Heart: The city beneath - The curse of the formless one

About the Heart

The Heart is a dangerous, unpredictable, mad place. Located beneath the mile-high city of Spire in the land of Destera, it is a rip in the holes between worlds.

The Heart begins, in theory, in the undercity of Spire near the tumbledown settlement of Derelictus. Get out of earshot of the sing-song gangs of street children, leave behind the tenements and shanties, crawl deep into the forsaken bowels of the city and you'll reach the Heart.

The Heart ends, in theory, nowhere. The closer one gets to its center, the less stable reality becomes. In the midst of its red wet nightmare, concepts such as "beginning" and "end" come undone.

There are settlements on the outskirts: heretic churches worshipping forbidden gods; organized criminals guarding the drug farms and laboratories that supply Spire; cults of magicians who whisper to buried inhuman intelligences; in short, people who have turned their backs on the city above and delved into the Heart in search of answers. There are caves and buildings and the echoes of infrastructure that crumbled into uselessness centuries ago.

Go deeper, and the Heart makes less sense (to a rational mind, at least). Here there are crimson labyrinths ruled by the ghosts of slaughtered beasts; acres of high-rise buildings with swarms of specters haunting the lower floors and people scraping out an existence huddled on the rooftops; twisting market-warrens of red cloth, cobblestones and awnings where maniac serfs worship their god-king masters and chant their financial transactions like sacred mantras.

Deeper still, and the Heart is almost unrestrained. There are skies here -- blasted skies that have never held the sun or stars. There are lakes of dust where villages perch atop stilts and people hunt shark-headed beasts with harpoons. There are forests, moon-lit by no moon, where the trees are utterly mad and will hunt.

Beneath that? The Heart itself, a blossoming tear in reality, a parasite universe of blood and bone seeping into the world of man and elf.

The Heart can taste and smell you, and it makes itself anew in your image. The settlements are there because people believe they should be: they are expectations repeated and made real, scars carved into the meat of the City Beneath by invaders. But go off the beaten path, tread into the unknown, and the Heart will grow invisibly, silently, just outside of your view. It listens to your dreams and fashions your reward, your punishment, your world, from roiling quintessence.

This is the Heart, and you know that somewhere down here is what you need.

About the themes

Heart is a fiction-first game of adventure and horror. Player characters are not helpless and powerless to fight back against the horrors they encounter. Very much the opposite: they are fierce, powerful individuals, who have decided to dive into the Heart for different reasons, but they are more than capable of holding their own in this strange place.

You can expect to encounter adventuring, dungeon-delving, violent encounters with otherworldly beasts, diplomacy, negotiation, body horror, cosmic horror, creepy crawlies, reality-bending locations, and everything in-between.

About the session

This is a loosely plotted, player character driven session. You will have the option to choose between a range of pre-generated characters, and you will have the opportunity to give your character some level of customization. We'll dedicate the first part of the session to character refinement, where you'll be able to define your motivations and select your active beats, which will help us guide the story together.

What's expected of you

Come prepared to have fun. Be cordial and cooperative with your fellow players. Actively contribute to telling an awesome story with everyone else at the table.