Review: Called to the Heart

I've been plugging away at NEW BLOOD, my supplement for HEART: The City Beneath, and running some play-by-post games, and recently there was even a video review, so I think it's safe to say I'm a little heart pilled right now. Ah, sorry, I'm getting word that that's a different thing. Anyway, it's been a kind of busy month, actually, between updates. I've been really enjoying my time in Heart's system and setting! But I missed reading and writing about reading - so I thought I would take a look at some of the other stuff that's come out for Heart recently. Today, I'm taking a look through Misha Handman's Called to the Heart!

I've been writing about some design decisions on my itch game pages. I would call them "little" blogs, but, I mean, I don't know that I've been very successful at keeping them short. Anyway, that's all to say that if you're interested in reading my thoughts about designing for HEART, I have put up some thoughts over there. Called has FIVE whole classes! My thing has only three! So I'm really curious to see if Handman and I have similar thoughts about the design space and how to write in it, and whether we kept to similar constraints, etc etc.

The title immediately brought Heart's Callings to my mind, and the introduction also plays into that idea for me, suggesting that each of the classes "has been called to the Heart in search of something..." I think this is a neat idea, although my first worry is that it starts to get a little messy with the established "pieces" of a character. Heart is kind of specific that classes are kind of "just" skills or training or etc, the abilities you can rely on to survive (for a time) in the cursed undercity. They might suggest motivations (easy to imagine a Junk Mage searching for Enlightenment, whereas a Cleaver probably leans closer to Heartsong), but I read the text as trying to keep that entirely open. Interesting!

First up is the Annysian! The vibe is a little brighter than the usual Heart fare - the picture I get of this class is of a goddess-blessed pilgrim/mail-deliverer, but without any of the menace of the Heretic's worship of the moon goddess, or deeply cursed Incarnadine's relationship with their namesake deity. Broadly, I think I like it! The vibe is fun and new, and I think the tonal shift is not so extreme as to be disjointed with the rest of the game - there's one very good zenith ability which is selling me on the goddess and her worship in particular.

Mechanically, some stuff in here makes me a little nervous. One of the core abilities grants the Annysian a flat +1 protection across the board, but turns protection into an all-or-nothing game; protection normally is flat "damage reduction", but the Annysian only gets the benefits from protection if it would reduce the stress they'd take to 0. Not a big deal on its own; but the Annysian also has two minor abilities that each grant a total of 3 protection, making it far and away the class with the most efficient protection accumulation. My instinct is that this is setting up unfortunate interactions - it feels bad for the GM to have to choose between scaling up threats or letting a player flit through the game untroubled, and it feels bad for the player to invest a lot of limited resources into protection only for it to do nothing a sizeable fraction of the time (ask anyone who's failed a 75% check in Fire Emblem or XCOM).

The other mechanical trends are pretty fun, and are also spaces I was interested in - caring about making Connections on Delves, being the big one there. There's a little more leaning into gambling that I think I can understand as, like, goddess of travel/luck stuff, but is still not really where I'd go for my own designs. I think it's tough to beat something like the Witch's core ability Crucible, both in its simplicity and specificity, and how it makes both winning and losing the gamble fun and interesting (and dangerous).

Next up is the Druid. This was one that jumped out to me immediately when I was reading the summary - it's citing some similar inspiration to my Myco-Alchemist. The execution here, however, leans much further towards wild beasts and bloody ritualists. I think it's well done, although I think it doesn't quite wind up feeling like a Heart class - it would be just as at home in a more traditional fantasy game (albeit a fairly dark one). Mechanically, I think it's interesting that we both wound up tying our "nature-y" class to resource generation / growing things! The Myco-Alchemist's approach wound up being about investment, and supplies management - you put in resources and might get out more value than you put in, but you risk losing it all. The Druid simply trades stress for resources, at a rate of about 1:1, which is pretty elegant. Later abilities open up some ways to turn that trade in your favor, which is cool although potentially open to some weirdness - if you have blood protection, you can wind up making resources for "free", and since you can sell them right away for healing if you're in a Haven, we can take advantage of statistics to acquire an arbitrarily large amount of resources.

I think the other miss for me is the focus on turning into animals, ala 5e's Wild Shape druid. The Witch has this pretty well covered, I think, and the minor upgrades just giving new animal abilities isn't very exciting to me. 

There's a zenith ability that totally delights me, though - Questing Beast has a creature burst from your body when you would die, in a process that endlessly repeats. Though your form may change, some part of you will live on in the Heart forever, free. It's good!! I'm also a sucker for any ability called "Internal Geomancy".

Third is the Forsaken, which reads to me as a kind of ascended sin-eater, someone so put-upon that you can wield guilt and retribution. Mechanically, this one also seems to be particularly interested in Protection. Many of the Forsaken's minor abilities (the five that grant domains) forgo any kind of small ability, and are only "mechanical", granting access to a domain (normal) as well as +1 protection. Broadly, I like the mechanical and flavor overlap here - this does feel like the class I want to be getting knocked down and getting back up again. But ultimately it's missing some of the vital spark I want out of a Heart class.

I think I want to expand on that a little bit, because my criticism of the Druid touched on this idea, and my thoughts on the next class will too. Heart's (core book) character designs are in kind of a weird place - they're very deeply tied to the setting and background elements, in a way that I'll concede is not for everyone. But I think it does work for me! A big part of the allure is that I can't just play a wizard in Heart - access to magical power is gated by the ways in the setting that people can actually acquire it. You could become a receptacle for magical bees, or you could steal it from lesser powers, or you could have awful blood. I haven't gone looking for it (in case it isn't real, to save myself the disappointment), but I think I remember Grant Howitt saying that one thing about the classes in Heart is that they're all a little bit warlock-y, in D&D parlance - all of them are compromised, all of them are attached to something bigger than themselves, because there's no other way to survive. The Forsaken is attached to something greater than itself, but that thing is metaphysical sin, which looks a little generic compared to how richly weird religion is in the base setting (just as real world religion is)!

My other criticism here is that I'm not really compelled by protection. I think it's nice to have in small doses, but ultimately kind of thin to build your mechanical identity around. I really and truly believe that Heart is a game about having horrible things happen to your character and reveling in them. Taking fallout is frankly, not that bad! Often it's kind of good, even! At the very least, it's funny! Avoiding taking stress isn't exactly the same thing as avoiding taking hp damage, something that you uncomplicatedly want to avoid as a player of, say Dungeons and Dragons, and the strategies for doing so often come with other tradeoffs, or at least their own vulnerabilities. Heart doesn't really have those kinds of tradeoffs, but it also isn't really what it's trying to do. The Vermissian Knight isn't a "tank" class because it has a high protection value - it's because they can do things like hold their breath freakishly long, or take a hit for their friends, or fall off of tall buildings. They can heal stress, but at cost. That stress healing might contribute to their tenacity, but ultimately, every character class is as invulnerable as any other. You can never take so much stress or fallout that you have to die.

There are some cool and weird abilities in the Forsaken that I want to shout out. Coughing up a fallout and turning it into a weapon is awesome! The ability that grants Compel, THE PRISONER'S DILEMMA, gives you a little reward when you're betrayed! The ability EYES OF SIN ends with "unfortunately, this ability works on yourself"! Good stuff.

The penultimate class is the Harrower, who is kind of an action adventurer thief. If that description isn't very descriptive, it's because I don't have a very clear idea of what makes a Harrower a Harrower - they seem to just be kind of plucky and mercenary.

I've already said that this approach isn't what I'm looking for, so I won't belabor the point. What I will point out is that I think Handman and I had a similar thought process! The Harrower is a thieving character, with Sneak and Warren as part of their core affordances; my Packrat is a thieving character, with Sneak and Warren as part of their core affordances. There's a hole for a thieving, Sneaky, Warren-roaming class! Where Handman has kept the Harrower fairly wide open, my Packrat drills down to be pretty narrow - yes, you'll get some abilities about stealing stuff, but you'd better be prepared for weird rat politics and you'll have to pay taxes. It will not be for everyone!

The final class is the Luminated. It's pretty daring, actually! It's going for a Jekyll and Hyde thing - your skills, domains, and abilities are locked to your "waxing" ideal self or your "waning" original self, and taking fallout forces you between them. It's neat and flavorful! That swapping is the central excitement, though, and to balance out the opportunity cost of only getting half of your skills at any one time, minor abilities grant two apiece - as a result, the design goes out of its way to make switching something you have limited control over. I'm not quite captured enough by the idea to think that it's worth it - without the switching, I don't see any abilities that jump out and grab me by the shirt and say "you want to do this! it will be cool!" The conceit gets my attention, and I think it would be a lot of fun if someone had a really strong concept that they wanted to run with, but it's not doing enough work to make me pick it over Deep Apiarist or Deadwalker. With the right Calling, I could just have two personalities, and also have a class that lets me cast wild spells or kill people with the manifestation of my own death.

Before I wrap up, I wanted to run a few little tests that I came up with, back when I was reading through the core book to get inspiration for the classes in NEW BLOOD. The thing that I'd noticed was that in my mind, I had sorted the core classes into "boring" and "exciting" - but when I did a closer read of the text, I found that the difference in number of boring and exciting abilities was actually quite small between boring and exciting classes - every class had abilities that I thought were cool! So, let's see how the classes of Called stack up against the core book.

My method when checking the core book was to go through each major and minor ability, and ask whether the ability surprised me - not whether I thought it was good or well designed or anything like that, only whether or not my eyes kind of popped when I read it. According to this entirely biased and subjective metric, the Annysian does pretty well, about at the level of some core classes, notably the Heretic and the Incarnadine, its fellows in religious service. The Druid and the Forsaken are close behind, but rank as less exciting to me than every core class but the Hound. The Harrower is further behind. The Luminated is tough to judge, because it has to sacrifice a lot of ability space to make the core conceit work - if I weren't granting it any grace points because of that, it would rank equal to the Harrower.

The other little ranking I made was to assess how much of a "lift" I thought the classes' core abilities provided - how often do I think the class is likely to be using or thinking about its core? Does it offer something that other people don't have? The Deep Apiarist, one of my favorite classes, has a pretty light-lifting core - for sure, if you're a sicko playing a bee wizard, you're probably stoked to hit someone with your swarm of bees, but as a core ability mechanic, it's not doing much that a gun couldn't do. On the flip side, the Witch has a heavy-lifting core - you might constantly be thinking about gambling with Echo stress, especially if you're hoping to trigger your True Form, an ability that you're probably pretty eager to pull the trigger on! Both classes are cool - the level of lift is detached from my opinion as to whether the class is interesting or not, just like my "surprisingness" ranking. This is just for fun, and to see if any pattern emerges.

My opinion is that none of the classes in Called have a very heavy lift! The Luminated is closest, but until they unlock an ability that makes for more consistent switching, the core abilities more provide a baseline than a toy in the player's hands. The Annysian and the Druid also have medium lifting cores, I would say. For the Annysian, it seems likely to me that you'll go on pilgrimages often, and of course your protection rules are going to be at the front of your mind every time you take stress (and probably every time you get a minor advance and wonder if you should take more protection). For the Druid, killing people and growing stuff to sell or eat seems like a major part of the idea of the class. The Harrower and Forsaken both have light-lifting cores - neither class is getting a whole lot of juice out of those abilities, more like constant minor drips, is my read.

And that's Called to the Heart! It was super interesting to read someone else's work, especially tracing the overlap of our similar thought processes! And I like seeing the choices other writers make, even when I know I'd make different ones. Here's a final example, The abilities in Called are quite short, and classes can fit on three pages - mine are not (and cannot)! I should do an editing pass and see if I can trim down any excess, haha.