Design Study - the Xanthous Zealot from Heartsong #1

I just drilled into each of the four classes of Ways and Means, looking at each ability and trying to understand how they combine into the gestalt of a class in Heart, in an attempt to grapple with what is going on in Heart design and what makes that design work for me, or not work for me. As one last design exercise / attempt at fairness / victory lap, I'm taking the boring machine and drilling into the design of the Xanthous Zealot, the class I wrote in Heartsong #1!

My goal here is to be as critical as possible. Obviously, I can speak to the design intention behind the text, but I also want to turn my recently-honed critical eye on the success of the text. Do the themes come through? Are the abilities exciting without overshadowing other characters? I'm unfortunately cursed by knowledge, but my hope is that with my recent design thoughts for Ways and Means, I will have a pretty good image against which I can compare.

Intro

The introductory fiction establishes the core premise - the Xanthous Zealot belongs to an order of demon worshipping hateful chuds who believe in conquest and dominance and decisiveness. Until I reread this, I hadn't considered at all how it might stack up against my thought in Ways and Means about the way the classes there kind of muddle class and calling. The Zealot does prescribe an emotional core; textually, Zealots lean into anger and choleric temperament stuff. But I notice I did carve out a little space in the intro here; "You now are one of them, true believer or otherwise." I think this is an intentional, if maybe subconscious, attempt at preserving the distinction between class and calling. Becoming a Xanthous Zealot isn't necessarily why the character came to the Heart (although it could be - check out the Hate calling in New Blood!), even if being a Zealot now forms part of the answer about why the character stays. It's more comparable to the Blightborn than the Snail Pilgrim, Crawler, or Witness. It's not the most important design goal when I set out to make a class, but it's certainly my preference to make a class that could fit with as many callings as possible, and without too much cognitive dissonance.

The other thing that I drew a lot of attention to in Ways and Means is my strong preference for character classes that emerge out of the world, and thereby make the character's power contingent and a little compromised. I want characters in Heart to feel powerful but desperate, and I want the Heart to feel dangerous but full of opportunity. To drive that home, I invented a whole faction of demon worshippers to tie this character to. I think it's hard to imagine that these kinds of guys are as widespread as I imagine Witches and Cleavers to be, for example, but I think it's not too hard to imagine some enclaves of them, and even some travelling asshole philosophers.

Core Abilities

The Zealot gets three. Unbalanced Humors is the crux of them. This ability takes away the Zealot's blood resistance (and negates most kinds of blood protection), and clarifies that this means whenever they take blood stress, they immediately take fallout. This is a pretty big downside! But the other two core abilities mediate this a little. Ruling Temperament prohibits blood fallout from interfering with the Zealot's skills or domains, and can't reduce the stress the Zealot inflicts. Finally, Acidosis has an upside - once per session, the Zealot can replace an incoming minor blood fallout with a special one that turns incoming damage they take into an acid splash attack. The fallout lasts for one situation, but can be kept by taking blood stress (meaning, taking another fallout). 

Looking back on it, wow is Unbalanced Humors a pretty gnarly downside! I think Ruling Temperament does more work than I remembered as a safety valve - all those blood fallouts can have fictional effects and probably will impact the difficulty of rolls, but keeping all your dice is a pretty useful guardrail. And re Acidosis, I think the threat of turning a minor blood fallout into extra outgoing damage is kind of a neat little game; because the downside is so real, I think it's alright to give the power to the XZ player to pull the trigger and say "actually, I take this fallout instead." It is all upside; I'd probably consider that decision a little more if I were making a similar one today.

Because I know what else is in the class, I know there are further ways to mitigate blood stress and fallout, but my critical and worrying designer brain, at this point, is thinking that this might have been too big of a swing - the XZ is probably going to take a lot of blood fallout. 

Devoting a little time to the rest of the core stuff the XZ gets; their core skill is kill, and core domain is cursed. Nobody in the core book actually starts with kill as a core skill; I read two possible (and not necessarily mutually exclusive) design intentions there; one, not starting with kill highlights that there are other ways of solving problems (or simply other kinds of problems worth solving) than fighting; two is that fighting might be so common of an activity that it would be a little frustrating for one class to enter the game just a little more proficient at it than anyone else. (And really, kill is just the most universally applicable skill for fighting - hunt and endure and sneak are all pretty easy to transmute into a "combat action")

The gamble being made here is that, because things are just so much riskier for the XZ than other folks, it's alright for them to mess with this expectation. I think that's certainly true for the second of those two design considerations - even if a Zealot is more proficient at fighting, they're not likely to emerge unscathed, so other classes will still get to shine in combat in a different way. It's harder to say for certain with regards to the first, but I think we could think of the Zealot as being the obverse of the principle - if there are other options besides killing, the Zealot will have to invest more resources into them to reach the proficiency of other characters. 

Finally, a note on the starting equipment; the first two options that the Zealot gets are pretty highly tuned; a D8 brutal, dangerous melee weapon, and a D8 point-blank shotgun (point blank means it goes up to D10 at melee range). The most comparable weapons in the core book are in the hands of the Cleaver and the Deadwalker, whose big weapons get the tiring tag (so they become less valuable as failures accrue). D8 and brutal is a pretty potent source of damage, but the dangerous tag is particularly relevant - brutal also makes rolling the max more likely, which, in the hands of the zealot, means that you're more likely to take fallout, even on an otherwise stress-free success. Likewise for the point blank weapon, you get the most out of it if you're also in range to take blood stress back. I think both are pretty highly tuned, but within band of the most relevant comparable core classes.

At the end of the core section, I think the class is being pretty clear about what it's about - the Zealot is aimed at getting in fights and dealing big damage, but is pretty likely to get hit back hard.

Minor Abilities

Affliction Afficionado: +2 echo protection. I chose echo protection because I think it's another pretty common consequence to close encounters with weird creatures, and I think it makes sense for the Zealot's achilles heel to really just be blood protection.

Ashen Complexion: grants the desolate domain and an immunity to "mundane fires and heat exhaustion." I think this is fairly limited in utility, although there's a small fiery subtheme to the Zealot that gives this a little extra "combo" potential. In any other class I probably would have tacked on this ability to a protection granting advance, but it makes the most sense for blood protection, and the Zealot can't get that. Doesn't quite have the oomf of the Vermissian Knight's ability that lets them fall from three storeys without taking harm.

Bilious Conduit: grants the occult domain, and gives the XZ an explicitly demon tainted soul. That has specific consequences for people who know about demons, but generally just means that people are unnerved, and in a fight will target the XZ first, or run away from them. This is another one that I think could maybe stand to be a little punchier, but I think the taunt/scare effect is a fun one with kind of wide utility, and both modes are good for the XZ; they love to get in fights, but it's also great to have a different kind of activity in a fight occasionally. Having to chase someone who's terrified of you, or getting to chase someone who's terrified of you away from your friends are both valences of this ability that I like, for example.

Conqueror Ideology: The generic domain advance. The XZ can't pick up the religion domain. I was torn on this - demon worshipping is religion too, but the book makes a distinction there and puts that kind of activity in occult. I came around to liking it - the Zealot's deal is so anathema to established or organized religion in the Heart that they'll never really be able to get the right feel for that stuff.

Decisive Action: The generic skill advance. It wasn't intentional that they came right after one another, but it does amuse me now. The XZ can't pick up evade; they can't run from a fight. I was a little torn between evade and sneak, but sneaking I think is ok - they can pick which fights they want to get into, and use underhanded tactics. But once a fight is happening, they're in it. Mend was also on the table, but I actually liked referencing the medical theory of humorism too much, and mend made sense for that. 

Furious Fixation: +2 mind protection. A couple reasons for mind protection. One, I like highlighting mind stress for barbarian-like classes, because I think it's a relevant way to complicate their lives, and so giving the Zealot a little breathing room there seemed good. Two, I think it points the class toward a potential depth - one thing I was trying to hit with the Zealot is that they're not stupid, they're actually deeply immersed in a philosophical tradition. Third, no way was the Zealot going to get fortune protection. That just left supplies as the other option; I can think of some fun ways to give the Zealot supplies protection, but it's not as exciting of a resistance I think. Nobody in core gets the combo of +2 echo and +2 mind, either, which made it appealing to me.

Indomitable: +1 protection in anything but blood. I opted to give them the usual four choices, instead of taking away an additional protection - I thought it would be a little too punishing (even if I think these generic advances are fairly unpopular and not very impactful).

Interpersonal Problems: grants the haven domain and the ability to, once per session, pick an NPC in the landmark you're in; that character immediately starts an argument with the XZ. Haven is a little bit of a weird choice; I might not have gone for the 4 skills & 4 domains structure if I had designed this after seeing Ways & Means. But, as I gestured to above, one of the goals with the Zealot was to build something for them beyond getting into fights - getting into arguments is like fighting but with words, which I think is a fun and resonant space to push into.

Spinning out one other thought here - for minor abilities, often my design process is to narrow down what skills or domains I think the class should have access to, and then build an ability that fits into that skill or domain. I think from a game design perspective, the most important part of the minors is how they impact the dice pool, and the extra text is there to drive a little excitement, and give the player some things to look forward to, some ways to characterize and roleplay as their character, give some identity to their class, that kind of thing. I like working from the other direction, picking an ability and then trying to match it to a skill or domain I think the class should have access to, but that way carries its own risk of keeping the class too one-note.

Heat Seeking: grants the hunt skill and the ability to see heat, enough to detect warm things through thin barriers. Developing the heat affinity/subtheme a little more. My preference is for abilities that open up a new way of solving problems, but without solving a lot of problems on their own. Heat vision is kind of like darkvision in certain circumstances, but it doesn't really substitute if the thing you're trying to do is navigate a dark, empty cave. It does make it hard to hide from the Zealot, which is very useful if you're trying to fight someone sneaky!

Quickened Pulse: grants the mend skill and a spell that makes someone move very fast. The spell lasts for only the next action, unless the recipient takes D6 blood stress. In addition to the narrative effect of moving fast, it gives the attack the spread tag. I'm not sure that this really works. I like getting a little spell at minor, I think access to the mend domain is interesting for deepening the class... but the spell is just a little too game-y. I think I'd probably want to rework this into something else.

Porcelainization: grants the endure skill and the ability to swap out a major blood fallout once per session. The fallout gives special blood protection equal to "bile" fallouts (the special fallouts specific to the Zealot), and lasts for one situation, then clears. This would definitely be too strong in any other class, I think - the ability to negate one major fallout per session is huge. But because the Zealot is so prone to blood fallout, my intuition is that were still fairly safe. This scales nicely, but most of the bile fallouts are only for one situation, so you have to use them all up at once if you want to max your protection. Great for big fights, but a harder decision during delves. At the time, I was convinced that specifying minor or major fallout was a useful lever for limiting the Zealot's choices & power - now, I'm not so sure. I think this could probably say "minor or major" blood fallout without too much trouble.

I like a little minor ability that plays with or interfaces with a class's core abilities. But I wanted to be careful with the design because the fallout-replacing game is very very powerful, and only made reasonable because of the gamble that the class is constantly making. If the Zealot can switch too many fallouts, then it stops being a gamble at all - it will be too hard to give the Zealot any fallouts. I think the total turned out ok, it maxes out at three blood fallouts, and the abilities are distributed across major and minor so it takes a little investment for the Zealot to get them all. But it is definitely something I am still concerned about.

Trench Sapper: grants the warren domain and gives the zealot a special bomb every session. The bomb is a decent enough weapon; D6, point blank, and spread, with the volatile drawback and a little piece of extra text - the bomb "does immense structural damage to buildings and terrain." I stand by this descriptor as more meaningful than trying to mechanize terrain destruction. There's no scaffolding in the book for determining like, a resistance number for a wall or anything. You're a little at the GM's mercy for destroying a building with this, but you can fall back to the text - the impact should be "immense." And of course if you don't use it fast enough, the GM might hit you with the volatile tag and blow you up, which I think is a useful and fun tension to have.

Warlord's Mien: grants the compel skill, and the ability to steal underlings from someone by proving yourself superior. Compel completes the social/argumentative angle of the Zealot. I was a little down on this ability originally - I like the thematic angle and playing into the leadership & demagoguery of choleric temperament stuff, but the effect is a little marginal. With rules for hirelings, though, I think this takes on a new life! I should also shout out that this ability takes big inspiration from Dungeon World's Barbarian, which I really appreciate for how it pushes against D&D-y barbarians and leans into more of a Conan, pulp fantasy space.

That does it for the minor abilities! It's a little hard for me to characterize the mechanical effects - immunity to mundane fires seems like it will not often be relevant; starting each session with a bomb could be pretty impactful. I'm hardly an impartial judge, but I do think that the minors do a pretty good job at crafting an identity for the Zealot - they're obviously geared towards getting in fights, but that's more flexible than it might seem at first blush. They can pick arguments, blow things up, impress underlings, scare people with their demon cursed soul, and see heat through thin walls. Those abilities propel you towards a certain image of action (primarily conflict) but still are broad enough that I think players can, well, play with them. That's the goal of the design, anyway.

Major Abilities

Contagion: cast this spell with kill+cursed; on a success, the Zealot conjures an aura of sickness around them, which increases the stress nearby adversaries take - roll an extra D4 whenever inflicting stress. The upgrades give specific adversaries specific debuffs, one to their stress die, one to their protection, and the third turns defeated adversaries into disease vectors.

A spell for extra D4 stress to everyone doesn't seem super exciting to me at first blush, but I think it actually is fairly impactful - it's a +2.5 damage buff to everyone you hit, better than stepping up the die, and your allies can get in on it too. The minor upgrades are also pretty strong - hitting an adversary's die size is probably not hugely impactful but is kind of like getting protection for the Zealot, and cutting the protection in half is quite relevant.

The final ability is entirely fictional, and I think it doesn't really accomplish what I'd hoped it would. I think it's a neat, and very flavorful pickup for a Zealot who's excited about leaning into a particular kind of playstyle, but I don't know that it really accomplishes much. If I kept this idea, I might rework it so it's a little clearer how you can use it - sending a defeated adversary to a landmark and making everyone there irritable is fun enough for me to like the gist, but it puts the GM a little on the spot without much support.

Digestive Slime: grants the ability to turn into an acid slime blob that has protection against normal weapons and can squash and stretch. The upgrades let you eat cursed or harmful resources and heal echo stress, makes the transformation fast if you're suffering from bile fallout, and split yourself into two slime blobs.

I'm a little low on slime form. I'm even mixed on the protection, which was the big impetus behind it at the time - I thought it might be a kindness to give the XZ a solution to weapon damage. It isn't an eject button, since the transformation isn't instantaneous (unless you have the right upgrade, and fallout), but I'm worried it muddles the identity a little. The ability itself spends too long litigating itself, too.

Healing from cursed and harmful items I think is fun, but maybe a little too efficient! I do have a fondness for calling out the downside resource tags, because I think they make for interesting gameplay and decisions. Turning the form into a panic button under the right circumstances works alright for me (not withstanding my worries about the original ability), because those circumstances do come at a relevant cost - taking a bile fallout means you've used up some of your most powerful tools. And it's hard for me to be too critical about splitting into two goo guys. I do, ultimately, think that some game design can just be to give players some text that is mostly funny. On the other hand, although it is funny, I think that ability has some real utility!

Dread Resonance: unlocks a special weapon - demonic radiation, which is an innate D8 point blank weapon with bloodbound (take stress to get mastery), and wyrd (dealing max damage also hurts you, echo stress flavored). Upgrade to cough up a demonic drug introduced in Spire, which you can smoke to heal stress, take D6 stress to teleport items around, and unlock another bile fallout that can make you self destruct.

I think the weapon is fine! At this point in my major ability design, four classes deep, it's starting to get a little bit of tag-salad-y. I saw some people complaining about special weapon majors, since often you can just buy comparable stuff. I think that these abilities are great opportunities for characterization though, and I do like getting a little funky with the weapon tags. This one, in particular, gives the Zealot a way to turn on blood stress whenever they want it, once per situation, with the bloodbound tag. And I think the demon flavor is worth exploring.

The upgrade that generates the drug sulphur - I'm not sure how I feel about it anymore. It refreshes stress after killing people, which is in line with the description in Heart. I'm maybe getting cold feet. I think one of the design goals here was to make a class that's a little uncomfortable. I think a major+minor combo giving you a resource once per session is not unreasonable (sorry the Crawler). The resource is also taboo, another downside tag, which makes smoking it yourself the most consistent way to turn it into healing.

The teleporting upgrade is kind of out of left field. I'm not sure it's a great fit, although I think it is a very useful tool, and I like its invocation of demonic spatial weirdness. It might simply not be selling that fiction well enough. This is a D6 to mind, which hasn't been a big throughline for the Zealot.

The bile fallout here accomplishes something that I wanted to do more of, but couldn't because the palette space was so limited, and I really didn't want to add too many bile fallout replacement abilities. This one can switch out for any blood fallout, including critical, and is itself a critical fallout. While you have this fallout ("Demon Core" - I was having fun with demons as nuclear weapons), you count up each other fallout you take that situation, and if you hit three, you detonate. You lose the Demon Core fallout at the end of the situation, but keep the count; you erase one count each session. I quite like taking fallout that is its own curse, but is a curse of your own choosing, and I like giving the player the option in particular to opt into critical fallout and choosing to explode. The exact count is maybe not totally balanced, but three has just such a powerful draw. Five would definitely be too many, and I think four is probably pushing it, so three it is.

Mania: you can replace minor mind fallout with a bile fallout, which negates "mental interference" but makes you a danger to yourself. Upgrades let you, once per session, not take fallout if the fallout die is less than the number of fallouts you're already suffering from; goad your conversational partners into rash action; and set "traps" for people by talking to them.

The Mania fallout is a little tricky, but I think it's pretty clear and concise for what it's trying to do. It's maybe not a huge get for a major ability - the fallout replacement could probably stand to be either minor or major.

The upgrade to not take any fallout is kind of out of place here, and it might be one too many ways to mitigate fallout. Comparing the fallout die to the number of fallouts you already have is kind of cute, though, and it means that it's only really valuable if you're already suffering a lot.

The other two minors are playing in the argument space for the XZ and I like them a lot. The goading one should really specify NPC, and I'm not sure why it doesn't. It's basically a pbta ability with a trigger and an effect, just no roll. I like all the suggestions of rash actions the NPC might take, which I think both provide enough structure for the GM while also being exciting and impactful, to give the Zealot player a reason to want to use it. The one that turns your philosophy into a trap is another one that I think is a little goofy but also genuinely useful - inflicting stress by talking is a useful tool for the Zealot. I wanted the Xanthous Order to come across as assholes who are obviously wrong but annoying to argue with because they've actually done the reading - kind of platonist in their pompousness, kind of sith-y in their self righteous libertarianism.

Reflux: cast this spell with endure+cursed; on a success, create a pool of acid anywhere nearby. The acid hurts so don't fall in. One upgrade makes it so you can eat your own skills and domains to generate additional pools or make the pools more damaging, one upgrade makes the acid highly flammable, and the final upgrade turns the core bile fallout into a ranged attack.

I like a spell with predominantly fictional effect, especially those that affect the terrain. The pools do inflict stress, but that might not be as meaningful as the fact that you got to shape the immediate surroundings (by adding a pool of acid). It's a little hard to use Heart's system to represent "damage over time" which is I think the part of the spell that works least.

The upgrade that lets you bump up the spell depending on how much of your character sheet you're willing to sacrifice (temporarily) is very much the space I want the Zealot to live in. It's a little hard to gauge exactly how impactful it really is, though. Certainly there's something to be said for dunking someone in the rare and costly D12 acid pit. The upgrade that makes the acid flammable is also perhaps not quite explicit enough - the text doesn't insist on any extra damage, for example - but I really like to live in the mostly fictional space with these kinds of spells! There is some obvious utility for having a spell that makes flammable liquid. The choice to turn Acidosis from an area punisher to a ranged shot is maybe a little too mechanical, but another one where I like the utility and I think is an interesting choice to give to the Zealot, without giving them too much additional power.

That does it for the major abilities. There are definitely some spots where I'd clean up the language, and I think if I were redoing the class I might take a second look at Digestive Slime. But broadly I think they do a good job at reinforcing and extending the thematic throughlines from the core and minor abilities. On that angle, I am worried that there might be a little too much going on - there's acid and sickness and demon energy and even a little fire and philosophy. On the other hand, I think the big themes are pretty successful. This is a class about getting into fights and risking stress a lot of stress, with some idiosyncratic complications to the formula, and some fun flavor about bile. Time to wrap it up!

Zenith Abilities

Acid Death: The Xanthous Zealot explodes into a fountain of yellow bile, inflicting a boatload of stress  (20D6) and turning the area into an acid hellscape. Pretty straightforward. The 20D6 is probably a little gratuitous. I do like that this isn't just a bomb that kills an enemy - it's a bomb that kills a lot of enemies and marks the site as cursed forever. My feeling reading it this time is that the ability is missing just a little something, but I'm not sure what else I'd want here.

Proliferation: The Xanthous Zealot self combusts, and the relics of their body become surprisingly potent weapons for the other player characters to use. This also locks the nearby landmarks into a "cycle of perpetual violence" for control over the remains. It's the latter, fictional effect that really sells this one to me - yes, we're two for two on zeniths that ruin the place you're in, but being the cause of ongoing conflict just seems so perfect to me for the Zealot. It's awful!

Burnt Out: run out the timer, let the inner flame die, and see if your body can handle it - if you die, at least you didn't kickstart an eternal cycle of bloodshed, or turn a place into a bilious nightmare wasteland. This is a spin at the "renunciation" style of zenith, which aren't particularly widespread but had an outsized influence on my thought for the design of zeniths. The Incarnadine can retire to a peaceful life of relative ease; the Deep Apiarist can forgo the unending, futile struggle for order and embrace chaos (and thereby explode). I think there's open space for a sad zenith ability, which is what I set out to do here. I intended the ability to read as fairly beak; the layout editor chose to highlight the last sentence, which I think really alters the emotional impact! But the consequences of the ability I think are still impactful; you can't just opt out of being yellow-bile-filled, you can't just pass the consequences on to someone else, you will have to suffer.  Maybe it works out in the end, but there's no escaping unscathed or unchanged.

I do think there could stand to be more variation in the zeniths, but I think three is usually the right number to get. I'd make the case that "acid hell zone" vs "eternal warfare zone" are pretty different in the specifics of how they ruin the local environ, despite some strong thematic overlap. I think a potential reader without special access to my notes and thoughts will still get the basic deal.

That's the Xanthous Zealot! I don't want to be too self congratulatory, but I think it's broadly pretty successful at communicating what I wanted it to communicate. There are definitely places where the language could stand to be clarified, some abilities whose mechanical text is really not up to snuff; and I think there are some unfinished threads - there isn't very much fire affinity, for example. in the throughlines expressed through the major abilities. It might be trying to fit a little too much in, but that's certainly my preference over having too little.

That's enough design studying! Hopefully I'm back soon, though, with some new design work. This process has been very useful in helping me brainstorm what I'll be writing for the next issue of Heartsong.