Heroes by Hearthlight Review

Heroes by Hearthlight is a fantasy TTRPG written by Mitch Schiwal and uses the Forged in the Dark engine. It is inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, which you can see in the playbooks, and community building. It is a game where where you call home is as important as the adventures you undertake.

The group is expected to make up the world, but there are three tenets true of every world played in the game.

• The world is dangerous and beautiful.
• The world is comforting and strange
• And beyond that, the world is yours to create.

OK, so one thing right off the jump in this intro that I like, and I wonder if it gets expanded on. There are 4 districts to your Settlement that you as a group make, but they’re all led by specific people from specific buildings. For example, “The Elder supports the people and their traditions from the Temple.”. This is really cool. The Temple isn’t tied to a specific district, but your city will have an Elder and a Temple, flavored as you will, probably. The 4 districts extend to the wilderness, where the wilderness areas are each overseen by one of six Overlords who serve as the villain of that region.

I like this a fair amount. It gives you the important people and the choice of Overlords will determine the types of threats you’ll be dealing with. I almost wish there were 6 of the Leaders to match 6 Overlords, but I feel like the temptation to play with cities larger than 4 districts would be way too high with that.

Getting more into the mechanics, this is a lot like Blades in the Dark, but I want to point out one really cool thing: Bane clocks.

Instead of just taking “Level 2 harm, poisoned”, you can get a clock as a consequence called Poison 2, and it ticks up over time. If you resist this clock, you can increase the amount of sections of the clock to give you more time to deal with it, which is done through a separate clock, leading to a race against time. This is really cool and it feels like it’d be a GREAT way to use something like curses or other high level harm, because you could then tick that at appropriate times, such as taking a certain type of damage, taking too much stress, or even “when you return to the settlement”. This rules.

Another new addition to the standard Forged in the Dark rules is the Doom/Advantage system. As a fan of Technoir, I loooove me some push/pull mechanics, so this is right up my alley. The default Advantage action lets you get +1d on a roll, then it becomes Doom for the GM, for the GM to use later to complicate things. You can inflict a change in the board state as if the players failed a roll, then it moves to the party’s shared Advantage pool.

I am liking how the book gives a bit of detail on the different types of consequences, just to kind of help direct your thinking about what reduced effect, lost opportunity, worse positioning, and different types of minor/standard/severe complications.

I like how Wealth is handled. Instead of just being a cache of value you can pull upon when needed for extra downtime actions, stashing coin and reaching new wealth thresholds is helpful. Every time you reach a new wealth threshold (every 10 coin), you gain a magic item. One thing that I’m a little fuzzy on is if you lose that improved quality of life if you convert Wealth back to Coin and go below 10/20/30/40, and I’m guessing you don’t gain yet another magic item if you yoyo around those marks, like 29 -> 30 then spending down to go back up next downtime.

I like how the realigned Turf system works as your Settlement, advancing automatically as you gain tier, allowing you to spend Coin to unlock their special abilities. Basically, you make connections with your community, invest in it (in this case quite literally), and they give back. And almost as if it’s intentional (I’m joking it is), these are called Connections. Cool way to hopefully get players to buy into the Settlement.

I also like how you both pick a Reputation for your party, and then a starting base type. The former lets other people react to you in different ways, and it also acts like an xp trigger for you, and the latter gives you different tangible effects, such as more Advantage at the start of a quest.

Keeping with connections and the party, picking an Adversary from one of the 4 Leaders is fun. It may lock out their specific building from your Connections, but it also gives a little more life to the city, and creates a tension within as well as without the settlement.

Adding Heritage as another player option is cool, especially because there are 4 traits per Heritage, but a player picks 2. The 4 represent the qualities that are often found in the Heritage, but not found in every member of the group. Good stuff. I also like the alternate Heritage rule that you can use in lieu of or alongside the normal Heritage rules.

I like how the Vices are a bit more generalized and can fit a ton of specific actions within it. Thrills being gambling is cool, but it can also cover people who like getting into fights or stealing shit.

The game boasts that each of the 12 playbooks can support multiple players playing them, which is a cool and ambitious decision, given how playbooks usually seem to go. And I can kind of see it. Since each class has a free like, Class Ability that you can level up as part of your advancements, you could go all in on that, or you could spread out and pull from the list of like, 8? Special Abilities as your regular Playbook advances.

I’m trying to decide which of the like, Class Abilities I like best. Monk’s is probably the most reliable. Ranger is possibly the most fun. I take it back, Sorcerer! Sorcerer! Sorcerer! You beautiful, self-destructive bastard. You start with 1 point in this, and you can recharge it when returning to town, or when you hit the Rest phase of a Quest. These abilities are cool.

I know this is vague, I’m trying to get as much across without giving the book away.

I have to share this though, a Warlock special action lets you gain Potency as well as +1d when taking a devil’s bargain. That’s cool right? Buuuuuuuuuuuut. If you ever roll 3 6s on a roll, someone in the scene dies. This feels like an ability you need to consult with your group before taking. I love these high risk things. Devil’s Bargains are already risky, because they introduce some complication to the scene just to get the die, having Potency being another carrot for you to willingly fuck up the scene really highlights how selfish Warlocks are. They are power at any cost, and damn the consequences. They can be great team players, but at their core, they want something for themselves.

Spellcasting is something new too. And I think I like it? You have two types of spells: Rotes, Spells and Heavy Spells. Spellcasting classes have slots to prepare Rote spells, and these can be cast repeatedly. Spells and Heavy Spells are used when cast, and Heavy Spell slots cost 2 Load, which is a nice bit of decisionmaking spellcasters have to think about. Do I lose 2 Load of gear for this big heavy duty spell? It’s cool.

ALSO! Spellcasters only get like extra spell slots. ANYONE can take Spells as part of their load. That RULES.

The section on Overlords is cool. Not only do the Styles you roll for each of them give you a way to think about how they behave (like the Paranoid one gives you some ideas how their lair might be set up and the faction goals they have), but there are also tangible detriments when going against their faction. For example, we’ll take Paranoid again, the party takes -1d on the Stealth and Deception approaches to missions against them. They are too difficult to surprise because they’re worried about all possible vectors for failure.

Similarly, the Archetypes gives you a glimpse into the “what” the villain is doing. Do they accomplish their goals through conquest? What about manipulation? What about those who whip up a crowd of True Believers?

These two axis gives you a pretty good starting point for each of your Overlords.

But there’s one special case: The World Eater. The World Eater is not an every-game Overlord. It’s not even a Sometimes Game Overlord. This is a world ending threat that only comes up 1/216 rolls for Overlords. You need to roll a 6 on the Style, then a 6 on the Archetype, then a 6 for confirmation. If you get 6/6/1-5, you just have a regular Overlord.

Skimming through some more and Expeditions are a good way to handle large quests. These can act like multi-part quests where you can return to the Settlement between legs, or you might be stuck out doing a lot of quests in a row to thwart an Overlord’s plan. Between each leg of the Expedition, you get a Rest, which is how you can recharge your class ability, and it’s treated like a small Downtime, giving you a single Downtime action each.

Except you can’t use Coin, instead you spend your Advantage.

That’s so smart because if you’ve been rolling as a party or you just survived a section where the GM fired off a bunch of Doom at you, the Advantage can help you get back on your feet. This extra downtime action could be more valuable than getting a +1d later on.

During these Rests you can also use the Restock downtime action, which is freeing up 1 point of Load off your character to use freely on the rest of the mission.

I really like a lot of what this game is doing. There’s a lot of cool stuff and the class abilities are really flavorful and strong. The Overlords seems like a solid way to give a game some direction, especially if you make 4 villains everyone is excited about or had a hand in making. While Duskvol is a cool city, having the party make the city feels like a great way to get everyone invested right off the bat.