Adopt your own predatory lair with new Heart: The City Beneath RPG class the witch

The creators of upcoming tabletop RPG Heart: The City Beneath have revealed a new player class, the witch - who has a range of unusual powers.

Based in the same world as dark RPG Spire, Heart: City Beneath takes place in a “realm of unreality”: a nightmare dungeon that can give you everything you’ve ever wanted - or murder you.

“We wanted to have a class that was in touch with the reality-warping nature of the Heart - someone who could channel the immense power of it through their frail mortal forms,” co-writer and designer Grant Howitt told Dicebreaker. “From that, we explored some ideas around the concept of fey; the witch is an outsider, but very powerful and uncanny with it.”

Among the witch's abilities are Exsanguinate, which grants control over someone else’s blood; Ascendancy, which lets them change the area around them; Lair which adds a summonable hideout - that you can create or adopt from any number of the predatory buildings featured in the game; and Great and Terrible, which allows increased control over their normally chaotic True Form.

In addition, the witch can turn into a “flickering zoetrope horror” and also summon a familiar - which can be whatever they want.

Familiar ideas posited by Heart creators Chris Taylor and Grant Howitt include a vicious, needle-toothed homunculus that eats rats; a sack of meat that won’t stop breathing; and a greasy snake that might actually be an eel.

In the world of Heart: The City Beneath, many of the character classes wield strange powers. “The Deadwalker, for example, is able to break into heaven through the back door and plunder ambrosia to sell on the black market,” added Howitt. “The Deep Apiarist is full of psychically-charged bees that let them work their magic; the Vermissian Knight can summon the Last Train, a legendary subway locomotive, to crush their enemies."

Currently, the team is finishing off modifications to the player characters of Heart: The City Beneath. In the meantime, Howitt is writing one-page RPGs , while a team of newly organised writers works on one-shot missions for the team's previous title, Spire.

Heart: The City Beneath is available for pre-order on Backer Kit currently, with digital and hardback copies starting from £15 ($19).