A review by cybergoths
Spire: The City Must Fall by Grant Howitt
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.