For Players, you'll discover three new Classes: the freewheeling bardic Witness, the mind-warping fungal Blightborn and the walking body horror of the Crawler. Keeping with the tradition of Heart, each Class is a weird and wonderful ticking time bomb that burns bright and explodes with fatal, but world-altering Zenith abilities.

We also have three new Callings to sink your teeth into: the muse seeking Artist, cult building Demagogue, and stoic Protector. Each new Calling provides the delicious character motivations that drive your delvers into the Heart and give provide the iconic Beats that shape their downfall.

As if that's not enough, you can roll up your sleeves, dive up to your elbows, and rummage around in all sorts of additional goodies to make your one-way trip into the depths easier, or at least more entertaining. Don't leave home without:

For Game Masters, you'll find a sopping bucketload of unsettling and horrifying events for each Domain in the Heart to make your Delves truly unforgettable, accompanied by a roster of new adversaries and adventures to hurl at your unsuspecting parties.

We’re also providing GMs with dozens of Bounties - self-contained one-page jobs that you can plug into any ongoing game to act as a reason for player characters to chuck themselves headlong into disaster or to provide impetus for a one-shot game.

Deranged Scrawlings Volume 1 is an expansion booklet for the Heart GM Screen. That means it's a softback zine rammed with even more tables and reference notes for GMs to cut up and slap on the screen to make their ultimate screen (or you can just read them from the book if you don't want to get the scissors out).

Deranged Scrawlings Volume 1 covers content featured in Ways and Means, including characterful tables for the new classes and callings, hirelings, and more. It's a no brainer for GMs who love their messed up little GM screens and want it to do even more!

Heart: The City Beneath is a game about delving into a nightmare undercity that will give you everything you’ve ever dreamed of – or kill you in the process. It is a dungeon-crawling, story-forward tabletop RPG from the designers of Spire that focuses on what characters have to lose in pursuit of their dreams in the chaotic darkness beneath the world.

Since Heart was released in 2020, it has won seven ENNIE awards, including golds for Best Setting, Best Writing and Best Layout. It has sold over 7,000 copies, and graced (or cursed) many a table.

Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor, Creators of Heart (he/him separately): Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor combine together, mecha-like, to form a two-headed, eight-limbed entity that lives and works in Sheffield, England as a sort of games designer. The entity’s work to date includes Spire: The City Must Fall and Heart: The City Beneath; one of its heads (and two of its limbs) wrote Eat the Reich and, ages ago, Honey Heist. It enjoys smoking cigarettes, consulting thesauruses, and talking to itself. Read more of its work at rrdgames.com.

Elaine Lithgow Producer and Designer (she/her): Elaine Lithgow is a producer and game designer at Rowan Rook and Decard. She hails from the frigid wasteland known as ‘Scotland’ and is best known for her work on a frankly staggering number of RPG books from Warhammer of all kinds, to the Laundry Files and the post-apocalyptic fantasy heartbreaker Broken Weave. After kicking last year's Dagger in the Heart campaign into the world, Elaine is keen to see how far off the rails she can drive this cursed train. You can follow Elaine’s enthusiastic ramblings about books over on Bluesky.

Minærva McJanda Layout (she/they): Mina (or Minerva) McJanda is a graphic designer, layout artist, game designer and font-hoarder based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. You’ve probably have seen her ENnie award-winning layout work in Heart: The City Beneath, and possibly her other work in Dagger in the Heart, LANCER, Voidheart Symphony, Hard Wired Island, and the 5th Anniversary Edition of Spire: the City Must Fall. Fresh from the revised edition of Heart, she's very excited to see how horrible a font can be while remaining legible. Check out her work at honeybatdesigns.myportfolio.com.

Sar Cousins Artist (they/them): Sar is an illustrator and comic artist from Oxford who mostly works in the small press field, working with the team on Heart has been their first major gig. Their personal work is a little all over the place, emerging as zines about weird British folk horses, crabs, amateur ghost hunting, and worn down statues from the V&A museum - anything that piques their interest is in the danger zone for a zine being made about it. In the limited time outside of doing art, they enjoy TTRPGs and ducks.  Find more from them at their website, on Instagram, or Bluesky.

Felix Miall Artist (he/him): Felix is a UK based illustrator and university lecturer in Game Art, who moonlights as a potter. He made the artwork for Heart: The City Beneath, Burned and Broken, Sanctum, Vermissian Black Ops, and Doors to Elsewhere.

Finley Palaniki Writer (they/he): Finley Palaniki is a games academic turned TTRPG designer currently based in a monument to roundabouts and concrete cows- Milton Keynes, England. They're currently working on a folk horror solo game for the GAST: Horror Zine Collection by Hatched Games. When they're not writing, you might observe them playing solo rpgs, experiencing the thrill of having an energy drink at 5pm, or making resin dice. You can find more info about their work, academia & socials here: finleyjinley.carrd.co

Pam Punzalan Writer (she/her): Pam Punzalan is a part-time game worker, full-time feral queer based in Canada. She's won awards for her work (D&D, World of Darkness, Pathfinder, Blades in the Dark, Spire, and more), but her real claim to fame is losing a Nebula to Elden Ring. Likes cats and whiskey a normal amount; can tolerate people, especially if they pay her. Follow her on Bluesky under thedovetailor, or don't.

Taylor Navarro Writer (she/her): Taylor Navarro (she/her) is a Diana Jones Emerging Designer Program Winner (2024), Storytelling Collective Creative Laureate (2024), editor, project manager and two-time Big Bad Con POC Scholarship recipient (2022 & 2023). Her great loves are her children, dice, her husband, kobolds, and knitting/crochet (probably in that order!) Find her work at taylornavarrottrpgs.carrd.co

Thomas Manuel Writer (he/him): Thomas Manuel is an award-winning playwright and an award-losing journalist from Chennai, India. He previously worked on SIN,  a supplement for Spire: The City Must Fall, making the Ministry even weirder than they were before. He's a worker-owner at tabletop news outlet Rascal News (rascal.news) and is also the writer of the weekly Indie RPG Newsletter (ttrpg.in) and the host of the Yes Indie'd podcast.

Eleanor Hingley Writer (she/they): The last remaining scion of an ancient bloodline of fae beings stuck in this pathetic realm, Eleanor is a Norwich-based writer who has worked on Doctor Who: The RPG, Hollows, SIN: A Spire Sourcebook, Aegean and Broken Weave. Eleanor has particular obsessions with horror, fairy tales and the Gothic, because one should always know one's rivals intimately. The heart of Eleanor's wondrous and terrible ritual of creation is her itch page: https://magpie-elle.itch.io

Making games is tough and full of surprises. Especially once you factor in stretch goals and polish. Thankfully, this is far from our first rodeo.

With that in mind, we have provided our intended timeline for delivering your rewards. We ask that you temper this with our promise that any delays will be a result of our commitment to giving you the absolute best version of Ways and Means and all other rewards.

Shipping costs will be calculated during fulfillment and vary based on your pledge tier, chosen add-ons, their combined weight, and your location. To help you plan for this, we have provided some estimated shipping costs for various rewards.

Important Note 1: Shipping costs may change based on factors beyond our control. Such as freight cost changes, inflation, or wildcard freighter captains blocking the Suez Canal.

Important Note 2: We are working hard to reduce the cost of shipping to Canada. Hopefully we will succeed before Ways and Means ships, but we want to be honest up front about the cost of shipping at this moment in time.