Of Hearth, Your Home

Of Hearth & the Harrowing has three game phases that make up play, the adventuring phase, the hearth phase, and the harrowing phase. Today, we are going to talk about the hearth, the hearth phase, and all things settlement for the upcoming game.

The hearth is where the heroes settle in the wilds. They start with three villagers (followers in other games) and can make their hearth wherever they see fit. They can make more than one hearth as the game progresses.

During the adventuring phase, the heroes head out into the wilds, in search of adventure, treasure, and even finding more people to convince to join them at their hearth. The wilds are a rough place, and surviving out there means banding together and building something out of nothing.

The idea of the hearth and the hearth phase came from years of playing games that had downtime systems, followers, and even things like bastions in 5e, land management in Runequest, etc. I've always found that some players really love to latch onto these systems, and build something for their heroes, and thus was born the hearth and the hearth phase.

The hearth phase grounds the players into the setting and gives them something tangible that their characters are striving towards. Finding more villagers to help them, building up the defenses of the hearth, finding trade goods or treasure to trade for the things they need, all are reasons to go adventuring. In that way the hearth phase feeds into the adventuring phase.

It also gives the players something that they are building. Gone is the adventure plotline handed to you from some NPC you don't care about. Instead it is replaced with real goals your players set out for themselves.

Time wise, the adventuring phase takes up the majority of time, likely 60-75% of play is spent in the adventuring phase, so the hearth phase does not take over the game, it just adds to the adventuring and helps feed into it.

During the hearth phase several things happen:

1. Advancement - If the heroes have gone on an expedition out into the wilds, the next hearth phase they spend at the hearth, they can advance their skills.

2. Villager Labor - Each villager is assigned to a task for the week. This is usually divided into building, food production, trade goods production, or crafting.

3. Training - Heroes can spend time trying to raise skills, powers, or even characteristics through training during hearth phases. BRP has a system for this well defined already.

4. Crafting - Heroes with craft skills can spend time crafting gear. This includes enchanting and alchemy skills.

5. Hero Labor - Finally, any hero not training, crafting, or adventuring during a hearth phase can labor in the hearth. Unlike villagers, heroes can produce more than one unit of labor in a week with a successful skill roll.

Let's examine a couple of points here real quick.

Advancement in BRP is something we have talked a lot about, but essentially anything you are successful at using (skills, powers, passions, personality rolls) allows you to check an XP box. During advancement in the hearth phase, you check against each XP box to see if that thing raised or not. This is all done in the hearth phase.

Village Labor is the process of figuring out what all villagers are working on. Villagers start without a specialty and gain one when they are assigned a job in the village, such as blacksmithing if they are to man the forge. Once a villager is assigned a specialty they can raise their specialty every month.

The labor villagers produce is generally used for building new building projects, gathering food for the hearth, produce trade goods that can be later traded elsewhere, or crafting gear the heroes can use.

Training is much like advancement, only you did not get the XP box by experience in an adventure, but are instead working during your downtime to advance. You spend time doing that instead of working on the hearth. Once you have spent enough time, you get to attempt to advance whatever it is you are training.

Crafting by heroes or villagers takes time and a successful craft skill roll. Each item in the equipment chapter has a cost, in gold, which is also the amount of successful weeks of crafting rolls needed to craft an item. Crafting is a trade off. It is not automatic, like producing trade goods, and weeks can go by of failed craft rolls before progress is made.

Finally, heroes that did not adventure, train, or craft can help labor in the hearth. This automatically produces the same amount a villager would, but because they are heroes, the player can attempt an appropriate skill, passion, or personality roll to try and push to gain an extra unit of labor. This labor, just like villagers, can be spent on building projects, food production, or trade goods.

A few times we have mentioned building projects. A typical hearth established in a ruin has room for 10 people to stay and no other infrastructure. It is up the players to decide how their heroes are going to guide the construction of the hearth. The most enduring aspect of that are the building projects.

Each project has a number of weeks of labor it takes to build it, and prerequisite buildings that must be completed before the building can be built. Each building then can be used to both house more villagers, produce trade goods, or produce food (at a higher rate than just foraging).

Here is an example building project, the tower:

And here is the tech tree from the core book. We plan to add more building projects in future books, and gamemasters and players should feel free to use this as a starting point for more building projects they dream up.

The Hearth Tech Tree, showing building project prerequisites

Players we have tested the game with really love the hearth concept and the hearth phase. They love getting out and adventuring, then putting that to use in the hearth phase, figuring out what they need to build next, and then finding out how they need to go out into the wilds to find more villagers, trade for things they need, etc. I've even had multiple player groups draw maps of their hearth.

In the end, the goal of the hearth and the hearth phase is to really ground the players, and give them something to strive toward. They are constantly trying to make their hearth better, gather more survivors to the hearth, and most of all protect the hearth from the depridations of the Harrowing. That brings us to the harrowing phase, but lets save that for a future blog post.

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