Last week or so some of my friends ended up free and I offered to run a game for them, Heart has been sitting on my PC since the Bundle of Holding sale and I've been dying to run it since I saw it waay baack (Let alone after listening to some of Sangfelle).
I can say for sure I loved running it, it was super fun and I'd gladly play it some more. We used the pre-gen characters that came with the quick start but just as an exercise in understanding the game I prepped my own little delve for them.
My personal takeaways:
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I love the beats system. It provides a really cool flagging system of player interest and ideas they want to hit while giving concrete rewards for pushing for them.
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The abstraction of the delve Stress is wonderful. I've been a player in a lot of dnd games, so dungeon crawl stuff has been around me a lot. I'm personally not the biggest fan of the feel it CAN bring (not always or anything, very hit or miss), and the ability to simultaneously abstract and give a number/mechanic to the progress is brilliant. Sometimes they charge through an obstacle quickly and make short work of it, other times, something becomes a major setback and a lot more interesting all of a sudden. I loved it, specifically, a neat ritual door situation got really wild after some failure.
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A focus on failure is something I love. The players agreed, despite being a lot about failure, it never felt punishing or stifling. It encouraged the group to push harder against those aspects, etc.
(Some more specific details are below, including a description of some of the horror elements, body horror, self-sacrifice, etc.)
The delve began with a request from one known as Princept Purple, the ruler of the strange cathedrals high above. The skies around burned a constant crimson, and the Old Roads surrounding were in constant repair by the strange workers.
Princept informed them of a strange happening, entire areas were becoming literally impaled by strange spires rising from the ground. In some cases, wiping out entire Havens. So they were tasked to find the source.
Some of the interesting focal points:
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A strange ritual door blocking a Haven. It was surrounded by a few shrines and basins, the group quickly began attempting to add various things to the basins to activate them. It could've been simple, but a few failures led it to get quite messy. Our Hound attacked and destroyed one, on the orders of his Master, taking Mind stress in the process as retaliation from the entity but successfully opening the door.
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In one major fallout, I elected to mess with the whole group and give it to everyone (its a oneshot sooo why not), they all became obsessed with the spires that had been pervading pretty much everything on the way down and felt the need to carry them with them in some way.
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The sorta 'final boss' was the "Impaled King Vedelka" in his throne of broken gravity. He could balance between and used the spears within his body to attack the party. Once he got pretty messed up, the Vermissian Knight (who lost his armor right before) elected to go out in a blaze of glory. He impaled himself with the spires he'd collected (due to the above fallout) and dove full force into the boss, wrapping his arms around him and dealing just enough Stress in order to take him out. They both collapsed, wrapped around each other kneeling in a death embrace. He took the Critical Fallout of haunting the party, sticking with the spires they had now collected as a medium of his spirit.
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As they came back up from the delve, many of the shrines and strange ritual sites were twisted now, instead showing the impaled embrace of the two they had witnessed before. The one destroyed outside the Haven was made anew showing the strange image itself.