Shake Off Your Flesh: A review of Heart, the City Beneath

I’m tired of writing about the virus; I’m going to stay inside and read game books. Taking a break right now. I’ll get back to the unrelenting parade of boring real horror outside in a bit. I’m going to look at an unrelenting parade of interesting fake horror, instead.

One of the games that ended up on my radar a while back – due to the Modifier podcast (the episode itself is missing from the podcast’s own page, which is strange,) which has pointed me towards more interesting games than just about any other source thus far – is Heart. This game is a companion to the game Spire: This City Must Fall, and both use a fairly interesting proprietary system (called the Resistance system,) so I’ve spent a lot of time examining them.

That’s at least one third of the equation of why I’m looking at. A big part of it is Felix Miall’s artwork, which is gorgeous in a slightly-wet-and-squirmy way. Another big part of it is just how strange and fascinating the setting of the game is.

A passage on the very first page of the book sums it up quite effectively:

Heart is a game of wonder, horror, tragedy and humanity in the face of inhumanity. Each player character is fundamentally doomed, as most of the high-level abilities kill the user when triggered.

What follows is a game carefully calibrated to deliver that exact experience. While it uses fundamentally the same system and setting as its predecessor game, there are some mechanical tweaks that have been made to produce the desired experience, which I feel are remarkably well-constructed game-mechanical apparatuses aimed at producing a very particular sort of story.

But first, some background.

Spire transposes the punk feeling of Cyberpunk into a weird fantasy setting — and unlike many things claiming to be X-Punk (which it doesn’t really do as far as I can tell,) it actually is punk. By which I mean it concerns competent people who would really just prefer to be left alone fighting entrenched power structures.

Spire took place in the eponymous tower-city, a single monolithic structure that jabbed up monumentally at the sky. Heart takes place beneath it, in a space into which the eponymous alien dimension has begun to bleed. It is a place that shifts about, and between the relatively static landmarks nothing is completely set, like some horrible combination of Area X and the House on Ash Tree Lane. People from above have begun to invade it, settle it, and colonize it – the population of the Spire is generally home to a large Drow (dark elf) population, subjugated by a small but vicious population of Aelfar (light elves) who rule with an iron fist. In the Heart, there is no subjugator or subjugated: both Aelfar and Drow stand cheek-and-jowl with Humans and Gnolls, outsiders who rarely come to Spire. All of them are equally alien to the Heart, and must rely on one another from time to time. It is to the Western what Spire is to Punk.

Down there, the wilderness is made up of shifting unreality, where flesh and stone and forest and bone all mingle and the bloody angels try to slaughter you without even a be-not-afraid, just the sound of grinding teeth. Prejudice, in such a situation, is revealed as a liability.

So this brings me to my first mechanical piece that I think is brilliant: Callings.

The question is, essentially: why would anyone want to go traipsing around in what are probably the guts of a dreaming god-thing? Callings are the answer.

Each character has a reason for being there: they seek glory, they seek enlightenment, they seek forgiveness for a transgression, they’re forced by a third party, or the Heart called them. Each Calling has a list of tasks — called beats, — separated out into Minor, Major, and Zenith level, depending on how arduous the task is: at the end of every session, the players select two beats and tells the game’s facilitator, who then needs to introduce the opportunity to achieve those things. This creates a player-facilitator feedback loop where the story is communally controlled.

It bears a certain similarity to the advancement system that is used in Chronicles of Darkness, but it helps to signpost particular story elements, tightly focusing things on a particular kind of story, with a particular kind of feeling.

The cocktail named after the junk mage probably burns on the way down, but freezes when it reaches your stomach.

So, instead of getting experience for killing monsters, you might get it for engaging in a raucous bender, or getting in trouble with the law, or “Have a cocktail, fighting move or legendary beast named after you.” It’s structured so that it helps you tell a particular story about a particular kind of person.

These beats are keyed to particular kinds of Advancements, and Zenith beats are always big and dramatic – something along the lines of “Be truly absolved of your sins by a higher power” or “Take bloody revenge on your master.” These unlock the game-ending moves, called “Zenith Abilities”, that are mentioned above, in the quote. Clearly, since they’re mentioned in the second proper sentence of the game, they are a major influence on the feel of the whole thing.

Each of the classes – and they’re strange classes, ranging from a “Junk Mage” who is addicted to stolen and unstable magical power, to the “Incarnadine” debt-priests, to the “Vermissian Knight”, a sort of Paladin of Cursed Public Transportation (there are, of course, other classes, but I’m trying to keep this reasonably brief and focused.) Almost without fail, the Zenith Abilities kill the character – or drive them mad, or…

This ability, of the Vermissian Knight, is what really sold me on the game.

It’s a thematically appropriate design choice. This isn’t Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings; you’re not movers and shakers of the world: you’re desperate people in a desperate situation, and every now and then you have to make a last stand.

Of course, it would be one thing if the Zenith Abilities were the only way a character could die, but it retains its predecessor game’s Fallout mechanic, whereby you accumulate a pool for each type of damage and then roll when it hits a certain, character-determined threshold, and the result of that roll determines the exact nature of the particular problem. A character’s health is a pool, but so is their sanity, so is their resistance to the corrupting influence of the Heart, so are their financial resources. Some fallout is simple – a broken arm – some is more complicated and narrative – being mistaken for a divine being and getting kidnapped by cultists who want you to lead them to the promised land.

I have to say, there are a number of design choices in this game that I quite like, and I think that future game designers should look to it as an example of a tightly-written, well-structured game with innovative mechanics.

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But I have to wonder: what’s the point?

Don’t get me wrong, Heart is a good game, and I highly recommend picking up a copy. I’m not arguing that it doesn’t deserve your attention, but as I write this I think about the world outside my windows and I feel anxiety. I said I wasn’t going to pay attention to the real, boring apocalypse we seem to be living through.

I lied. What would be a piece I write for this website that doesn’t have a left-turn or a volta or something similar within it?

Franz Xaver Wintertalter’s painting inspired by the novel.

There’s a book I’ve never read, mostly because of a lazy joke that you can probably figure out if you look at my name, called The Decameron. It was written by Giovanni Boccaccio. He was a correspondent of Petrarch, and wrote his works in the 1300s. He was a vernacular writer like Chaucer or Dante (or, indeed, like Petrarch.) In The Decameron, he told the story of ten young people isolated in a country estate during a plague (most likely the plague of 1348.) Within this frame narrative, the seven young women and three young men tell over a hundred stories about love. They can’t be around anyone else, so they tell stories about connection.

My mind turns back to this great work of literature that I have never read, which I only know the broad strokes of, throughout this current crisis: as I do the dishes, as I bake more than I have in recent memory, as I try to focus on grading.

Periodically, Edgar and I log on to Discord or Roll20 and we play these games, building snatches of narrative set in a world not beset by a monstrosity that we can’t defeat. We play Invisible Sun to feel like we can find the answers to mysteries; we played Rapscallion, to feel like the horizon was open and we could hoist the black flag; we play Changeling: the Lost, to feel like the pain we experience really matters; we play Masks: A New Generation, to feel like we can take on the challenges we face.

I couldn’t fit it in elsewhere: the title of this piece is from an album I learned about from reading Heart: the City Beneath, called Avalon. It’s by The Huntress and Holder of Hands. It’s a good album, and quite a good song.

These stories help keep us safe because they help keep us sane and connected despite not being able to go outside and see our friends and family. They’re a way to keep our minds and hearts fed and alive when we can’t craft the stories of our lives..

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.

Hey, if you’re inclined, I’d recommend buying a copy of Heart. It’s a great game, and has a lot of fun concepts (you can find the link in the first mention of the game.) If, after that, you’re looking for some fiction, might I recommend buying my writing partner’s novel, The Horn, the Pencil, and the Ace of Diamonds.

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