Speaker 1: Thank you for joining me for an interview with Grant Howard,
the creator of Heart the City Beneath. Got some stupid
questions and hopefully we can get some exciting answers.
Speaker 2: Here we go.
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely exciting. Hello, Hi, I hope I can give
you the exciting answers to your questions that you need
for content.
Speaker 1: All right, So the first question I got a weird
one off the bat. People will always say the heart
wants what it wants, right, I've heard that a million times.
Do you think that sufficiently advanced AI could fall in love?
Speaker 3: No? No, I don't think it could. I think I
think it can definitely pantomime falling in love. I think
that it can go through the motions of falling in love,
and I think that asks a lot of tricky questions
about consciousness. But no, I don't think it's going to
I don't think we're going to be able to upload
an AI into our box and steel co Pilot and
date her like Seth Green from Mass Effect.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, okay, okay. It would be wrong for a
person to fall in love with an AI.
Speaker 3: I don't think it's wrong for a person to fall
in love with anyone or anything? Beautiful answered why not? Hey?
Speaker 2: You know I was going to ask do you think
two Ais could fall in love with each other? But
it sounds like no. So that's the weird one out
of the way.
Speaker 3: So I think that. Sorry. So that's what Twitter is currently.
It's just AI's trying to fuck each other.
Speaker 2: There you go. That makes a lot of sense. It
explains everything. Cool.
Speaker 1: So tell us about Heart.
Speaker 3: Yeah? Cool. So Heart is the sequel or the sister
game to Spire. We wrote Spire in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen,
and we were looking forward follow up to it, and
we figured what if we did a like an os
R game using the resistance system from Spire, which is
our goal with the system was to skip to the end.
So we didn't want to track like money, but we
want to track if you were in debt to a
horrible person, that sort of thing. And so we started
spinning out the idea of an SR game and we
came up with some ideas and that was all fun,
and we realized we didn't know what the setting was.
And Chris a co author he was not on the
show today, leant over and said, do you want.
Speaker 4: To make a lot of money because we can just
do it in the same setting again, and so and
so we used Hearts as a means of expanding Spire,
and like, I'm glad to say that, Like perhaps it
sounded a little bit cheap there, but I think the
Heart's very much its own thing and it's.
Speaker 3: A really cool expansion of the world. Destera is the
is the name of the land Heart takes place. So
we knew we wanted just a resistance game. We knew this,
knew that this this was the setting for it, and
we needed to publish something after Spy so we could
carry on having jobs. And that was Heart. It was.
It is an exploration into dungeon crawling and our attempt
on exploring some well worn fantasy tropes in a new way,
much like Spire was. It's it's us, it's us, it's
us doing dungeons, and it's our fantasy.
Speaker 1: Heartbreaker, right seems like a little bit more than there,
But hey, you guys won a bunch of awards for one.
Speaker 2: I want to say it was something like seven.
Speaker 3: It's it's yeah, the book got seven awards. I will
say it was. It was the twenty twenty, so there
was a lot going on. Yeah, at the time, it
was not, it was not a hugely competitive feel. But yeah,
we got seven ens because I think is the most
books ever won. It's amazing and I really well thank
you for saying that, because every time I mentioned to someone,
they're like, oh, what's an Annie. So it's quite and
like and like having attended the Ennis this year, it
has it has a real sort of like Regional insurance
awards vibe to it. It's a big it reminds me
of being in an office. It's quite strange. So I
could see punters really don't care about the Enies. It's
all just it's an excuse for us to reach each
other around. Sorry, sorry, sorry, slap each other on the
back and not reach out ouah.
Speaker 2: Yeah court, yeah no, yeah, that's weird.
Speaker 3: Nothing world going on, but we want a lot of
many three of them with for Felix's art and three
of them after the Mind and Chris is writing, Yeah,
the art's top draw And I think like part of
the way, part of the reason why our art is
good and why we keep winning awards for this sort
of stuff is because we work really hard to find
a good artist and then let them do whatever they
want within reason, And the trick is finding an artist
who is infused and excited about building a world with
you and not and like and not someone who who
you're going to say, Okay, so this character is a
half elevant Maide and she is five foot seven and
has one eye that's violet and one eye that's silver.
Briefest possible descriptions on vibes man.
Speaker 1: Evocative is the word I would use for this art.
Like it's looking at any pages got art on there
in any of the books that I've seen from you guys.
It lays my brain on fire. I see and they're like,
oh my god, Like what is this character?
Speaker 2: Like, who are they in? It just writes stories in
my mind.
Speaker 3: It's a really fun it's a really fun way of
doing world building as well, because so with Spire, we
wrote the majority of the book and then got in
touch with Adrian Stone as the guys know, as the
artist why did Inspire Felix melded Heart, and so the
setting was pretty much set in Stone by the time
we got to Adrian, and with Felix it was much
more organic and much more back and forth. And one
of the first things which he sent through. There's an
illustration in the the Red Market, Tier two, I believe,
and it's got like some there's there's an argument or
a fight breaking out in this weird bizarre and at
the back of it there's this guy crouched down under
the bazaar who must be twelve foot tall. And Chris
I were like, I didn't think people were that big
in heart, I guess they are now. I guess some
guys are just big. And ever since then, I've really
leant into the idea of dark souls, which is people
can just be big if they want. Oh yeah, the
sadder you are, the taller you become.
Speaker 1: So that's another weird one. Man, I really enjoy those.
You gotta I gotta get. I haven't played elden Ring
yet because I've got a young child.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: The opportunity to play stuff where you can can't pause.
Speaker 3: So yeah, and like equal amounts of time required for both.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, but like if I could just pause it,
like when she's like like, dad, come look at this,
I could pause it. Child, Oh right, either way, either way, please,
so look at it. Heart Ery talked a little bit
about your your inspiration for it, but not the game Heart,
But like the setting of the Heart, the concept of it,
what was your inspiration for then?
Speaker 3: Oh, it's a book called Annihilation by Jeff vander Meer
and also a film which Netflix did with Natalie Portman
and Oscar Isaac Shibit. I read that. I read that
after we were finnishing a spire. Chris and I we
saved up for a for a week off together, I'll
please finish the spire, so we just went off. We
went this back in twenty eighteen. We went to a
small house in Kent for the week. There were some
goats nearby. We smoked a lot of drugs and watching
Netflix and I was reading. I was reading Annihilation. And
so if anyone has not read Annihilation, Heart will seem
incredibly inventive to you. But Annihilation, like it's it's a
it's it's a modern sci fi book. And the idea
is that there's a strange area called Area X, which
happens on Earth and we send people in and none
of them come back. But it's about the sort of
lost and tragic people who go in there to try
and find something out. And as you get into Area X,
you start to become undone. Your body mingles with the
space itself, and it's got it's got a lot of
interesting questions about it, and like a really cool way
of of demonstrating or portraying an alien intelligence. And I
read that that's what heart is then, and so and
so I just kept leading into that. It's a little
bit of roadside Picnic. Forget the name of the author.
So it's a Russian novel which kind of inspired Stalker.
If that rings a bell, Okay, yeah, Roadside Picnic is
about this again, the similar this zone in Russia where
aliens landed and then left, and like the stuff that
they left behind is incredibly valuable to us, and he
compares us to ants at a roadside picnic, and so like,
I wanted to explore the idea of something which is
far bigger than you and older than you, and you're
not supposed to be there, and it's strange, but it's
but it's nonetheless exciting and enticing. And dungeon and dragons
broadly like mega dungeons, that sort of thing, you know,
like there's something really exciting about reading a mega dungeon
sitting down and being like, okay, here's this sort of
social ecology which we're built together, and how do you
want to manipulate this as an outside agent? And while
those are much more, much more ordered usually and much
more about exploration in that way, and much less up
to the GM, I think there's I think Heart scratches
a similar itch. For like, he is a really big
place you won't see of.
Speaker 1: So when you're sitting up to make a brand new game,
new game system, where you start from.
Speaker 3: So this was so look for Heart. This was this
wasn't quite a new game system. So it uses the
same result. It's used the same system as Spire, but
iterated and evolved. And I think Chris and I had
learned a lot through writing Spire. And also I write
one game a month, which which I released. I saw
I release a one page game through my Patreon every month,
and I've done so. Oh, I think we're up to
about we're nearly past ninety now, I've done. Yeah, I've
done a lot. Yeah, and I've got about five ideas,
let's be honest, But you can keep sort of changing
the hats and the mustaches. The I'd learned a bit
in the interceding two years, and so had Chris, and
I think we've gotten more confident on working together, and
so we were able to use the system to push
it in different ways. The one of the stipulations which
Chris put on it is it has to be resistance,
and anything which we put out within this world in future,
and we do some plans for stuff has to be resistance.
So while it might use a really weird version of it,
it'll be a D ten pool system and you'll roll
for fallout and that sort of thing. And about every
nine months or so I come to Chris, and Chris
I fixed resistance. I've removed all the dice, and then
he sort of like pushes me back down into my
Jack in the box until until and I can just
sort of get that out of my system on a
one page but for a completely new set of rules.
I normally, normally i'll start off with a with the
fiction first. Occasionally I'll sit there and look and look.
Some of my most interesting games come from, Oh I'll
play around with some dice or some cards and feel
out what's going here or here's an interesting combination. And
those are interesting games for games designers to look at.
They're not they're not necessarily fun games to play. And
so there are there are a at this stage in
my career. Now I've written ninety one page games and
twenty odd longer page games. There is a feel for
what works for rules. You can understand. Here's the input,
here's the output, here's the player. Well, it will reward.
Here's what a session will look like when plugged into
this overall rhythm and mechanics. So usually I start with
a setting and then like or like, oh, it would
be cool if we could do this, and then go
from there. So at the moment, for example, I'm right,
I've just finished writing a one page game. Well, I've
done the mechanics for my one page game this month,
which is called Goblin Bin Wizards. And I knew that
I wanted to write a game about goblins who are
building trash dragons. And if your trash dragon is cool enough,
it becomes a real dragon and eats you. It's like
I was like, man, that's that's that's a really good
fight if for a game. And then and so I
was like, well, I want to have Goblin magic. So
I wrote up this Goblin magic system, which I've sort
of hacked from Unknown Armies a little bit, and also
a game called Rain, so so hacking these bits and
over together, and like I'm trying to other people at
work and they're like, you don't need to have the
dragon bit. That doesn't make any sense you. Yeah, you're right, Yeah,
fuck the dragon, but just throw the dragon out. And
so now I've got a game about goblins who are
sort of making spells out of things they find in
the garbage and rearranging stuff. And it's kind of a fun,
a fun magic system. And like magic, the magic system
comes from you. Each spell has three parts, and the
GM rates each part out of three. Then you roll
that many dice and you look for matches. And that's
a completely separate system from the from the way in
which we resolve actions in the world, like like Monday
in actions, because I wanted magic to feel like, oh
it's different, it's a different thing, and it's much more like, oh,
we're going to cast the bones and describe the future
or what have you, and so like a way of
physically physically separating out the magic and the mundane. And
so that's so that's an example. And it starts with
an idea, it starts with some fiction, and even though
the original details of the idea might get scrubbed out
and pushed into the next month's Cobald game. You you can,
you can sort of take the overall vibe of it
and work out what happens.
Speaker 2: There's awesome.
Speaker 1: I will sign up for your Patreon when that sounds
great and I want it in my life. There's a
lot of from my perspective, a lot of horror and uh,
you know, horror themes in a lot of the stuff
you guys do. I'm guessing you're a big horror fan.
Speaker 3: Oh no, I'm I'm an absolute coward when it comes
to horror films. I do not I do not like
getting scared. I think like I'm kind of into post
modern horror or clever horror or stuff which plays on
the tropes, but any just sort of actual scary stuff. No,
Chris loves that ship. Chris is. Chris is absolutely into
like the sort of horrible experimental I can't recommend you
watch this sort of film. Yeah, because Chris Chris Chris
as Chris has an unusual trap, Like it's like a
like a horrible steel barb wire trap of her mind
and a lot of stuff gets stuck in it. So
like that's his thing and mine. I think I like
scaring people. I like I like I like triggering emotions
in people. I like being able to craft an evocative thing.
And horror is a really easy motivator for a game.
It's a very like like even if there's something, there's
something wonderful about it, it inasmuch as it inspires wander,
it inspires or it's exciting and it's engaging and you
want to know more. You want to run away, but
it forces this reaction. And one of the one of
the challenges we've actually seen in a game like Heart
is where you describe something like like, oh, and there's
there's there's an enormous, undulating sphincter riddled with teeth, and
it creaked open with a cry of eighteen birds and
admits you into the station, and like people for other
people that they don't know if that's just Tuesday, because
because they're in the Heart and that's just what the
door looks like. So you have to be careful, like
to establish what weird is and then push into it.
One of the things which we were really which we
went back and forth on our own Heart, is we
have ancestries, or we have I suppose the old the
old fashioned D and D term would be racist that
you play. So there's knolls, alfear, drought, and humans and
these sort of the four major components and the major
cultures from Spire, which we wanted to play with. A
lot of people wrote in well, oh, can we play
a gutter kin? A gutakin is kind of our Spire
catch all word for Cobald's trash fairies, goblins, anything about
a foot or two in height, okay, And some people like, oh,
I want to play a dog or I want to
play a series of floating spheres, and it's like you can,
but it really, it really undoes a lot of the
weird and part of like every every every ancestry in
Hearth is effectively a human, you know, two arms, two legs,
right number of eyes, that sort of thing, and we
want to talk about the humanity or the personhood coming
undone when pushed up against something. So that's that's the
horror in that. And also like the Isolation, the deprivation
is a fun horror thing that we were inspired by
films like The Descent I really enjoyed, which is it's
an all female horror films, British horror film from the
early two thousands. It's about it's about a caving expedition
that goes horribly wrong, and like there is something innately
horrible about going underground. There's something that like it's it's
magical and it's exciting, but it's also like, no, you
shouldn't be down here, Like it's not built for you, dude.
It's like it's like being out in it's like being
out in the ocean, or out in the middle of
the desert or trapped in the middle of Like, oh,
I went to a we're driving through Louisiana years ago.
We went, we went on a barbecue tour of the
South back when we were living with one of the
best weeks of my life from like not not from
a digestive point of view, that was that was a
severe challenge but worth it, definitely. I've nearly recovered so,
but it was. It was it's about ten years ago,
and we drove and like we we we we went.
We went from Houston and then down to so we
went Austin and Houston down to Texas and we got
to Louisiana and we were in Baton Rouge and it's
proper swamp land, proper like by you wet, hot life.
And I'd never expec experienced anything like that before because
England doesn't. It's got some weather, but it's not enough
to be interesting and like and like, and Australia was
very sort of like hot and baked and dry. But
the sense of entering this mangrove forest and like even
like even in the car, in the car driving down
a highway and you see this mangafl It's like if
I wasn't in my car moving at least sixteen miles
an hour twenty minutes time, I'd be stumbling through this mangrove,
so I'd have been stabbed in the gut somehow. There's
leeches hanging off my face. No one would find my
body before it was eaten by the fish. And it's
just this sense of like, no, nature doesn't want you here,
like it's it's a bad place to beat, which is
really alien to someone from England, from a much more
temperate climate. And so I wanted to tap into some
of that in Heart and Hollows as well, which is
sort of our upcoming projects. Yeah, the idea of spaces
is threatening, the idea of like of of man not
being the mustard is. I think there's something quite there's
something quite primal to play with the horror of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a project that I'm working on that
really leans into pretty much exactly what you were just
talking about, and look forward to that too. I'm excited
about everything. I don't know if you've noticed that yet,
but I get excited.
Speaker 3: Hey, dude, it's a great trait to have.
Speaker 2: I get all flustered sometimes. So if you have to pick,
what would you say is your favorite horror movie that
you enjoy?
Speaker 3: Alien?
Speaker 2: Alien?
Speaker 3: Okay, love Aliens? Yeah, yes, And the older I get,
the more like Aliens as well. I think I wrote
Aliens off as a bit sort of cheap and like
a bit flashy when I was younger, because I was
very pretentious. But it's most definitely done, but Alien in
like considering it was released in nineteen seventy nine, it
looks great. It's like, it's still it's still scary, it's
still cool, it has interesting themes which play around it.
It's got, it's got, it's got your strong female protagonist,
absolutely and one of the and like, yeah, one of
the best. And I yeah, I watched that quite early
on and it really marked me because it wasn't too scary.
It wasn't like this, this isn't going to be disturbing.
This is in space, this is really far away. These
are some space truckers. John hurts here, it's okay, it's
all it's all not real. And so I can see
that like as opposed to like, oh, here's here's a
scary story about an horrible man. What lives in your floor?
It's like, I've got a floor, it's just too close
to him. So alien was abstracted away enough for me
to really enjoy it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's Alien's a classing.
Speaker 1: A lot of alien content makes it down to this channel,
so people will be excited to hear that and.
Speaker 2: See, I go, what more for you? How did you
get your start in the RPG industry?
Speaker 3: Well, so in nineteen eighty six, I was born a
white Englishman, which is really useful. That is the second
best thing you can be after a white American.
Speaker 2: Hey, yeah, I did that one myself for the same year.
Speaker 3: Actually, yeah, ingrats, it's I says, able bodied, straight, passing,
broadly functional. Now that I've got the meds I have,
every door in my way has been propped open for me. Basically,
I've stumbled through the gap lift by Robin d Laws
into my current career. But in terms of my actual start,
what I did was we used to do live games
back during university and coming out of that, so we
used to do like like like zombie survival games. We
did like a game where you robbed a sweet kiosk.
We had a game in the in the National Science
Museum where you were like you were interviewed about the
ethics of killing a zombie, all sorts of fun stuff,
and we used to do that, and then I had
to move to Australia. I didn't have to. I meant
to Australia with my partner who's got a job at
the Guardian over there that were setting up in your
office for the Guardian, which is which was a great
English newspaper and is now a rancid nest of transfers
from what I can But we went down there. It
was great. They hey, they paid for my flat, and
they weren't They weren't terrible at the time. But I
couldn't legally work in Australia, and the Guardian giving us
enough money to support us both through there, which is great.
So I was able to fuck about and write role
playing games on a patron, and so I said, up
a patron. And because I had a tiny little presence
on the Internet, because I used to be a games
journalist before all that, I was able to market directly
to them and say to two and a half thousand people,
hey there, do you want a game? And enough others
people some of that and liked what I done and
thought I was funny that they came and did that.
Went back and forth, and then I think I did
Patreon for I've released about four or five games through
that before I realized it was costing me a significant
amount of money to send physical copies from Australia. Terrible idea,
don't do it. Also the also the games were thirty
pages long, whereas now all there was no games are
one page. So from that we did Goblin Quest as
I first kickstarted. This was back in the wild West
when you could get one hundred grand for potato salad
on Kick Sutter. It was a magical time. And so
I was able to rock up with like, with no experience,
no like, no credits to my name. And there's a
comic books artist who happened to like Goblin Quest and
got in touch and said, oh, just I did a
drawing of my Goblin. I was like John Morris of comics,
do you want to draw all the gods? And so
we just sort of lucked out into it and it
made enough money and we published it, and then from
there I've had an audience where I've been able to
write to them, and the idea of releasing books for
people for a dedicated audience means that I've been able
to once support myself and then support other people. I
will also say as well, if any of this sounds
like I've made sound business decisions, none of that was me.
I am. I'm learning. I'm getting there, and after about
ten years in the game, I'm starting to pick up
some nouse. But back back at the early stages is
my partner, Maz Who's who is Rowan of Rowan Rooking Decard.
My partner has helped so much in terms of setting up,
in terms of making sure that we were paying the
right taxes, in terms of making sure that X, y
Z and so. Now Rowan Rooking Decard is what we are.
We're nearly a dozen people, most of us are full time,
and we are it's pretty cool. We're publishing games, you know,
and I'm spending a lot of my I'm actually sort
of managing humans and doing translation deals, which is exhausting
because what I want to do is write books. But
hopefully we can get hopefully we can get a bit
of balance back in there. And honestly, I'm just really
happy that I am able to write books for a
living and be part of a company which creates profitable art.
And we don't We don't cut corners, we don't like
we don't go in for brand deals. We don't go
in for like licensing deals unless we're really keen on
the on the license as a thing rather than like, oh,
this will make a bunch of money, et cetera. We're
really careful with what we're doing. We try to make
stuff which we're proud of, and that makes me tremendously happy.
Speaker 2: It's awesome.
Speaker 1: Well, I can tell you everything that I've seen that
you guys have put out has been you said art.
Speaker 2: I would one hundred percent agree. Beautiful production really.
Speaker 3: Oh sorry sorry sorry, art Art has no their word,
art has no indication of qualities.
Speaker 2: I mean, honestly, you know, if you say it's already
Counters Art.
Speaker 1: I think that absolutely beautiful products, exciting and interesting ideas
behind everything, and the layouts are really great, and I
am very excited to play this, and I'm really happy
that you were here to talk with us.
Speaker 2: Uh Man.
Speaker 1: I hope that everybody enjoys this game that we've got
coming up.
Speaker 3: I hope you have fun, or will have had fun or.
Speaker 4: Will.
Speaker 3: I hope you enjoyed Hearts.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I did in the future very much and will yes, well,
thank you very much. And with that out of the way,
we're going to get right into it.