Welcome back to the Ways and Means developer blog series. We’re picking up with our third entry as our crowdfunding campaign enters day 3 - we’ve already funded several stretch goals (thank you!) and we’re heading for more. We’ve already covered two of the brand new classes we’re including in the book (the Witness and the Blightborn) so now it’s time to take a look at the third: the Crawler.
So, rogues, huh? Weird little guys. Just as the Witness started with us looking at a Bard and the Blightborn a druid, the Crawler began life as a series of musings on what purpose a rogue or thief fulfills in an archetypical dungeon.
What does a rogue do? Well, they sneak around in the shadows, disarm deadly traps, pick open locked doors or treasure chests, and pilfer anything not nailed down. But here’s something any long term GM knows (but might not admit out loud): you probably won’t add lots of locked doors, hidden traps, and shadowy alcoves to your game unless you have a rogue-ish character at your table to take advantage of them. Poke at that logic for a second and you come to the metatextual realisation that the very presence of a rogue somehow litters your setting with traps and locked treasure chests. Talk about a perfect example of how the Heart works.
From that seed, the Crawler was born: a walking talking cautionary tale about delvers who are consumed by the overwhelming certainty that the Heart is a dungeon made just for them.
The Visuals
Once more Felix Miall took on the task of bringing the Crawler to life visually. The challenge of taking the iconic rogue aesthetic and twisting it into a distinctly “Heart” form was solved surprisingly quickly by one of my favourite methods: dumping a rotten bucketload of body horror on its head.
Crawlers crave the concept of loot, but don’t seek a specific reward. They live for the thrill of breaking into forbidden places, even as the Heart makes these places just for them. They want to become the perfect dungeoneer, but without the dungeon becoming too easy. As a result, Crawlers enter a twisted metaphysical feedback loop with the Heart, as if they’re a tired old couple who can’t decide what to order for dinner: “What do you want?” “I dunno, I’m happy with whatever you want!”
Over time, the Heart tries to mould the Crawler into the “perfect” dungeoneer, in mind and body – with eyes that pierce the dark, lockpicks for fingernails, 50ft of intestinal rope, and herniated pouches to conceal their coveted loot. After all… it’s what you wanted, right? RIGHT?!
Here’s what Felix had to add on depicting the Crawler.
Felix Miall:“I was looking at footage of the inside of a kangaroo pouch and I thought about that when I was making this (my youtube algorithm decided I would be interested in this and I'm embarrassed to admit that they weren't wrong). And of course her relic of choice is a little guy because I get very antsy if I don't get to draw a little guy.”
The Abilities
Now you’ve seen the Crawler take form, it’s time for me to switch into the third person and ask Elaine Lithgow what her thoughts were when designing some of her abilities.
Elaine Lithgow:“I love loot. Maybe it’s a lifetime of CRPGs and MMOs, but a fundamental part of me is hardwired to shoot a hot spike of serotonin into my brain whenever I see the sparkle of loot beckoning me from a fresh corpse, or hear a thrilling fanfare when cracking open a treasure chest. Inexplicable Loot is my love letter to loot in all forms. As the Crawler delves deeper, taking greater risks in search of some reward, ANY reward, the Heart responds by spontaneously sprinkling treasure around like candy, just for them. I simply love the idea of a canonical explanation for all those reinforced treasure chests containing a single weapon that somehow ended up in a dead end corridor in the bowls of the earth.
The steady stream of equipment and resources also acts as the foundation for a number of the Crawler’s abilities, including Every Tool a Hammer, which gives the Crawler a nice way to burn some of that extra loot, because nobody likes a messy inventory. Speaking of which…”
Elaine Lithgow:“Denizen’s Desires hits another trope I’m a big fan of, giving characters in games random gifts to try and sway their opinions of you and learning something in the process. Who knew that the town crier was a huge fan of rare bugs!
Denizen’s Desires encourages the Crawler to look at their resources and the people around them in a different light as they try to match their Domains with incomplete knowledge. This ties into another common theme among Crawler abilities, the concept of pushing your luck or taking chances. With this ability, the Crawler gets one chance to try to pick out a gift they think will suit the person (or thing) they’re trying to charm. Get it wrong, and they’ve wasted a resource, but get it right and they’re laughing. Social Link Unlocked!”
Elaine Lithgow:“I have a twisted love of traps, especially the old school kind. Some of my earliest memories of designing roleplaying games involved peering at crunchy black and white illustrations of traps which functioned like improbable Rube Goldberg contraptions. Counterweights, acid pits, spikes, sliding floors, each one meticulously designed to annihilate a little stick figure in the most contrived way possible. Yes the Home Alone movies were formative for me, how did you know?
Unfortunately, once I started playing and running games myself, I found that these kinds of sadistic traps are nowhere near as fun when the unwitting targets are some of your closest friends sitting within dice-throwing distance.
So the instant I latched onto the idea of the Crawler, I knew I wanted to put the power of traps into the hands of players. Finally! An excuse to deploy the most brutal and complex traps ever conceived, now with minimal friendship drama! (It’s all good when the targets are the GM’s mooks, after all.) Of course I couldn’t resist adding a crack of spice by letting players increase the complexity of their traps by also increasing the likelihood of triggering the trap themselves. You know, because GMs deserve traps too.
PS: Yes, I fully encourage people to combine Denizen’s Desires and Ambush traps to make friends with deadly ambush predators. What could possibly go wrong?”
Elaine Lithgow:“Zeniths are one of my favourite parts of Heart. Here’s something that might not surprise you: I’m one of those ‘forever GMs’. It’s a rare and fleeting chance that I get to sit in a player's seat. As a result, over the years I’ve tried to develop a GMing style which encourages my players to dip their toes in the GMing waters: describe the world with me, name that NPC, tell me what you find at the bottom of the well. It takes a bit of the weight off and my quiet hope is that I’m secretly preparing my players to one day kick me out of the GM’s seat and seize control.
Enter the Dungeon Master ability! One of the Crawler’s three Zenith abilities and the one I’m currently most proud of; because whenever I say to people ‘yeah one of their Zeniths lets you explicitly become the GM’ people always get wide eyed and very excited. It’s my hope that if people choose to go down this path, they might even look back on their time with the Crawler as a micro tutorial on how to GM and realise just how much fun it is.”
That’s the Crawler! Initially we had only intended to add three Classes to the book, but as fate would have it, before we’d even finished writing this blog series, we went and unlocked a stretch goal which added a fourth class to the book! This one is going to be a creation of Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan and while we don’t know what it’s going to be yet, you can bet we’ll be talking about it right here when we do.
For now, make sure to follow the campaign if you haven’t and come back next time when we’ll be discussing the new callings that Ways and Means has to offer.
We launched Ways and Means yesterday, funded within 34 minutes, and smashed through the first three stretch goals before we'd even gone to bed. Hell, at the time of writing, we're sitting a scant couple grand short of hitting our £100,000 stretch goal in under 24 hours. Silly business.
Needless to say, the launch has beaten all our expectations and I just want to take a moment to say thank you to all you wonderful backers for showing up in droves like the hungry horde of delvers you are.
With that said, let's look at what's new.
New Add-Ons!
Due to popular demand we've added two new add-ons to the campaign.
A stand alone PDF version of the Delve Deck, for use in VTTs or print-at-home.
A limited number of the Dagger in the Heart Bookmarks packs (There's only 100 packs, so get 'em before they're gone!)
We hadn't intended on selling the bookmark packs, but so many folk have lamented missing out on them during the Dagger campaign we figured why not. (Plus it's a good way to clear out some of the spares we ended up with after fulfilling everyone's orders.) There's only a limited number of them though, and once they're gone they're gone! So get them while they're hot.
Stretch Goals Unlocked!
We've blasted through a bunch of stretch goals in a short time, let's take a look at that pretty pretty graphic to see our progress: As you can see we've unlocked:
£40,000: Four additional pages of gear for the Ways and Means! Giving you literally more bang for your buck (cause I want to channel my inner Ptolemy Bay and create more impossible guns).
£55,000: A whole new calling for Ways and Means written by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan - the author of Dagger in the Heart!
£75,000: Four additional pages of weirdos to the hirelings chapter of Ways and Means! (Might be people, might be animals, we'll see what the Heart conjures up once we get to writing.)
Our next stretch goal on the horizon is a big one!
£100,000: A whole new class for Ways and Means, also penned by Gareth! As I type we're tantalizingly close to unlocking this, and we cant wait to see what Gareth comes up with.
Developer Blogs
If you haven't already, and want to sink your teeth into some juicy behind-the-scenes developer insight, our dev blog series is still ongoing. You can read about two of the new classes already (the Witness and the Blightborn) and expect the Crawler dev blog to go live some time tomorrow.
Launch Stream Catchup
If you missed out on our launch stream yesterday and want to catch up, we've uploaded the VOD over on youtube. Take a look if you want to watch Grant and Elaine (that's me!) gibber away about the campaign. Including some behind the scenes chat, Grant speculating about a Heart skirmish game based around trains, and Elaine lamenting how difficult it is to get a specific Pokemon plushie. Riveting stuff!
The campaign is shaping up to be a great one, so keep an eye out for more updates soon.
Join us for another entry in our Ways and Means dev blog series, as we take a gander at another class we're adding to Heart — the mind-warping Blightborn. I hear mushrooms are all the rage.
As discussed in our previous dev blog about the new Witness class, when it came time to conceptualise new classes for Heart, we spent some time inspecting classic fantasy RPG archetypes and conjuring vivid group hallucinations to imagine how they might manifest in the Heart.
The instant ‘druids’ slid under the microscope we realised that there’s something interesting there. After all, the iconic druid is an antisocial weirdo who loves nature more than people, hangs out in the woods with very questionable hygiene routines, and spends an unhealthy amount of time shapeshifting into wild animals.
That’s all well and good when you’re ‘one with the forest’ and spend your time chatting up the local trees or turning into an owl for a bit. But what happens when the environment you’re attuned to is a subterranean fleshy lucid nightmare which specialises in luring hapless fools to their inevitable annihilation?
Well, you get the Blightborn! They’re walking fungi-infested sensory organs of the Heart. Part druid, part vampire, and someone who’s absolutely going to give you the mother of all fungal infections (we hope you brought PPE on your delve).
The Visuals
As with all the classes in Ways and Means, the task of visualising the Blightborn fell to Felix Miall. We wanted a character which didn’t lean on the traditional depictions of a druid in fantasy. So out were leather and pelts, wooden antlers, and all that jazz. Instead we wanted to stick with the classic Heart concept that someone from the Spire, a relatively metropolitan city, had been infected with these spores and pulled down into the Heart as a last resort.
They may be a walking ball of hyper-sensitive mycelia, but they still have to at least try to keep up appearances! As such, despite their unfortunate predicament, this dandy Blightborn is the current holder of the award for ‘cleanest clothes in the Heart’. I’m sure they’ll get all this infection nonsense cleaned up and be back in the upper Spire in time for dinner.
Felix had this to say about working on the Blightborn.
Felix Miall:“I don't like enoki mushrooms and I think I channeled that into the Blightborn - it's just something about the MOUTH FEEL. I imagined the masses from his head and mouth making bobbly slimy noises as they shifted about, just like those hellish enoki. His aelfir features are kind of being pulled around on his head - I guess eventually his receding eyeline will just stretch off into the back of his skull. Still combs his hair, and the mushrooms with it.”
The Abilities
Now you’ve whetted your appetite over the pretty pictures, let’s take a look at some of the Blightborn’s abilities, and what Chris Taylor has to say about them. Chris Taylor:“I really enjoy mechanics where there is a central simple action you can take and everything else sort of spills from that. Colonise by itself doesn’t actually do anything. In fact it’s a fairly costly power to achieve nothing. As you hit Beats and pick up more abilities however you can customise it in a variety of different ways and kind of make the class your own.
The second core ties into this and prompts you to begin colonizing as many people as you can. Having walkie talkies in a dungeon crawl would make everything so much easier for the Delvers so why not infect your friends with your Heart-spawned spores? Having the rest of your party infected gives you a useful quality of life ability that I think we’ve all used in a meta once or twice in our RPG games, and this just legitimises it.”
Chris Taylor:“Saprophyte was one of the first abilities I wrote for the class. It’s one of the few that doesn’t use the spore mechanic but I still love it. Fungus is always associated with rot and decay and the growth of something beautiful from putrescence is a lovely image. I am also absolutely rubbish at any video-game that uses stealth, so a way to both easily hide a body and get a refresh out of it was too good an opportunity to pass up.”
Chris Taylor:“Heartsblood Shift is perhaps the most obvious link to the Druidic origins of the class. Here we have the classic shapechange. I’ve always enjoyed the min/maxing aspect of character creation so knew immediately that just letting the class change into anything was a recipe for disaster. So the Shift was born. Pick a wretched form and gain new abilities! (while temporarily losing the old ones. Become an awful rat and sneak anywhere, fly above the situation as a sort of lumpy pigeon, or excrete dangerous traps and hunt in the darkness. Of course as you hit more beats you gain the ability to mix the forms of these nasty little mistakes. We can also see in Split Morphology the beginnings of a kind of tanking playstyle which I always really enjoy, especially in a game where getting Fallout is the fun bit.”
Chris Taylor:“I love Zeniths. Trade your character away for a single blast of astonishing power. However, here I thought “What if you can’t get rid of them?”. You’ve likely been infecting all sorts of people (friends included) for several sessions by this point. What if you just took one of them? Overwriting the total concept of what makes someone a person is one of the more violent acts I can imagine. This ability lets you do that forever. This awful fungus creature eternally copying themselves over the mind of others as their mind degrades like a worn out VHS until they run out of people is such a sad and awful thing.”
With the Witness and the Blightborn covered, that’s two of the three new classes coming to Ways and Means ticked off. I’ll see you next time when we’ll shine an uncomfortably bright light on the third and final class, the Crawler.
Today in our Ways and Means dev blog series, we take a look at the first of three new classes we're adding to Heart — the freewheeling bardic Witness. Better watch yourself! They've got a typewriter-accordion and they're not afraid to use it!
Here’s something we don’t talk about often: making new classes for a game like Heart is bloody hard.
It would be nice and easy if we could just pick a specific flavour of magic (like fire, or lightning, or ice) or a special way of killing things: like a guy who can use a sword AND cast spells, or a guy who uses swords to cast spells, or hell maybe even a guy who’s sword IS a spell (all of which are absolutely different and interesting enough concepts to build an entire character around thankyouverymuch).
Alas, Heart classes have to go and be all about themes, archetypes, and an inevitable downward spiral of self destruction leading to an explosive climax of world-altering self actualisation and annihilation… Plus there’s got to be a few jokes in there?
Makes them a bit of a headscratcher, if we’re honest.
So it’s safe to say, when we first sat in the writers room with the task of conjuring up three new classes for Ways & Means, there was a palpable sense of concern around whether we could dredge up new classes at all.
Turns out we shouldn’t have been so worried.
The first of our new classes leapt from the depths almost instantly once we started thinking about iconic dungeon delving archetypes which we hadn’t explored yet, namely the idea of what a bard would look like in the world of Destera, and not just any bard, but one willing to dive into the Heart specifically.
From that seed, the Witness was born.
The Visuals
We reached out to Felix Miall to reprise his role of bringing the Heart classes to life, as he’d done in the Heart corebook years ago. Thankfully, he accepted, and set to work developing a unique aesthetic for the Witness. We leaned heavily on the idea of the Witness as a grotty love child of a musician and a reporter – someone who’s mad enough to stand around gawping and recording all the insanity on display during the average delve, and capable of spreading the stories they collect (to varying degrees of authenticity).
Here’s some extra insight from Felix on the creation process:
Felix Miall:‘Honestly, during the rough stage I drew the dumb concertina typewriter accordion thing before the actual character. I'd like to try to make one in real life to work out how it actually functions (prediction: it won't).
Lots of little details just happen as I go - I kinda like the idea that he tried drawing scrying eyes on his glasses and camera lenses and it granted them unexpected inquisitive properties. Definitely got his gold tooth from getting smacked, too, or from falling in a pothole trying to get the perfect shot.’
The Abilities
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Heart character without some bizarre abilities to call their own. So here’s a sneak peek at the core abilities the Witness has at their ink-stained fingertips, with some commentary from Grant, who is the mad genius behind the lens.
Hell, we’ll even throw in an example minor, major, and zenith ability for you to chew on. We’re nice like that.
Grant Howitt: “Bards record and recount things. That’s the way I see ‘em, anyway, pulling on the historical context; you’re part of a culture that exists without much writing, so the best way you can hope to remember it all (and to teach it) is to put it down in a poem or song or similar. Having a Bard tag along with your party feels like it should be a shortcut to greatness cause you’ve effectively got your own hype man coming along for the ride (with deliberate and loving reference to the representation of Chaucer in 2001’s A Knight’s Tale).
Given that Heart already has Beats as a means of measuring a character’s progress through their own story, it felt sensible to key those to the Witness’ core ability - when they see a player character achieve a Beat, they get stuff. They power up. They’re kind of a cheerleader for everyone else, pushing them to roleplay and tilt towards their inevitable doom.
Inspirational is a catch-all attempt to round up “Inspire Competence” and all that low-level, almost ambient bonus stuff a D&D Bard has. You can support your team (assuming you have a broad range of skills or domains to do so) and you don’t have to faff about with the visual of singing a jaunty tune to help someone sneak or intimidate or whatever. You just pick it at the start of the session and get on with it.”
Grant Howitt: “Felix put some cameras on the class art and I decided that I had to make something of that. The Daguerreotypist ability undercuts Observer, which is all about helping people achieve their aims, and instead offers the chance to earn just as much out of it when you help them as when you stand back and take a picture. It’s a joke, effectively; the Witness runs off from the fight and sets up their big old-timey camera on a tripod and struggles to get the perfect shot. I didn’t want them to be too subservient.”
Grant Howitt: “I’m into Commedia dell’arte. Or rather: I’m into the concept of it, the whole “improv theatre along a set path with pre-prepared goofs and gags and everyone’s a stock character,” because that’s a pretty good description of most roleplaying games. (In practice it’s quite hard to find any, given that it fell out of fashion about two hundred and fifty years ago. But the idea is great, right?)
Given the often lonely nature of Heart games (when compared to the bustling metropolis of Spire), I wanted a way to bring in a recurring character. And I figured that the Heart probably has improv theatre, given the lack of a central authority to disseminate plays, so maybe the Witness can do a bit of magic and pull one of those stock characters out for a scene to help. (Is it a real person? Is it just the stock character in the flesh? Both? I dunno.)
It was fun to come up with six archetypes that threaded between a) existing commedia characters b) the average members of a delving party, because that’s most players’ frame for the fiction c) people who could scheme against one another and make an interesting story and d) someone who might be able to help out in any given Heart situation.”
Grant Howitt: “Okay so I said I was into Commedia dell’arte but I’m REALLY into memetic viruses. I love ‘em. (See: The Carnival, the Labyrinth Curse, the theatrical Arrival cult in Sin, my ongoing obsession with the King in Yellow, etc, etc.) I like how creepy they are; it’s an aspect to body horror that rarely gets poked at, but the idea of an infohazard turns my stomach in the most fascinating way. Imagine a song that could stain your consciousness so utterly that it consumes you! That’s some aelfir shit right there. And it felt natural to include one.
Anyway, this is kind of the villainous Zenith; your life is transmuted into a play that spreads like a virus. And while everyone in every future campaign can sing your title track and get some healing, it’s more that you get to transform part of the City Beneath so it’s about you. It contrasts with the other Zeniths which range from selfless (play a song so sweet you can enchant the flood and lead it away from the settlement) to cheeky (set up an interdimensional boozer). There’s some overlap with the Firebrand High Advance from Spire where you become a song of revolution, but THIS one has some rules in it. Because I’m a better designer now.”
The Witness is just one of the three new classes coming to Ways and Means. The crowdfunding campaign launches soon, so don’t forget to spread the word! Next time, we’re going to take a look at the next class – the fungus infested Blightborn.
Introducing... the Ways & Means developer blog series!
Greetings Delvers! Can you believe it? The crowdfunding campaign for Ways and Means is thundering towards us faster than a cursed locomotive ripping a grizzly hole through space and time. It’ll be launching on 5th of August (a little later than intended, but good things come to those who wait).
To celebrate the impending chaos, and shamelessly drive up that sweet, sweet engagement which powers the crumbling behemoth we call the modern internet, we’re here to present a series of short developer blogs about the making of the first hardback sourcebook for Heart: The City Beneath.
Each blog focuses on a specific piece of the Ways and Means puzzle. From new classes or callings, to equipment or hirelings, you’ll find all the juicy deets right here in good auld blog format – the way our internet ancestors intended.
Now let’s begin by taking a look at the development of the brand new cover illustration.
Delving Deeper
Since Ways and Means is the first hardback sourcebook for Heart, we knew going in that we wanted to pay homage to the original Heart corebook cover, illustrated by Felix Miall, which features a small group of Delvers beginning their descent into the red wet heaven of the Heart.
We reached out to Sar Cousins to work on the new cover after their incredible work on Dagger in the Heart – last year’s truly insane Heart campaign module. Sar immediately set to work picking out the key aspects of the cover (isolated delvers, oppressive ruins, and giant creepy hands) and sketching out a bunch of thumbnail ideas to try and find a composition which worked.
We quickly landed on the idea of continuing the downward spiral deeper into the Heart, tossed in some Relativity vibes by M. C. Escher, Sar found something which we fell in love with.
We played around with some different iterations (including one with some gribbly Pitchkins stalking the Delvers which was very fun, but way too busy for the vibes we wanted) before landing on the final version which you’ll find on the cover of Ways and Means.
There we have it! The gory cover illustration for Ways and Means. In the next developer blog, we’ll be taking a gander at the first of the new Classes you can find in the book. Follow the project to get that directly to your inbox!
