I thought it would be fun to dig into the three classes, their inspirations, what they've got going on mechanically, what's exciting to me about them! This one is about the Myco-Alchemist.

Design Story: The Myco-Alchemist began design in 2021 (!), although mostly as a little joke to myself. I'd been having a lot of fun thinking about HEART's Zenith abilities. I'd seen "Death Moves" deployed a couple of times, but had never been sold on them - but something about the tone of HEART made them click to me. They were kind of funny! And sometimes a little wacky. Certainly there's an undercurrent of tragedy, but dying in a game can be all of those things without any contradiction. On August 2, 2021, I started a document that would become the design doc for the Myco-Alchemist that had a few design goals and then three zenith abilities - two of them were full paragraphs, and the last one was simply "Mushroom Town."

When I'm designing a player-facing thing for a game, like a playbook for dungeon world or wanderhome, I usually start by wondering what kind of conceptual and mechanical space isn't already well covered, and if I can think of a combination of the two that work nicely together, then we're off to the races. One of the neat things for designing for HEART is how deeply tied the classes are into the world, so that's important here too. But actually the thing I think that was most important to me, that denoted whether the class concept would make it out of early concepting was "Does this idea have three unique, interesting ways to die?". I really do think that having evocative, clearly signposted zenith abilities is just as important in getting me invested in a HEART class as an interesting core ability and identity

The zenith abilities / endings came pretty readily! More difficult to crack was the core ability. The identity was pretty clear - "you ate a weird mushroom and now your body has been rebuilt into an alchemy lab" felt like a cool concept, in line thematically with the rest of what we see in the core classes, but I think meaningfully distinct from them. Mushrooms were a big part of SPIRE's lore, and it was fun to get to reference the small handful of named mushrooms in flavor text! And additionally I thought an Alchemist opened up a conceptual/mechanical space for a "support" class that cared about supplies and items. 

But the core mechanic took a long while to come together! Early drafts focused around transmuting items from one domain to another - but it couldn't shake the similarity to the Incarnadine's core ability. Leaning too far into the healing potion territory threatened to overlap in a way I didn't like with the Witch, but I decided ultimately that turning resources into useful items was too interesting to leave as a Witch minor advance. The other breakthrough was centering the importance of Supplies fallout to the class - something that other playbooks don't really delve too deeply into. I think Supplies is probably the least "punchy" of the resistances - Blood and Mind are classic with very clear stakes each - die or have a mental breakdown in the dungeon; Fortune can be dramatic and I think can lend itself to comedy (or irony) in fun ways; and Echo is one of the calling cards of the whole game! Caring about the stuff you're carrying is going to have a hard time competing - so what if the Myco-Alchemist made their supplies part of themselves?

From there, things started to speed up! Aligning the minor and major abilities to work alongside the core abilities was pretty easy - the abilities wanted to do weird mushroom things and make weird potions or other alchemicals, and there's a lot of real world inspiration to draw from there. Each minor domain lets you grow a different kind of mushroom (by making your body the appropriate growing environment for a mushroom of that domain), and each major ability gives access to a new kind of alchemical, either in the major ability or through one of the minor advances.

Mechanical Considerations: It was important to me that spending resources can't be too efficient, or you wipe out the need for Haunts, which I think are too interesting to subvert. At the same time, you want spending resources to feel cool and powerful, so you don't feel bad for using them up. I think a pretty good way to accomplish this is by making smaller resource value items feel relevant - having ways of spending them for effects that, even if they scale with size, can still feel fun and interesting at low numbers.

Assorted inspirations: the mold that only grows on top of another mushroom from Infinite Jest; the druid of the living spire, which was interesting as an approach at something similar for SPIRE, but didn't really feel like it would fit that well into HEART; Fungi of the Far Realms, a book I've always jumped at using, whenever I can; "tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit"; blending different fruits (infested with fungus?) into philosophies at the Mangrove College in Fallen London.

Favorite ability: It's hard to choose, since more than the other classes the Myco-Alchemist spent the longest time cooking, and I had a lot of time to grow fond of everything. But I think probably the piece that still makes me smile most reliably is SLIME MOLD, where I got to write "your brain/mushrooms/brain-mushroom hybrid".