Design Study - The Snail Pilgrim from Ways and Means

Part three of four in my deep dive into the class design in Ways and Means! Today's blog is on the Snail Pilgrim, a holy wanderer with the weight of a world on their back. The goal is to talk mostly about the mechanical design, with some reference to the thematic elements and how the two inform each other, to see what works for me and what doesn't.

Intro

The Snail Pilgrim takes a pretty big swing with its concept - the idea is that you've been tasked by some divine entity to seek revelation/salvation/etc in the Heart, and you've taken your community with you, turned into goo inside a shell that you carry on your back. In general, I'm a fan of big swings, and I'd even say that specifically I think this one is extremely cool. 

I have a few hesitations about the concept. First, this class is, once again, mostly a calling in my opinion! That is, the class is answering the question "why are you in the Heart?" and only answers the question "how do you hack it in the Heart?" in sort of a roundabout way. I like the answer! But so far I've been finding that the classes that approach their design from this angle have wound up feeling a little confused in their identity. We'll see if that's the case with the pilgrim.

Two, it's ambiguous where I would prefer it to be specific. I have a tough time vibing with the Heretic, because religious characters don't do a lot for me, but all the stuff that does work for me is picking up ideas about the tripartite goddess/es of the moon beneath, and keying into the history and culture of all of that. I like inventing those details on my own, but part of the thing that draws me to Heart is how opinionated its design is, and how deeply embedded in the world its (core) classes are. Now, this is the one class from the supplement that we know the author of, and it's not the author of the core book, so it's maybe not entirely fair to hold it to the same expectations, or want a tantalizing image of a culture of worshippers of the snail god. I intend to be generous - but I want to make note of my preference again at the top.

Third, I am skeptical of the entire concept - I just don't know, at the outset, that I think a Snail Pilgrim is going to hang together nicely with, say, a Junk Mage and a Cleaver. It seems like the things a Snail Pilgrim gets up to might be somewhat orthogonal to the things other delvers get up to. We'll find that out too.

Core Abilities

The Snail Pilgrim has a lot of ground to cover in order to set up their fundamental deal.

First things first, the defining feature of the Snail Pilgrim is their Pilgrim Shell. This core ability grants +1 blood protection, and gives them the option of once per session retreating into the shell - this negates a single fallout, but steps down all their "action roll" dice (from D10 to D8) until the end of the session, or until they take off the shell. We've seen stepping down or up before, but never about the D10s for the core dice pool! That's pretty wild. The ability to just not take a fallout is pretty strong, too. You keep pretty good odds of a success on the D8s; ~60% success on a normal 2D8 roll, ~75% on a normal 3D8 roll (vs 75% and 87.5%, respectively, for 2D10 and 3D10), but it's much more likely that you take stress on the D8. Interesting choice, although it gets more and more "free" the longer you wait to use it in a session.

It's already been alluded to, but just as carrying the shell is of utmost importance, so too is the act to Remove [your] Shell. This decants the haven carried in your shell, at the cost of a suitable resource, and requires a significant space for the haven to spread out over. The text has suggestions about what kind of landmarks are likely suitable, based on their domain. The decanting process takes 12 hours, minus the size of the resource sacrificed, and half as long to scoop back up. There's an odd bit of text here that suggests you can swap people in and out, but it's on a one for one basis - it sounds like you can't stock up too many people, for whatever reason.

There are a couple extra sections in the core traits section, after the core skill (endure) and domain (haven), and the equipment (notably, a D10 resource, larger than usual, and a mend supplies item, the first time I think I've seen one actually listed out this way). After all those, there are two additions. The first sets some expectations around the haven you're carrying (most notably to me, it establishes that the haven has only "one or two structures and a small handful of people at most." The second lists a few options for the god that's involved - apparently, snail pilgrimages are an interfaith affair.

I'm getting on board! Imagining a haven coalescing out of goo is very fun, and I am excited to try to get it to happen in a game. I like that it comes at the cost of a resource, and the fact that there is no mechanical benefit to do so is sticking to my brain in a fun way. Not everything has to reward you / some rewards are non-mechanical! But it does seem as though, just in terms of core abilities, that the biggest core aspect of the Snail Pilgrim is that they have a burden. That's interesting and very thematic!

Core Abilities

Astralpod: grants the sneak skill and fuses your legs together into a pseudopod that confers a myriad of uses. You can cling to walls and ceilings, you can float on water, and you can even traverse "spiritual places such as dreams..." Huh! I'm on the record as enjoying the body horror aspect of the game, so I'm well disposed to anything that fuses limbs together into a pseudopod. The fact that it grants sneak is very funny. The text about moving through dreams, etc, is a little out there - it's a big abstraction without clear mechanical interpretation, and as weird as some Heart and Spire pieces are, that's actually quite rare in the core books. It's one of the things I noted on my quick skim that make this class stand out as by a guest writer. I don't think it's bad by any means! But I do think it will require some expectation setting. In this case, it doesn't sound to me as though the Pilgrim necessarily has any way to get into dreams or other spiritual places, so I think the ability is largely just permission to keep on crawling through or around any obstacle, including weird metaphysical spaces.

Beast of Holy Burden: +2 supplies protection, and your haven gets a new structure, a building that can store bulky or Awkward resources. In addition, you can vomit up slime, once per session, conjuring some useful item that was in your haven. Listed examples of things you might get from your haven are things like “a weapon” or “delve equipment” or “a piece of furniture” or perhaps something slapstick like “a bridge” or “an anvil”. Anything that’s been established to have been present in your haven. 

I think this is neat. I like caring about inventories & specific items, but I don’t really like having to do a rigorous accounting  – this seems to me like a good compromise, where some stuff is made concrete in the fiction, and the stakes are about your town. Sure you could vomit up the town’s bridge, but what is little Timmy gonna do if it breaks? How’s he gonna get to school in the morning? 

The one thought in my brain is that this is more of a complete ability than most classes get with their protection bonuses. I don’t think it’s a huge problem. For one thing, the consequences of supplies fallout are usually less dire than other fallouts, so supplies protection is maybe less valuable. And this ability doesn’t actually create items ex nihilo, but requires you to have already had them. The thing it really adds is a way to deal with big or awkard-tagged items, which is certainly useful but not really the sort of thing that makes me think “wow! Powerful!” Still, it’s maybe something to watch out for – the Junk Mages or Incarnadines of the world might balk at taking their measly, ability-less supplies protection in a world of Snail Pilgrims. 

Divine Providence: grants the religion domain, and the ability to ask for charity from haven dwellers or occult, technological, or religious domain folks. They must help you or else give you a D6 resource (or greater, if they’re feeling really charitable). 

I think this is probably mostly a free D6 resource each session, although there is a full half of domains that won’t help you. The resource is probably more valuable than the help, but maybe this opens up a new hireling, or another NPC who could become associated with your haven. Simple and pretty sweet. I’d probably make it so that it’s once per visit, rather than once per session, but that’s picking nits. 

Eyestalks: grants the discern skill, and implies that your eyes are now on stalks, that can extend around corners, etc.  Neat! I think this is a little more marginal than the similar Astralpod, which opens more transformative modes of movement. It’s hard to be too mad, but I think this ability could be punchier / do a little more for the Pilgrim. 

 

Friend! Blessed Friend!: the generic skill advance, EXCEPT that to take it you must have a willing new resident to join your haven that can represent the skill you’re acquiring. For your extra effort, you also get a new structure connected to the skill / the new resident, and you roll with mastery whenever your haven is deployed, since you can get help from the new resident. 

I really like this! It turns the generic skill into something exciting and cool, while still keeping the flexibility and utility, and without adding too much “power.” The Snail Pilgrim’s list of skills they can choose from is compel, discern, hunt, mend, kill, and sneak, which means they’re missing three, the most any class has missed so far; delve, endure, and evade.  Endure is kind of a tough one to externalize, since it’s not exactly clear to me that it’s much of a “skill” in the same way as these others. And delve and evade both show up as minor advances, so they’re just excluded from the usual path to mastery / knacks. 

 

The Flesh Changes: generic protection, +1 in blood, mind, echo, or supplies. Another class who can’t access fortune protection! 

 

Hardened Shell: +2 blood protection. No associated ability this time. This combo (+2 supplies & +2 blood) is the same as the Deadwalker’s. 

 

Martyrdom: grants the cursed domain and the ability to take fallout for your residents. I would probably rule this to include your hirelings, as long as your hirelings are believers / are on the pilgrimage / sometimes take residence in your town. Definitely useful, but probably taking stress is even better, since it’s easier to load up on protection on yourself. 

Pilgrim Trail: grants the delve skill. After completing a delve, you can mark it with slime, which halves the resistance of the delve for as long as the slime trail endures. I like encouraging backtracking, but I wish this felt just more solid, or there were a way for the player to keep their hands on the lever a little – this could be an alternative way to establish a connection or etc. 

Pilgrim Ways: the generic domain advance. Pick from cursed, desolate, occult, technology, warren, or wild. Notably, neither the religion nor haven domains show up here, the two which seem like obvious choices. I probably would have nixed technology and kept the other two, if forced to miss one. 

 

Radula Sword: grants the kill skill, and the ability to conjure a weapon by taking D8 blood stress. The weapon has a special version of the “tiring” tag – normally, failing with a tiring weapon steps the die down for the rest of the situation, but this tiring tag is permanent (until the sword is remade by taking more stress), so seems to me to be representing the degradation of the weapon.  

The weapon is pretty good – it's got brutal, so even after going down to D6, it’s still got a higher average than a non-brutal D8 weapon, and it’s got bloodbound, so you can take stress to roll with mastery, which will make the tiring less likely to happen. The D8 blood stress is nothing to sneeze at, though. And it’s rare to get this good of a weapon as a minor advance. The most comparable is the Deadwalker, who gets to turn their “Death’s attention” into a D8 ranged, one shot weapon. My feeling is that this is tough but fair, and maybe even a touch strong, since the Snail Pilgrim starts with some blood protection and can pick up more. 

Refuge: add a D6 haunt for a resistance of your choice, and add it to your haven. It can be upgraded like normal haunts. You can pick this advance multiple times, just like the other generic advances. I think this makes a lot of sense, and the ability to bring a haunt with you is pretty useful! Particularly once you can guarantee healing for major fallouts (which happens at D8). Most places have blood haunts, but bringing a big echo, fortune, or mind haunt with you will probably save you a lot of trouble. 

Slug of God: grants the evade skill, and the ability to squeeze through even the smallest gap (although you must leave your shell behind if you do). 

It’s a cute little ability, although the cost, leaving the shell behind, seems pretty steep. I don’t think I would have put evade on the table for these guys. They already have four skills, although it seems like the more contemporary design ethos is to grant more skills than domains. I’ll have more thoughts about that after I see the Witness. 

 

That’s it for the minor abilities! As I mentioned at the end there, the Snail Pilgrim walks away with 5 skills (delve, discern, kill, sneak, and evade), and 2 domains (cursed and religion). The biggest quibble I have here is that I probably would have highlighted different skills and domains. But otherwise, most of the abilities seem interesting and useful, with a few small exceptions. I think it’s interesting that the haunt-making advance seems to have come at the cost of a skill or domain advance – the total remains the same as usual at 13, with only 7 assigned to a skill or domain, against the usual 8. But in general, the adaptation of the format to fit the big weird thing about this class is inspiring. I love the idea of getting new people and having them be the source of skills – it makes me immediately invested in keeping them safe, for one thing! 

Major Abilities 

Fortress of the Snail: your shell grows towers and battlements, including a cannon, which is a D8, ranged, reload, spread, obscuring weapon. The upgrades add a belltower, with which you can take mind stress in order to hasten the time it takes to manifest the haven, you can make your shell become a castle when the haven manifests, large enough for the whole town to shelter in, or you can make the cannon autonomous, so it will fire even if you are incapacitated (although the text notes that it still must be reloaded manually). 

Pretty fun! Here’s the major advance special weapon I was talking about. This one is maybe a little less impressive in the damage numbers and useful tags than some other examples, but it has the advantage of being attached to your person. On the tags, they’ve given the weapon the “obscuring” tag which reduces the size of stress dice for incoming ranged attacks - and also outgoing ones! I think I’d probably rule that the cannon is unaffected, but anyone taking cover behind it suffers the penalty to their dice. 

The prospect of taking mind stress for increased manifestation speed seems relevant, and is probably a useful pickup. I think it could stand to be slightly more generous – as written, it seems like you could have to choose your resource first (which sets the baseline time), then roll for mind stress, and the result of the mind stress will further reduce the manifestation time. Choosing the resource first means you’re locked in before you know the mind stress result, which could drastically under- or overshoot your expectations, particularly on a D10. I don’t mind some friction, but the stress cost is already a pretty big disincentive. I’d probably make it a scaling thing – roll the D4 once, then take mind stress to roll it again, any number of times. Maybe a D6 for a little greater variability. 

 

The autonomy of the cannon is left deliciously ambiguous, but the text suggests sort of a divine hand behind the fuse. I'll confess that I'm not sure exactly how the cannon fires before you acquire this ability to make it explicitly autonomous - It's amusing to me to imagine the teamwork weapons from Helldivers 2, but I think the intention is probably that you can fire it merely by willing it so (in which case, I'm not sure what the autonomy is really buying you, except the comedic potential, which is certainly not nothing). Probably the player gets to still decide when the cannon fires autonomously, and at what, but it isn't exactly determined by the text. Anyway, this is an example of an ability that I think is mostly written for humor.

Heaven is a Place on Earth: the haven no longer dissolves into slime, but instead teleports into a pocket dimension inside your shell. Since everyone in the haven continues existing, and is not dissolved into goo, they get to go about their lives during the pilgrimage, and so offer you a D6 resource of your choice every time you release the haven by removing your shell. The upgrades allow you to teleport people into your haven with a touch, manipulate the domain of the surroundings when you deploy your haven, and clear your mind stress whenever you deploy your haven. 

This is a funny one, where the major ability itself is mostly just fine and it’s the minor upgrades that are great. Getting a D6 resource per manifestation is quite nice, as now the haven is mostly paying for itself (unless you want it to set up faster), but Divine Providence will likely be generating nearly identical resources once per session, as long as you’re in the right kind of location. 

The teleport is exactly the kind of surprising twist that I love. Very cool, very funny to imagine teleporting some adversary into the haven and having the whole town come out to gang up on ‘em. I like that it’s only one way; you can’t teleport people out. So if you teleport a problem in there and it continues to be a problem, it’s stuck in there until you can manifest the haven again. That's cool! I love a solution that maybe is just a different kind of problem. 

The other piece that drew my attention was the mind stress clear, which could appear to “combo” with Fortress of the Snail’s upgrade that gambles mind stress to hasten the haven’s manifestation. Because we’re not playing the kind of game with rigorous rules about, like, ability triggers or the stack or etc, there’s ambiguity about how to handle this, and I think either way of layering the effects can feel bad. If the heal comes first and then the gambling happens, the player feels like the ability is basically worthless; with five kinds of stress to accrue, it will be rare that you’ll have a notable amount of specifically mind stress at the conclusion of a delve. On the other hand, if you get to gamble and then clear all that stress for free (so long as the stress didn’t turn into fallout), you lose the transgressive thrill of gambling. In addition to potentially being frustrating for the GM who might feel as though they are letting a player "get away" with something (a feeling which I encourage quashing), I think it takes away the interesting decision of the gamble.  

You could simply change the kind of stress that the ability heals, but that just makes the whole thing kind of unappealing – the sweet spot, I think, is making the stress healing relevant to the resistance that the pilgrim will be suffering from the most, particularly in small amounts, gradually accruing over time. That's probably more likely to be blood, given the inbuilt blood protection, and you can pick up Radula Sword to take some on command.

 

Opener of the Way: grants the ability to, once per session, “perform a feat of incredible strength” in order to “[overcome] some obstacle that blocks the path of your pilgrimage.” And also implies that you’re buff as all get out. Alternatively, if a feat of strength isn’t relevant, you can instead opt to receive a divine revelation. The minor abilities make it so that adversaries who impede your path suffer D4 stress (to mind, if relevant); add spikes to your shell, which inflict D4 (blood) stress to melee attackers; and expand your success window to discern the right way to go, at the cost of greater stress. 

This one doesn’t work for me quite as well as the others. I think it’s fun to some text saying you’re a big beefy snailperson now, maybe due to an investiture of divine power, or maybe from carrying around the shell all the time. But the ability is just a twinge too abstract, and also kind of boring. There’s no cost but opportunity cost, and how many obstacles to the path of one’s pilgrimage, that are solvable by sheer strength, does one expect to encounter per session? The text even seems to anticipate this frustration and offers the divine revelation as sort of a consolation prize.  

Generally I’m in favor of more abstract “powers” - it’s more interesting to me to establish things that are true about a character, over things like “this character can cast 3 spells at 2nd level before needing to rest.” I think the distinction here is that this is a abstracted truth (“you can perform feats of incredible strength!”) bent into the contrived constraints of game language (“...once per session, in order to overcome an obstacle to your path”). Worse, this is exactly the kind of ability I don’t like to see –the "simply press the ability button to solve the problem" kind. 

The minor that inflicts D4 stress to anyone who gets in your way is pretty funny to me, but it smacks of a more trad-game kind of mindset. Don’t forget your ability triggers and all that stuff. For that reason, this and the spiked shell are not very interesting to me, although I think it’s a little more Heart-y to turn yourself into a punisher tank. 

The ability that expands your discern success tiers is interesting, but kind of extreme – you succeed on a 2+, so the only way to fail on 2d10 is the one in one-hundred chance. The circumstances for it are fairly limited, so this ability is basically just saying “you’ll never fail to discern a path forward.” It gets more interesting in Risky or Difficult situations, and I like the double stress cost, but I’m generally low on this kind of design that’s aimed at making characters feel competent by succeeding more often.  

Temple of the Snail: the Snail Pilgrim’s haven gets a D10 echo haunt, a temple and cleric devoted to your faith. The minor abilities make it so that enemies of your faith must succeed a test (?) or else suffer stress to enter your haven, downgrade mind fallout by one step once per session, and give tokens to other pilgrims, that allow you to sense their location. 

Whew, remember what I was saying about how useful a big echo haunt would be? Having a pocket D10 haunt is quite nice, and there’s basically no reason to ever need any other. A D12 haunt is useful in the specific scenario wherein you need to heal 11 stress in one go and are prepared to spend a D12 resource to do so. That is to say, "never" - you don't even really need D10, since a D8 haunt suffices for major fallout. 

The minor advance that hits any enemies of the faith with a D4 for trying to enter your town is kind of cute, and is a good signpost to the GM to throw a big horde at the haven, but honestly, a D4 is hardly ever going to be that relevant. There's also the weirdness that this ability seems mostly to be aimed at characters who can be forced to roll a discern+religion check and suffer echo resistance; only player characters can do those things. I think this is unintentional - it seems way more likely that this is just a misunderstanding on the part of a writer from outside the RRD core team, and an odd miss on the part of the proofreading team. Anyway, neither here nor there. I think it is unfortunately just pretty marginal.

On the other hand, the free mind fallout healing is pretty huge! Between this and the upgrade to Heaven is a Place on Earth that clears mind stress, it's going to be pretty hard for the GM to get any mind-based consequences to stick.

Waypoint: when you pack up your haven, you can grab the landmark that you're parked next to or on top of, and take it with you, leaving behind an abcess. You can only take one at a time, but you can swap 'em out if you ever want to switch. There's some ink spilled on complications - the landmark might degrade over time or lose some properties. The upgrades can let you gain a domain from the landmark as long as you carry it, can let pick up a second landmark at a time, or digest a carried landmark to transmute it into a D12 resource (which does come with a drawback tag).

Wow! This is an unprecedented level of power over the terrain of the Heart. I think it rules. If I had to make one suggestion, it would be that I think the consequences would be largely social - how do the people caught up in this feel about becoming your residents? How do the people who got kicked out of the landmark feel about you taking their stuff? Yes, if you take a well established haven with lots of haunts, you've completely eaten the lunch of a Snail Pilgrim who chose to invest in the haunt-gaining minor advance, but you've also probably earned a number of enemies for life, perhaps including the people who operate the haunt you took with you. Also it's way cooler to imagine that you can pick up a Vermissian station and drop it off and the line is still connected, just saying. Anyway, all that is to say is that I don't find the text's attempts to complicate this ability that exciting or interesting.

The upgrade that grants you access to a domain while you are carrying an associated landmark has great flavor, but it isn't much better than just grabbing a generic domain (there's something to be said for the flexibility of switching out as needed, certainly). For that reason, I'd probably rule that if you have the domain-granting minor upgrade and the second-landmark-carrying upgrade, you could get a domain for both. 

The very last minor ability, which opens up the option to turn a landmark into a resource is, whew. The power to destroy a landmark is the kind of thing that has been the exclusive domain of zenith abilities. It is certainly a big swing, and even though my sense is that this is kind of a problematic tool to just give to a player for repeatable use, I like it so much that I would hate to see it go. I think some of this is that, as I alluded to, there are obvious consequences for destroying a landmark. Part of the fantasy of the zenith abilities is that you can do that and then be beyond consequences (usually because you're dead), so having to stick around for the aftermath is, I think, a serious drawback. This I think is a perfect test case for what I mentioned earlier - this ability is huge and ambiguous and requires a lot of negotiation. But because it's just about establishing some truths about what the character is capable of doing, it doesn't need a lot of game language to work and to have angles for complications and drama - those can emerge naturally out of the fiction. You juice just one landmark and I think it is likely that everyone in all those other landmarks will have opinions about where you set up shop.

 

 

That does it for the major abilities! These are mostly pretty enjoyable for me, and I think they do a good job overall of building out a neat identity for the Snail Pilgrim. The identity is maybe a little obvious - the shell is the strong outer barrier protecting your haven; what if the shell were a castle? - but I think that the whole class concept is so strong and so unexpected that it doesn't need to do anything too subtle or surprising to keep driving my interest. There are a couple pieces that don't quite fit for me, and there are a handful of minor abilities that feel obvious in the slightly-boring way. But mostly the moves here work for me, and the prospect of getting to play a character with the power to make big decisions on the geographical scale seems great.

 

Zenith Abilities

The Pilgrimage Continues: Pass the shell off to another character who will take on the burden. Without the weight, you go sicko mode super saiyan ultra instinct are empowered, and anything 2+ counts as a success (although you take double stress in the 2-5 range). At the end of the situation, you perish. Meanwhile, the character who took on the shell clears all fallout and stress, and if they happen to be a player character, they immediately acquire the Snail Pilgrim core abilities and can choose from among Snail Pilgrim abilities when relevant.

 

I think this kind of beat, the passing on of the torch before expiring, entrusting the burden to another, all that is great stuff. I wish it weren't overshadowed by the mechanical text, which isn't very exciting to me. This is the paragraph that directly follows the ability that destroys landmarks! Taking the shell off and just, like, pummeling some guys just doesn't feel that impressive to me. I think this ability needs to do something to suggest a different, more empowering fictional position. As it stands, the mechanical effect of taking off the shell being "you succeed more readily" doesn't really translate to "taking off the shell has revealed your hidden supernatural power," because the stuff you're succeeding at is the same stuff you've always been doing. 

 

The Pilgrimage Denied: Consume the haven in your shell, engorge with divine power to become an enormous slugmonster, and go Godzilla mode, then explode. The italicized text sells this as the last stand born from intense disillusionment.

 

This is a little more the kind of thing that works for me. One, we've been carrying around that shell forever, so there has gotta be an ending in which it cracks and everything is ruined. Two, going Godzilla mode as a giant slugmonster sounds great. The actual mechanical effect the text gives is that you can totally wreck something and roll a nice big die for damage to everyone else, but that is pretty lame and doesn't really accord with the fiction, I don't think, so at my table this would buy you a little more.

 

I want to return, though, to one of my little worries that I referenced at the top - this ability reads to me like you've had a second calling the whole time, whose stakes were investment or disillusionment in your pilgrimage. I don't mean it as a "gotcha." My frustration is more that the mechanical constraints of Heart's character building mean that a Snail Pilgrim who wants to choose this kind of emotional arc for themselves has to cobble it together out of ill-fitting parts. This ability makes a great goalpost, but there's no scaffolding to help get you there.

 

The Threshold of Heaven: Cast this spell on tier 4 of the Heart. You die, and your haven ascends to the domain of your god - unless you've decided that your god is not worth it and their heaven is bogus, in which case you can have the spell create a new heaven that more perfectly conforms to your desires and the reward your residents deserve.

 

Not as exciting to me as the previous zenith, but there's no avoiding it - we need a zenith about achieving the pilgrimage. In contrast to the previous one, I think that this kind of endpoint does alright without too much structure to hold it up. And while I'm here, I might as well clarify - the argument I'm making is not that you need the book's permission or guidance to have a resonant and meaningful character arc! Part of my frustration isn't the Snail Pilgrim's fault at all, it's that I think there is a fundamental awkwardness to the zenith beat / ability structure. But some of my difficulties with these zeniths does stem from the weird position that the Snail Pilgrim occupies relative to other Heart classes and their zenith beats & ends.

Hopefully to jump to the point - why does this spell kill the Snail Pilgrim? They did it - they made it to the Heart. You can just do the thing the class is about doing, you don't even really need to get to tier 4, you can just walk into the various heavens, there are rules about it and there's a whole class about it. Because the class is also kind of a calling, and it can achieve an endpoint in the plot, not just in the characterization or theme, I don't really understand why you need the text's permission here. 

The dissonance is strongest in this final zenith, but I think it's somewhat present in all of them. They could happen for characterological reasons, but they could also just be moments in the development of the plot; they don't imply or need to be grounded on any internal growth or change. It makes narratological sense for the Deadwalker to die at the end of their journey - but it's importantly not logitcally entailed that they will die at the end of their journey. Finally I maybe have a pithy way to express the little piece of grit in my experience of the Snail Pilgrim - the class has conflated two different ways of understanding stories. Most of the time, it doesn't matter much! But here at the end, I can really feel the strain.

My one last note here is that I think casting the spell to make a new heaven is a different spell, and should be a different zenith! The class is already weird and breaks all the rules, let it have a fourth zenith ability.

So far, each of the Ways and Means classes have had a little trouble with their identity, in my opinion. Luckily, we've been on an upward trend. The Snail Pilgrim takes some big swings, conceptually and mechanically, and I think the concept and aesthetic are really compelling. The trouble comes from a mismatch or confusion about classes and callings and character arcs, which mostly only expresses itself in the zeniths. As I wrote in my earlier review of the whole of Ways & Means, the Snail Pilgrim's identity is strong, and because the concept is clear and the execution is interesting and both are pretty well aligned, there are a lot of things I'm willing to look past. My frustration with the class's strange character arc messiness is one of those things. 

Tune in next time for the fourth and final class of Ways and Means, the Witness! Will I also have some frustrations about its identity? Who could possibly say.