me, running Mothership: okay so the elite soldiers who entered the facility deliberately destroyed the connection to the comms network, to their own detriment, after being attacked by A Creature capable of interfering with electronics
my players: okay let's restore the communications
me: a creepy voice over the now restored radio thanks for you repairing the damage
mothership lets you put your players in interesting scenarios such as "The Company accidentally created The Torment Nexus and then made it your problem" and everyone is going to have so much fun
"oh i'm such a mean GM, i LOVE making my players' characters suffer"
you have never truly felt the catharsis of being a mean GM until you've played Heart: The City Beneath
because i literally just sent one PC to hell to be tortured eternally, destroyed another PC, body and soul, to birth a new goddess into the world only for her to be immediately and permanently imprisoned, and turned the third PC into an all consuming, immobile abyss doomed to do nothing but hunger for all eternity
Today i finished running an adventure for some friends in the Heart: The City Beneath roleplaying game, which was an absolute wild ride from start to finish.
First of all, the system fucking SLAPS, and if you like lightweight systems which still enable honestly a lot of tension, your character suffering a LOT like seriously your little guy is going to have such a bad time, tragedy, horror, and tragic horror you should give it a go.
But Oh Boy, the shenanigans which were got up to. Extended summary below but this barely scratches the surface of everything that happened and the context for it all so if you're curious or what to know more about the system or setting send and ask or message me because I'd love to provide more context.
Our cast consists of Horizon, a mage, addicted to magic, microdosing on corruption, desperately trying to find a cure for the affliction of feebleness plaguing their entire race. Shay, a walking corpse who came back wrong, with the whispers of their possibly dead girlfriend in their brain urging them to delve greedier and deeper. And Zaktan, a surgeon made of wasps, seeking to impose perfect order on the world.
They travelled deep beneath the ground, all seeking some elusive, vague font of power, capable of granting whoever finds it whatever their soul desires, called The Heart.
The very first settlement they came across quickly disappeared, drowned by waterlogged corpses spewing salt water from their mouths. Horizon accidentally opened their soul up to the master of these creatures with a particularly unlucky roll, and left them retching up salt water for a brief moment before everyone could escape to the Temple of the Moon.
Here they meet the high priestess Airelle, who apparently can't die, because she's the moon's favourite. She tells them that the walking corpses are vassals of the Drowned Queen, a deep god of everything beneath the water, including drowned corpses. She tells them that if they fetch a collection of runes from deeper down, she can perform a ritual to banish the queen and save all the nearby settlements that she's trying to drown. She'll offer a reward, of course, but Zaktan doesn't trust her one bit, and refuses her offer to he can break into her room to snoop around instead.
The first step on this quest is to sneak through a junkyard filled with cultists obsessed with death. Here they find a beast of metal and Heartflesh. Shay frees it, as the voice in their head encouraged them to do, devours some of its flesh, and in its gratitude it devours some of the cultists in their way.
The next destination is an ancient train station with vibrating crystals hanging from the ceiling, threatening to fall if any loud noise shakes them free. Here Zaktan becomes fascinated with the wreck of a magical train, being studied by Knights of the Rail, Horizon seeks treatment from the knight's surgeon (nasty little goblin who thinks Horizon's entire race are a lost cause because of the curse of feebleness they bear), and Shay immediately sets about collapsing the ceiling of the place to break the floor and open a tunnel deeper. This frees an angel of convulsing, raw flesh and sinew which proceeds to destroy the entire station, forcing the group to flee.
The group accepts Shay's actions after they calmly explain themselves.
Just kidding Zaktan slices Shay's face off. Shay doesn't care in the slightest because they brought the love of the Heart to the station and everyone in it.
From here it's a straight shot down to the sanctum of the mages keeping the protective runes.
Just kidding again. The Drowned Queen has taken up residence here. In person. All ten feet of her perfect, pristine, divine body, clad in jellyfish and kelp. The whole area is flooded, but Horizon, having opened up their soul to her (accidentally, but she's so lonely she doesn't realise that) and so sweet talks into letting them explore the tower. They find a vault at the base, with the runes inside, along with a victim of the mage's experiments: a person having been infused with the magic of the Heart and turned into a strange, warped creature of warping flesh. Shay free it, it attacks Horizon, and Zaktan does literally nothing to help until Horizon misses a spell to defend themselves and accidentally hits Zaktan, exposing the fact that Horizon is capable of drawing on the Drowned Queen's power.
This doesn't go down well with Zaktan, who has been shaken by an unlucky roll and is now deeply terrified of the queen, despite his disdain for all things godly. He insists on Horizon telling him exactly what is going on, and the two do so, over a completely amicable exchange of notes which doesn't result in any more faces being sliced off.
They all rest here, and Horizon is unnerved by the Queen watching them with a burning intensity the entire time.
On the way back up, with the runes in hand, they encounter a Knight of the Rail, the only survivor of what Shay did to the station. The knight attempts to bombard with with his cannon, but Shay practically skips up to him, and shoves him into the netherworld with naught but a boop on the nose.
Getting back through the station isn't as easy, as the angel has transformed into a massive tree of meat and pulsing veins, supporting the ceiling while its roots writhe across the floor seeking flesh to devour. Shay doesn't care and just walks through, the tendrils seemingly ignoring them. Zaktan and Horizon are less lucky, and Zaktan loses his notebook, his most prized possession, becoming convinced that Horizon stole it when exchanging notes. Horizon would have made it through fine, if they weren't distracted by the desire to collect a sample, which leads them stranded, surrounded, blood from the weird angel flesh tree right in their eyes, and needing to be rescued by Shay.
Back through the junkyard, they confront the bishop leading the death cult. He reveals that he and Airelle came here together, before she betrayed and abandoned him. Shay then suplexes him off of the raised platform of his throne, Zaktan injects him with a sample of a horrid virus, and Horizon calls upon the power of the queen once more to drown him.
This clears the final obstacle back to the temple where they can begin the ritual to banish the queen. Zaktan refuses to give up the runes unless he is the one to perform the ritual however, even though it draws on the power of the moon goddess. He's convinced he knows her better than one of her high priestesses, and he's convinced said high priestess is keeping something from him. Shay mans the barricades to keep the queen and her vassals out when she inevitably attacks, and Horizon...is conflicted.
The queen does indeed attack. Her form has changed. She now resembles a drowned corpse clad in a rotting, waterlogged gown, hollow eye sockets filled with nothing but worms and small crustaceans picking at the flesh, suspended in the air by a fleshy tendril connected to some massive creature concealed in the tunnel behind her. She blows past Shay, angered that this group promised to spread her influence only to turn on her, slaughtering everything in her wake. Until Horizon rolls ridiculously well on a roll to distract her, approaches her, kisses her...giving just enough time to Zaktan to finish the ritual to banish her.
She looks at Horizon, not angry. Just sad, and betrayed. She could have given them everything, she says, moments before being yanked back down into the deep.
The group were heroes. The people living in and around the temple celebrate.
Zaktan however, heads upstairs to Airelle's room and murders her, searching for the secrets she was keeping. He doesn't get much though, not even a scream or a struggle, just a cryptic message that "She's really not going to like that, you know."
And that ends the pre-written adventure that all of this came from. Next few sessions are going to be off the edge of the map and I am so disgustingly excited as to what horrors this lot are going to get themselves into next.
you're floating in the middle of the ocean, and attached directly to your guts is a rope which stretches down, down, down into the dark water below and out of sight in the gloom.
occasionally it tugs just strongly enough to briefly pull your head beneath the surface
i am an approximately person shaped construct of meat and bone piloted by an army of tiny goblins frantically pulling levers and turning cranks to simulate a vague semblance of humanity. the goblins and myself are doing our best
they/them, ttrpgs, art i find inspirational, occasional unhinged feral-posting, just generally having a chill fun time
if you check the original tags on this post you can find links to the art i make (#myart), the ttrpgs i run (#chewing dice), ttrpgs in general, and various OCs whom i think about constantly
you can also find me on bluesky
sometimes i’ll reblog gore, body horror, etc, but it’ll always be tagged as such
(the drow and lizardfolk above belong to @incoherentmuses and @rollinwiththepunches)
