eb00kie's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
funny
informative
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
4.0
Playing this with a group and it’s brilliant. The mechanics require a PhD to master so it’s been a bit trial and error, but bless our GM, he tries
Content Warnings
Moderate: Murder
Minor: Slavery
myceliumgirl's review against another edition
An excellent game. Elegantly designed, the plot develops organically and the pacing is lightning fast. The Worldbuilding is top notch, Spire is weird as fuck and gives a GM a myriad of threads to pull on. The one quarrel I have is that the book isn't laid out particularly well for quick in game use. But still: Brilliant. I had fun, my group had fun, it'll probably become an ongoing campaign.
cybergoths's review against another edition
4.0
## *Spire* RPG.
The Spire is a fantasy Megacity, inhabited by the Drow, and conquered and occupied by the cruel Aelfir, but its origins are lost to time. In this game, your characters are Drow Terrorists, sorry Freedom Fighters, striving to liberate the city from the High Elven overlords.
The book is an attractive blue hardback; stylistically, it is cleanly laid out, almost to the point of sterility, and the artwork is excellent and very distinctive. It does look good.
The system is a simple dice pool one, where you can build a hand of up to four dice (more if you have assistance), and take the highest result rolled on any of them for the quality of the result. Failures cause stress, and stress can cause Fallout (damage traits of some form whether physical, mental or social). The system isn’t very clearly presented, so I tied it together in a two-page document for quick reference for my own use.
In particular, the fallout section is laid out in a way that makes it useful to read but far less useful in actual play. However, I think it would work well in play. If it didn’t, I’d just map it to the Wordplay engine. An interesting take is that character advancement is linked to creating significant change in the social structures of the Spire.
The books starts with a short introduction to the Drow, Aelfir and the Spire but then dives into pages and pages of system and characters. It’s dry and sterile and nearly put me off. Fortunately, it gets interesting about eighty pages in when it starts to describe the districts of the city. The organisation here is pretty basic, but it’s not done well for quick referencing. It’s nowhere near the standard of Cthulhu City in the way you can quickly parse and use the information inside. I think I’d be doing some work before I played the game to get this workable; maybe using index card summaries for districts and NPCs.
That said, I really like this book and want to explore it further, perhaps running a short campaign. It reminds me of a less structured, more brutal Blades in the Dark.
The Spire is a fantasy Megacity, inhabited by the Drow, and conquered and occupied by the cruel Aelfir, but its origins are lost to time. In this game, your characters are Drow Terrorists, sorry Freedom Fighters, striving to liberate the city from the High Elven overlords.
The book is an attractive blue hardback; stylistically, it is cleanly laid out, almost to the point of sterility, and the artwork is excellent and very distinctive. It does look good.
The system is a simple dice pool one, where you can build a hand of up to four dice (more if you have assistance), and take the highest result rolled on any of them for the quality of the result. Failures cause stress, and stress can cause Fallout (damage traits of some form whether physical, mental or social). The system isn’t very clearly presented, so I tied it together in a two-page document for quick reference for my own use.
In particular, the fallout section is laid out in a way that makes it useful to read but far less useful in actual play. However, I think it would work well in play. If it didn’t, I’d just map it to the Wordplay engine. An interesting take is that character advancement is linked to creating significant change in the social structures of the Spire.
The books starts with a short introduction to the Drow, Aelfir and the Spire but then dives into pages and pages of system and characters. It’s dry and sterile and nearly put me off. Fortunately, it gets interesting about eighty pages in when it starts to describe the districts of the city. The organisation here is pretty basic, but it’s not done well for quick referencing. It’s nowhere near the standard of Cthulhu City in the way you can quickly parse and use the information inside. I think I’d be doing some work before I played the game to get this workable; maybe using index card summaries for districts and NPCs.
That said, I really like this book and want to explore it further, perhaps running a short campaign. It reminds me of a less structured, more brutal Blades in the Dark.
jvan's review against another edition
4.0
Brilliantly weird worldbuilding, with fascinating and strange character classes and a very strong concept of what the game should be--overthrowing tyrannical rulers of a massive, mysterious city. The bits don't quite fit together, though. There's so much world that seems at best lightly connected to, or even distracting from, the main concept of the game that it cries out to run so many other kinds of narratives, but the game provides little active support for that. Doesn't matter, though, this thing is worth it for the alarming creativity of the setting alone, full of ideas and moments that could be stolen for any ambitious campaign.
mburnamfink's review
4.0
Spire is a New Weird RPG with a heavy setting a light system. You a drow revolutionary, a guerilla cultist in the Ministry of the Hidden Mistress. You home, the mile-high city-building Spire is ruled by cruel Aelfir, high elves who cannot feel sadness, pain, or empathy. Your own people will sell you out, and you life will be short and awful, but perhaps in that time you can strike a blow for freedom.
The system is simple, d10 based with the highest counting. You get 1d10 for being you, +1d10 if you have the skill, +1d10 for domain/background. Difficulty subtracts dice, and the highest result counts. Most successes are partial, stacking stress. Whenever you take stress to one of the attributes (Blood, Mind, Silver, Shadow, Reputation), there's a roll-under chance of triggering fallout, something awful that will happen.
Most of the book focuses on the strange abilities of the character classes, and then the meat of the setting itself. There are dozens of districts, each weirder than the next, grouped thematically by background. Along with the drow and high elves, there are dueling occult and technological traditions, orders of brawler knights, a grinding war of attrition to the south, against demon-summon gnolls, and hundreds of heretical cults. The Spire is itself something alien, perhaps an embryonic god waiting to be born, as the most mundane of possibilities.
The clear comparison to Spire is Blades in the Dark. There's a lot to love about the sheer atmosphere of the Spire setting, but I think I prefer BitD's more structured play-cycle, crew sheets for collective advancement, player empowering Push and Resist mechanics, and greater degree of accessibility. Duskvol makes more sense. Even the artwork of the book has trouble making sense of the scale of the city, of the way that districts should be both claustrophobic and parasitic on the alien architecture. Connolly's One Man novel makes the concreteness of living in a dead god's corpse a presence on every page, and Spire doesn't quite grab that.
The silver, shadow, and reputation resistances are inspired ideas, representing your character's financial state, cover over subversive ideas, and actual social ties, but much of the game is tied up with the specificity of the setting, which is wonderous, but not particularly gameable, in my opinion.
The system is simple, d10 based with the highest counting. You get 1d10 for being you, +1d10 if you have the skill, +1d10 for domain/background. Difficulty subtracts dice, and the highest result counts. Most successes are partial, stacking stress. Whenever you take stress to one of the attributes (Blood, Mind, Silver, Shadow, Reputation), there's a roll-under chance of triggering fallout, something awful that will happen.
Most of the book focuses on the strange abilities of the character classes, and then the meat of the setting itself. There are dozens of districts, each weirder than the next, grouped thematically by background. Along with the drow and high elves, there are dueling occult and technological traditions, orders of brawler knights, a grinding war of attrition to the south, against demon-summon gnolls, and hundreds of heretical cults. The Spire is itself something alien, perhaps an embryonic god waiting to be born, as the most mundane of possibilities.
The clear comparison to Spire is Blades in the Dark. There's a lot to love about the sheer atmosphere of the Spire setting, but I think I prefer BitD's more structured play-cycle, crew sheets for collective advancement, player empowering Push and Resist mechanics, and greater degree of accessibility. Duskvol makes more sense. Even the artwork of the book has trouble making sense of the scale of the city, of the way that districts should be both claustrophobic and parasitic on the alien architecture. Connolly's One Man novel makes the concreteness of living in a dead god's corpse a presence on every page, and Spire doesn't quite grab that.
The silver, shadow, and reputation resistances are inspired ideas, representing your character's financial state, cover over subversive ideas, and actual social ties, but much of the game is tied up with the specificity of the setting, which is wonderous, but not particularly gameable, in my opinion.
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