Archive Delving - Ways and Means

I'm back for another archive delve! I'm not digging very deeply - I'm reading Ways and Means, the (semi) recent supplement for Heart: The City Beneath! I took a quick glance through a few weeks ago, but I haven't had a chance to really sit down and grapple with anything yet. I'm excited to read!

Ways and Means is the first official supplement of its kind - the Burned and Broken supplement added a new calling, the Minister, but there have been no new official classes, nor anything else quite so player facing. And actually, the additive nature of the title is also an organizing principle of the supplement. The first half of the book is given to "Ways" and concerns all that player facing material, and the "Means" are in the back, and are for GMs (and in the printed copy, the text flips upside down, to prevent nosy players from learning GM secrets). I opted only for the pdf, and not any of the other add-ons from the crowdfunding campaign, so my thoughts will be limited only to the text, and my pdf doesn't even flip! Probably for the best.

The first half, Ways, has three sections - one for callings and classes, one for equipment and resources, and one for hirelings, which are entirely new to this supplement, and based on what little I saw, probably my favorite thing in the book.

Callings are up first! I've written a lot about callings, so here's an attempt at a quick recap of my feelings on them and what I'm looking for. Callings are a really tricky piece of design! Callings 1. answer the questions "why is this character here in the horrible dungeon?" and "why with these other characters?" 2. gesture towards a general character arc, from backstory all the way to conclusion; 3. accomplish the former with a list of "beats" - things players choose to attempt / suffer in order to level up; and 4. give the player character a small ability. It's hard to make all those feel cohesive, and the beat list in particular can be wildly variable. I think the best callings can immediately provide both players and GMs with an intuitive sense about what will be fun for the character, what opportunities and challenges to steer for, and help propel drama and characterization. But those are kind of big asks for a game piece that's almost entirely just a list of some things to do!

There are four new callings here. The first is Artist, "an eccentric creative who has chosen to dive into the unreality of the City Beneath in search of a muse, inspiration, or impossible substances" in order to create their great work. It grants the ability to take D6 mind stress to reroll all the dice in a pool. My first reaction is a little hesitant - the first place my mind goes is to goofy bard-y shenanigans that don't really match the tone I'm interested in for Heart. To boot, I think that the central fiction, seeking inspiration for a grand work, fits pretty neatly inside Enlightenment. But the beats turn it around for me! Some of them lean a little into that whimsy that I'm skeptical of ("find a  capricious reason to take on a terrible job") but many more of them I think point to some interesting and tough decisions. "Lose the use of your dominant hand" is an awesome Major beat!

Second is Containment, which pulls on some fiction from Dagger in the Heart and leans into some SCP Foundation-esque inspiration. The ability here gives the opportunity to take D6 Mind stress to gain a domain for the situation. The beats here are pretty good, but don't accomplish quite the same turnaround that the Artist's beats did. I think the fiction here is pretty useful - I think it makes a lot of sense to have a backstory or motivation around "stuff is bad and I want to fix it!" But there are fewer surprises in the Beats list. They're all functional, and a handful are exciting, but none of them provoke me to reimagine the character arc or challenge my preconceptions about it. I'm a little mixed on the ability, too. The ability is fairly powerful - exactly how powerful is tough to say, since it will depend a lot on how many rolls you make in a situation, but getting a domain for a situation usually means +1 die for everything. I imagine you can probably use it to pick up a knack, too. But my bigger frustration is that it doesn't really feel tapped into the fiction I was imagining. I think the aim is to make the character feel competent, like we might imagine someone who did this kind of thing as their job, but it mostly just feels kind of power-gamey to me. As a comparison point, I'd gesture towards The Machine agenda in Cain, which has a power called The Work - at any time, you can take 1 stress to get +1D on any action related to the work of being an exorcist. But the stress cost increases by 1, and you can only use the ability up until the first time you rest. Heart can't copy this structure exactly, but I think the scaling really sells the fantasy - you're devoted to the job, but it's killing you slowly, the more you give yourself to it.

Third is Demagogue, which has come to the heart to amass followers for its ideological goals. I do like my Heart to be social, but my first impulse is again a little skeptical - my thought is that it feels a little more appropriate for Spire. But there's enough here that makes me interested. The ability grants the character the Compel skill, which is immediately already quite good, gives you a number of followers, and then says you can use your followers to reduce the difficulty of any action by one step, at the risk of assigning stress to those followers. I like just about all of the minor beats, and most of the major beats, although I think especially the major beats could use a little more variation in tone.

The fourth and final calling is Protector, which is all about being self-sacrificing. It's quite easy to imagine why such a character would come to the Heart, but I do think it's a little odd that there's no textual explanation. Even the Demagogue got some italicized flavor text implying that they've been kicked out of Spire/the world above by the authorities and the Heart is their last hope. Protector is just down here because it's where the most people need protecting. The ability lets them double their protection value once per session. The beats are still pretty good but again the major beats don't all hit for me, and play out pretty same-y. I think I'd almost always pick Penitent over Protector - they have very similar emotional resonance for me, but the Penitent's implied character arc is more fun.

Next up are the classes! There are four of these as well. The first is the Blightborn, which is all about mushrooms growing out of your body. I am far too invested to be objective here - I am a sicko for mushroom stuff, and my own mushroom focused Heart class is made to my own taste. Nevertheless, I mean to go into this with an open mind and open heart. The core ability is about spreading mushroom spores, and you have the ability to communicate to anyone so infected. And I'm impressed and excited by a number of the minor abilities! Especially with how efficient so many of them are - Biofluorescence gives you the delve skill and lets you grow in the dark. Cloud colony gives you a "smoke" weapon and allows you to infect anyone in the vicinity. Invasive procedures gives you the Mend skill and gives all NPCs afflicted with your spores scaling protection - including adversaries! The Major abilities let you rot things with a touch, puppet a corpse, send someone on a mushroom trip, transform into a variety of animal forms, and replace fallout with mushrooms. The zeniths let you become immortal by passing through the bodies of anyone you've infected, escape into fungal heaven, or extrude all your mushrooms into an area, destroying it (but becoming normal).

In general, I like it quite a bit. There are a few pieces I find frustrating or disappointing. I don't care at all about the core ability and spreading spores / infecting others (although I can appreciate that focus in a supplement that is, at least in some way, about introducing hireling rules). Unlike my favorite Heart classes, the Blightborn has nothing to do with the history or society of the Heart - there is no culture or tradition of mushroom infections, this appears to just have been something that happens to some people. There are a few mechanical choices I would have made differently. In general I think it's missing the juice of a Deep Apiarist or Deadwalker, but that also means there's plenty of room to do your own thing with it. 

Second is the Crawler! The vibe I get is a dungeon-sicko - someone who's so devoted to dungeon delving that they will never leave the Heart, and so the Heart turns them into the perfect tool for dungeon delving. The core abilities let you turn resources or equipment into immediate delve progress, and grant you treasure on critical successes. The minor abilities give you things like quantum inventory, affinity for rats (we'll come back to this), a nomadic eyeball that can see in the dark, "detect secret doors", and a skeleton key. The major abilities let you reshape your flesh into delving equipment (or later, weapons), alchemize potions or explosives, cast a spell to bring a shadow to life, summon traps, or conjure a door to a saferoom. The Zenith abilities give you your secret desire, let you become the master of a personal dungeon, or become the Heart's perfect creature.

I have a noted fondness for thief-y characters with an affinity for rats, but I think I can keep a little more distance. I like this also pretty well! There's a greater degree of overlap, actually, between my Packrat and this Crawler, than I was expecting. For example, the Crawler's Saferoom major ability winds up functioning pretty similarly to the Packrat's Tunnel. They can both summon traps, have quantum inventory, and can kind of "generate" treasure! On the other end of things, the spell to animate shadows is the kind of idea I wish I had, and an early contender for my favorite thing in the book.

There are very few things I don't like, and they're fairly small quibbles. I do think four spell-like abilities at major is too many, for example. The one I'd cut would probably be the alchemy (which, to be fair, is only kind of spell-like), and of course I'm not very objective there as I have strong opinions on alchemy as well. I think the kick in the door ability for kill is kind of off theme (this is maybe also particular to me - I think of the Crawler as an OSR player, not a beer & pretzels D&D guy). I'm a little low on the giving treasure ability. But my biggest complaint once again is that I think the class's identity is only partially formed. I would make the same complaint about the Blightborn again here - the Crawler has very little context in the world and thus has very little to distinguish it from anybody else, particularly the Cleaver, who is also playing in the "body horror fleshwarp" space. But even more than that, my problem with the Crawler is that it seems to me like a calling! The Crawler seems to me to be mostly about why the character is in the Heart - they're here because they want to delve dungeons until they die. In particular, I think you can tell in the Zeniths. Only the Dungeon Master Zenith really hits for me. Getting your heart's reward is funny, but the definition of identity-less - that's what everyone is here to get! And turning into a heartsblood monster is essentially identical to the Cleaver turning into an Angel.

At the end of the day, I'm not terribly excited about the Crawler, and I think its the identity piece that's why. Just about all the mechanical pieces do click for me! But the fiction of them doesn't do much for me.

Third is the Snail Pilgrim! And immediately, any concerns I might have about lack of identity are addressed - this is a character who walks around with an entire haven in the shell on their back, distilled into a goo, and decantable wherever there is space! Minor abilities commonly add new structures to your carried haven, and the "general" minor ability for taking skills adds a new resident to the haven who is the source of your new talent. The major abilities add a cannon to your shell, turn you into a beacon of strength, add a powerful haunt to your haven, and pick up a landmark to carry within your shell too. There's also a major ability that turns your shell into a pocket dimension, so the haven just sort of teleports instead of emerging out of goo, which I can't imagine ever being an upgrade (breaking kayfabe, the ability is actually quite good). The zeniths have you pass on your shell and act like Goku with the weights off, turn into a slug kaiju, and/or ascend to heaven, or turn the landmark you're in into a more appropriate heaven.

What a good time! You can definitely tell that this one was written by someone not on RRD's core team. Some of that is that the tone is delightfully different. Some of that is that the mechanical implementation of the abilities doesn't totally gel with my usual understanding of the game. The major ability Opener of the way, for example, gives you permission to "perform a feat of incredible strength, overcoming some obstacle..." - some very exciting narrative freedom there, but a little more ambiguous than we usually get in a Heart ability. I have a small quibble with the minor abilities, in that I think it's a little odd to have given the Pilgrim direct access to the skills kill and evade. And if I wanted to, I could remark that this also has some confusion between calling and class - it seems like you're down here for pilgrimage reasons. But mostly I don't care, because the idea of playing a Snail Pilgrim and decanting a town just sounds like a blast. This is why I make such a fuss about a strong identity for the class! If the identity is strong, and the abilities are exciting, then who cares if it's not perfect?

Finally, the Witness. The Witness is a bard-y class. The core abilities let you sing a song that grants bonuses to allies who stand near you, and get bonuses for witnessing other people accomplish their beats. Minor abilities let you turn resources into mementos, give you access to a camera, spread word that you're coming to kill people, and beseech random gods for aid. Major abilities let you  summon stock characters, charm person,  get bonuses from intimate time, help others better, and perform for a crowd. Zeniths see you explode into a memetic virus, perform the perfect song, or set up a pub/performance space deep in the Heart where future adventurers can visit to rest and recuperate. 

Just as I cannot be objective about mushroom stuff, I don't know that I can be objective here - I am the wrong audience for bard stuff. Unlike my feelings on vampires, which are largely neutral, I have great disdain for the kind of wacky antics or faux-promiscuity of the pop culture bard. There are a few places where I think my sense of a design problem is not driven merely by personal distaste. In general, there are just a lot of ways to grant and acquire extra dice, at very little cost. Giving a domain to anyone nearby is a huge boon - one with an obvious lever for the GM to pull (separate them!), but is otherwise incredibly reliable and most importantly free. Broad spectrum theologist gives access to a mastery die for as long as you don't suffer Major fallout - a condition which is now dramatically less likely to happen because you get to roll an additional die for nearly anything. Onward, to glory turns your first risky or dangerous action roll into a normal roll. At Major, you get the ability to offer help dice much more cheaply, and can even grant two dice at a time. Giving extra dice to people (including yourself) is just about the most "powerful" thing you can do in Heart, and the Witness can do it better than anyone. In addition, the Witness has a lot of opportunities to heal or mitigate stress and fallout, including throwing around free healing when characters accomplish their beats - which the game directs you to happen at least once per session per character. I also noted the Lucky fighter ability, which completely negates (in fact, redirects!) incoming stress if that stress is the max on the die rolled. Of course, sometimes that will do nothing, but it means that the average damage the Witness suffers is less than any other character. 

Finally, I'm going to make the same observation I've been making - it seems to me as though the Witness is its own calling, and mostly is about answering why they're in the Heart, rather than how they survive in the Heart. They're not here for penitence or revenge or because they're a minister, they're here because they want to witness things. Granted, you could probably fold Adventure in here, and Artist will work fine, but it seems to me that any calling will be playing second fiddle to the true calling, which is watching other people be adventurers. This is again mostly a question of taste! But it sticks out to me as a missed opportunity, or an indicator of a muddled identity.

Those are the classes! From a design standpoint I think there's a lot of good and interesting stuff here, although a lot of it doesn't work for me. I'm already thinking of doing an ability-by-ability deep dive into each... Stay tuned if that's the kind of thing that's interesting to you.

We have a few more sections still in the "Ways" half of the book. This next section is on equipment and resources. It's about 25 pages worth that's just a big list of items! There is plenty here that is delightful - magic candles, magic bells, holy relics, cursed items, spells, clothes... lot of great stuff here. I think that this kind of stuff is exactly the grit and detail that makes Heart so special to me. I want more magic bells! I want to learn more about moonsilver, the metal which grows around shrines to the goddess of the moon beneath! I particularly love some of the spells, which have very evocative material components and ritual action requirements, and no game mechanical way to shortcut them. To cast Abeyance of Blood, you're gonna have to find some medical textbooks! To play The Hangman's Game, you must find old nails from guillotines or the like! I like all the clothes as well, particularly that the text grants them all resource dice sizes - you might have to sell the shirt off your back for medical care in the Heart.

There's a sizeable section on arts and culture, which includes a variety of tools and instruments, pigments & paints, and even artistic movements. The movements are a bit hit or miss for me, but I do love the gesture of them towards the social scene of the Heart (and a few of them are very cool). The artistic tools & paints & etc are very fun to me. Special shout out to Sculptor's Dynamite.

The next big section is for Delver Trappings, which includes odd delving equipment and drugs. Lots of great stuff in this section, including some bug traps, ghost-vision glasses, and fish-eye lamps that don't shine light but give you psychic impressions of where it shines.

I want to spend just a small moment on the drugs. First, there's a special callout here that the topic is sensitive, and should be approached with safety tools. I think this is appropriate, and even good. What I think I would like, though, is a little designer commentary on why drugs are here! I think they make a lot of sense for Heart - the job is dangerous, joys are fleeting and hard to come by in the first place, and the game is deeply about desire, self destruction, and clawing desperately for even the slightest advantage. Drugs fit right in! Or at least to me seem to advance a resonant theme. I wish that the text would address the camera and speak about why they're here, what they can do for the game, etc. Ok, serious talk over. The fallouts for drug use say "increase the difficulty of all Mind checks" - what the heck is a Mind check? Any check that risks Mind fallout? That's a very cool way of selecting between actions, so I dig it, but I wish the text were a little clearer.

I don't have much to say about cuisine, except that I appreciate its inclusion! There are some fun entries. I'm the kind of sicko who wants even more on, like, what are the staple crops down here? Is there farming or is everything imported from Spire? Etc.

Guns! All of the guns are great, all of the writeups have a lot of character and are fun glimpses into a small but very relevant part of the world. Explosives! Just a few of these but similarly delightful. The maze dust vial, made of the ground-up bones of someone who had been afflicted by the labyrinth curse, and which makes victims hallucinate they're trapped in a maze - that's the stuff I come to Heart for.

Finally, there is a small set of renowned equipment, "legendary" items, in that we're told there is only one of each. I think these are also all good - I wish they were slightly more daring in terms of mechanical weirdness, but all of the stories are rich in detail and specificity, which I find is the best kind of inspiration for making my own.

The final section of the Ways half is for hirelings (and animals)! I think good hireling rules can have a big effect on play; if the rules are too finnicky or complicated, then a lot of players won't bother - but if there isn't enough of a scaffold for players to help set expectations, it can feel daunting or unfulfilling to try and simulate and keep track of a whole bunch of other characters. 

The new rules here are pretty straightforward, and, pleasing to me, provides a reason to care about Heart's bond mechanic. Spire had bonds because you all lived in the big dystopian megalopolis - those kinds of stories and adventures are perfect for a stable supporting cast. But in my games of Heart, it never felt crucial or even particularly useful to establish any bonds. The intended use case is that you can offload some of your stress to them (typically mind stress, but supplies stress is probably possible - blood, fortune, and echo are a little too personally embodied, usually). Additionally, there are some rules for bond actions, asking your friend to do something for you, but those dice pools don't ever get very big. Bonds absorb stress (either from you or a bond action) and then test for fallout, and as they accrue fallout the relationship gets worse (and/or the person with whom you have a bond dies).

Hirelings work awfully similarly, but have a few twists. First, you can't dump your stress on to your hireling, presumably because this is a professional relationship. Second, and obviously, the hireling will be coming with you on the adventure, which does also mean that they can take fallout from the stuff that happens during the adventure. Third, related to the joining you on the adventure, is that hirelings have an ability, and if the ability is relevant, you can get their assistance on a check and take an extra die. That's basically all of the strictly defined rules - the few other pieces that I took notice of were that hirelings count towards your maximum number of bonds (3), a detail I had completely forgotten about, and that hirelings can be controlled by either the player or the GM! That's neat - I like the flexibility there. 

There are also a few pieces clarifying how hirelings take stress. All stress hirelings take is tracked on a single track, and they can also have protection, which functions just as it does for PCs and other NPCs. Even though hirelings don't have different resistances, the text makes allowances for protection to sometimes be only for specific kinds of stress. I think this is a cool idea, but it does make me wonder about the central dice mechanic. This and the drug fallouts make me think that RRD expects rolls to always know upfront what kind of stress is being risked. I think establishing that is a great idea, but I don't know that I've ever noticed it as explicitly textual. Anyway! The single-resistance track is interesting, and it makes me wonder how it plays, because it's a little tough for me to estimate the consequences. The text asserts that this is done so that "[hirelings] can't suffer as much damage as the average delver," But does that "can't suffer as much" mean "they are not as hardy as an average delver and will succumb more quickly" or "the game mechanics will prevent hirelings from suffering as much as the average delver"? My first instinct is that predominantly, the single track will make hirelings lean towards the latter interpretation, since every fallout they suffer clears their track, whereas delvers will often keep stress in other resistances for future suffering.

Finally, the last genius piece about hirelings is that they often come with unique fallouts. There's a small handful of general hireling fallouts, and textual permission to adapt the standard player-character fallouts if so desired. But I do truly think that having a shortlist of fun and particular consequences to hit hirelings with, even if they're fairly obvious, is the key to making this part of the game run. Having the dangling threat ready to deploy is I think what makes Heart such a joy.

There isn't much else to say about hirelings except to point out some of my favorite tidbits! There are a full 25 "classes" of hirelings here enumerated, and each comes with a short example character with a small writeup, in addition to the "statblock." The Fetching Accessory is a small pet who is almost preternaturally adorable - its fallouts make everyone drop what they're doing to give it attention or saddle you with an obsessed stalker who is determined to wrest your pet from you. The example here is also notable in that it introduces a (very small) mechanical benefit not suggested in the text! As an inveterate tinkerer, I do really love it when the text points towards its own incompleteness, and prompts players and GMs to think about how they can make the game their own. The Gleeman is a stab at a bard that mostly lands for me, even if the comedy is a bit slapstick. The Heartologist has a combination heal + lore dump ability that I find endearing. You can hire a guy who's whole thing is carrying a ten foot pole (technically telescoping so maybe longer even). You can acquire a Scapegoat, a ritually anointed goat who can take everyone's current fallouts and then depart into the wilderness (to potentially return later, deeply changed by the experience). This rules, but it is a piece of rules text that I think could probably use a little more scaffolding - as written, this is a very cheap way to clear as many fallouts as you could desire, and it doesn't seem like there's much reason to take the goat with you on a delve, which is absolutely the thing I want to see. The Torchbearer gets a very loving writeup and the example given, a torchbearer who loves darkness and wants to see as many kinds of it as possible, is just perfect. The Vital Apparatus, a mobile alchemy lab / medical station / herb garden / etc, is so extremely my kind of thing that I'm kicking myself for not landing on this expression of the idea (although I might argue that my Myco-Alchemist is in fact me doing something similar). Every single one of these I think would be a joy to bring to the table, and I immediately want to come up with some adventures that put the spotlight on some choice hirelings. 

That's it for Ways! Next up are the Means. The general purpose of this half is to arm the GM with a variety of fun things to throw at the players. There are three categories of GM armaments; Arcane Artefacts (more magic items, but perhaps of greater power/complexity); a "Bounty Board," a bunch of sidequests / short adventure hooks; and a list of delve events for each domain, ready to be inserted into any delve of one's desiring. I don't have as much to say here as the design work is not really the load bearing part of any of these, but there are some that really work for me and some that I'm less sold on and maybe that will be interesting to you.

First up, the arcane artefacts. To me, the thing that really distinguishes these from the "renowned" quality items earlier is that these, we're told, all originate as backer ideas from the crowdfunding campaign. There's an enchanted coffin which mirrors and refracts the soul of anyone inside, restoring them from any malady including death; there's the pocket arcanotech vizier / LLM analogue; there's a dragon egg, a spider-goddess lyre, a prokatakos hand, a creepy magic doll... Each comes with a few paragraphs of fiction, as well as an adventure hook. These, like the items themselves, are a little variable. A couple look fun to use, but none of them jump out so strongly that I'm itching to throw them in a game. 

The most interesting "mechanically" to me are a set of necklaces that are supposed to allow wearers to transmit their consciousness from one necklace to the other - but actually, some "malicious intelligence" emerges from the device upon use, and overwhelms the mind of the person on the other end. Cool! Slightly tricky but very interesting to me because the text also suggests obscuring that consequence from the players, including giving them a decoy fallout. I like the gist of it, although I'm often less comfortable with actually lying to my players at my table. On the other side of things, the haunted doll item really doesn't do much of anything for me.

Next up is the Bounty Board. These all adhere to a pretty similar structure - they come with a hook to get the players interested, a few paragraphs explaining what's really going on,  and then a few things like important characters, thoughts on possible actions / outcomes, and mechanical text, like delves & adversaries. Broadly, my feeling on these is that I just want more detail!! This might be the kind of sicko that I am, but I don't really need a bunch of one page short ideas - I'm pretty good at coming up with the one page short idea. The toolbox items are nice - a quick delve, some statblocks and new adversaries, that's great! But it's the rare one of these that makes me feel like I've found something I wouldn't have thought of in a few minutes.

I do have one favorite - the bounty board posting that looks like a textbook escort mission is actually an assassination. The delvers pick up the job for some dissipated scion who, to the chagrin of his family, is soon to become the inheriting heir. So the family counter hires you to kill him and make it look like he died on the journey. That's great! It feels very much like a Spire mission, which is in no way a knock against it. The runner-up is about an old delver who's been warped by the Heart into becoming an anglerfish-like predator, which deploys the bodies of those it kills to lure further victims into its deadly trap-quest. The imagery is delightful and I think the structure of the quest is great and easily hackable. The pig union quest is just very amusing to me.

There are only a handful that I really don't vibe with - the mail delivery one just doesn't have enough detail to make me feel confident or excited about the additional difficulty that's supposed to come with delivering the cursed mail, and I'm not excited enough about the premise to want to do that work myself. The other escort quest has a bucket list that I find a little overbearingly melodramatic. The deep apiarist bee bequeathing mission has all the hallmarks of the stuff I love, but is kind of only the broadest outline of a quest ("here are some example factions who could want to take the queen bee!" kind of design). All in all, I think I'm simply not the target audience for this kind of GM tool, and I don't view it too negatively.

The final section is the rather enormous list of delve events! 17 pages of them! And they're all pretty long, in contrast to the usually single-sentence entries that delves usually devote to their event list.I like a lot of them, but liking them is hardly even the point - this is a phenomenal resource to have and compare against and be inspired by. Even the simplest ones get a little color to help distinguish them - one of the Cursed domain events summons a person mid-transformation into a heartsblood angel. She's determined to "[shear] the imposter flesh" of the delvers to reveal the bodies of her family. Simple! Effective! Is it the kind of thing I'm likely to use in my game? Eh, not really. But extremely good for getting in the mindset of "what can happen on a Cursed delve?"

I will just call out a few favorites - the cursed event that drops the delvers into a gallbladder cave; the swamp which is actually some enormous ooze; the obsidian glass wasteland with a single, gross apple tree; a magical ruin made of the unfinished love song to a god, which has turned contagious and all-devouring; the chorus of sobbing worshippers, using the acoustics of the ribcage of a dead leviathan, and the tragic wailing is so powerful as to draw up the delvers' buried sorrows; the spider bog.

That's Ways and Means! I'm a little disappointed by some of what we might call the "traditional" design work (much of the design work of the classes and callings, as well as some of the sidequests), but both the list of hirelings and the list of delve events are great resources, and I am excited to use them, or mine them for ideas to turn into my own stuff.