It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City Of Spire

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Players enjoy a good conspiracy. What they truly love is to be part of one. Games like Delta Green and Vampire The Masquerade bring the players together by surrounding them with secrets and making it hard to know who should be entrusted with forbidden knowledge. Spire: The City Must Fall, from Rowan, Rook and Decard, sets up the players in a conspiratorial role as members of a resistance cell. They’re tasked with taking action against the cruel rulers of the city and they’re the ones that must deal with the consequences of their actions one way or another. Designers Christopher Taylor and Grant Howitt team with illustrator Adrian Stone to bring a stunning fantasy punk universe to life. The company sent along a book for review. Does the city stand on its own? Let’s play to find out.

Spire tells the story of the titular city which has been home to the dark elves for thousands of years. Unfortunately, the high elves conquered it a few hundred years ago and these long lived beings have been living under the heel of oppression for that long. The players are part of the Ministry, a revolutionary group that’s trying to cast off the rule of the high elves. The game makes it clear that this is no good versus evil story like Star Wars. The Gamemaster section has an excellent discussion on how to adjust the shades of grey in the game to taste. Are there high elves sympathetic to your cause? Are there dark elves who cross the lines you won't? Victory seems unlikely for the Ministry. Even when they do strike a blow for freedom, the retaliatory strike will hit the rebels and the people they love even harder in return. The Empire doesn't just strike back, it puts its boot on their necks until they die.

The system running Spire will be familiar to folks who have played Apocalypse World or Blades In The Dark inspired games. You roll a small handful of dice and they determine whether you get a full success, a mixed success or a failure. In this case, it’s between one to four d10s with the highest roll determining how well the player does in their action. In the case of mixed success or failure, the player takes some stress on one of five resistance tracks. There are physical and mental stress tracks but there are also tracks that affect social elements of characters like reputation and available funds. When a player gains stress, they make a fallout check to try and roll over current stress levels. If they roll under their stress, some of it goes away, but the GM gets to inflict a juicy plot twist or lingering condition on the character.

This stress system takes the best elements from earlier mechanics of this time. The cycle of stress and fallout runs much faster than, say, Heat from Blades, though the game offers options to slow things down for longer term play. The game also brims with suggestions of fallout of different types and ones that affect specific character classes. These abundant examples help show GMs how hard they are supposed to hit back when the dice roll their way. Like many other titles in the Rowan, Rook and Decard library, this is a game where characters are supposed to be played like stolen cars and players should celebrate the opportunity to leave behind a spectacular wreck.

Advancement follows a very loose milestone system. Characters get new abilities based on how heavy the changes are to the city made by their cell. These mirror the low, medium and heavy ranking in fallout but feel like they are staggered out a bit more throughout a campaign. Low advancements should come every session, medium ones every story and big advancements feel like they should b e just in time for the character to go out in a blaze of glory in a session or two. Players can choose them based on their class but there are additional ones scattered throughout the books based on narrative choices they can make. I would probably let my players do a little pre-shopping to see what stories they’d want to pull from in a full campaign to allow me to seed the right moments in my stories. I also hope that somewhere there’s a master list of all these effects gathered into one place. This system worked for me but it might frustrate players who are used to more concrete experience systems or people who meticulously plan their characters from the start.

Adrian Stone did all the art in the book and he gives everything a moody, alien feel. There’s a Mike Mignola aspect to his style that makes me think of Hellboy whenever I see an illustration. That sense of strangeness is backed up by the description of a city that’s been steeped in magic for thousands of years. Exploring the city is one of the main reasons to play the game even though it seems unlikely the players will persevere. There are idiosyncratic character classes like vigilante weapon enchanters and part-spider matrons who fight to protect the next generation of dark elves. The city is full of evocative locations from the decadent ice towers of the rich to the weird abandoned magical subways that the rebels use to sneak around the city. Discovering the world of Spire makes the fatal aspect of the rebellion go down smoothly. It’s easy to see why the dark elves would put their lives on the line for such a fantastic, weird place. There’s so much to fight for and nothing will change even if the steps taken now don’t seem to go anywhere.

Spire: The City Must Fall offers a moody game in a dark city full of spies, revolutionaries and strange magic. It stands out thanks to solid mechanics, iconic artwork and a background that’s evocative but still gives plenty of room for gaming groups to explore on their own.
 

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Rob Wieland

Rob Wieland




I'm running Spire now, and there's a lot to love. I think my only issues are that:

-For a game that seems more narrative than trad, most rolls are actually still very binary as far as moving the narrative forward. If you succeed at a cost (an intentionally very common result) you get what you want but take Stress. If that Stress doesn't trigger a Fallout result, then you just did the thing. Compare that to something like FitD or PbtA, where if you get a mixed success you generally have an immediate consequence, some shift in the current situation that heightens things. In Spire, that shift often doesn't happen, and instead you get the threat of something bad happening down the line, should you take more Stress. But even if that later Stress hits and Fallout results from it, most of the example Fallouts are very specific to the character. You're now wanted for questioning, you've taken out a loan you can't repay, etc. Compare that, again, to FitD or PbtA, where a consequence might be the car the entire group was using breaking down, a storm rolling in, or an enemy learning what the group is up to. Those are shifts in the narrative, as opposed to narative damage, essentially that a specific PC is generally taking. In that sense, the game doesn't give the GM as many tools to keep things spicy—they have to go back to their trad bag of tricks, of just introducing threats and complications as they please, instead of as a result of the game engine chugging along.

-Combat's not very fun, for some of the reasons above, but especially because it adds damage rolls to the core mechanics. So you can very often get a hard-earned full success (meaning you inflict Stress on an enemy but take none in return) and then roll a 1 for damage. And if you get a critical success when attacking? That's +1 damage. Even people on the RRD Discord who love Spire often talk about house-ruling combat to make it more interesting. That's a design flaw, no getting around it.

Those gripes are major ones for me. But if you're willing to inject things with more FitD/PbtA-ish principles, play a bit fast and loose with the rules, they aren't dealbreakers. And the flexibility the system gives you, as far as putting lots of different kinds of Stress on the line, is genuinely cool and pretty unique. But my recommendation for anything checking it out is to either really deemphasize big, face-to-face brawls, or else be ready to tweak those mechanics after you see how fights work in the system. And the setting and premise—especially if you ignore the more traditional "good guys stopping a random threat" adventures and lean into the resistance/revolution framing—are work some system problems, imo.
 

Played a Bloodwitch character in a short lived group and had a blast. Character abilities are flexible and often very narrative, which encourages a lot of flexible thinking. The world building and story focus is very much built on parallels with real-world social and political struggles which my group loved, gave us plenty of room for tongue-in-cheek "current events" griping and commentary. A good DM presenting the world of Spire is going to give you plenty of villains you'll love to hate while also hitting petty close to home for many.
 

Sometimes when I run Blades or PbtA I get tired of coming up with complications. There are days when the players can't hit a 10 to save their life and it's hard when you're on your fifth "uh... you're out of ammo again" success at cost. I like that Spire mixes up those events so sometimes it's big, sometimes it's little. The cost is still there but sometimes you run up the credit card a little bit before you pay it off

I also like that new suggestions for Fallout come in each expansion. Though I wish someone would compile all the options scattered throughout all the books into a big list or a deck of cards.
 

Though I wish someone would compile all the options scattered throughout all the books into a big list or a deck of cards.
I can't find mine in my bookmarks atm but if you ask on the Rowan Rook and Deckard Discord, I know people have collated them into Google sheets and stuff, so they may be able to help: Join the Rowan, Rook and Decard Discord Server!

That's a design flaw, no getting around it.
I feel like we're like, approaching the need for a Spire 2nd edition, because Heart did a better job with a lot of the mechanics, and stuff like Sin has basically replacements for entire major mechanics (including advancement, which the review alludes to being a mixed bag).

I don't know if RR&D will ever do a 2nd edition, not sure that's their "bag", especially not Grant Howitt, who I suspect would always rather design a new game that delicately improve an old one (not a criticism!), but at least the way Spire is designed it's generally very easy to accommodate house rules.
 

I feel like we're like, approaching the need for a Spire 2nd edition, because Heart did a better job with a lot of the mechanics, and stuff like Sin has basically replacements for entire major mechanics (including advancement, which the review alludes to being a mixed bag).
They revised it for the 5th anniversary edition in 2023, which incorporated a few of the softcover expansions and I believe reorganised things. In my head, I recall that they also streamlined some of the rules to be more in line with Heart but I cannot find anything that documents that so it may just be a fever dream.
 

I feel like we're like, approaching the need for a Spire 2nd edition, because Heart did a better job with a lot of the mechanics, and stuff like Sin has basically replacements for entire major mechanics (including advancement, which the review alludes to being a mixed bag).

Totally agree. Though I think for it to really work, they'd need to introduce some new mechanics that let you abstract some of the espionage/resistance cell activities, sort of like how Heart abstracts some delving elements. I think that's a tall order, and involves really diving deep into what makes resistance cell narratives work, and how to translate those elements into mechanics. The adventures, imo, show that they don't really understand how to do that. Whereas mechanizing dungeon delves? That's like game design 101, at this point.


They revised it for the 5th anniversary edition in 2023, which incorporated a few of the softcover expansions and I believe reorganised things. In my head, I recall that they also streamlined some of the rules to be more in line with Heart but I cannot find anything that documents that so it may just be a fever dream.

I have the original and the 5th anniversary edition—the latter pulls in some material from the Blood Magic book and distributes it throughout the book, adds the Blood & Dust adventure to the back of the book, tweaks the overall layout (like changing fonts and background images), and adds a fantastic full-page infographic/chart that lays out the core mechanics. Unfortunately, it also introduced new errata/typos that weren't in the original edition! But to your point, it doesn't change or streamline the rules at all. In fact, the mistakes make things a bit less clear in places.
 
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