When you’re doomed from character creation, what is there left to do but what needs to be done? Spire: The City Must Fall indirectly asks you this question when you pick up this RPG.
The Spire RPG was released in 2018 by the publishing company Rowan, Rook and Decard with it being funded by the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. It received £71,708 ($90,258.86 for us Yankees), soaring high above the original pledge goal of £25,000 ($31,467.50). So what makes it such an interesting RPG and why is it worth reviewing?
The quick answer would be the eerie world-building that makes one hate the antagonists, so much so that they’d rather die while trying to take down the Spire alongside it. As for the long answer:
Review for the Spire RPG
Spire is no one-page RPG like Honey Heist (which shares the same creator). It boasts an entire world within its 253 pages and acts more like a lore book than an actual RPG guide like the Dungeon Master’s Guide or the Player’s Handbook. That’s why this review will be a little different from what we have done before.
To begin, I want to thank the authors Christopher Taylor and Grant Howitt for the great read and Adrian Stone for the wonderful illustrations.
Context
I originally came across the Spire RPG by first coming across its successor, but a separate RPG, Heart: The City Beneath. I was watching Quinn from People Make Games on his new RPG review channel Quinn’s Quest (both YouTube channels that I highly recommend checking out). Quinn had such a passion for Heart that I had to check out what the big deal was. We reached out to Rowan, Rook and Decard and they allowed us to review their books. This review will be the first of two, one for the Spire RPG and another for Heart.
The World of Spire
What is the Spire that this RPG is named after? In short, it is a mile-high tower that stretches up into the sky. It holds more than 15 floors for the party to explore and cause chaos within. It’s almost like a mega-dungeon that couldn’t be held within the ground and crawled its way towards the stars.
Spire RPG differs from most fantasy settings by being within the walls of a giant city, a lack of a morality system (no chaotic good goblins here), no conventional monsters, and an emphasis on the hardships of actually performing magic and acquiring magic items.
It is ruled by the oppressive and snobby Aelfir, high elves that rule Spire with an iron fist. In a world where magic is not exactly flowing, the Aelfir use their natural ability to control magic to keep the drow under their thumb.
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The Drow
This is where you all come in!
This game tells you in the first paragraph that you have joined a paramilitary resistance cult and your oath is to fight the high elves and most likely die in the process. This theme of brutal honesty is often repeated throughout the game, so may as well get used to it from the get-go.
Drow, as was previously mentioned, has been assigned the role of underlings to the Aelfir. They live in underground cities and covered towns due to a curse that separates them from the Aelfir and burns their skin when it comes into contact with the sun. It is mentioned that things weren’t always this way, that the curse that separates them from the Aelfir was placed upon them by the high elves themselves. Hundreds of years of time have erased what exactly happened, with most drow historians not even sure due to the pressure put on them by the Aelfir. To balance the brutal honesty of this RPG, the lore that the book gives you is intentionally vague, encouraging you and your friends to fill in the gaps yourselves.
Spire RPG is Not A Kind World
Drows are not well off in this world. If you want to try and improve your life by trying to live and work in the city, drow have to go through a phase of “durance” to the Aelfir. Durance is a different way to say indentured servitude. Aelfir acts as a self-described patron to a drow individual in exchange for free service. This durance changes based on things like your family’s relationship and influence with the Aelfir, type of work, and other factors. Due to the high cost of living, most drow are stuck in the cycle of servitude for life. This servitude results in your character’s abilities.
That’s when it struck me. This game is absolutely brilliant.
As I mentioned previously, this book at times seems like more of a supplementary book of lore rather than a rule book for an RPG. But it’s way more than that, it is a seamless combination of the two. This not only makes the characters fit more into the setting but there is an internal logic that just makes sense in the character creation that I find lacking in other RPGs.
That is where your mission for this game comes in. You are going to work with the Ministry to overthrow these bastard Aelfir, even if it costs you your life. The Ministry is that cult I brought up earlier, they worship the dark side of the moon and their patron “Our Hidden Mistress” gives you the strength to resist your opressor.
Who you are in Spire
You work with your Game Master to decide what Durances you endeavor through and what abilities you receive. While an interesting mechanic to blend lore and character creation, where I think character creation shines most in this game though is its class choices and variety. It is almost tiring to pick up a game and see just a remix of classic Dungeons and Dragons classes. While there is nothing wrong with these classes, I just find that they can become quite repetitive and cookie-cutter like. If you have similar feelings to mine, you will sigh a breath of relief when you look at these classes.
There are eleven unique classes that you can choose from, while I won’t go into all of them, there are two that I’d like to touch on.
Idol
The Idol is described as an artist and revolutionary, where your creations reshape the world in a sorcery that is only half understood. This is reflected in your “advance” or ability Truth is Beauty, where you spend a week in the game to create a piece of art that is a suggestion that the world bends and twists to make it true.
Masked
When you choose masked, you choose a character that is a servant to an important Aelfir. You wear a mask that is expected to be donned by Aelfir and their servants. You excel at the more quiet acts of rebellion. This is reflected in the advance Institutional Falsehood, where once per session you have the ability to change and edit paperwork from an organization, leaving your edits to replace the original and will be believed until proven false. Bureaucracy at its finest <3.
Midwife
In Spire, drow are born from flesh-like eggs and are taken care of by a subspecies of spiderlike drow called the Midwife. Your job is to protect the future of the drow race by being its caregiver and this is reflected in the advance called Protector’s Eye, where you can ask the GM once per situation what an NPC wishes to protect above all else.
While these all seem like overpowered abilities, they are. But they have major consequences in the game when your character encounters stress. But this review is about the worldbuilding of the Spire RPG and not the game mechanics itself. (I’d recommend going to their site and buying it yourself to find out more!)
Conclusion
There is a lot more that I want to dive into and talk about, but I honestly think I would be doing you a disservice by spoiling too much. That is why I will leave off with a 4.5/5 star review and what the book tells you in “Things to Know”.
- Subvert, don’t destroy
- This is not a kind world
- You are brave
- This is going to kill you
- You are going to hurt people
- There is always another level
- Your own family would sell you out
- The ministry would sell you out
Next week we are going to do a review of Ennie award winner Heart: The City Beneath. If you want to catch that article, we recommend joining our discord below, it helps us run the website and you get freebies just for joining!
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Resources
- https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gshowitt/spire-rpg
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