Heart: The City Beneath

Spire: The City Must Fall is a tightly wound game of highly specific revolutionary action. I liked the vibe, but doubted how playable the setting was. Apparently Rowan, Rook and Decard agreed, because Heart takes the same basic system and moves the game underneath the Spire, to the fantastic realm of The Heart.

You are exiles, renegades, and mad cultists in search of something, delving into an unreality where dreams and nightmares come true. Survive and the mysterious powers of The Heart might give you everything you want. Or more likely you’ll die an awful death in the dark. The game draws inspiration from weird zones and areas across fiction, especially Stalker/Roadside Picnic and Annihilation, and sticks a dungeon delve structure on top.

There’s a lot I like in this game. The classes are all uniquely weird (I’m playing a Junk Mage, a sorcerer addicted to raw magic), and five callings structure motivation and advancement, with new powers unlocked when your character achieves a chosen fictive milestone rather than some number ticking over. There is a lot of evocative weirdness in the setting.

The downside is a much weaker gameplay loop than Spire. Players move from haven to haven while trying to collect valuables and keep the hazards from making their stress tick over into painful fallout. The Heart runs on dream-logic, where belief warps what is “real”. There’s sort of a metacommentary on TTRPGs as a genre there, but also makes it hard to grasp the concrete fiction of the setting, aside from diving into being a mad cultist yourself. It’s a setting that’s more fun to read than play.