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Ways and Means: more sourcebooks for Heart: The City Beneath!

Created by Rowan, Rook and Decard

More callings, classes, art, enemies and allies for Heart: The City Beneath!

Latest Updates from Our Project:

Delving With Protection
8 months ago – Thu, Aug 14, 2025 at 04:02:51 AM

The Ways and Means crowdfunding campaign continues apace, so it’s time to sit around the fire and talk some more about the content you can look forward to. Following on from our previous post where we spoke about the Artist calling, today we’re looking at the Protector calling.

Let’s hear what Chris has to say about their new calling.

Chris Taylor: I am a creature of habit. There’s always a protector type in games I have a hand in. Sometimes it’s subtle or mildly occluded - like the Midwives in Spire - but Ways and Means gave me an opportunity to be brash with this classic archetype. I love the image of the heroic defender standing against impossible odds and with the core ability Defiant (which lets you double your protections against an attack once per session) you can now add that trope to any class. Though the joy of doubling down on it and having a Vermissian Knight with a massive shield in the art scratches some primal itch in the back of my head.

This being Heart however nothing is ever as simple as all that. The protector/martyr trope works so well because it is always a choice. The hero stands alone and saves the day and doesn’t flee when things get difficult, and they are paragons of virtue and selflessness. Nobody is a paragon of selflessness. The beats look into the humanity of the trope and try to understand its failings.

We get to see the sad side of being a protector, (Build a memorial to someone you failed to protect.) the violent side, (Use excessive force.) and the very human side of them (Save an item of sentimental value from destruction.). While this tough figure weathers the storm, Beat choice can lead you down some darker and more interesting paths.

Callings are much shorter than a Class, with less moving parts, but I always find them much harder to write. You’ve basically got 30 lines to promote multiple possible story arcs that still feel coherent for the concept. This is all summed up by the Zenith Beats. They can be cruel and difficult but that’s OK because it is not like the PC is going to be around to deal with all the fallout after they activate their Zenith anyway. So you are left with two options. Either you slay some great threat or everything you swore to protect is destroyed and you utterly fail. I love that we put that choice in the player’s hands. 

For more updates, make sure to follow the campaign if you haven’t, and come back next time when we’ll rally the masses around the third calling – the Demagogue!

- Elaine & The RRD Team

Artist's Impression
8 months ago – Tue, Aug 12, 2025 at 06:42:31 AM

Welcome back to the Ways and Means developer blog series. We’re one week into our crowdfunding campaign and going strong. We’ve already peered into the machinations behind the three new classes we’re adding to Heart (the Witness, the Blightborn and the Crawler), so now it’s time to talk about the callings on offer as well!

The first calling we’re sketching out is quite fittingly, the Artist.

Let’s hear what Grant Howitt has to say about creating the calling.

Grant Howitt: When I was writing the corebook, quite near the end of the process, I began to realise that the Heart was becoming quite a bleak place. It was dark and forbidding and eroded the sanities of those who lived there, and honestly, it sounded like a bad time. I didn’t want to soften the place, especially, but I did want to come up with something for the denizens to do other than suck moss off rocks and beat each other to death with profane relics, so I put in a bit about how most everyone who spends any time in the City Beneath starts making art about it. 

Then I finished the book and never wrote about art ever again. But we’re back now, and doing some more Callings, and I figured that I could use this to talk about the creativity of the people in the Heart - and also tap into the image of the tragic, obsessed artist who’s tearing their life - and self - apart in pursuit of an ineffable beauty. 

The Artist calling ties in very neatly to my Witness class, much in the same way that Heartsong ties in very neatly to the Witch and the Cleaver, and Enlightenment sits well with the Junk Mage and the Deep Apiarist, but I reckon you could slap it on most any class and add an interesting slant to it. 

I can’t remember exactly when I first heard the phrase “I’m a messy bitch who lives for drama” but it’s sat well with me ever since, and I wanted the Artist to exemplify that. Sometimes you meet the kind of person who’s leading an impossibly interesting life and they seem to be doing it out of spite, and while I don’t necessarily want to spend a lot of time with that person in real life, I think there’s something fun about pretending to be them for a little while.

As such, the Artist has a few beats focused around the craft - find interesting art materials, do portraits of people, incorporate valuable items into your work, take an apprentice under your wing - but the meat of the Calling is about being a fucking liability. There’s beats about capriciously accepting a terrible job on behalf of the other delvers, falling in love, pushing someone into despair, getting weird on psychedelics and going for a ramble in meat hell, doing something Dangerous on purpose, ostentatiously destroying something you’ve made to prove a point, touching an Angel, etc.

There’s a balance to strike between “interesting catastrophe” and “oh this fuckin guy again” and I hope I’ve hit it - I think that the Artist should provide some fun friction at the table, and offer some neat sidelines during delves or when talking to / falling in love with / painting unwanted portraits of / cutting off their dominant hand at the wrist to prove their devotion to NPCs. 

For more updates, make sure to follow the campaign if you haven’t, and come back next time when we’ll  hear from Chris about his calling – the Protector.

- Elaine & The RRD Team

Crawling In My Skin
8 months ago – Thu, Aug 07, 2025 at 07:28:22 AM

Welcome back to the Ways and Means developer blog series. We’re picking up with our third entry as our crowdfunding campaign enters day 3 - we’ve already funded several stretch goals (thank you!) and we’re heading for more. We’ve already covered two of the brand new classes we’re including in the book (the Witness and the Blightborn) so now it’s time to take a look at the third: the Crawler.

So, rogues, huh? Weird little guys. Just as the Witness started with us looking at a Bard and the Blightborn a druid, the Crawler began life as a series of musings on what purpose a rogue or thief fulfills in an archetypical dungeon. 

What does a rogue do? Well, they sneak around in the shadows, disarm deadly traps, pick open locked doors or treasure chests, and pilfer anything not nailed down. But here’s something any long term GM knows (but might not admit out loud): you probably won’t add lots of locked doors, hidden traps, and shadowy alcoves to your game unless you have a rogue-ish character at your table to take advantage of them. Poke at that logic for a second and you come to the metatextual realisation that the very presence of a rogue somehow litters your setting with traps and locked treasure chests. Talk about a perfect example of how the Heart works.

From that seed, the Crawler was born: a walking talking cautionary tale about delvers who are consumed by the overwhelming certainty that the Heart is a dungeon made just for them.

The Visuals

Once more Felix Miall took on the task of bringing the Crawler to life visually. The challenge of taking the iconic rogue aesthetic and twisting it into a distinctly “Heart” form was solved surprisingly quickly by one of my favourite methods: dumping a rotten bucketload of body horror on its head.

Crawlers crave the concept of loot, but don’t seek a specific reward. They live for the thrill of breaking into forbidden places, even as the Heart makes these places just for them. They want to become the perfect dungeoneer, but without the dungeon becoming too easy. As a result, Crawlers enter a twisted metaphysical feedback loop with the Heart, as if they’re a tired old couple who can’t decide what to order for dinner: “What do you want?” “I dunno, I’m happy with whatever you want!” 

Over time, the Heart tries to mould the Crawler into the “perfect” dungeoneer, in mind and body – with eyes that pierce the dark, lockpicks for fingernails, 50ft of intestinal rope, and herniated pouches to conceal their coveted loot. After all… it’s what you wanted, right? RIGHT?!

Here’s what Felix had to add on depicting the Crawler.

Felix Miall: “I was looking at footage of the inside of a kangaroo pouch and I thought about that when I was making this (my youtube algorithm decided I would be interested in this and I'm embarrassed to admit that they weren't wrong). And of course her relic of choice is a little guy because I get very antsy if I don't get to draw a little guy.”


The Abilities

Now you’ve seen the Crawler take form, it’s time for me to switch into the third person and ask Elaine Lithgow what her thoughts were when designing some of her abilities.

Elaine Lithgow: “I love loot. Maybe it’s a lifetime of CRPGs and MMOs, but a fundamental part of me is hardwired to shoot a hot spike of serotonin into my brain whenever I see the sparkle of loot beckoning me from a fresh corpse, or hear a thrilling fanfare when cracking open a treasure chest. Inexplicable Loot is my love letter to loot in all forms. As the Crawler delves deeper, taking greater risks in search of some reward, ANY reward, the Heart responds by spontaneously sprinkling treasure around like candy, just for them. I simply love the idea of a canonical explanation for all those reinforced treasure chests containing a single weapon that somehow ended up in a dead end corridor in the bowls of the earth.

The steady stream of equipment and resources also acts as the foundation for a number of the Crawler’s abilities, including Every Tool a Hammer, which gives the Crawler a nice way to burn some of that extra loot, because nobody likes a messy inventory. Speaking of which…”



Elaine Lithgow: “Denizen’s Desires hits another trope I’m a big fan of, giving characters in games random gifts to try and sway their opinions of you and learning something in the process. Who knew that the town crier was a huge fan of rare bugs! 

Denizen’s Desires encourages the Crawler to look at their resources and the people around them in a different light as they try to match their Domains with incomplete knowledge. This ties into another common theme among Crawler abilities, the concept of pushing your luck or taking chances. With this ability, the Crawler gets one chance to try to pick out a gift they think will suit the person (or thing) they’re trying to charm. Get it wrong, and they’ve wasted a resource, but get it right and they’re laughing. Social Link Unlocked!”



Elaine Lithgow: “I have a twisted love of traps, especially the old school kind. Some of my earliest memories of designing roleplaying games involved peering at crunchy black and white illustrations of traps which functioned like improbable Rube Goldberg contraptions. Counterweights, acid pits, spikes, sliding floors, each one meticulously designed to annihilate a little stick figure in the most contrived way possible. Yes the Home Alone movies were formative for me, how did you know? 

Unfortunately, once I started playing and running games myself, I found that these kinds of sadistic traps are nowhere near as fun when the unwitting targets are some of your closest friends sitting within dice-throwing distance.

So the instant I latched onto the idea of the Crawler, I knew I wanted to put the power of traps into the hands of players. Finally! An excuse to deploy the most brutal and complex traps ever conceived, now with minimal friendship drama! (It’s all good when the targets are the GM’s mooks, after all.) Of course I couldn’t resist adding a crack of spice by letting players increase the complexity of their traps by also increasing the likelihood of triggering the trap themselves. You know, because GMs deserve traps too.

PS: Yes, I fully encourage people to combine Denizen’s Desires and Ambush traps to make friends with deadly ambush predators. What could possibly go wrong?”



Elaine Lithgow: “Zeniths are one of my favourite parts of Heart. Here’s something that might not surprise you: I’m one of those ‘forever GMs’. It’s a rare and fleeting chance that I get to sit in a player's seat. As a result, over the years I’ve tried to develop a GMing style which encourages my players to dip their toes in the GMing waters: describe the world with me, name that NPC, tell me what you find at the bottom of the well. It takes a bit of the weight off and my quiet hope is that I’m secretly preparing my players to one day kick me out of the GM’s seat and seize control.

Enter the Dungeon Master ability! One of the Crawler’s three Zenith abilities and the one I’m currently most proud of; because whenever I say to people ‘yeah one of their Zeniths lets you explicitly become the GM’ people always get wide eyed and very excited. It’s my hope that if people choose to go down this path, they might even look back on their time with the Crawler as a micro tutorial on how to GM and realise just how much fun it is.”

That’s the Crawler! Initially we had only intended to add three Classes to the book, but as fate would have it, before we’d even finished writing this blog series, we went and unlocked a stretch goal which added a fourth class to the book! This one is going to be a creation of Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan and while we don’t know what it’s going to be yet, you can bet we’ll be talking about it right here when we do.

For now, make sure to follow the campaign if you haven’t and come back next time when we’ll be discussing the new callings that Ways and Means has to offer.

- Elaine & The RRD Team



Funded in a Flash and Stretching our Goals
8 months ago – Wed, Aug 06, 2025 at 06:06:40 AM


Bloody hell you guys like some Heart, huh?

We launched Ways and Means yesterday, funded within 34 minutes, and smashed through the first three stretch goals before we'd even gone to bed. Hell, at the time of writing, we're sitting a scant couple grand short of hitting our £100,000 stretch goal in under 24 hours. Silly business.

Needless to say, the launch has beaten all our expectations and I just want to take a moment to say thank you to all you wonderful backers for showing up in droves like the hungry horde of delvers you are.

With that said, let's look at what's new.

New Add-Ons!

Due to popular demand we've added two new add-ons to the campaign.
  1. A stand alone PDF version of the Delve Deck, for use in VTTs or print-at-home.
  2. A limited number of the Dagger in the Heart Bookmarks packs (There's only 100 packs, so get 'em before they're gone!)



We hadn't intended on selling the bookmark packs, but so many folk have lamented missing out on them during the Dagger campaign we figured why not. (Plus it's a good way to clear out some of the spares we ended up with after fulfilling everyone's orders.) There's only a limited number of them though, and once they're gone they're gone! So get them while they're hot.

Stretch Goals Unlocked!

We've blasted through a bunch of stretch goals in a short time, let's take a look at that pretty pretty graphic to see our progress:

As you can see we've unlocked:
  • £40,000: Four additional pages of gear for the Ways and Means! Giving you literally more bang for your buck (cause I want to channel my inner Ptolemy Bay and create more impossible guns).
  • £55,000: A whole new calling for Ways and Means written by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan - the author of Dagger in the Heart!
  • £75,000: Four additional pages of weirdos to the hirelings chapter of Ways and Means! (Might be people, might be animals, we'll see what the Heart conjures up once we get to writing.)

Our next stretch goal on the horizon is a big one! 
  • £100,000: A whole new class for Ways and Means, also penned by Gareth! As I type we're tantalizingly close to unlocking this, and we cant wait to see what Gareth comes up with.

Developer Blogs

If you haven't already, and want to sink your teeth into some juicy behind-the-scenes developer insight, our dev blog series is still ongoing. You can read about two of the new classes already (the Witness and the Blightborn) and expect the Crawler dev blog to go live some time tomorrow. 

Launch Stream Catchup

If you missed out on our launch stream yesterday and want to catch up, we've uploaded the VOD over on youtube. Take a look if you want to watch Grant and Elaine (that's me!) gibber away about the campaign. Including some behind the scenes chat, Grant speculating about a Heart skirmish game based around trains, and Elaine lamenting how difficult it is to get a specific Pokemon plushie. Riveting stuff!



The campaign is shaping up to be a great one, so keep an eye out for more updates soon.

Until next time, keep delving deeper!

- Elaine & the RRD Team

Meet The City Beneath’s Most Fun Guy
9 months ago – Tue, Jul 22, 2025 at 08:34:28 AM

Join us for another entry in our Ways and Means dev blog series, as we take a gander at another class we're adding to Heart — the mind-warping Blightborn. I hear mushrooms are all the rage.

As discussed in our previous dev blog about the new Witness class, when it came time to conceptualise new classes for Heart, we spent some time inspecting classic fantasy RPG archetypes and conjuring vivid group hallucinations to imagine how they might manifest in the Heart.

The instant ‘druids’ slid under the microscope we realised that there’s something interesting there. After all, the iconic druid is an antisocial weirdo who loves nature more than people, hangs out in the woods with very questionable hygiene routines, and spends an unhealthy amount of time shapeshifting into wild animals. 

That’s all well and good when you’re ‘one with the forest’ and spend your time chatting up the local trees or turning into an owl for a bit. But what happens when the environment you’re attuned to is a subterranean fleshy lucid nightmare which specialises in luring hapless fools to their inevitable annihilation?

Well, you get the Blightborn! They’re walking fungi-infested sensory organs of the Heart. Part druid, part vampire, and someone who’s absolutely going to give you the mother of all fungal infections (we hope you brought PPE on your delve).

The Visuals

As with all the classes in Ways and Means, the task of visualising the Blightborn fell to Felix Miall. We wanted a character which didn’t lean on the traditional depictions of a druid in fantasy. So out were leather and pelts, wooden antlers, and all that jazz. Instead we wanted to stick with the classic Heart concept that someone from the Spire, a relatively metropolitan city, had been infected with these spores and pulled down into the Heart as a last resort. 

They may be a walking ball of hyper-sensitive mycelia, but they still have to at least try to keep up appearances! As such, despite their unfortunate predicament, this dandy Blightborn is the current holder of the award for ‘cleanest clothes in the Heart’. I’m sure they’ll get all this infection nonsense cleaned up and be back in the upper Spire in time for dinner.

Felix had this to say about working on the Blightborn.

Felix Miall: “I don't like enoki mushrooms and I think I channeled that into the Blightborn - it's just something about the MOUTH FEEL. I imagined the masses from his head and mouth making bobbly slimy noises as they shifted about, just like those hellish enoki. His aelfir features are kind of being pulled around on his head - I guess eventually his receding eyeline will just stretch off into the back of his skull. Still combs his hair, and the mushrooms with it.”


The Abilities

Now you’ve whetted your appetite over the pretty pictures, let’s take a look at some of the Blightborn’s abilities, and what Chris Taylor has to say about them.
Chris Taylor: “I really enjoy mechanics where there is a central simple action you can take and everything else sort of spills from that. Colonise by itself doesn’t actually do anything. In fact it’s a fairly costly power to achieve nothing. As you hit Beats and pick up more abilities however you can customise it in a variety of different ways and kind of make the class your own.

The second core ties into this and prompts you to begin colonizing as many people as you can. Having walkie talkies in a dungeon crawl would make everything so much easier for the Delvers so why not infect your friends with your Heart-spawned spores? Having the rest of your party infected gives you a useful quality of life ability that I think we’ve all used in a meta once or twice in our RPG games, and this just legitimises it.”


Chris Taylor: “Saprophyte was one of the first abilities I wrote for the class. It’s one of the few that doesn’t use the spore mechanic but I still love it. Fungus is always associated with rot and decay and the growth of something beautiful from putrescence is a lovely image. I am also absolutely rubbish at any video-game that uses stealth, so a way to both easily hide a body and get a refresh out of it was too good an opportunity to pass up.”
Chris Taylor: “Heartsblood Shift is perhaps the most obvious link to the Druidic origins of the class. Here we have the classic shapechange. I’ve always enjoyed the min/maxing aspect of character creation so knew immediately that just letting the class change into anything was a recipe for disaster. So the Shift was born. Pick a wretched form and gain new abilities! (while temporarily losing the old ones. Become an awful rat and sneak anywhere, fly above the situation as a sort of lumpy pigeon, or excrete dangerous traps and hunt in the darkness. Of course as you hit more beats you gain the ability to mix the forms of these nasty little mistakes. We can also see in Split Morphology the beginnings of a kind of tanking playstyle which I always really enjoy, especially in a game where getting Fallout is the fun bit.”
Chris Taylor: “I love Zeniths. Trade your character away for a single blast of astonishing power. However, here I thought “What if you can’t get rid of them?”. You’ve likely been infecting all sorts of people (friends included) for several sessions by this point. What if you just took one of them? Overwriting the total concept of what makes someone a person is one of the more violent acts I can imagine. This ability lets you do that forever. This awful fungus creature eternally copying themselves over the mind of others as their mind degrades like a worn out VHS until they run out of people is such a sad and awful thing.”

With the Witness and the Blightborn covered, that’s two of the three new classes coming to Ways and Means ticked off. I’ll see you next time when we’ll shine an uncomfortably bright light on the third and final class, the Crawler.