Rowan, Rook, and Decard have a new sourcebook for A New Heart: The City Beneath. Ways and Means: A Heart Sourcebook is packed with new classes for players and new ways for the GM to complicate delves into the deep:
Ways and Means is our new sourcebook for Heart: the City Beneath, and it’s jam-packed with stuff.
The “Means” part is aimed at the players, and has all sorts of new things for them to be, do, and use en route to their beautiful demise.
Four new classes (the freewheeling bardic Witness, the mind-warping fungal Blightborn, the mucosal Snail Pilgrim and the Crawler, described by its author as a “bibically-accurate dungeoneer”) and four new Callings (Artist, Demagogue, Protector and the strictly inadvisable Containment) kick off the player-facing half of the compendium.
They’re followed up by rules and plenty of interesting lore about the sort of equipment and allies that delvers can get their hands on to make their one-way trip into the depths easier, or at least more interesting:
- Hirelings: the legbreaker, the pole-carrier, the mumbler, the cook, and so on
- Pets: the watch-hog, the decidedly ignoble heartsblood horse, and the so-called Useless Worm
- Guns to shoot things with or blow up in their hands
- Drugs to bung up their noses in search of enlightenment or oblivion
- Artistic supplies including a paint that’s the metaphysical opposite of blue and “sculptor’s dynamite”
- Black market spells to buy from a shady wizard that let them step between tiers of the Heart, pin their soul to a moment in the past or absorb incoming hexes by jamming nails into a Witch’s heart
- Ten legendary items commissioned by generous supporters including a railway chronometer so accurate it overrules local time, a dreaming dragon egg capable of rewriting the world around it, and a vial of powdered death which doesn’t necessarily kill you but makes you much, much more accident-prone
- Real AND fake religious artefacts including holy water, sacred shrouds, devotionally itchy shirts and a pampered scapegoat
The other half of the book - the “Ways” half - is devoted to Delves, and aimed at the Gamesmaster. We’ve broken down the Heart into domains and come up with loads of modular bits to shuffle together and construct into thematic, interesting and dangerous journeys between islands of stability in this red wet heaven.
We’re also providing GMs with sixteen Bounties - self-contained short-form jobs that you can plug into any ongoing game to act as a reason for player characters to chuck themselves headlong into disaster or to provide impetus for a one-shot game. Bounties range from gathering up and evacuating a Haven to safety, going house hunting (with a gun, in case the house gets any ideas), escorting a feckless aelfir princeling to his ancestral sepulchre so he can die properly or protecting one (1) very important bee that is keeping the boundaries between this world and the next intact.
THE DELVE DECK
Also on sale is the Delve Deck, which reformats the delve events from Ways and Means into a series of prompts on shuffleable cards. If you’d like to trust to fate and let the players encounter what they may, or if you want to get some quick inspiration by blending together events from different Domains, you can do just that with this nifty product.
