Heart: the City Beneath

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Don't know where I got the bit about Knacks from either - if anything, Knacks in Heart pretty much require double-purchase of a Skill or Domain, or are entirely transitory, which is a lot cleaner than Spire where you tend to end up with a handful of them. They have two Core Abilites; Heartsblood gives them a minimum protection value for all resistances equal to the Tier they're currently on (0 for the City Above, 4 for the Heart itself), making them tougher the deeper they go. Instead she found herself playing personal bodyguard to the one aelfir in all of Spire that no one was even trying to kill.

Likewise, if the player accepts it, two Major Fallouts can combine to result Critical Fallout - this means that the character will shortly die or otherwise leave the campaign. Classes in Heart are far more 'balanced', both in game terms and narrative weight, and Abilities seem rather more substantial than Spire's Advances. And when Arold's teeth had been adequately scattered across the street's gutterkin, Ysalda walked into her bar and dealt with her problems the way she always had. Ancestry has no mechanical bearing, but offers characterisation ideas and asks how you got into the Heart.You came to Spire with nothing but the clothes on your back and a dream, looking for excitement and profit. Heart's their newest release (PDFs dropped on the 1st of April), and it works as both a kind of sequel to Spire, and as a second iteration of the core mechanics. Hang Station was built as a tourist trap; suspended over a vast subterranean sea, so that aelfir could see the captured, sleeping monster beneath, captured from the far north.

Perhaps, now that I think about it, one might play Heart: The City Beneath to feel a moment of burning, dying, defiant victory that seems so hard to imagine grasping in a time like this. Despite the game’s flaws – and to be clear, most of them are quite minor – I loved my time running it. Their Minor Abilities let them grant protection to their allies, and interact with the devout of the Moon Below, as well as seeing in the dark, or discrening lies (it's a bit of a grab-bag). When the GM prepares a delve, they determine the length of its resistance track, which functions much like a health pool, tracking the overall progress of the trip.Sir Ysalda has spent a lot of time slowly piecing together various parts of her revolutionary bender, and the energies she gained form the spaces between. It's a pain to get rid of - I'll go into that later, but it generally requires the sacrifice of various resources, or some class abilities to get rid of it. All ancestries have a choice of three questions the player can answer one of to flesh out the character a bit, as well as a d20 table to generate a couple of trinkets they start with, but no other mechanical effects. Next, every class bar one (the Hound) has two Minor Abilities that each give +2 to a resistance - the 'strong' resistances for that class.

After reading Strata, I did not believe any character class could top the absolute perfection that is the Inksmith. Priests and healers, they follow a syncretic religion which worships all three faces of the moon in a way that would likely now be unrecognisable in the Spire.

Consum‐ ing resources requires your attention and leaves you exposed, so doing it successfully in stressful situations (such as combat) could require a Sneak or Evade roll. Instead of a rogue you get Deadwalker, stalked by their own death, and Incarnadine, a priest of the god of debt. Thankfully, none of the characters had taken any abilities interacting with this part of the rules, so this wasn’t a problem.