‘Dagger in the Heart’ Provides a Thrilling and Personal TTRPG Campaign [Review]

I run a lot of tabletop RPGs, but due to my friends’ availability they’re often one shots. While I would love to have more ongoing campaigns, this does allow me to sample as many systems as possible with the times we can find. That said, there is one game that I’ve been able to run multiple full-length campaigns of, and that’s Heart: The City Beneath by Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor. Its amazing combination of fiction-forward mechanics and fiendishly clever world building makes it my favorite RPG I’ve played.

When publisher Rowan Rook and Decard announced they were going to be publishing their first campaign book for the system, I knew I’d be backing it immediately as the crowdfunding page went live. Now that the book, Dagger in the Heart by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, is in my hands, I’m happy to say it’s a wonderful sourcebook with tons of potential for a thrilling and personal campaign.

If you haven’t heard of Heart: The City Beneath, it’s a dark fantasy game about doomed adventurers delving into an ever-changing subterranean hellscape full of twisted mutants and even more twisted denizens. It’s heavily inspired by things like Bloodborne, Annihilation, and Darkest Dungeon, and it features some of the most unique classes I’ve ever seen, providing flavorful variations on classic tropes. Occultists filled with bees, priests to the god of debt, and knights with armor constructed out of train parts are just some of the wild options your players will have when creating characters.

The world and monsters of Heart match the creativity of the classes, giving you plenty to explore on your dangerous quest. The titular Heart lies at the core of the underground area you’re exploring, and it’s warping the desires of everyone there into a nightmare landscape. As you travel, some of the places you’ll pass through include remnants of a cursed train network, a living inn that consumes its visitors, and a bazaar that sells physical manifestations of memories. Every location in the book is well sketched out, immediately getting your creative juices flowing. Reading through the bestiary is equally inspiring, featuring creatures with evocative names like the Cult of Knives or Mirror Spiders. As a GM, it was easy to pick a location and a monster and quickly brainstorm an adventure for my players.

The engine that drives Heart is the Beats system. In addition to a class, each player character also has a calling, which dictates the goals of their character. Each calling has a list of Beats, which are goals the character is going to be working towards. For example, a character with the adventure calling may have a beat to kick someone off a high building, while someone with the penitent calling could have a beat to convert an NPC to your order’s cause. When a character completes a Beat, they are allowed to take an advancement for their character that grants them new skills or abilities. The Beats allow the players to communicate to the GM the type of challenges they would like to see show up in the game, then reward them for overcoming the challenge. It makes for a very player driven campaign, in the best possible way.

Another element of your character that guides the action is fallout. When characters fail rolls, they take stress to one of five resistance tracks. These represent different ways your characters are affected as they journey through danger. Blood stress represents your basic bodily harm, but you can also take supply stress as you expend resources, mind stress as you begin to lose your sanity, fortune stress as luck turns against you, or echo stress as the weird energies of the land begin to transform your body. Each time you take stress, you make a fallout test. The more stress you have, the more likely you are to get fallout, which is a mechanical and narrative consequence for the damage you took. Blood fallout could manifest as a broken limb, while echo fallout could mean a strange flower grows from your chest. It’s a wonderful push your luck system that adds tension to every dice roll, and interesting consequences to every failure. Fallouts can be cleared by spending resources, but it can be just as fun to keep a thematic fallout as it is to heal yourself.

Given how much the players drive the action in the base game, I was slightly skeptical that a campaign book would be helpful, but the story it tells won me over. Dagger in the Heart focuses much of the action on the aftermath of the Vermissian disaster. At one point, high elves from the surface attempted to create a trainline into the Heart, and they accidentally tapped into the dangerous energies that nearly devastated the city above. The seven chapters of this book set the players on a chase for the Delving Machine, a device that was used in the Vermissian project that is still boring through the Heart, warping everything in its path. Each chapter has a series of landmarks that the players can run through, all with different connections to the search for the machine. Specific locations provide you with opportunities to drop more lore about their quest and the various people that have been sucked into its orbit throughout the years.

To add complexity to the story, there are three main antagonists that will oppose your players. Each of them brings their own flavor and themes to the story: a spooky cult leader, a brutish arms dealer, and a conniving high elf who was part of the original Vermissian project. There’s great advice about how to introduce them into the campaign and weave them into the tale you’re telling, eventually prioritizing one of them for the final chapter. They each have a list of goals included, as well as moves they can make against the player, which helps give you inspiration when you’re stuck on how best to utilize the unique elements they bring to the table. Agents and allies of these enemies are also available, providing some NPCs you can drop into any location to help them close in on the player.

In order to bring that same player driven feeling to a campaign like this, you’re also provided a list of Beats that are associated specifically with certain sections of the adventure that all players can choose from. It’s a perfect way to prepare the players for the types of things they’ll be running into during Dagger in the Heart, while giving them the opportunity to tell the GM what parts they’re most interested in. On the GM side, there’s also a little worksheet you can fill out about each player that can help keep their goals and motivations in line, allowing you to tailor the narrative to their desires. The events in the book specifically outline several moments that are meant to heavily reflect the player characters, which is such a great idea that helps make this prewritten campaign still feel deeply personal.

Even if you didn’t want to run the campaign that’s outlined here, Dagger in the Heart contains over forty new landmarks for players to visit, which is worth the price of admission. One important thing I’ve always appreciated about Heart is that it doesn’t overly dictate every little detail about these locations, but instead gives you important facts that convey the vibe of the place while still leaving you room to make it your own. For example, there’s a landmark called the Scabbery that lists a location called the “Camp of the Bone-Needle People.” It never says who the Bone-Needle People are, but the name alone gets my neurons firing about how to flesh them out. This could be frustrating for some, but I love that there’s still space within a preconceived world for me to add my own flair as a storyteller.

Just like the main book, there’s also new creatures and NPCs for you to unleash upon your players. These range from body-snatching insect swarms to an adventurer looking for a cure to his own immortality. Many characters or monsters have origins that tie directly into the wake of the Delving Machine, but not so much that they would be unusable outside the context of this specific campaign. While the variety here isn’t quite as robust as seen in the original Heart rulebook, there’s plenty of great new additions here that could be useful for any game you’re running in this setting.

Art was always a highlight of the base game, and I’m happy to say that the illustrations by Sar Cousins in Dagger in the Heart live up to the high bar set by Felix Miall. The moody images bring the horrors to life vividly, giving you ample direction for how to present them to your players. I particularly loved the illustrations of the three adversaries, which effortlessly conveyed so much character.

GMing games can be intimidating, especially when it’s a game that might be new to your players, but Dagger in the Heart simultaneously outlines a thrilling story while still giving you room and guidance on how to make it reflect your unique group. It’s a tricky balance to strike, but this book manages to guide you through the process with ease. It’s an exhilarating chase littered with menacing antagonists, treacherous landmarks, and terrifying creatures that still remains deeply personal to your party. What more could you want from a tabletop campaign?

Dagger in the Heart is available in hardback and PDF format from the Rowan Rook and Decard store.

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