Burned and Broken preview

Let’s talk about how Heart interacts with Spire.

Burned and Broken is the final form of the Spire Conversion Guide – a set of rules for adapting characters from the City Above in order to send them on journeys into the City Beneath. We had a lot of requests quite early on in the process of Heart development – before we’d released playtest documents, even – for a means of converting characters between the games – this makes sense, and given that both games a) are set in the same world and b) use broadly similar systems, it shouldn’t have been too hard, right?

Here’s the problem, though: we wrote that. It wasn’t hard to do. It just wasn’t good.

Heart is a very different game from Spire; it uses the Resistance system as a base, and some of the skills and domains are the same as in Spire, and you can definitely see where one system has evolved into the other. (We’re going to overhaul the Resistance Toolkit, too, once Heart is released, with what we’ve learned. It’s not that Heart is a better game than Spire, per se, more that we’ve figured out a lot about adapting the core of the system to make it more fit for purpose.)

But it tells different stories about different people, and the characters from Spire just don’t fit properly into the Heart. In both games, we’ve tried our level best to bake the setting into the character classes, because that’s where players interact most with the game. It just doesn’t work properly when you try to strongarm one set of rules into another.

The translation guide we put together was dry and unexciting. The characters could never hope to be as viable as characters built using the Heart rules, because their core competencies lay elsewhere. An Idol wouldn’t last ten minutes in the Heart; a Knight, torn away from the culture of the North Docks, barely felt like a Knight at all. It felt like a waste of time.

So: we went back to the drawing board. We thought about how we could still deliver what we’d promised but make something interesting and fun; and Burned and Broken is that something.

Why would Ministers choose to go into the Heart? If they had no other options. (Or, I guess, if the Ministry sent them there. But Spire already has setting and rules for the Heart, so you can use that if you’d like.) Rather than get into specifics, we assumed that everything bad that could have happened to the cell had happened or was about to happen: attacks from the Paladins, assassination attempts from Ministry kill-teams, betrayal by old allies, the destruction of safehouses, and so on.

We started working out how we could use the already-established mechanics from Heart to represent a cell being hounded out of the City Above, and came to two main conclusions:

ORIGIN

Your Origin is who you were – your class, in Spire terms. Considering how far you are from your network of bonds, allies, supply chains and your normal life, each Origin is vastly underpowered compared to the originating class. That’s deliberate; on one hand, we wanted to illustrate how messed up you are given the nature of your departure from Spire. On the other hand, we wanted to give you room to grow into your new class.

By which we mean: Burned and Broken isn’t a way of perfectly converting your character from one system into another. It’s a way of showing what’s left of you and your abilities after the Ministry decide you’re worth more to them dead than alive, and how you’ll become someone capable of surviving in the City Beneath.

FALL

Instead of a Calling, you start off with a Fall.

(Your Calling is how you advance in standard games of Heart – it’s the driving force behind why you’ve chosen to spend your life in a nightmare labyrinth. It’s broken down into a whole bunch of beats (things like “Take Minor Blood Fallout” or “Kick someone off a really tall building”) which, when you hit them, allow you to choose from the abilities available to your class.)

The whole group shares the same Fall, and you’ll each choose three beats from it. When you hit them, you pick out a Calling and a Class, and take elements from that to add to your character. Once you’ve hit three, you’re a fully-fledged Heart character, ready to go headlong into the chaos under Spire, and maybe even prosper down there.

The Fall functions as a means of illustrating your descent from Spire (with beats like “Evade a Ministry Silence team” and “Get revenge on someone who sold you out”), learning the basics of how to survive in the Heart (“Complete a Delve,” “Fight an adversary with Protection 2 or higher”) and developing into a new class (“Get paid for work,” “Establish a connection between two landmarks”).

BREAKDOWN

That’s enough explaining our working for a bit. The book contains:

• A breakdown of Derelictus, the City Between, as a series of delves and landmarks so you can run it like a sort of mini-Heart to get players used to the system
• Advice on running Burned and Broken games, both as a means of translating characters over from Spire and as a standalone prologue for a new game of Heart
• The Fall, and how to run it
• Origins for all of the Spire character classes, even the Inksmith and the Shadow Agent from Strata and the Blood-Witch from Black Magic
• Rules for stealing pigs

We really hope you like it. It was one of the more challenging parts of the whole creative process, and we’re proud of what we managed to pull off with it.

If you’re interested in learning more about Heart, you can check out our (finished) Kickstarter here or pre-order a copy from our Backerkit store here.