Artist Impressions

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