The Spire ?

Guts · Post by **Guts** » Tue Jun 25, 2019 12:58 pm

Anyone seen this yet? Players are drow guerrilla fighters against the High Elf regime in a exotic fantasy-punk city. The visuals are neat:

Design-wise it's in the corner of PbtA or Blades, aka fast rules closely tied to setting themes ir particulars. The playable archetypes are great exames of that. Ie: the Vermissian Sage is a historian with access to a defunct elven planar transit system that's now used as a vault, with abilities like "Back Door" that allows him to enter it from anywhere, or "Unspeakable" that allows him to teleport away entire concepts from existence (and bring them back from the vault later). Even the basic "Fighter" here has crazy abilities linked to the setting.

I haven't played yet but I'm warming up for it.

Yesterday's Hero · Post by **Yesterday's Hero** » Tue Jun 25, 2019 1:48 pm

Those pics remind me of Darkest Dungeon. Is a cool aesthetic.

Guts · Post by **Guts** » Tue Jun 25, 2019 8:24 pm

Yesterday's Hero wrote:Those pics remind me of Darkest Dungeon. Is a cool aesthetic.

Pretty much, yeah. This reminds me I have a pending Darkest Dungeon game halfway through the campaign. I should go back to it sometime.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Tue Jun 25, 2019 11:05 pm

I backed the kickstarter for the Strata expansion, and that plus the core book showed up in the mail a month ago. There's some really cool stuff there, and they don't hesitate to give players really nice powers. However, I have some concerns about the amount of railroading that goes into many of the sample adventures.

There's definitely some value in making the situation change when players rest if you are concerned about 5 minute work days, and rolls should certainly be meaningful, but I listened to a podcast where one of Spire's developers ran a game and treated a failed "I search the warehouse boxes for something useful" roll like a failed SAN check in a Cthulhu game, it was really bewildering.

Guts · Post by **Guts** » Thu Jun 27, 2019 3:03 pm

Avoraciopoctules wrote:I backed the kickstarter for the Strata expansion, and that plus the core book showed up in the mail a month ago. There's some really cool stuff there, and they don't hesitate to give players really nice powers. However, I have some concerns about the amount of railroading that goes into many of the sample adventures.

Ssomething that seems missing from Spire , specially in contrast to it's PbtA/Blades cousins, is proper play structures. I can see Blades districts traits and inter-faction relations being super useful here.

There's definitely some value in making the situation change when players rest if you are concerned about 5 minute work days, and rolls should certainly be meaningful, but I listened to a podcast where one of Spire's developers ran a game and treated a failed "I search the warehouse boxes for something useful" roll like a failed SAN check in a Cthulhu game, it was really bewildering.

Can you elaborate on that? Maybe the PC stumbled with some eldritch truth on those boxes, or was under a time pressure or something?

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Thu Jun 27, 2019 3:14 pm

They were in a big warehouse, with a ominous hole/tunnel into King Teeth's lair. All they knew at that point was that there was something creepy going on, and the hole had something to do with the district's weirdness.

One of the players wanted to search the boxes for something flammable, so they could throw firebombs at any crazy monsters inside.

The MC says that's a difficult roll, because the warehouse is already picked-over. The player fails the roll, so they take mental Stress, and the MC explains that the PC just goes nuts, babbling, knocking boxes around as the frustration overwhelms them.

Guts · Post by **Guts** » Thu Jun 27, 2019 8:05 pm

Yeah that sounds off. If that stress taken fill up some stress track or something, then it's reasonable, but if that happens out of nowehere it's weird indeed.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Thu Jun 27, 2019 10:40 pm

https://feats.podbean.com/e/the-spire/

I think this is the podcast I listened to. You can give it a listen yourself if you want. The big thing that gave me red flags here is that the creator of the game is MCing for this podcast. And it still felt seriously clunky in a few areas.

The box searching stressout is just one thing, I feel like Grant put way more time and effort than was necessary into making everything feel the right kind of edgy. The time he put into his spooky fat ghoul voice might have been better spent setting up a less anticlimactic finisher for the game.

Still, I do think there's some seriously cool stuff in Spire. I can sift through the 2 books I got and get all sorts of ideas I can incorporate into other games. I really like how they can give you a decent NPC, goals and dislikes, and scene prompts in half a page.

Guts · Post by **Guts** » Tue Jul 02, 2019 5:20 pm

Thanks for the link. I'll hear it later.

This is something I feel would greatly benefit the Spire:

https://bladesinthedark.com/sites/defau ... ctions.pdf

Specially with proper mechanics in place to track those relationships and the effects upon it's changes.