Tag: Kickstarter

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EAT THE REICH: what is it?

We announced EAT THE REICH earlier this month to thunderous acclaim: but what is it? Details below:

THE GAME

EAT THE REICH is a pun that got way, way out of hand. I’ve been experimenting with the concept for about a year now after realising that “REICH” and “RICH” are very similar words and going on from there. It began as a Powered by the Apocalypse game, but that really didn’t allow me the flexibility I was looking for, and after much experimentation I ended up re-purposing and refining the mechanics for orc fuckabout HAVOC BRIGADE.

HAVOC BRIGADE is a freewheeling over-the-top chaos simulator where a gang of elite orcish operatives break into a city and steal a prince. EAT THE REICH operates along similar lines, in as much as the player characters are the most immediate and dangerous threat in any scene and the defenders are perpetually on the back foot. You’re not fighting one nazi – you’re taking on a couple of squads at once, maybe an armoured car, and mashing through defenders with ease. 

Systems-wise, you’re rolling a handful of D6 (about four to ten) and looking for any that show 4 or more, then spending those to do exciting things like: shrugging off automatic weapons fire, throwing a truck into a river, drinking all the blood out of a nazi officer and, in general, stomping your way across occupied Paris.

Each scene is framed as an Objective (what you need to do to progress) and Threats (whoever’s trying to stop you from progressing). Each turn, Threats increase their damage as more and more nazis rush your position – so it’s a toss-up between pushing back the Threats to give yourself breathing room or dashing to solve the Objective before you’re overwhelmed. 

In terms of game length, you’re looking at two to three evenings of play to take your group from your coffin-drop to your epilogue. EAT THE REICH is designed to tell one story (and it tells it well!) so we don’t faff about with minor details.

THE CHARACTERS

EAT THE REICH uses pre-generated characters. I did a lot of back and forth on this – I had a robust and entertaining character creation system, even – but the intended tone for the game became hard to communicate and it was tricky to get everyone on the same page. Plus, unlike many RPGs which are about anything and can go anywhere, this game is about a specific four-hour period in an alternate version of wartime Paris.

EAT THE REICH has six iconics that players can control as they invade France.  On offer to the players are:

  • Iryna, a gothic socialite warlock who brought a cavalry sabre from home
  • Nicole, a hard-bitten gun-toting French Resistance explosives expert
  • Cosgrave, an East London wideboy necromancer
  • Chuck, a rotting cowboy trying his best
  • Astrid, a spirit-channelling wild woman with a machine gun
  • Flint, a half-bat monstrosity who lives in a cave

Each of them plays a little differently – Flint has more vampiric powers than equipment, Nicole is packing more heat than your average spec-ops unit, Chuck can sacrifice his brand new hat to escape death – but they all use the same core system of rolling a bunch of dice and picking out 4-ups.

THE ADVENTURE

We provide you with an inaccurate map of 1940’s central Paris, you pick a drop site, and then bash your way towards Hitler. Throughout the game, players can trigger Flashbacks (usually in reaction to rolling very poorly) that shed light on their previous actions in WW2 that lead to this climactic assault, and show the bonds they’ve created as a rag-tag team of undead commandos.

The adventure always ends the same way: confronting Hitler in his luxury zeppelin that’s tethered to the communications network inside the Eiffel Tower. This seemed like the most extra way we could do this.

HITLER, HUH?

Let’s address the fascist elephant in the room: this is a game with nazis in. Real-world ones lead by their real-world leader Adolf Hitler in real-world occupied city Paris. This is not a sensitive portrayal of the realities of war or the challenges of tackling fascism, whether in military or civilian terms. We’re taking a lot of liberties with the source material here including establishing Paris as a major nazi power base, upping Germany’s technological advantage and, of course, that thing with the vampires.

EAT THE REICH is not a tasteful game. It is garish, and disgusting, and violent. It glorifies bloodshed. The players massacre their way through dozens if not hundreds of nazis en route to  drink all of Hitler’s blood and then shove his lifeless corpse off a dirigible. It is also a comedy game, in as much as the central premise is ridiculous and we then provide the players with a variety of opportunities to kill fascists in novel and entertaining ways.

To this end: we are working with a number of professional sensitivity readers to ensure that what we’re putting out is tasteless in the right sort of way, and that it doesn’t punch down at anyone. (I actually don’t think you can get lower than a nazi, but they seem to have a high opinion of themselves, so it counts as punching up in my book.) We have several sensitivity readers lined up with diverse backgrounds and expertise to ensure that we strike the right balance throughout the book. And this is a situation where the more perspectives we have, the better, so if you are a sensitivity reader with relevant expertise, please get in touch. 

Despite our best intentions, we know this isn’t going to be a game that everyone will love. And that’s fine. Hyperviolent antifascism is a tricky genre that certainly doesn’t appeal to everyone, and we know some people will want to sit this one out. There are both historical and modern-day resonances here that can be uncomfortable to play with even when they’re handled with care. If it’s not your sort of thing, we offer a wide variety of other roleplaying games with absolutely zero nazis in.

THE PLAN

We want to get everything ready before we come to Kickstarter – as in, all the art, all the layout, all the writing, etc. All we’d need to do is hit print when the money comes through and we’re off to the races. At present, the art is coming along nicely and the text is near a complete first draft, at which point I’ll be handing it off to our sensitivity readers and awaiting feedback.

You can follow the project here to be notified upon launch. If you’ve got any questions, feel free to come along to our Discord and ask ’em, or post a comment below.

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Mortician Executioner Class Breakdown

The Mortician Executioner is one of the two new classes in Sin, our upcoming sourcebook for the Spire RPG, which is currently on Kickstarter. You can learn more about Sin – and maybe even secure yourself a copy – by clicking here.

“As punishment for your crimes, the city of Spire has declared you dead – and it falls to me to correct the administrative imbalance that sees you standing here, alive, breathing, in flagrant violation of several crucial edicts and one Grand Statute.”

Executions are illegal in Spire thanks to a law instituted over a century ago by a Legislator-Architect who found them unfashionable. However, the influential Mortician sect were able to find a loophole around the ban – declaring a person legally dead and then redressing the balance at swordpoint. You are a Mortician Executioner, and you have joined the Ministry of our Hidden Mistress; you live a double life as a state assassin and a revolutionary, and must shoulder all the burdens that brings.

The Mortician Executioner has been following us around for a while. (Not in real life, you understand: that would be terrifying.) They were one of the original Spire classes, back when the game had a Control stat for every fight, a Black Bag skill and used, god, playing cards or something to resolve challenges or something. We knew that we wanted a death magician, but they kept skewing too close to being in authority for us, and we couldn’t come up with enough interesting abilities to make them work properly so we shuffled them off to one side and forgot about them for four years.

And now! Here we are, older and wiser, with a better understanding of what Spire is about and hundreds of hours of games design experience under our collective belt. We figured we’d have another go at the Executioner, because it would be interesting to take a look at death (and the administration of same) through the lens of a culture that differs from the Carrion-Priest in the core book.

OVERVIEW

All told, the Executioner is a joke that got out of hand. We liked the idea of state executions being illegal but declaring someone dead and then correcting the real-world inaccuracy with murder being perfectly legal, because that’s the kind of Kafkaesque gag that fits perfectly into the black humour of Spire. In practice, it’s actually been really hard to work with, because the murderous insouciance of the aelfir has resulted in a lot of in-canon executions which we’ve just sort of glossed over, but here we are.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: the Executioner is a cop. 

The Knight is a sort of cop if you squint and don’t worry about the fact that the only badge they have is tattooed onto their arm. The Bound is a vigilante. But the Morticians are directly supported by the city and enforce state law, in as much as they kill enemies of the state (or anyone important enough to have that title thrust upon them via bribery), and they’re part of a vast and influential bureaucracy that controls vast swathes of land and power within Spire.

In short: not your average revolutionary. Which is another reason why we didn’t include them in the first book, because they felt too powerful and too in-charge to be interesting to play, especially when we had the refugee Carrion-Priests who were doing the same job and got a cool hyena to play with. 

What we’ve tried to do with this class is underline the fact that the player character is undercover in the Morticians – they’re a state executioner, but given the lack of oversight applied to their actions, they have the ability to manipulate and abuse the systems of power from the inside to benefit the revolution. That’s why their refresh ability is focused not around doing their job, as in the case of a lot of the other classes, but about subverting challenges and turning them into tools to be used rather than destroying them. That’s one of the central themes of Spire – subvert, don’t destroy – and it was nice to be able to reward it directly.

EQUIPMENT

We’ve gone for two different flavours of Executioner using the starting equipment choices. Firstly there’s a witch-hunter, Inquisitor, cool-lookin’-guy-in-a-coat with a crossbow and an axe type; secondly, there’s the Russian-Orthodox-Priest-lookin’-guy who gets a big staff and a load of robes and holy symbols, who is more of a cleric. We spent a very long time researching names for particular kinds of holy attire (tippets, chasubels, kalimavkorai, etc) but most of them were so obscure or funny-looking to be of no use whatsoever, so we settled on “robes” and let you fill in the details yourself.

CORE ABILITIES

Once per situation, Executioners can automatically detect who in the immediate area knows what they want to know – getting it out of them is their problem, though. Hopefully this can speed up investigations and remove red herrings.

Crucially, once per session, they can declare someone legally dead. A few of their abilities key off this (see below) and they get increased combat capability against their target; they can mark extra people using this method, but doing so causes their Shadow stress to mount up as they risk discovery from their Mortician masters. 

ABILITIES

The Executioner is a combat powerhouse, if you want them to be – they’re easily the equal of the Knight or the Carrion-Priest once they get up and running. Abilities like ONE DROW ARMY and REAPER’S TOUCH allow them to chop through whole groups of assailants at once:

Mina’s on holiday so we couldn’t get these laid out properly – please use your imagination as to how good they’ll look

Single targets aren’t safe either, thanks to DEATH’S KEEN BOLT:

I like any combat power that includes multiple written reports

Which, you’ll note, is great unless you actually kill anyone with it, at which point you get in trouble with your boss and have to start falsifying records to cover up the fact that it wasn’t shot at an enemy of the state but, in fact, an aelfir arms dealer who you decided was easier to deal with once they were dead.

But! Honestly? The combat bits are the less exciting part of the class compared to their MAGICAL BUREAUCRACY and CORPSE SURGERY abilities. We wanted to show that the Executioners aren’t just Judge Dredd-style badasses running around and killing people, but that they’re part of a larger organisation with its own rules, benefits and restrictions. For example, you can use SPEAK WITH “DEAD” to communicate with someone who’s legally dead but not actually dead:

Why? Because we thought it would be fun to distract someone with a ouija board and then steal their wallet, or pretend to be someone’s subconscious and see if you can’t trick a password out of them. You can also influence the city around them to reflect the fact that they’re no longer a living citizen, to make them late for things, because we’re really into that kind of petty evil here at RRD Towers. Channelling the bureaucracy of the dead in different ways allows them to recreate events from official reports or half-forgotten memories, erase Shadow stress and fallout, and even – once – swap out their own death for someone else’s.

The corpse surgery elements come from the way that the Morticians have developed Undying surgery – a necromantic practice that fixes you at your current age and renders you immortal but prone to madness, moth infestations, curious leakages, etc. We figured that we could play with the idea that they’ve managed to implant stuff in people that shouldn’t strictly be in there, which leads to audacious and fashionable implants such as visible organs behind glass, nonfunctional megacorvid wings, hands of glory, dead men’s eyes, and so on. Do well enough and you can get the full Undying package:

INSPIRATIONS

The Mortician-as-state-badass is undoubtedly inspired by Inquisitors from Warhammer 40k and the Witch Hunters of real-world history; we can’t say that we agree with their methods or their goals but there’s a lot of scary imagery and association to draw on, there. 

And: you know how there’s, like, funny laws? Like “you can’t carry a pig under one arm in the market square on Sunday in Canterbury” or “in Zachariah, New Michigan you can’t marry a Frenchman unless your door is painted green,” that sort of thing? We like those. Or rather we like what they say about law – that it is infallible and strange and a purely social construct, and that once you step away from it for a hundred years or a hundred miles it can seem perverse and ridiculous.

That’s what the Executioner is – an extension of the ridiculous and a sack of ideas about death and bureaucracy and ritual tied up in a bag that’s trying to overthrow the government. They’re the most organically Spire class we’ve ever done, I think – they’ve arisen out of the fiction and become something more than they started as, and they fit really neatly into the overall whole of the game.

You can learn more about Sin, our upcoming sourcebook for the Spire RPG, by checking out our Kickstarter. And why not pledge while you’re there? 

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Gutter Cleric class breakdown

The Gutter Cleric is one of the two new classes in Sin, our upcoming sourcebook for the Spire RPG, which is currently on Kickstarter. You can learn more about Sin – and maybe even secure yourself a copy – by clicking here.

THE GUTTER CLERIC

“Azur! Charnel! Limyé! Incarne! Merhor! Great Damnou! Uh, Brother Harvest? Plür? Is ANYONE listening up there?”

You are on the cutting edge of Applied Theology. Wielding miracles granted by a dozen gods, you are somewhere between a field researcher and a metaphysical con artist who tricks forbidden, dead or merely unpopular deities into blessing you with their aid and hiding from their sight before they realise what happened.

We’ve been toying with the idea of the Gutter Cleric for a long time. They were one of the original classes in the Spire corebook, but we couldn’t figure out how to make them work without being jarring – despite the game definitely being about religious magic and unorthodox uses of same, they didn’t quite fit. We called them GODHACKERS as a placeholder name, which maybe explained why we never managed to make them fit into the game; it doesn’t gel with Vermissian Sage and Carrion-Priest.

Anyway. We’re better games designers now, and we needed classes for a new book, so we went back to our old ideas and saw if we could do them justice. Turns out that changing the name from Godhacker to Gutter Cleric – a name with heavy overtones of the Junk Mage, their counterpart in Heart – gave us the inspiration we needed to properly build them out. Rather than being an academic innovator, the Gutter Cleric became a sort of desperate con artist who was ripping off gods by pretending to be faithful just long enough to earn a miracle.

EQUIPMENT

Gutter Clerics start with either a big heavy self-written holy book (D3, Defensive, Surprising) or a one-shot improvised pistol and a cut-throat razor, which are popular recruitment tools in the grim backstreets of Pilgrim’s Walk. You have two options: either a sort of bumbling scholar who hits people over their head with a bible or the sort of bastard who’d sell your grandma for a sack of hooky relics. Both are good.

CORE ABILITIES

PETTY COMMUNION allows you to speak with the small gods of objects and talk with them; the more important the object, the less it cares about what you have to say. BOOTLEG MIRACLE lets you go slightly mad or attract unwanted attention in exchange for rolling with mastery on any roll you like. I’m mainly telling you about these because I’m happy with the names.

ADVANCES

We matched each tier of advances to a tier of gods – unpopular gods for low advances (or things that aren’t quite gods at all – they can siphon Idol powers, for example), the Nine Forbidden Faiths for the medium advances, and then ancient Titan-esque precursor gods for the high advances.

Great news for people who love big toads

Eagle-eyed readers of Spire will note that we have not really defined what the Nine Forbidden Faiths are (and indeed we go on to imply that there are actually Seven Forbidden Faiths in the sentence immediately afterwards due to a typo) and that there’s been no mention of precursor gods at all so far in the text, so it was both fun and a challenge to come up with things that fit the tone of Spire whilst making for a fun class and not contradicting any lore that we’d established in the past. (Or: contradicting it in an interesting way, at least.)

We even managed to get some of the REALLY Forbidden Faiths in there with a clever workaround that you can barely notice

So the medium advances focus primarily on the banned Old Gods of the aelfir (The Void Above, The Beast Beyond The Walls, The Fire Stolen) which was fun, because we got to flesh out the history of the high elves and imply some stuff about their difficult past in the Frozen North. It’s also nice to give players an option to use the gods of their oppressors against them, I think.

We wanted to show the experimental/improvised nature of the Gutter Cleric by giving them two different power levels in each medium advance – one for a low stress cost, and one for a high stress cost. This puts them somewhere between traditional reliable Divine magic users and riskier Occult casters. The high advances let us really mess with the mechanics of the game, because we wanted to show that these gods are different from the other gods we’ve seen so far, as you can tell from this ability which lets outright ignore fallout as long as you don’t mind it accidentally hitting increasingly familiar people instead:

We’ve gone for a traditional Moirai or Norns set-up, but we put in a fourth sister who lets you Groundhog Day your way into eternal madness too

INSPIRATIONS

I really like that scene in The Mummy where Benni, the sort-of-villain character who wears a fez, gets threatened by the titular Mummy, and starts cycling through holy symbols and prayers from different religions in an attempt to gain divine protection. The Gutter Cleric is basically a whole class about that.

Of course, there’s a lot of crossover with the Junk Mage, and both of them share DNA with the characters in an unpublished novel I wrote called God In The Attic which features a con-artist demonologist who spends the entire book lying to demons and passing off crap he bought at a pound shop as ancient relics in back-room sacrifices. I will continue making characters who lie to supernatural entities and maybe get away with it until my demands are met (i.e. the novel is published). 

You can learn more about Sin, our upcoming sourcebook for the Spire RPG, by checking out our Kickstarter. And why not pledge while you’re there? 

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Class breakdown: The Vermissian Knight

The Vermissian Knight is one of the classes from Heart, our upcoming RPG. Check out the Kickstarter here.

The Vermissian is cursed. Intended as a revolutionary mass transit system within the city – the first in the world of its kind – the creators attempted to pierce the Heart Itself in order to power its engines, and unleashed a nightmare unreality throughout the dark corners of Spire. Within the bounds of the Vermissian, time and space come unstuck – but it provides limitless potential for those brave enough to explore it.

The Vermissian Knights are brave enough to explore it. They are protectors, avengers and guides for those who would step into the thrice-damned tunnels; they wear uncanny powered armour made from repurposed train parts, and channel the network’s loose grasp on reality into strange technologies.

CORE ABILITY

The Vermissian Knight used to have the core ability SHORTCUT, which made delving quicker. But it felt unbalanced, and also cut out quite a lot of the fun part of the game, so after playtesting we decided to swap it out. Having spent a while talking about what was the core image of the Knight, we kept coming back to their armour – hulking, semi-powered, repurposed and mysterious. We made it their core power.

Now, with VERMISSIAN PLATE, the Knight can consume resources with the Occult or Technology domain – presumably by repairing it with them or just shoving them into the furnace – to power it up once per session. You can find full details of this in the Quickstart game, but suffice to say it lets you, for example, burn the pages of a magic tome inside your suit and wreath yourself in shadowed energy to gain the Sneak skill, or ignite the parasite-ridden bark of the Blighted to release the resonance within and smash apart your enemies.

ABILITIES

Want to kill big things? The Vermissian Knight has an ability specifically devoted to that! DRAGON KILLER improves your damage and defence against anything that’s significantly larger than you, and in the Heart, lots of things are significantly larger than you. Upgrade it enough and you can summon a particular monster that’s hunting you – it’s still hunting you, but it might well kill some of your other problems along the way. 

AETHERIC FIELD protects you from the weird energies of the City Beneath, and allows you to reroute ambient power into augmenting your attacks or overwhelm adversaries with waves of force. ECHOING RAILS allows you to find back doors to the Vermissian – even if they weren’t there when you previously checked – and access moving haunts to heal your wounds and gain respite. GUARDIAN puts you into a classic knightly role; you become better at defending something, no matter what that is, and you inspire those around you to greatness.

ZENITH

We wrote the Vermissian Knight first, and the first Zenith power we wrote for them is THE LAST TRAIN, which informed a great deal of the rest of the abilities in the game. Using THE LAST TRAIN summons The Last Train – the only remaining functional locomotive on the Vermissian network, which is unable to ever stop and is only loosely steerable – and it smashes apart everything in the area. Here it is:

There are others, too; becoming electricity and blinking between Technology landmarks, or punching with the power of a flat-out engine, but THE LAST TRAIN is the one that really sums up the Knight for us.

INSPIRATIONS

Okay so:

Take a Paladin. (Paladins get a bad rap, I reckon.) Remove the whole “god” bit and replace it with a furious desire to protect people; to impose structure and understanding on a world that defies it. Combine that Paladin with Iron Man, because powered armour is cool. Channel the Vermissian Sage class from Spire into it, so none of the technology works properly and no-one understands how it functions, and tinge everything with the occult.

That’s the Vermissian Knight. The big turning point on was seeing Felix’s art – we knew that the Knight was cool, but seeing the dude in armour looking battered and faintly sci-fi really sealed the deal. Have I mentioned, also, how I’ve been playing Warhammer 40,000 for the last twenty years, and always been quietly fascinated with the blend of high-tech and low-tech that that game has? Maybe you can see my obsession in the Knight.

The Knight is easy to play; they’re a knight, and knights hit things and protect people. (In roleplaying games, at least. The less said about knights in real life the better.) They’re the Fighter class, for want of a better word, and they do the protecting and hitting that Fighters do, but they also have a special domain that’s all their own – the Vermissian. More than any other class, the Vermissian Knight allows the player to claim spotlight time and show off their abilities.

You can back the Heart RPG, and download a Quickstart Edition of the rules, on our Kickstarter page.

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Kickstarter, Heart and the union

So, let’s talk about Kickstarter.

When we were preparing to launch the Heart campaign, the news broke about Kickstarter’s alleged union-busting activities, including the firing of two employees who were active in attempting to organise.

At the time, that prompted us – along with a lot of other creators – to seriously consider our position. Some people took the decision to delay or cancel launches; others pointed out that boycotting before a union is formed can be actively harmful to organisation efforts, as the instability plays into the hands of management, who can then paint organisers as adversaries rather than engaging in good faith.

We came to the conclusion that the most important thing to do was to listen to the people who are directly affected by the issue – current and former staff, those who are still trying to unionise – and take our cue from them. They said, on Twitter, that they were not formally calling for a boycott. So we made the call to go ahead, but to clearly state that we stand in solidarity with the nascent union, to sign the petition to support them, and to do what they recommended – which at the time was not to abandon planned or live projects.

Last night, news broke on the Current Affairs site of a discussion that their editor had with the Kickstarter CEO. From the statement, which was later posted along with an FAQ on the Kickstarter blog, it appears that the company will continue to oppose the formation of a union. This is obviously extremely disappointing to all of us, and we know that many people, both creators and backers, will choose to withdraw their funding from the platform. 

However, we still believe that the most important voices in this situation are the ones that are currently the least heard: we want to know what the workers organising the union need from us, and since the tweet embedded above – at the time of writing – there has been no update. There has not been a union election yet, and we know that early action can be deeply damaging to organisation efforts; it’s not entirely clear what the demands are that accompany the boycott, given there is currently no union to be recognised. So we have reached out to the organisers both by email and on Twitter, and we hope that they will update or reiterate their advice for creators. We encourage you, as the CEO suggests in his blog post and as we have done, to email thoughts@kickstarter.com and tell them your opinions. While we understand (and feel!) the desire to act immediately, we do not want to cause harm while meaning well, so we are waiting for an update from the organisers before taking further action.

That said: if your personal moral stance is that you do not wish to give any of your money to Kickstarter right now, we entirely understand and support your decision. We are working with Backerkit to ensure we can launch our pre-order store there as fast as possible once our campaign ends, and we will be updating everyone via our social media accounts and our email newsletter when pre-orders go live. Another option is to back at the lowest £1 level, meaning you will still have access to all our updates and will be automatically grandfathered in to the Backerkit in a way that enables you to upgrade your pledges later without giving a larger fee to Kickstarter. To support that choice, we will make it possible for Kickstarter backers to upgrade to custom content levels in Backerkit for at least the first two weeks post-launch – that might push our schedule back a little, but it means if you want to back at a high level but don’t want to give Kickstarter a cut, backing at £1 will give you the option of an upgrade later.

Assuming the union does not call for a boycott, this is the approach we will follow. However, if the union does call for a boycott to begin before our campaign is scheduled to end, we will take down the current Kickstarter project and re-start it elsewhere. At the moment our best next option appears to be Indiegogo, and we’re getting everything prepped to launch there if we need to. If this happens it will be severely disruptive, and will cost us a great deal more in terms of time, effort and money than it will cost Kickstarter by comparison. Our business is tiny in terms of Kickstarter’s funding, but Heart is the biggest project we have ever worked on; it’s been in the works for 18 months, and at its current level it could fund our next two years of development. It’ll be difficult to get books out on the original plan, and it will require us to fund again, which means asking all of you to get out your bank cards and engage with a whole different website in order to get your books. That, honestly, would suck.

But it would also be the right thing to do, and we’re prepared for it. We stand by our principles, and we believe in supporting people who are trying to organise for better and more equitable working conditions. We are frankly astonished that Kickstarter, a public benefit corporation seeking to do good in the world, would set fire to its reputation and damage its communities of workers, creators and backers simultaneously in such a short-sighted way. We do not support the company’s actions.

Most importantly, we stand in solidarity with Kickstarter workers. When they tell us how best to support them, we will act accordingly. Until then, we’re watching.

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Strata Kickstarter goes live Tuesday 16th October

We’re excited to announce that the Kickstarter for Strata, our first full-length sourcebook for the Spire RPG, will launch on Tuesday 16th October. Follow us on Kickstarter to stay up-date.

Strata will include, but is definitely not limited to:

  • Two new classes: the Inksmith, who is a pulp-fiction two-fisted literature occultist, and the Shadow Agent, who has given themselves up to the Hidden Mistress in exchange for the ability to mystically transform themselves into cover identities.
  • Five scenarios written by exciting authors: these range from a one-shot where the cell liberate the victims of artistic beautification surgery to a full campaign frame that sees the doomed drow house of Starys return to try and reclaim Spire.
  • Advances for playing a character from each of the nine noble families of the drow.
  • A huge amount of setting inspiration and details for the richest and poorest places in Spire: the glittering perversity of Amaranth, the folk tales of shadowed Derelictus, the warring factions of Ivory Row, drug-dealing speakeasies in the Works, and more besides.

What’s more, backers will be able to pledge at a higher level to be part of the book itself – suitably Spire-ified, of course.  Want to become a patron of the revolution, or set up your own organisation – complete with a set of advances that members can access? That’s a thing you can do.

We’re really excited to make this happen. See you on Tuesday!

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Spire RPG: The Classes

We wanted to share some of the development we’ve done on the classes in Spire – our Kickstarter, which is nearly over – and how they reflect the system and the setting of the game. This is going to be a long post, so let’s get started!

We’ll go through the classes in alphabetical order, picking out one (or maybe two) abilities in particular from each that we feel are worth sharing. These abilities are all purchased in the same way – when you change something in Spire, you gain access to an advance. The bigger the change, the bigger the advance; these abilities are from all three levels of power.

AZURITE

The Azurite is a blue-clad priest of Azur, the god of gold, one of the rulers of the Blue Market to the south of Spire. They are deal-makers and traders, and Azur is surprisingly flexible as to what sort of boons they’ll bestow upon their followers – so long as they can pay. At earlier levels, sacrificing coin can earn the Azurite temporary access to skills, domains, languages and even allies that they don’t have – but the High abilities, as with all classes, allows them to do some weirder stuff:

BUY SOME TIME. [Divine] It’s expensive, but you can buy back a minute of your time. Mark D8 stress to Silver to cast this spell, which takes effect instantaneously. You travel a minute back in time, and will probably meet yourself from the past depending on how far you’ve moved over the last sixty seconds. At the end of the minute, you and your past self meld back into the same person as they cast the spell.

(If you stop yourself from casting Buy Some Time, then things get temporaly difficult. Each of you takes D8 stress every minute until one of you dies.)

Buy Some Time lets you do exactly that – purchase a minute of time back from the cosmos in exchange for what may well be enough money to bankrupt you.

 

BOUND

The Bound draws on traditional animist religions; members of a downtrodden underclass, they are something of a secret police for the poor unfortunates who live in Perch, nailed to the side of the city itself. Most folk in Perch refuse to devote their lives to the major deities, and instead worship the tiny gods that live in their possessions – knives, clothes, ropes, and so on.

For the Bound – a secret police amongst the poorest of Spire, who hunt down wrongdoers and pitch them off the city – they take it one step further, and capture loose gods then bind them, painfully, into their blades. This lets them go things like:

THE SECRET OF FEAR. You rattle the cage that keeps the god bound in your blade, and it terrifies your enemies. Mark D3 stress to Shadow; your bound weapon dice size increases by 1 for the next situation.

It’s not all captured gods, though; our favourite Bound power, and one that almost every Bound player has taken, is the Secret of Lucky Breaks:

THE SECRET OF LUCKY BREAKS. Your gods see to it that you’re never without small luxuries. Gain +1 Mind and +1 Reputation slot. Your bottle always has a little bit of liquor left in it, and your crumpled cigarette packet always contains three cigarettes, and your box of spireblack matches always contains one match. (You can’t use this ability to give out infinite cigarettes and booze to loads of other people in an attempt to make money; the gods will resent the abuse, and cease to aid you.)

We called all the low-level abilities for Bound Secrets, the mid-level abilities Saints (e.g. The Saint of Last Stands) and the high-level abilities Gods (e.g. The God of Getting Even). This has no particular in-game effect but we thought it sounded really cool.

 

CARRION-PRIEST

We’ve been through a lot of rewrites with the Carrion-Priest (and even changed their name a few times) but we’re really happy with where they’ve ended up. While they have all sorts of abilities focusing around their sacred pet hyena, we like this one:

GHOST SPEAKER: Your connection to the World After is strengthened through Charnel. +1 Mind, +1 Reputation. You have a close connection to death and the afterlife. Take D3 stress in Mind or Blood to activate this power for a situation – you can see, speak to, and physically interact with ghosts as though they were physically present in the scene. In addition, once per session, you find a ghost and talk to them about the present situation – ask the GM who it is.

We wanted to try and give each class some scene-framing abilities so player could push the narrative in a certain direction without relying solely on the GM to make it happen; most of them have one in their core abilities (the Idol, for instance, can make a party happen once per session), but we have a smattering as optional upgrades. With this one, we gave the Carrion-Priest to opportunity to speak to and interact with ghosts, but we also wanted to make sure that it’d come in useful in case the GM forgot to put ghosts in the game – and once per session, they can locate the spirit of someone useful.

 

FIREBRAND

The Firebrand is the most recent class – we wrote them after all the others had been settled on and playtested, after seeing a gap in the market for a pure revolutionary type. I think my favourite thing about the class is how their low- and mid-level advances focus around mundane elements…

THE PEOPLE’S CHAMPION. You are the rock around which the rebellion is anchored. +1 Reputation. You gain a street-level bond based on the cadre of revolutionaries that follow you around, espouse your virtues and (if you’ve written any) hold up your manifestos as intellectual principles for life. When you ask this bond for a favour, the stress dice is one size smaller than normal.

… which is all well and good, but given the peculiar nature of Spire, at high levels, their abilities shift to become divine in nature:

THE MEANS OF DESTRUCTION. [Divine] Your touch becomes anathema to your oppressor. Mark D3 stress to cast this spell. Any improvised weapon you touch (i.e. work tools, bolt-cutters, kitchen knives, crowbars, etc) inflicts D8 stress when used against your oppressors for the remainder of the situation, and gains the following tags: Brutal, Devastating.

What that power means is that not only do you triple the damage output of mundane weapons, but you also make them ignore all armour and the wielder gets to roll twice for damage and pick the higher dice. Which we envisage as you walking around with a box of work tools and chair legs, blessing them with the righteous power of the revolution.

 

IDOL

The Idol is an artist and magician whose main project is themselves – every Idol is impossibly beautiful, thanks to a combination of black-market charms and practiced poise. We wanted to make a social class who was so persuasive that they didn’t need weapons to hurt people, and someone who was so beautiful that reality had a hard time keeping up with them. For example:

INCORRUPTIBLE. Your mind is too beautiful to mar with insanity. Your mind is crystal, shining and pure, and madness rolls off you and onto others. Once per situation, when you take stress to Mind, a different nearby character (chosen by the GM) take it instead.

They also have a wide variety of spells that let them rewrite reality (or make people feel so unworthy that they start to rip and tear at their own bodies), but this subtle ability is one of our favourites:

RENDER UNTO ME. [OCCULT] The world is yours for the taking. Once per situation, you can command an NPC to hand an item they’re carrying over to you, and they must obey.

It’s a small ability, but it’s a powerful one; we primarily envisage it being used to calmly walk up to an enemy in a gunfight and ask them for their gun, but there’s a lot of wiggle room there which we can imagine players using to surprise their GM. And who doesn’t like surprises?

 

KNIGHT

The Knight of the North Docks (to give the class its full title) was the first we wrote, and the first solid faction I came up with when I was sketching out the core ideas for Spire this time last year. While almost all of their lower-level abilities focus around them being a load of unstable, pubcrawling brawlers, all of their high-level abilities involve quests for legendary items. (Although: all quests involve finding an ancient legendary pub, so.) We saw the Knight’s levelling as a sort of redemption; they start off pretty rough around the edges (and in the middle, too, honestly) but as the campaign continues they get a chance to go on a quest to heal the sick, reform the North Docks in their own image, or, as you’ll see below, pull the sword from the stone:

PULL THE SWORD FROM THE STONE. [QUEST] You travel in search of a legendary sword. When you accept this quest, you gain the Resist skill and Occult domain as you are ritually branded or tattooed with symbols of chivalric protection. You must journey to the centre of the Spire, find St Beneferas’ sword, and pull it from the floorboards of The Stone (a pub) into which he plunged it hundreds of years ago.

When you complete this quest, you gain a (D6, brutal) magical sword; as it’s magical, you can use it to attack ethereal creatures or those which are immune to normal weapons. In addition, choose two of the following upgrades to the sword

– Inflict D8 stress
– Gain the Ranged tag
– Gain the Stunning tag
– Gain the Defensive tag
– Gain the Bloodbound tag
 – Gain the Devastating tag

And one of the following “upgrades”:

 – Demons and ghosts are drawn to the sword’s powerful energies
 – The sword whispers eerie truths
 – The sword glows blue in the presence of… something, you’re not sure, seems important though
 – You know in your heart that you are the true King or Queen of Spire

LAHJAN

Lahjan means “silvered” in our drow dialect (which was built with a lot of inspiration taken from Haitian Creole) and the silvered are the priests of Our Glorious Lady. One of the big things we wanted to explore with Spire was the effect of oppression on religion; while there are three core goddesses at the root of the wider drow faith, only worship of one – Our Glorious Lady, the light side of the moon – is permitted in the city by the high elves. With worship of the other goddesses driven underground and into radicalisation, the Lahjan have become the spiritual guardians of the community.

They have a lot of your standard cleric-themed healing powers, but also some stranger abilities as well, such as turning into moonlight, reforming their minds into mirror-images of their enemies, or this one…

RITE OF THE THREE SISTERS. [Divine] You share misfortune between your allies. Mark D3 stress to Mind when you cast this spell. You and two allies take part in a half-hour ritual in which your blood is mixed with sanctified mercury and daubed over your heart. Until the next dawn, when you or one of the other participants in the ritual mark stress, it is divided equally between all three of you. If one of the members of trinity falls unconscious or dies, the spell ends.

 

MASKED

The Masked are our quiet social class, where the Idol is loud; once servants to the high elves, they are masters of subterfuge and quiet rebellion. They’ve also picked up the habit of permanently wearing masks in public, as the aelfir do, and combined with ancient drow sorcery and illegally-procured materials, they have access to weird magical masks. These range from black pieces held in the mouth that smother all nearby noise, terrifying copies of their own masks which can overwrite the minds of others who wear them, and the ability to become legendary dark elf folk heroes:

THE MASTERLESS MASK. [Occult] You create a version of a mask that is whispered of in high elf circles – the Masterless Mask, terror of the aelfir, scion of the Red Moon, who will visit their doom upon them. When you wear it, you roll with mastery and inflict D8 stress when you attack an aelfir, regardless of what weapon you’re using to do it.

What’s more, each night a drow in the Spire prays to you to deliver them from their masters, refresh. Ten or so people removes D3 stress, a hundred D6, and a thousand or more will remove D8.

 

VERMISSIAN SAGE

The Vermissian Sage was our attempt to write a bookish mage class whilst making sure it was uniquely tied to Spire; they are wizards, for sure, but they are primarily historians and researchers who are using the reality-warping tunnels of the Vermissian, Spire’s defunct mass transit network, to store relics from their race and explore the myriad potential futures available to them.

One of their most iconic abilities allows them to create a connection between any two NPCs (and let the GM figure out precisely what that is – remember, who doesn’t like surprises?) but we like this one, too, because it let us discuss the ancient noble houses of the Home Nation dark elves without having to do it in a boring box-out:

DYNASTIC MEMORY [Divine]. +2 Reputation. Mark D3 stress to Mind to channel the power of the ancient Houses of the Home Nations, and give you and your allies strength. The first time you use this power on a character, determine which House they originate from by choosing it from the list below. From then on, when you use this power on them, they gain access to the relevant power for the remaining situation. (This spell only functions when cast on dark elves.)

Destera, the Weavers –  Spiders adore you and will perform self-sacrificing actions on your behalf
Yssen, the Unquiet Blades – If you wear no armour, your attacks have the Brutal and Surprising tags
Malrique, the Unlidded Eye –  You cannot be surprised or ambushed
Valwa, the Silver-blooded – When you successfully Compel a target, gain a temporary bond with them
Gryndel, the Crimson Hunters – When you declare a target’s full name out loud and they hear it, you roll with mastery on Fight and Pursue actions against them. You can only do this for one target at a time
Starys, the Drowned Kings – You no longer need to breathe
Aliquam, Repairers of Reputations – At the end of the situation, remove all stress marked against Reputation
Duval, the Grave Cold – By focusing for a minute or so, you may not be seen so long as you remain motionless and you close your eyes
Quinn, the Noble and Most High – You can smell gold, silver, jewels and other items of value

That’s not all – we’ve got a lot of extra abilities too, such as worship of the Hungry Deep (the rotting hole in reality that hides at the centre of the city), the violent and unpredictable drow rebels of the Crimson Vigil, the luckless City Guard, and the hard-bitten noir investigators of the Greymanor Detective Agency. If you’d like to back Spire, check out our Kickstarter – we’re in the last few days!