There’s a particular shelf in my study where the “beautifully doomed” RPGs live. You know the ones: art that looks like it was printed with occult ink, settings that smell faintly of incense and revolution, rules that don’t so much simulate reality as dare you to make better fiction.
Heart and Spire sit there like matched obsessions, one a red, wet nightmare beneath the streets; the other a mile-high powder keg of class war and masks. Both books are jaw-droppers: Spire’s fifth-anniversary edition ships with new layout and additional art, and folds in whole sourcebooks; it’s the sort of object that makes you brew a coffee before you open it, because you know you’re going to be a while. Heart is equally sumptuous and weird on purpose, and the text outright tells you the intended mood: wonder stretched over tragedy and horror, with stubborn humanity gleaming through. That promise isn’t just cover copy, the rules and procedures push you there.
The Engine (why the dice feel dangerous and fair)
Both games run on the Resistance system. You build a pool of d10s from three levers (relevant skill, relevant domain, and mastery) roll, then read the single highest die off a tidy outcomes ladder. 1 is a catastrophic face-plant, 8–9 is a clean win, 10 is a critical that juicers your outgoing harm; 6–7 succeeds but slaps you with “stress.” Only roll when something’s at stake.
It’s fast to teach, quick to adjudicate, and deliciously stressful in play. Spire prints the ladder in big friendly letters, along with how difficulty strips dice from your pool; Heart mirrors the same table and adds a one-die “hopeless odds” fallback.
Stress is the beating heart of both games. In Spire you’ve got five resistances (Blood, Mind, Silver, Shadow, Reputation) mapping cleanly to physical harm, mental strain, money, cover, and social standing. Heart swaps in a different set (Blood, Mind, Echo, Fortune, Supplies) because the City Beneath is less about wages and masks and more about body-warping unreality, luck curdling at the edges, and whether you’ve enough rope and lantern fuel to stagger on. Mark stress during risky moments, then test for Fallout: the GM rolls a die and compares it to your total marked stress; low rolls against high totals trigger concrete trouble, from a limp to a blown cover to a cracked mind, which also clears stress so the story crystallises and moves forward. It’s elegant, grim, and it keeps pace humming.
Difficulty isn’t +/–1 modifiers and table scans; Control (your GM) literally removes your best dice for “Risky” and your two best for “Dangerous.” If difficulty would zero you out, you roll a single d10 and only a 10 ekes out a costly success. This is a brilliant little cruelty that makes desperate actions feel… desperate.
Heart: The City Beneath (red heaven, sharp teeth)
Heart is a surreal delve-crawl where “journey” is a mechanical thing, not just boxed text between scenes. You travel through Delves, abstracted transitions that sap your resources and nerve, towards Landmarks, the real places with haunts, trades, factions, and trouble. The rules tell you outright what delves are for: not blocking progress, but testing what you’re willing to lose en route. It’s a half-step between dungeon-crawl pacing and story-game consequence, and it works.
Tiers escalate from uncanny to “did we fall into a cathedral full of wrong stars?” Tier 3 is where gravity shrugs and the forest has opinions; the book’s Landmark write-ups drip with usable seeds (e.g., Briar, a twilight huntland where House Gryndel’s rich scions become tree-trophies). Each Landmark gives domains, default stress, haunts (where you can buy recovery by trading Resources), and a few “Potential Plots,” which is basically the game winking at you and saying: “Steal me.”
Character-facing tech leans into doomed heroism. You choose a class (Junk Mage, Vermissian Knight, Deep Apiarist, etc.), a calling (the why of your descent) and then chase Beats, minor/major goals that pay out advances as you pursue obsession. Some classes are gloriously weird: the Vermissian Knight patches their reality-armour by eating Tech/Occult resources to heal, blow holes in Delves, or grant temporary skill/domain access; Deep Apiarists become living hives, their organs swapped for wax and purpose. The vibe is “die interesting,” and the mechanics make that easy.
At the table: Picture a Saturday one-shot. We open in The Bunker, old soldiers dug in where the city forgot them, negotiating for maps when a stress check goes sideways and someone picks up Minor Shadow? No, wrong game. In Heart, it’s Supplies because they traded away the good batteries. They push on into Briar; the Knight tanks Blood fallout (a proud limp) while the Junk Mage deals Echo scars that… hum when hungry. They reach the hunter’s hut, spend a D8 Resource at a haunt to remove the limp, and decide whether to give the Gryndel matriarch her son back or the antlers she paid for. Heart’s text wants this ferment: wonder, tragedy, horror, humanity, stirred on a low heat until it tastes like obsession.
GM help is pretty clear about the intent: “hit the guy with Blood protection somewhere he can’t armour,” “make the room fight back,” “let the knife’s D6 apply even if they dunk his head in a fountain, because great description beats optimal play.” It’s some of the most practical, tone-aligned combat advice I’ve read. Cinematic, but still tied to stress dice and fallout.
Spire: The City Must Fall (revolt as campaign frame)
Spire is a fantasy-punk conspiracy about drow revolutionaries undermining their aelfir overlords in a city that should not stand and somehow does. You’re ministers of Our Hidden Mistress, sworn to subvert rather than conquer because, as the book whispers up front: you can’t win this. If you grab too much turf, something larger and colder notices. That thesis shapes play: slow victories, risky assets, and a constant sense that success hardens into the next problem.
The rules layer on the same Stress/Fallout engine but tuned for urban insurgency: Shadow for heat/cover, Silver for means, Reputation for clout. Classes are a buffet of pointed archetypes: Idol, Lahjan, Knight, Carrion-Priest, Vermissian Sage, Masked, Midwife. Each with core abilities that tell little stories: Lajhans bathing scenes in moonlight and literally warding a crowd; Midwives arriving out of nowhere to interpose their lives between harm and the drow’s future. It’s flavour as mechanics, not just trappings.
Campaign frames are plug-and-play scandals. Kings of Silver starts you with a crumbling gambling hall and a sheaf of clippings; “win” the entertainment district through cabaret, blackmail, and a suspicious wedding. Eidolon Sky strings murders, drugs, and discount demonology into a gorgeous snarl. They’re scaffolds for heists, scandals, and hard choices.
At the table: Another Saturday night, this time a Spire one-shot. The cell needs to humiliate a Solar Church archbishop before ordination. The group work the room with Compel and High Society, the Masked rolls with mastery against aelfir etiquette, and when the knife goes in (metaphorically, mostly) they all mark Shadow because the watch saw something. Fallout hands the Firebrand a “Wanted” pamphlet with his face on it. They get out, but their victory spawns a new clock: angry parishioners and a suddenly interested patron who thinks they’re useful. The Ministry’s not your mum; if you mess up loudly enough, they’ll sell you out. The book tells you so.
What the designers are aiming at
Spire’s thesis is political on purpose: stories of sedition where life is cheap, alliances are temporary, and magic is perilous, using a light, declarative engine to keep the camera on choices and consequences rather than build points. The “you can’t win this” sidebar is ethos, not edgelord posturing; it stops the campaign collapsing into murder-hobo regime change and keeps it tight and local.
Heart’s aim is different: take the dungeon crawl and make it personal, surreal, and transactional. The delve rules explicitly reframe travel as attrition of hope and supplies, the class kits are little doomed poems, and the GM chapter flat-out instructs you how to evoke wonder, tragedy, horror, humanity, then gives you permission to delete anything that breaks the tone by having the City Beneath swallow it. Designer intent meets table craft.
What this looks like in practice
I can see a Heart arc that starts with a Heretic preaching the Moon Beneath in an oil-rain chapel, a Vermissian Knight drawing power from a broken rail network, and a Deep Apiarist who could fix your wounds with wax… or detonate into apocalyptic self-annihilation if things turn truly bleak. (Yes, that’s a Zenith-level “nuke me” button. File under only on finale night.)
In Spire, I want to run Kings of Silver as a slow-burn prestige drama: one season to “own” a street via cabaret and scandal; one to survive the counter-coup. Throw in a Vermissian Sage with a Glass Library that lets you “investigate any location as if you had access” (what a tool for conspiracies), and a Masked crafting god-tricking masks when things get theological. That’s political urban fantasy with teeth.
Comparable vibes? If Blades in the Dark taught you to love faction clocks and position/effect but you want the camera tighter on theme than on loadout, these scratch that itch; a|state fans will recognise the community-first melancholy and moral debts (on different axes), while old-school dungeon devotees will find Heart a refreshing, lethal palette-swap of the tunnel crawl where the walls hum back at you.
Who are these for?
If your table gets excited by theme-first play (consequence webs, character-driven advancement, and scenes that end with “well that made things worse in an interesting way”) you’ll thrive here.
If you like high signal, low rules overhead, the engine is breezy once internalised; most of your headspace goes to choices, not modifiers.
If you want campaigns with thesis, Spire’s politics and Heart’s poetry are explicit invitations, not hidden subtext.
…and who won’t love them?
If your group craves granular kit-bash crunch, tactical maps, and the reassurance that a bigger sword is always the better answer, you’ll bounce off this.
If social friction at the character level makes your table itchy, Spire’s stress to Shadow/Reputation and “wins that become liabilities” might feel punishing.
If weird fiction gives you hives, Heart’s Tier 3 will happily be your allergen. (There are no stat blocks for “the correct answer,” and that’s the point.)
What I (and maybe you) will get out of them
I run games to watch players take beautiful risks. These systems reward that instinct: they compress mechanics into a single high die and then bloom consequences outward, Fallout as story accelerant, not failure tax. Heart gives me the best “expedition game” loop I’ve seen in years; Spire gives me my favourite “conspiracy against the city” toolkit that still remembers to be funny and grotesque between the manifesto lines. They’re both specific, which is why they’re playable.
Final Word
If you’ve read this far, you probably know which way you lean. If your heart beats for midnight sermons in ruined basements and victories that curdle into fresh problems, climb Spire and whisper the long con.
If you want to walk into a place the map says shouldn’t exist and come out with fewer parts but a better story, descend into Heart and let the walls name you.
Either way, bring nice dice, sturdy friends, and a willingness to pay for your wins. The City will collect.
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