Heart: The City Beneath

Heart: The City Beneath is for groups that want dungeon-crawling to feel like obsession, sacrifice, and transformation instead of careful encounter balance. It is strongest when the table wants each expedition to pressure the characters' identities, relationships, and ambitions, not merely their hit points or equipment.

It is a weak fit if your group wants clean heroic fantasy, tightly tuned tactical mapping, or low-stakes horror. Heart is built to turn desire into cost: progress feels exciting because the game keeps asking what your delvers will lose on the way down.

What the game is

Heart: The City Beneath is a story-forward dungeon-crawling TTRPG from Rowan, Rook and Decard, the studio founded by Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor. It shares a setting with Spire: the city above sits over the Heart, an impossible undercity of ruins, stations, cult sites, living nightmares, and places that should not fit together but somehow do.

The player characters are delvers: fringe people chasing answers, absolution, power, revenge, revelation, or some impossible private desire. Heart is not about methodical treasure-hunters conquering a stable map. It is about what desperate people risk when the world beneath them keeps reshaping itself around obsession, hunger, faith, and ruin.

Publication history and editions

The digital edition went live in 2020 after the crowdfunding and development cycle, and the current official storefront still presents the same core game rather than a second edition. RR&D's store currently lists the core book in PDF, hardcover-plus-PDF, and special Echo or Hive editions, so the practical question is format and budget, not which rules edition is current.

The line has expanded through adventures and sourcebooks instead of through a core rewrite. That matters for buyers: Heart currently reads like a complete base game with optional campaign frames and expansions, not like a line waiting for a mandatory revision.

What you need to play

You can start with the quickstart, which includes the essential rules, five pregenerated characters, and the introductory scenario Drowned. That is the cleanest way to test whether your table actually likes Heart's tone and pressure before anyone commits to the full book.

The core book is what you need for a real campaign. RR&D says it contains the full rules, nine classes, five callings, Zenith abilities, dozens of landmarks and adversaries, and an extensive GM advice section. If the quickstart proves your group likes the premise, the core is where Heart's class design, setting texture, and longer-form campaign logic actually open up.

Major supplements and support

The current official Heart collection is substantial enough to matter. The most important add-on is Dagger in the Heart, which RR&D describes as the first full-length Heart adventure: a sandbox campaign that drives delvers into the deepest recesses of the setting.

Beyond that, RR&D currently foregrounds sourcebooks such as Doors to Elsewhere, Sanctum, and Burned and Broken, alongside campaign aids like the GM screen and the pay-what-you-want digital map pack. There is also Heartsong #1, an official-store community fanzine built from RR&D Discord submissions, which is a good sign if you want extra landmarks, classes, delves, or a newcomer-friendly one-shot without waiting for another hardcover.

Core rules and play structure

Heart uses an expanded version of the Resistance system from Spire. In practice, the important part is not detailed simulation but the pressure model: delvers accumulate stress in different areas of their lives and bodies, and that pressure eventually becomes Fallout that changes them in lasting ways. The rules do not treat danger as a narrow combat problem. They treat pursuit, deprivation, bad bargains, revelation, and exhaustion as things that leave marks.

The campaign loop is expedition-based. A group takes a job, follows a Beat, chases a belief, or pursues a private need, then descends through landmarks and delves that become stranger and more dangerous the deeper they go. The GM is not expected to simulate every corridor. Heart works best when the route matters because of the pressures it creates, the bargains it demands, and the way the undercity distorts space, certainty, and motive.

Characters and advancement

RR&D's core-book overview highlights nine classes and five callings, and that structure gives characters a strong setting identity from the start. You are not building a generic fantasy adventurer and then adding weirdness later; the classes are already entangled with the Heart's faiths, institutions, technologies, debts, appetites, and surviving subcultures.

Advancement is one of the game's clearest selling points. Heart uses Beats to measure progress through a character's story, so growth is tied to the kind of trouble a player wants to invite rather than only to treasure or body count. Zenith abilities give the game its apocalyptic edge: peak expressions of power that feel less like a traditional power-up and more like choosing the exact shape of your ruin.

Signature mechanics

• Stress and Fallout: pressure becomes lasting consequences, so delves change characters instead of just draining generic resources.
• Beats: advancement is tied to the story trouble players are asking the GM to put on screen.
• Zenith abilities: RR&D presents these as the ultimate expressions of power, and the book makes a point of how dangerous and terminal many of them are.
• Landmark-and-delve structure: the setting is built from places, routes, and pressures rather than from balanced combat rooms.
• Shared-world Resistance play: if your table already knows Spire, Heart offers familiar DNA with a much more expedition-focused campaign loop.

What play feels like

A strong Heart session feels less like clearing a dungeon and more like surviving a fever dream with purpose. The party has reasons to keep moving, but every deeper choice makes the setting stranger and the characters more exposed. Victories tend to feel earned because they come with visible cost, not because the table cleanly out-optimized a balanced encounter.

The mood can swing between grotesque horror, tragic comedy, religious awe, and desperate intimacy. That tonal spread is part of the appeal, but it also means Heart depends heavily on shared taste. Tables that do not enjoy surreal imagery or character destabilization can bounce off it fast.

Running the game

The GM load is medium to high in the ways that matter. The rules are not there to support miniatures-heavy tactical play; the hard part is curating pressure, imagery, consequences, and navigable strangeness. The official book promises extensive GM advice, and that helps, but Heart still asks the GM to make the undercity feel coherent even when it is supposed to be impossible.

The most common failure mode is over-planning the geography and under-planning the emotional logic. Heart is stronger when the GM knows what people want, what each landmark demands, what the journey costs, and how every descent stage changes the party's situation. If you run it like a neat fantasy floorplan, you lose the thing the game is actually best at.

Campaign fit

Heart is campaign-first even though one-shots are possible. The quickstart's Drowned scenario is enough to test the system, and a short arc can absolutely work, but the game really opens up when Beats, Fallout, obsessions, and changing routes have time to stack up. That makes it stronger for short-to-medium campaigns than for disposable single evenings.

Replacement characters are possible because the setting naturally produces broken new delvers, but the emotional weight is best when the same group survives long enough to be altered by the places they keep revisiting. If your table wants an endless tactical crawl, there are cleaner options. If it wants a doomed expedition story with escalating personal cost, Heart scales up well.

Digital tools and VTT support

The current RR&D Heart collection does not foreground a dedicated first-party VTT module. Official support is centered on PDFs, print books, a quickstart, a GM screen, maps, and sourcebooks instead of platform-specific automation.

That does not make Heart hard to run online, but it does change who handles the adaptation work. Groups comfortable using shared sheets, voice or video, and generic tabletop tools should manage fine; groups that want polished first-party onboarding or heavy automation should set expectations lower.

Reception and awards

Heart's public reception is easy to verify. The 2021 ENNIE Awards gave it Gold for Best Setting, Best Layout and Design, and Best Writing, plus Silver placements including Best Game, Best Monster or Adversary, Best Art, Interior, and Best Art, Cover. RR&D's current store page still foregrounds that sweep as a major part of the game's identity.

Beyond awards, the reception pattern is consistent. Reviewers and players keep returning to the setting's imagery, the class design, and the way Beats and Fallout turn descent into character tragedy rather than simple resource bookkeeping; the Quinns Quest review is a good example of that longer-form critical attention. The recurring caution is just as consistent: Heart is emotionally and aesthetically specific. If the tone does not land for your group, the rest of the design does not rescue it.

Where it is strongest

• Groups that want horror delves to change the characters as much as the scenery.
• Tables excited by surreal worldbuilding, obsession-driven goals, and campaign play with visible consequences.
• Players who want classes with strong setting identity instead of generic fantasy roles.
• Groups choosing between Spire, Trophy, and other doom-forward games and wanting the most substantial expedition campaign option.

Where it can frustrate groups

• You want balanced tactical dungeon combat and careful cartography to be the main event.
• You want light heroic fantasy or horror that stays mostly aesthetic.
• You want a low-commitment one-shot engine that asks very little tonal buy-in from the table.
• You prefer grounded settings where consequences are clearer and surreal logic rarely overrides geography.

Content and safety notes

Expect body horror, cult imagery, obsession, self-destruction, scarcity, illness, coercive social structures, religious fervor, madness, and characters being physically or spiritually changed by what they pursue. Even when the table plays parts of the setting for dark comedy, Heart stays close to mutilation, loss, and the terror of wanting something too badly.

Groups should talk early about lines around body change, addiction, fanaticism, disease, harm to communities, and doomed bargains. Heart is exactly the kind of game where a thorough safety conversation improves the campaign rather than diluting it.

Best starting path

Start with the quickstart if you want a real test run; it gives you the rules you need plus pregenerated characters and Drowned. Move to the core book once the table knows it wants the full class list, deeper setting material, landmarks, adversaries, and campaign advice.

If the group clicks with the core, the next most useful add-on is usually Dagger in the Heart for tables that want a full-length campaign frame. After that, choose supplements based on what you actually want more of: havens and collapse, alternate-world campaign play, Spire-to-Heart crossover fallout, or more community-made delves and classes.

Research notes

Last checked: July 2, 2026. Sources used: RR&D Heart core product page; RR&D quickstart page; RR&D Heart collection page; RR&D Heartsong #1 page; RR&D about page; 2021 ENNIE Awards results; RPGGeek Heart listing; RPGGeek Resistance System listing; and Quinns Quest review.