So we have Technology, Wild, Religion, and Occult.

Lets have everyone vote on just 1 domain, and I'll take the 2 most popular ones, and we'll move on with whatever mix we get.

If there is a tie for second place, I'll break it.

My vote is on Wild.

I vote Occult

My vote is on Wild

I vote Technology.

Vote==>Technology

Hmmmm

What happens if there is a 3way tie?  LOL

Come on Manafort....

Figured I was going to roll 2d3. I like a bit if randomness to spice things up.

Yay....

I'm voting Religion :-)

So we have Technology and Wild, as our WINNERS

So are there questions about the havens as well?

Yes. Next question is Tier.

I'll cut and paste when I get home, but the basics are.

Tier 1 Not much wierd happens here. But you have larger organizations having more say. Oddities exist here and there, but people are not that strange for Heart dwellers. It is safer here.

Tier 2 We start to get wierd, people are a bit off here, and strange happenings are about. The larger organizations have less of a say here, and are more focused on protection at this level.

Tier 3 Wierd is the name of the game here. People are strange, and the environment gets extreme. There aren't a lot of people in these settlements and it is dangerous down here.

Tier 4 Nope. Here reality gets undone.

Then there is the moving settlement. That is hard to move but can be moved. And the pocket dimension settlement that requires a lot to open a portal to but you can access from anywhere.

Question - is this just a group created Haven that we will encounter on our exploration of the Heart or are you planning on running a Sanctum based campaign where we are based out of that Haven?

The group will start there, having delved down to the settlement. Attempts to delve deeper may have taken place, but they were unsuccessful. Plans to delve deeper are ever present, but for some reason or another you have settled in for now, this may be due to politics, personal connections made, mysteries present in the settlement, ect. How long it's been? Maybe a month, maybe 2, it is a bit unclear, made more unclear the lower tier you are.

We have a number of new players, and Heart can be a bit of a shock to standard fantasy players from my experience. They make rolls to try and do everything (instead of being more selective), and build up stress quicker than expected. I don't want to say "be careful" "you are building stress fast, you may want to not jump into this" and other warnings. I don't think it is my job as a GM to tell players how their character should react. I want you all to play the game, and as the system plays out everyone gets comfortable with it, and familiarizes themselves with the risk/reward system of Heart. By using the Sanctum campaign book, it allows me to ease players into the setting, give a bit of a buffer in terms of higher stress recovery than normal, while building some personal connections before I rip the rug from under you, and the delving begins.

I do want to recommend no lower than tier 2.  The other two options that are available, I've honestly never run a game with them. I can see the dimensional one being a more dangerous set up to start however, but it may leave you with a place to seek out later in game as you delve deeper.

TIER

Tiers are a rough guide to how close to the Heart itself (and therefore how weird) your haven is. The deeper you are, the more creative you can become – but the harder you will have to work to retain a sense of humanity. For example, if your inhabitants are all songs trapped in jars, you might struggle to get the players to connect with them on a personal level.


Tier 1

Located on the outskirts of Derelictus, these havens still follow most rules of space and time. There aren’t any weird portals to otherworlds, the walls are mainly made out of wall rather than meat or intelligent crystal and the people basically look like people. Generally these places don’t rely on magic or weird technology to stay intact, so they look like real-world underground structures.

Tier 1 landmarks are safer than deeper places, but they usually end up controlled by one or more existing power structures (e.g. the Vermissian Collective, the Hounds or the Church of the Moon Beneath). This can upset the inhabitants if they’d rather go their own way.


Tier 2

These landmarks have something definitely weird about them. Maybe gravity doesn’t work right, or the streets keep rearranging themselves when no-one’s looking or ghosts walk alongside the living. The inhabitants are similarly weird, having deliberately or accidentally severed themselves from normal society.

Tier 2 is significantly more dangerous than Tier 1, so most havens at this level are carefully guarded. Walls, gates and defences are commonplace, and Hounds will take an active role in protecting the populace rather than trying to keep society on an even keel as they do on Tier 1. The folk who live here are suitably suspicious of outsiders, but if you can prove (or fake) your trustworthiness, most will be keen to sell you a hot meal and trade stories.


Tier 3

Get as weird as you like. You don’t have to worry about making sense any more. Seas, woodland, alien skies, enormous pulsating organs, frozen caverns, cursed burial chambers of otherworldly sorcerer-kings, ghosts of entire settlements haunting other settlements; if you can make it fit the overall theme of Heart, go for it.

Havens at this depth are much rarer. It’s hard to maintain any kind of stability, and doubly so if you’re trying to support a community. Any permanent landmark you find will have a trick of keeping itself intact, whether that’s a unique method of living, bargains with otherworldly
entities, advanced (if not entirely understood) technology or changing their bodies to suit the environment.


Tier 4

The Heart Itself. There are no havens here...or maybe it’s one big haven! That’s up to you. (The latter is unlikely, though.)


Rogue

If you want to have a mobile haven that can move between tiers, giving it the Rogue tag lets you put it wherever you want whenever it’s narratively appropriate. Make sure that moving it is difficult, though. Give it some unusual requirements to get it started, make it need protection as it shifts between tiers or have elders in charge who need to be persuaded to move it at all.


Fracture

Fractures are extra-dimensional snickets that exist parallel to the standard plane of reality. They can be accessed from multiple locations, via ritual or through multiple specially-prepared portals. Fractures allow you to get creative with the makeup of the haven, but they’re hard to reach without trouble. Plus, their inherently strange nature means that they often lack something concrete for player characters to connect with, so be careful when building them.

I'd be fine with either Tier 1 or Tier 2. Tier 1 brings some stability with it--it will be less "ours," but also less our responsibility.

Tier 2 could be something we've only just gotten to "haven" status. Again, it feels like we'd have more ownership of it as characters, which is a sword that I trust the GM will keep sharp on both edges.

I'd lean Tier 1, both for the familiarity and for the potential to have that interaction with some of the established groups in the setting.

I prefer Tier 1 TBH. Heart is a game about exploration and I am assuming that we haven't explored much of the Heart at the start of the campaign.

Yeah Tier 1 sounds best!

I don't think I have much in the way of preference so I'll go with instinct and say tier 2

In reply to Crimson-Sun-On-The-Sky (msg # 28):

Ditto, Im new to the gaming system so best to go slow and be careful.  Like the HB suggested.

I vote for tier 1 as well. We don't want to bite off more than we can chew at the start, right?

That all depends on how good the flesh taste.  lol

Technology, WILD
Tier 1

Now step 3

SOMETHING UNIQUE
Something marks your haven out as unusual: a
 rule it breaks (whether scientific or societal),a god
 they worship,a special resource,some other defin
ing mark.

So take everything we have and suggest something.

An example, a cavernous space where a glowing white mushroom forest has sprung up around a lake of spireblack (a tar oil). A factory town where spireblack is refined has arisen pushing plums of black smoke into the top of the cavern, and covering the area in a haze. Black rain  falls when humidity rises to a point. From the lake creatures emerge and hunt the locals, stalking them at the edges of the mushroom forest. No fires beyond the factory are allowed due to the flammable nature of the spireblack, forcing everyone to rely on the dim glow of mushrooms to move around.

So beasts and mushroom forest for Wild. Factory town for Technology. Rare resource is spireblack. And Tier 1 means nothing overly strange.

Let's get several ideas up and what we like most we go with.

First came the factory, a million years ago the factory made strange hand held devices from glass and strange metals and other materials we don't even recognise. But the factory fell silent and still and the workers left and the very civilisation that made them went away. Nobody knows the purpose of those machines.

As generations of vines overgrew the factory, it collapsed. The vines died and became soil, became rock, became a cavern underground. Then came the Heart.

When the Heart began to beat, a forest of strange trees grew with transparent wood and black leaves, needing no sunlight but instead the energies of the ever beating Heart.

Now there is a small factory hidden in the forest where heartborn tribes make lenses from the shatterproof glass that grows here and only here..