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).

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.”

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.

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.