A review by mburnamfink
Spire: The City Must Fall by Grant Howitt, Christopher Taylor
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.