System Review: Heart

Heart: The City Beneath, from Rowan, Rook & Decard, was the first physical TTRPG book I ever bought. It took years for me to finally get it to the table, and in that time my excitement and anticipation only grew. Can any system hold up under those inflated expectations?

What is Heart?

The setting of Heart may be my ideal narrative playground. A massive underground dungeon, seeped in the magical radiation of the eponymous Heart at its center. The inhabitants are all affected in some way, whether it's the humans and elves warped by their own desires, or the beasts that have been twisted to match the Heart's unknowable designs.

This framing gives GM and players alike free license to make the Heart their own. The presentation of the book may colour your impression of what the Heart is meant to be, a grungy and visceral place where the organic and inorganic mingle and entwine. But there's very little in the text that would prevent an idyllic landscape with supernatural beauty, as long as it belies the inevitability of suffering and sacrifice to achieve your own demise.

Players are the Lifeblood of the Heart

Even with a setting as exquisite as the Heart, it's nothing more than a canvas for the player characters to paint their stories. The pigments at our players' disposal are an Ancestry, a Calling, and a Class. The ancestries just entail a few questions to establish the character's background, so the players won't be compelled to base their character around mechanical benefits.

Heart doesn't provide much history or culture notes for these ancestries, and makes it clear that each individual is unique and there are no broad classifications or stereotypes that can be applied to an ancestry as a whole. This makes for a lighter lift during character creation, as players don't need to read a history book to make sure their character fits into the world. Depending on your group, the lack of information may leave the ancestries feeling like a formality with no particular impact on the character, so I would recommend taking some time during the first session for the table to define important touchstones of their characters' cultures.

If ancestries are where the character came from, callings are where they're going. Primarily, the calling provides a list of story Beats which the player will be chasing to earn new abilities from their character's class. Even more so than the class that defines a character's abilities, the calling may be the most evocative aspect of a character. These are the reasons your character has for delving into the Heart, which would have otherwise been one of the more challenging steps in character creation.

Last, but certainly not least, comes the class. These contain the bulk of the mechanical abilities available to the character, and are easily the most exciting part for the players. The options here are unlike any other system out there, with options like train knight, spell junkie, and priest of the god of debt. Each class has Minor, Major, and Zenith abilities, which can be unlocked by completing the appropriate Beat from the character's calling.

Beats

I love Heart's approach of tying character progression to their personal narrative, but it depends heavily on how interested the player is in roleplay and narrative. Some players will be more focused on the mechanical aspects of their character, and finding best abilities they can trigger for every situation. In order to unlock those abilities, they may start looking at the list of beats as a laundry list rather than the building blocks of their personal story.

Now, the beats are hugely useful to the GM, since players set which beats they want to work towards at the end of each session. This means the GM has plenty of leads to prepare for the next session, and it's a lot of fun weaving the players' beats into the plot.

Particularly worthy of note are the Zenith abilities. These are the culmination of the character's story, unlocked by achieving the ultimate milestone that motivated them to enter the Heart to begin with. These abilities can only be triggered once, since it also marks the character's end, for any reason ranging from merging with the Heart to destroying yourself alongside a person or concept of your choice. This can make for a tremendous capstone to your character's journey, and the finality of choosing your own end can be hard to come by in this gaming space.

Awkwardly, there are a few Zenith abilities that spell the end for your character, but depend on other characters being around to trigger its benefit further in the future. This makes timing the climax of a campaign a bit trickier, and can potentially leave a player without a character for an indeterminate amount of time. There are certainly ways to make this work, like running a longer campaign with multiple characters coming and going. But this will need to be discussed from the first session, since players are likely to plan how their character will die as part of their creation.

The Dice

Heart has a straightforward resolution mechanic: roll between one and four d10s depending on your character's skillset, and the highest value determines how well you do. This will look familiar to those who have played a Forged in the Dark system, with a few more result bands to keep track of.

Tracking the effects of failure and success is straightforward and effective, essentially filling respective tracks to achieve a more impactful outcome. Failing a roll will deal damage (Stress) to your character, eventually leading to a narrative detriment. Conversely, succeeding will remove health (Resistance) from the enemy or obstacle at hand, counting down to overcoming it. This means the GM isn't scrambling to come up with novel outcomes for the result of every roll, while still keeping the excitement for the players.

For the most part, I like this dice pool system. With a single dice, players have a 50% chance of making progress against the Resistance they're facing, and a 70% chance of suffering some amount of Stress. Since Stress doesn't impose any adverse effects on its own, this isn't punishing enough to dissuade players from attempting a roll, but still meaningfully contributes to an eventual narrative and mechanical consequence, called a Fallout.

Fallout

When a character's Stress reaches critical mass, it coalesces into Fallout. These are penalties or injuries which stem from the narrative, and give the character a new struggle to overcome. Fallout can be straightforward, like a weapon breaks and becomes useless, or the character loses their temper and is unable to assist someone else's roll. They can also get weird as the Heart warps the characters, growing new eyes to see in the dark or becoming the target of a cult's worship.

Like Beats and Abilities, Fallout is split into Minor and Major categories (and Critical, which essentially marks the death of the character). These classifications primarily denote the severity of the Fallout, with Major Fallouts being more difficult to receive. Having said that, Fallouts within the same category can still vary wildly in their mechanical penalties, and I found it a bit difficult to find the most appropriate consequence. For example, the Minor Fallout "Tired" says the player can't gain dice from skills, but that reads as more severe than the Major Fallout "Critical Injury", which removes just one skill.

The Loop - Delves and Landmarks

The campaign structure of Heart is pretty flexible, but seems designed with point crawls in mind. Your party starts in a Landmark, a location of the Heart that has something of note. This is most likely a town or settlement, though it could just as easily be an abandoned temple, a cool tree, or a fissure in reality populated by figments of your imagination. From the Landmark, the party has a few options of where they want to explore next, requiring a Delve before reaching the next Landmark.

The original version of the Heart rulebook had barely anything written on Delves, about two pages for what equated to half the game's content. The 2024 edition of the book expands this to six pages, although most of the new content consists of delve and event examples, rather than advice on creating delves of your own. I suspect this is due to the flexibility and fluidity of delve design, and the designers don't want to box GMs into a specific way of thinking. I would personally like to see some more variety in the examples of delves and how they're designed, to demonstrate this kind of flexibility instead of implying it.

Equipment and Tags

"Delve" pulls double-duty in Heart's vernacular; the noun for a path between two Landmarks, and the verb for player skill checks. Not without reason: the rules state that the Delve skill is used to make progress in Delves. At first, that's what I adhered to, since players have equipment that increases the dice rolled when using the Delve skill. But that started to wear on me, as players weren't able to make interesting decisions. They just had to keep finding ways to keep using the same equipment and rolling the same skill.

So I broadened skill checks to allow skills of all types to chip away at a Delve's Resistance. But that left the players rolling d4s for everything, since equipment only has Delve, Kill, or Mend types. That means we either create equipment with other skills, or remove the equipment types entirely and allow the use of any equipment with any skill roll, assuming it makes sense narratively. Either approach makes sense, it's mostly down to how your players prefer to interact with these rules.

There are also a variety of tags that can be applied to equipment and resources. The list is extensive and just a tad unintuitive, meaning I had to constantly re-read the tag descriptions whenever they came up.

Where the Systems Shine

It took a few sessions of practice, but soon enough I found Heart's strengths from a GM's perspective. And chief among them is this: between Resistance and Fallout, Heart's systems can be broadly applied to most situations. At the start, I was making Delves that were simple obstacle courses, describing the environment and asking the players how they make their way through it. While this is a perfectly valid implementation, it didn't sit quite right with me; the adversity wasn't concrete enough for my table.

So I started creating new Fallouts that applied to the situation at hand. At one point, my players were taking a vertical train (see also: elevator) deeper into the Heart. If it was destroyed, they could be in a lot of danger, and the Delve would be much harder to navigate in the future. So there was a collective Fallout: first the train car starts malfunctioning, then if it was further damaged it would fail entirely.

This was where I finally felt the system click into place. With Resistance as the progress bar and Fallout as the consequence for failure, we have the tools to create all sorts of encounters. Besides the usual obstacle courses, defense and escort missions, or hunts and battles, we could also create debates and popularity contests, mystery-solving, and macguffin searches.

The End is in Sight

Heart is designed to have a finite end. The book recommends less than a dozen sessions. Technically, there's enough power progression for players to keep unlocking abilities for maybe double that, but playing as characters who gain that much power runs counter to the experience Heart is trying to evoke.

This is the game that convinced me to run shorter campaigns more often. Ten sessions was plenty for our table to experience the world of the Heart, for me to understand the feel of the system, and for my players to discover their characters' stories.

Final Thoughts

To answer my opening question, did Heart live up to expectations? Yeah, mostly! It builds a lot of momentum during the first session, as characters are crafted and everyone imagines all the different paths laid out before them. The pacing flagged around the midway point, when I searched for ways to keep Delves interesting and various ways to meet the players' Beats. As we entered the final session, the system was absolutely singing, and everyone was able to bring their story to a satisfying conclusion.

I'd love to run another Heart campaign, perhaps using the Dagger in the Heart sourcebook. But not for a while, yet. It was a draining experience, and I feel like I need to give it some space before I pick it up again. A TTRPG that can illicit that kind of feeling is a success in my book.