Heart: the City Beneath Quickstart
A downloadable game
The Heart: a roiling tear of unreality beneath the city of Spire.
Within its borders, there are routes to unknown places, great secrets, shrines to long-dead gods, and monsters the like of which have never been seen on the surface world. In the Heart RPG, players take on the role of delvers – strange, desperate, broken people exploring the nightmare city in search of the object of their obsessions.
Take your first steps into the City Beneath with this streamlined version of the rules for the Heart RPG. This document includes:
- All the rules you need to adventure, go mad and die in the Heart
- Five pre-generated characters with space for advancement – the magic- addicted Junk Mage, the zealous Heretic, the noble Vermissian Knight, and more
- An adventure, Drowned, which sees you rescuing vital components from a lost settlement to put a stop to coral-boned monsters flooding the Church of the Moon Beneath with salt water
If you enjoy the Quickstart, you can pre-order the full game (and a number of softback supplements) through our Backerkit pre-order page here.
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Development log
- Redesign updateFeb 27, 2025
Comments
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Hey, I'm playing out of the second printing 2024 edition. And I have a few questions about stress and fallout.
Do you roll fallout after every time a character receives stress or only after they were doing an active roll?
I think we've been playing it incorrectly, rolling fallout against the resistance the character takes stress in. So if someone has 6 echo stress, and takes 2 more, we do a fallout roll against 8, rather than "total stress" across _all_ resistances. Also matching the fallout to the stress/resistance we rolled against. Is this correct? Or should it be against everything together and we just pick 1 resistance to clear and give a fallout?
But even with the more limited fallout option, we're noticing this kind of stress and fallout cascade. Where 1 player takes a minor fallout, the minor fallout causes other players to take stress, then it triggers minor fallout in them, something they do might cause someone else to take stress. Is this the right way to play it?
We got into the second delve with a smattering of stress across the characters and various resistances, and 1 character lead the delve with help from 2 others and just beefed it with 5 dice, full failure with stress. So all 3 took a d4 stress which rolled 4, and 2 of them had low rolls on their fallout, had 1 of them do something gross, because we hadn't really accomplished anything everyone just said they saw it, and they all took mind stress, which lead to 3 more fallouts. At that point I was feeling a bit overwhelmed just trying to keep track of the process, and also thinking about how to keep our game on any kind of pace. Felt like it took half an hour just to untangle it.
As we kept playing I just started making those things really explicitly 1 person is affected, and avoid the fallouts that would push stress around.