Review: Bloodthirsty (for Heart: The City Beneath)

I've been continuing to mess around writing for Heart (in fact, you can read some more of my design work in the 70-page fanzine, recently published, which includes really fun writing from a plethora of others), so today I'm back with a review of Bloodthirsty, by E.R.F. Jordan! 

Bloodthirsty is a collection of materials: a new class, several new landmarks (which make up the bulk of the text), and a few pages of adversaries, with some new fallouts sprinkled throughout. It's largely without theme, not in any way to its detriment, but perhaps in contrast to the other (very few) things written for Heart. The handful of official materials by the original authors are quite small and focused in scope, and the other third party stuff (Ichor-Drowned, Corpus, and my own New Blood) have a central adventure that kind of drives the text. Dagger in the Heart might be closest; it does have a big plot line, but I think Dagger is at its strongest when giving you a bunch of weird places and terrible people. I'm pleased to report that I found much of Bloodthirsty to be delightful, particularly its landmarks!

First up is Bloodthirsty's class, which is also, it seems to me, where the supplement gets its name; the Strigoi. The in-fiction pitch is that something went wrong with the witch blood-disease, making you into a monster. The pitch for readers is that this is a vampire class! Interestingly, ARCANA pulled a similar maneuver, relating Witches to vampires. The mechanical core of the class is that it restricts how you recover Blood stress - you can only heal it by drinking the blood of people, fresh from the vein. Three of the minor advances modify that restriction. The major advances give you animal transformations and the ability to make thralls (very vampiric), among some other, more mechanical ones.

I am unfortunately not a very sympathetic reader here - I have never been especially interested in vampires from basically any angle, so the promise of the fiction isn't enough to float the class for me. It does seem like the class would support a pretty classically vampiric playstyle! But it's missing the vital spark that I associate with my favorite core classes. I wrote a little about this when I reviewed Called to the Heart, but to recap briefly here: I think my favorite core classes rise to the top because they sell me both on a powerful and idiosyncratic vision (wizard bees! train knight!) and often promise a cool little mechanism to play with. My anti-vampire bias maybe prevents me from appreciating how cool the vampire fiction is, but the mechanical pieces of the Strigoi also don't impress me - being a vampire seems kind of just like being anybody else, at least at the level of game mechanics.

But that's probably the most negative thing I have to say about all of Bloodthirsty. The solid majority of the text is given to the Landmarks, of which there are 21, and just about all of these struck me as immediately fun and exciting to drop into a game. Here are a few of my favorites: a church where the tubers growing in the catacombs contain slivers of divinity; a cavern-turned-artist-retreat due to the presence of slugs with "hyperpigmented" slime trails, now used to make paint; an abandoned technohorror facility where tanks full of comatose people are generating some kind of weird dream slurry; an enormous metal plain, covered in tar from the mysterious ironworks at the center, around which roving bands of mad-maxian pitchkin fight for dominance; the list goes on. Even for the landmarks that don't make me raise my eyebrows and say "I wish I'd thought of that!", several impress me with how quickly and easily they find the fun part of the premise. The Vermissian station caught in a time loop is pretty classic, but Bloodthirsty's Precipice Station is an excellent example of how to make that intriguing and playable. 

There are a few misses for me. I think that these fall into two camps. One is that some of the landmarks feel a little formulaic - take a kind of place and then put it next to something horrible or weird or both. Sometimes, the combination reveals a fun new angle in synthesis - Canvaston, the cave with weird slugs from before, I think transcends its pieces - but a handful are just a little flat. The second is that sometimes the concept just feels a little too detached for me to fill in the gaps. The Frozen Step, for example, is a Hound outpost at the top of an icy staircase, spiraling down infinitely and home to monsters and cannibals. I have no real expectations of realism in the Heart (so it gets a little bit of a pass from me for the material relations I'm usually looking for), but I think it is missing enough of the semblance of sense-making to turn me off the concept. Why would cannibals go there? Who are they eating? Where do the monsters come from? I do think vibes are more important to a landmark that rigorous answers to these kinds of questions, but sometimes they stick in my craw.

Each landmark also comes with two plots! Mostly these serve as prompts to introduce players to the central idea of the landmark; basically, nice little "here's what you could have players do when they get here" or "here's why they'd be coming here" play aids. This sometimes has the effect of showing to me why I was wrong to think of a landmark as boring - the potential plot to steal a doppelganger from The Crowd, for example, immediately turned me around on the Landmark. Sometimes, the plots pull back and twist the landmark to reveal a different facet, like the plot for The Venous Passages, which has players investigating a gestating Heartseed(!). All in all, these are usually great and just about always exactly the kind of thing I'd want to use to run a session.

Before moving on to the Adversaries section, I wanted to carve out a little space to talk about the fallouts included - even though there are a few fallouts in the Adversaries, most of them are part of the Landmarks. Bloodthirsty's fallouts remind me of why I really enjoy this system - even though the fallouts are pretty mechanically simple (to the point where I'd want to tweak them, probably, if I used them), they immediately can sell me on the fiction. Fallouts are just a really helpful tool, I think, to throw the fun & exciting dangers at your players! The format just works really well for me personally - "oh, this place has a fallout about running afoul of the attendants, so I'll make sure to think about social encounters in this landmark." I do wish a few more of them took greater liberties with the mechanics, but mostly because I'm just interested in what Jordan thinks are fun consequences.

Last up are the Adversaries! There are eight of them, and none are particularly complex. Jamie Bernstein, who edited and compiled the fanzine, described them as "fairytale" inspired, which I can kind of see - there are kobold-y Gold Eaters, pixie-like Sylphs, and lesser Minotaurs (the Minotaur in Heart is a legendary adversary; these are a little more manageable). I think the inspiration ends there, though. The most interesting to me of any of these is the "Rail Larva," described as an attempt by Deep Apiarists to commandeer Vermissian technology to make a bugmachine that could inscribe the Heart with sacred geometry. Whatever happened, they made a big insect train, which is exactly the kind of idea I want to read more of. The Sawbolt adversary is fun to me too - they're described as ancient malfunctioning medical automata, on an eternal quest to heal the denizens of the Heart, which they accomplish by performing impromptu prosthetics surgery (and then the magic of the Heart makes that work). Gruesome and fun! I think just about each of the adversaries gives me a little something to chew on, just enough to give an encounter a little flavor.

That's Bloodthirsty! I think it's a great pickup for anyone who's looking for more landmarks and adversaries for their game of Heart. I'd be very interested to hear from others about the Strigoi class (especially if my vampire apathy has blinded me to how cool it actually is).