Archive Delving - Dagger in the Heart

Time for another delve! Hopefully without too much resistance (this is a joke about Heart's Delve procedure). Today, I'm reading the very-recent first-draft pdf release of Dagger in the Heart!

Dagger in the Heart is an adventure module for Heart: The City Beneath, by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan (and made with the auspices of Rowan, Rook, and Decard, the publisher of Heart). I like Heart a whole lot! So much so that I recently published my own adventure for it (made with no auspices, but I think it turned out pretty good anyway). I mention this to reveal to you the burden of my biases - know that I am opinionated, and worse, I publish. To my dear, noble readers, I promise you a charitable and excited review. I can't promise to be objective, because I don't believe in any such thing, but I can assure you that nothing as crass as a "profit motive" enters into this process.

Dagger in the Heart made somewhere close to 230 thousand dollars on backerkit this past March.  I'd previously heard of the author, Ryder-Hanrahan, predominantly through his novels! The promise of the supplement is for a "full-length adventure" and the big push seems to me to be on a "trio of antagonists." I'm not really much of a "BBEG" kind of GM. I mean, let they who are without sin cast the first stone - I love to come up with a nasty guy and throw 'em at my players. I have had my share of climactic battles for the heart of the galaxy. But it's something that's interested me less and less recently. I'm excited for Dagger to show me I'm wrong! But I think I'm more excited about the adventure's new landmarks and other "business" - I'm really interested to see how an "official" product aims to support a GM in running the game.

The adventure is split into 7 chapters (!) - I'll see if it makes sense to write them all up individually, or if the best thing would be to just write a big chunk on the "story." But the intro jumps pretty straight into it - by page 6, we're already looking at statblocks for those big three badguys. I like the intro pretty well - the pitch is strong, and the text differentiates the antagonists several ways, which is fun. You might choose, per the text, to pick your opposition based on character classes/adventuring styles (one is more combat-y, one is more social/intrigue, and one is more mystical), or based on length of game (apparently the three lend themselves to different lengths!), or even in terms of game-analogues - one is compared to a player character, one a game master, and one a piece of the setting. All of that is cool!

For all that, though, the text kind of punts on "how to fold in your players." I like the suggestions it does have, but there's not a huge amount of substance. I'm wondering if we get any more of that later, but my big worry with modules like this is that they can be kind of inflexible.

Quick writeups of the antagonists! First up is Ptolemy Bay, a human retro-engineer & arms dealer, with ties to Azur, the god of commerce. I'm struggling to imagine picking him! His faction is kind of fun - you get some Azurite weirdness, and he's bankrolling the aelfir cop who's supposed to be cracking down on the illegal weapons trade. He's also got a badass gnoll enforcer.

Next is The One Who Waits In Ashes. It takes a big swing - the pitch the text wants to sell me on is that this bad guy is the evil future version of one of the player characters. This is undeniably Neat, but it's kind of the absence of a cool badguy - this has big "left as an exercise for the reader" energy to me. I'm maybe a little sour grapes on it, because I was hoping for something with a little more of a punch behind the nihilism angle - something along the lines of "the true opposition to the Heart is an absence of desire" rather than the totalitarianizing demagoguery here. There's also only a single line on who The One is, if they're not a PC - all that the text says is that they're a "fallen priestess of the moon beneath." Their retinue is also not super exciting to me! Bummer!

The final adversary is Aramos, an aelfir and member of the elite, who was one of the visionaries / "thought leaders" behind the Vermissian Project, which was apparently also a bid to make the Spire the center of a world empire (by sending the trains anywhere). I'm kind of mixed on this, actually... I love the Vermissian, and it's maybe one of my favorite pieces of a setting, full stop. But I think it's best when it's a failed public works project, rather than a secret scheme to take over the world. You see it a lot in, like, Star Wars or comics -  putting more and more weight on the loadbearing pillars just makes the setting look smaller and smaller. The good news is that that angle is ignorable - the much juicier piece is that Aramos was blamed for the failure of the Vermissian and exiled, and now he wants revenge, and intends to get it by using the Heart to delve back in time and change history. His organization has some great hooks, although I'd love a little more detail about their holdings. Aramos's agents, however, are plentiful and wonderful. They again pull the trick where you get to decide some key detail - it's usually my preference to focus that energy on a single compelling character write-up, rather than several less fleshed-out ideas, but the concepts are largely good enough to be exciting all the way through.

Each adversary comes with some "schemes" and "countermeasures". I think they're kind of a missed opportunity! The text instructs you that each faction will try two schemes per chapter, and that completing schemes unlocks more extreme schemes. They work fine as prompts, but they don't really feel like they're fleshed out enough to save me any prep time. I guess we'll see if they're easily tied into the chapters, but right now the impression I get is that they're kind of ancillary. Countermeasures are a little more fun - they're more specific actions the faction takes when their schemes are interfered with. The text suggests using them as Fallouts, though, instead of as, like, GM moves.

Before we get to chapter one, we're given a little more about the idea of an adventure in the Heart. The text advises you to think of this as a "map," rather than as a "script." You might hint at nearby landmarks, but don't get too solid with your geography, so that the players can choose where they go next. I'm in, although I made the opposite choice, with regards to geography - players have choice, unlike the linear paths in other Heart adventures, but New Blood assumes a kind of stable arrangement of its core pieces. I'm excited to read how Dagger thinks of the wide open map!

There's also a quick set of ideas on how to think of the time distortion (which mostly plays it kind of boringly safe, although not without reason) and a pretty solid set of ideas for how to tailor the game towards more specific lengths. There's a page of custom beats for the early chapters (and the promise of another one for the later chapters), and some cool questions to hook into the adversaries. This all rocks!

This leads directly into the chapters. After having read the first two, I think it makes sense to talk about them fairly quickly. The point of chapter 1 is to hook players into some of the intrigue, and make them aware of the existence of a particular train that they'll later go searching for. The actual set-up here is quite simple - there are two plot hooks that are basically context-less encounters you can throw at your players and call it done. The landmarks here have some other pieces ("Potential Plots") that are largely fun ways to help color outside the lines and keep players entertained, but only minimally have anything to do with the larger structure - at most, they're about hinting who the adversaries are. I'm a little mixed on this - the plot hooks are fine, and the landmarks are fun and cool! But it's not really much of a structure at all. 

Chapter 2 is about finding that train car, in order to learn about the time-bleeding zone in the Heart, as well as the fact that other people are looking for it. The text suggests hitting all the landmarks in this section, and dropping in some special events while delving, but there's again not much in the way of a structure or scaffold, except to run the landmarks & delves in order. The landmarks here are even better than in chapter 1, with a lot of fun & weird pieces - the trick is that most of them are only loosely connected to the bigger plot! The suggested plot events are cool as well. The trick for these is that the big action the text implies for them happens off screen; the bigger event is about meeting a janitor, who will get scooped up by Aramos and questioned after the PCs finish the event. If the PCs are nice and give him supplies, he won't rat them out - if the PCs are really generous, then he'll even... tell the PCs that any of this is happening at all. This kind of thing is big in the Schemes, too - good ideas, just, stuff that's hard to make player-facing. My one other complaint is about a move that I'm seeing the text make again and again - it continues to equate "rot" with "entropy" - these are two very different things, with very different thematic resonances to me! They're almost antithetical in my mind - entropy is the opposite of life, the tendency of complex things to be broken down into formlessness, whereas rot is definitionally about life feeding other life. But anyways that's just me.

Chapter 3 is positioned to be kind of a break in the action - a chance to do some research & get entangled with some factions and journey up into Spire. It's a little weird to me, although I love the idea. I just can't imagine playing the Heart and hearing a player say "wait! before we throw our lives away in a dangerous adventure into mystery, we should talk to some cops first!" That said, the support the text provides for that angle is pretty brief. I like the ideas, but we once again return to a bunch of landmarks that are tied with varying degrees of closeness to the bigger plot.

Chapter 4 starts to move us into the second half of the adventure, and centers on a funky haven. Here, the scaffolding is a little more explicit, with some big moves made by the opposition (and some punchy write-ups for a variety of strategies for all three). The landmarks continue to be the piece that I'm most fond of. There are usually an assortment of delves in these chapters too - I haven't written much about them, largely because they're mostly just functional! The most care has been put into their event lists, but otherwise they feel a little shallow. They don't give me a lot to go off of, if players are backtracking via the same road. That seems maybe important, since the other major resource this chapter has is a bunch of jobs back up towards the surface! Two last notes on this one: the chapter intro promises that this is a chance to rest and recover, but most of the places here are not particularly safe havens with a lot of (or very strong) opportunities for healing. The one exception is explicitly a trap! The second promise is that this is a chance to talk to people about the Delving Machine (oh by the way, there's a big macguffin that they'll be chasing), and that way absorb some info and get a feel for how the world is shaped around it. There is no mention of this in any of the NPC writeups! Not a terribly hard thing to invent, but kind of a let down.

Chapter 5 is a hunt for the delving machine! There's a neat little procedure here - while delving, you track stress inflicted against the delve the characters are on and against a delving machine tracker simultaneously. The text offers some example delving machine resistance numbers, which it suggests could be tied to how informed the characters are to reward preparation. Healing and otherwise losing time adds increasing dice to the delving machine's resistance - first D4, then D6, and so on, and if you go past D12, it escapes for good. The one quirk is that the text suggests it should be possible but quite difficult to catch the delving machine - based on the numbers here, even at its worst, the machine is about three delves away. I think it sounds pretty doable to do two delves, rest once, and then a third delve, which will probably clinch it. Maybe I'm just too nice! Each of the landmarks in this section has a special descriptor for what's changed if the delving machine has recently been through - I like that touch a lot, even though it's small. There are a lot of landmarks in this chapter! A few of them don't quite hit at the level of the rest of them for me, but in addition to some great ones (one is described as Cronenberg-meets-Chernobyl-land; one of them is a storehouse packed full of bombs), there are some cool "flash forward" future-vision landmarks, one each for the bad-ending represented by the antagonists, and they're all done well.

Chapter 6 says it's working in concert with chapter 5, which I think isn't quite right, based on the description here; it sounds more like this chapter is about a possible "fail state" of chapter 5, which players can remedy by taking a journey up-Spire. The text seems to think that this is a "likely" response after failing to catch the delving machine, since... the Vermissian Project was started in Spire? And because two of the opposition factions are centered there? I think it's a little bit of a stretch, but it certainly sounds fun to do. There's a fun "conversion" of Heart's delves into Spire's locations - taking the street is a 1 resistance delve; climbing through the Vermissian is a little more dangerous, but not bad with 6 resistance. It's cute! The overwhelming majority of landmarks up here are about Ptolemy Bay, and they're pretty good. There's not a lot of stuff for Aramos, which I think is too bad - the attitude of the text seems to be that he's just too clever and well prepared for the players to get enmeshed in disrupting his plots, unlike Ptolemy's, whose are laid out here. This is also a reminder to me that the schemes from the introduction are only feeling more and more ancillary! I think the list of easily adaptable schemes is good, but the way to support it would be by more liberally sprinkling potential schemes in the landmarks' potential plots. Anyway, there's also a landmark that's connected to the The One Who Waits In Ashes, and I like it a lot - it's rife with metaphysical and religious tension, and points to a schism waiting to happen. Good stuff! It does make me wish The One Who Waits got, like... a real characterization in the text to fall back on, instead of being the dark mirror of a PC.

Chapter 7 is all about the final confrontation. The text throws a lot of stuff at you pretty quickly; the players will find the antagonists on the approach, but due to time weirdness those antagonists have been searching for decades (?); each antagonist has their full forces down here (despite decades of attrition?); it's possible to fail to board the delving machine, separating the party; each antagonist has an epic showdown with the party there; finally, there's a choice about what to do with the machine itself. A lot of these pieces miss for me. Aramos's write ups are the longest, and he gets some fun scheming, but is explicitly not here - it feels toothless and boring in the way that that "clever" DM's plots do. Everything was happening elsewhere this whole time! Cackling laughter ensues. Ptolemy Bay's write-up similarly does very little for me. The description relies heavily on the idea that he's burning all his credit and sacrificing his wealth for power. It's great conceptually, but the material depiction of it feels kind of weightless - it's not grounded in anything except making a cool set piece visual. It does sell the idea of a long-suffering antagonist who's had their plans ruined by the PCs, which is fun. The One Who Waits has the most boring retinue (a tide of fanatical worshipers), but the most interesting confrontation to me (involving shades of failed versions of the party). Even this has "children's movie monologue" problems. I think the thing is that I want these confrontations earlier! If these drive home the central themes, why save them for the end? I think, unlike a movie, a game wants these conflicts early - they drive the tension & present the stakes that will influence player action. The very final text is on the choice for what to do with the train, which are all enticing and fun and dangerous.

The final appendices! There's a list of all the landmarks, including the ones from the Heart corebook, with a thought on which chapters they fit well in and a short, often tongue-in-cheek note about its basic deal or how to use it. Remarkable restraint shown, in some ways - only one landmark gets the "not everything has to be connected" note. There are 34 new fallouts to throw at your players and 29 adversaries with statblocks all told. New Blood's balance is flipped (more adversaries than fallouts), and it has less of both (17 adversaries, 14 fallouts). I went back to count and Dagger has 45 landmarks! Whew!

Final thoughts: the book does basically exactly what I thought it would! It's stuffed full of great pieces to scatter into my game, but doesn't quite excite me to use its story. Some of that might be that I'm not fully on board with the premise (I'd prefer a plot, even one with earth-shattering, status-quo-breaking potential, to be a little more distant from the "canon" - I don't want to relitigate the Vermissian Incident, I want that to be the fun springboard for current weirdness). But even beyond that, I'm a little let down by where the text imagines the story ends up, and with the structure (or lack thereof) on how to get there. I'm comparing & contrasting with the modules for Spire - those usually didn't have anything resembling a structure, but I didn't mind so much for them when the prep they gave you was so immediately playable. That said, it wasn't always immediately playable (and in those instances, I wanted more structure!). Dagger wants plotting and scheming, teased out over time, culminating in a dramatic showdown - the kind of stuff it'd be nice to have a little more scaffolding for! I'm noting it only because it's exactly the question I asked myself when writing New Blood - what would I need to read to make the adventure my own? I settled on an overview of what's happening absent player interference, seeding more specific prompts throughout landmarks about leads and what might change, and a handful of thoughts on how you might hack my ideas into a shape more suited for the contingencies of play. It's still awfully loose - I imagine that readers of New Blood, if there are any, will leverage a similar complaint, that the text doesn't quite support the adventure they're thinking of! Anyway, all that is to say that Dagger succeeds exactly where I hoped it would, and misses me precisely where I thought it would.

Maybe most excitingly, I think Dagger proves to me that Heart has got legs - even themed as strongly as it is, I think Heart can support a lot of different, weird, horrible adventures (and even more weird, horrible locations to fill with dangerous sidequests and delightful little freaks). Dagger makes me want to write another Heart adventure! But probably shorter next time.