with the wall. This transformation seemed to cascade to Winters, who disappeared into the floor, leaving only her leering mask behind.
A moment later, the door burst from the wall, tumbling across the way into the mushrooms below.
The Gnoll
Hulf was in the process of trying to harvest some of the mushrooms when the door gave way. The huge ears tore in his hands and, worse still, their vibrations were contagious. He found himself half-deafened, but attuned to some sort of magical wavelength he had never heard before.
Up above, Blossoms returned to her normal form, stepped in, and grabbed the pack. Inside was an ornate urn - a device in the Gnollish style that Hastus and Bythebook had found before.
Moments later, an old gnoll appeared in a doorway on the opposite side of the fire-lit room. The gnoll was dressed in the swirling purple patterns that Bythebook recognized as Labyrinthian attire. Spooked, he dropped the walking stick he was carrying and ran away.
The delvers gave chase with Hulf bringing up the rear. They turned the corner into a large gallery with sloped bay windows running on the left wall. The right was cluttered with discarded office furniture. The old gnoll was already grabbing for the handle of another door on the opposite side.
Bythebook hucked a wad of viscous, sticky spit, fouling the door befofre the gnoll could escape. Warily, he held up his clawed hands in surrender.
The Debate
Hulf looked out through the windows as they led the gnoll back to his campfire. Far below them was the colossal settlement of Labyrinth, a sprawling tangle of stone walls lit sporadically by torches. It sprawled far below in a huge black cavern.
The gnoll introduced himself first as Golbahar, then as Bristlefur, since so few non-gnolls could pronounce his name. He seemed to focus intently on the delvers' faces as they spoke and they soon realized the old gnoll was deaf.
The gnoll said he had ascended from the Plaza of Silicate Flowers. Bythebook recognized this as the name of a neighborhood in the gnollish capital. Apparently, some three months ago the entire plaza had been translocated deep into the depths of the City Beneath. The gnolls were only just coming to grip with their new surroundings.
This sparked a hurried side conversation amongst the party. The plaza's arrival lined up exactly with the ritual that Hulf, Bythebook, and Blossoms had all participated in - the one that had seen the acolyte Jween seemingly merged with the Heart. A coincidence or had their ritual accidentally pulled the surface down to the Heart rather than the other way around?
Someone (Blossoms?) asked about the urn-devices. Golbahar explained that they were inanimate detectors. The idea was that if the Heart stayed consistent while watched, you could set up devices like these to freeze the City Beneath into a fixed topography.
Hulf scoffed at this. Not only was this likely to anger the Heart, the Stone Chorus would surely be displeased. Golbahar brushed this off as mere superstition. Does one worry if the lawn will be angered when you trim it?
The junk mage decided to show Golbahar the error of his ways by summoning an entry to one of the Stone Chorus' hidden shrines, as he had done when they had discovered Jween's hand. He turned and incanted the magic words and... nothing happened. Hulf was devastated.
The Captive
In the meantime, perhaps bored with the conversation, Eternal Bitter Winters had strayed out onto the landing to look down into the mushroom forest. "Hey," she called, "you might want to see this..."
Below in the darkness, a huge form slammed the ground, flattening the mushrooms at ground level before snaking back into a darkened tunnel.
The delvers immediately set off in pursuit with Bythebook leading the way. They reached the mouth of the tunnel in time to see the form - a colossal hand - wrench its way back through a too small exit on the far end. They called out for it to wait.
There was the sound of breaking bones and popping joints and then a colossal eye pressed itself against the end of the tunnel. Bythebook began to advance, then the eye was replaced again by the grasping hand, chasing after him! The party called out that they only wanted to help, but the creature had trouble hearing them, its senses muffled by the stone and its own flesh.
Blossoms stepped up and with a word and a gesture, called the Heart's influence into the space. The walls began to bleed as bricks slid free, revealing flesh behind. The fleshy walls had just enough give for the creature to turn and pull on the tunnel opening, revealing a mouth and the corner of an ear. "Help me!" it called, weakly.
The creature was clearly stuck. It didn't know where it had come from or how it had gotten down here. It only knew that it was crammed into a space too small for it and wanted desperately to escape. It knew nothing of Jween.
The delvers seemed to arrive at the same plan all at once. They would help the creature make its way to the gallery above and then let it burst out through the glass windows there into the huge cavern beyond.
The Escape
Blossoms, exalting in her powers, tried to extend the influence of the Heart into the surrounding corridors. That was when she realized her mistake: the power wasn't hers. It was the Heart's and she had painted a target on herself by pulling on it so greedily.
Still, the spell worked and the surrounding surfaces began to melt and bleed as the delvers retreated back up the spiral staircase. They grabbed Golbahar as they went.
The "minotaur" crawled behind, contorting itself to squeeze itself through seemingly impossible spaces. As it emerged into the shaft it began to baloon in size, filling the space.
The delvers fell back into the window gallery and pressed themselves against the door on the far side. Golbahar cleared Bythebook's spit and opened it, revealing a long staircase that he swore descended straight to Labyrinth.
With growing trepidation, they watched as the creature turned the last corner. They realized what was going to happen, but didn't have much of a choice now. Bythebook fired his blunderbuss and shattered the windows and the minotaur surged out into the cavern.
As it did it began to grow and grow, until it filled that space too.
The Labyrinth
The streets of Labyrinth were pleasant enough. Blossoms joked that this wasn't the first place they had visited with a fleshy ceiling, though it didn't usually groan.
The people of Labyrinth had set themselves the task of carving out defenses against the Heart. By memorizing the corridors, counting the turns and paces as they walked the halls they had made a space relatively untouchable by the Heart. Fortunately, the stone walls of their maze were also strong enough to support the weight of the minotaur overhead.
Golbahar led the delvers to a tavern - an exact match to the one they had passed through on the way down. This time it had a shingle hanging outside that named it the Penrose Stair. Inside the delvers discussed their next steps.
Eternal Bitter Winters, who had been giggling with delight throughout this whole affair, suggested that this must be the Heart trying something new. It was too specific and too novel a curse.
Bythebook, Hulf, and Blossoms considered repeating the ritual they had used to dissipate Jween, an adaptation of the one Hulf used to make sacrifices to the Stone Chorus. They would need to construct a huge glyph to contain the creature, but maybe the people of Labyrinth would be able to help...
GM Notes
I am writing these notes a few days after the session and have definitely missed some details, particularly about what exactly the delvers asked the minotaur.
This was a fun session though! The characters are really taking swings. I've tried to fold the theme of intentionally manipulating the Heart into the fiction and its fun to have the PCs start to do the same.
Unfortunately, Hastus' player won't be able to join us for the foreseeable future, which has the strange side effect of more or less truncating that plotline. Fortunately, all the details about the nature of the Heart and its relation to godhood or faith practices are evergreen.
Several players took "zenith beats" after last session - goals which, if completed, grant access to abilities that kill the player character in exchange for producing huge impacts on the fiction. These are one of the hallmarks of this system, and we'll definitely play with the house rule that if you complete a zenith beat, you'll get to use the power right away.
One interesting issue is Blossoms' dreams. They haven't come up in the text of the game as much over the last few sessions, though I've felt I have been pretty heavy-handed with sprinkling imagery from the dream into the world. We (Blossoms' player and I) talked about this some after the session, but didn't come to any real conclusions about it. She mentioned being more active in bringing it up, but to some degree, those just weren't the beats Blossoms' had been angling for in the past couple weeks.