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zerofiend posted:Nothing official, but a buddy of mine released an unofficial supplement called Ichor-Drowned. Contains multiple new classes, a new calling (Retribution), a different take on the Heart as a psedo-oceanic setting, vehicle rules, a Tarot-inspired deck for delve creation, and an adventure about breaking into the Incarnadine afterlife. It's gotten a lot of good feedback on the RRD discord. I'm biased, obviously but I think it's worth picking up. That does seem pretty cool as a pitch. I love me some customized callings, and love some alternate minigames for generating stuff. Delves especially are something that can use some help finding ways to keep them interesting.
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Nov 6, 2021 05:55
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I've been thinking about a pipe-dream PbtR hack, and in the process realized that if you tweaked the fallout resolution so that you check if the die rolls under the highest stress total in any track then it's a design intermediate between the highly lethal "roll under your total stress" base mechanic and the less-lethal "roll under the stress in the resistance you just used" alternate mechanic. Just thought I'd share.
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Nov 14, 2021 04:48
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Haystack posted:I've been thinking about a pipe-dream PbtR hack, and in the process realized that if you tweaked the fallout resolution so that you check if the die rolls under the highest stress total in any track then it's a design intermediate between the highly lethal "roll under your total stress" base mechanic and the less-lethal "roll under the stress in the resistance you just used" alternate mechanic. Just thought I'd share. Have you seen the Heart version of fallout checks? It works much better in practice than Spire's. GM rolls a d12, it's against total stress. Still needs to roll under. If the fallout check is under the total stress they trigger fallout and the die result determines if it's minor or major. Minor fallout clears the stress track in whatever category of fallout they're taking, major clears all stress. The GM and player can opt to upgrade 2 minors into a major or 2 majors into a critical. So there's never a "gently caress, narratively it doesn't make sense for you to die in this situation but the dice say you gotta" Also taking fallout leading to fully clearing 1 category or all stress, so it's much quicker to resolve than having to subtract different stress amounts based on the fallout. Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Nov 14, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2021 05:13
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SIN, The Magisters Guide, and the rest of the books from the last kickstarter are in general release now, if you want to get them now.
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Feb 4, 2022 22:39
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Haystack posted:SIN, The Magisters Guide, and the rest of the books from the last kickstarter are in general release now, if you want to get them now. Thanks, that's pretty cool I'll go pick that up. By which I mean, SIN.
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Feb 5, 2022 01:11
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I've been reading through the book for this and a lot of it seems really cool, but I'm really not especially keen on some of the core conceits basically being "you will do horrible things and then you will die, having achieved, at best, nothing at all, and every player character is aware of this." It just sounds like it would make for a pretty miserable, pointless time overall. I don't know if I have a specific question but can someone allay my fears in some way so I can maybe enjoy what this game has to offer?
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Jun 9, 2022 07:55
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DoubleDonut posted:I've been reading through the book for this and a lot of it seems really cool, but I'm really not especially keen on some of the core conceits basically being "you will do horrible things and then you will die, having achieved, at best, nothing at all, and every player character is aware of this." It just sounds like it would make for a pretty miserable, pointless time overall. I ran a Spire game for folks where I did a lot of bending and kept stuff mostly at tier 1 threats and risks until they were rolling with 4 dice consistently and I still had 1 pc death. The group really wanted to do more of a dungeon crawl type play so we ran a second campaign of Heart, where the PCs are a little less fragile and that ran out of gas when a player actually crunched the math and saw it was even more skewed towards failing so lost all motivation to play and asked we play something else. Plenty of folks in this thread have made Spire more their own by making the Ministry more just, but ultimately the stuff under the hood is geared around pyrrhic victories and characters paying heavy costs, and you'll be wrestling with the game if you don't want that. It's also not a good fit for groups that want longer stories following the same PCs forever. Like you absolutely can do a game with meaningful victories and the Ministry liberating Spire, but you need to end on that note or switch to a different system if you want to model a fight on equal footing or rebuilding the city. Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 09:07 on Jun 9, 2022 |
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Jun 9, 2022 08:57
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Players need to go into Spire knowing it's an almost certain bad end for everyone, so savor every little victory because memento mori. If you expect rollicking adventures and life-affirming victories, you're not gonna have a good time. Heart is slightly less grim but still pretty deadly/dark/gothic/weird. It's all a mindset. Put on your black T-shirts and Linkin Park and get ready to leap into the grinder.
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Jun 9, 2022 15:34
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Spire is very much "you're probably going to lose everything and/or die, but if you're lucky you'll make some progress toward the rebellion's goal." Heart is a little more optimistic. "You're probably going to lose everything and/or die, but if you're lucky you'll achieve your own goal before you explode."
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Jun 9, 2022 16:16
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A friend ordered me the Spire core book and that got here Sunday... I had no idea what I was looking at but the blurb on the back sounded cool. Once I started reading the book I had a hard time putting it down, it is crazy dense with lore. I don't know when I'll be able to get a group together for it, but I'm really looking forward to taking a crack at this game. CitizenKeen posted:Spire is very much "you're probably going to lose everything and/or die, but if you're lucky you'll make some progress toward the rebellion's goal." This is really my takeaway too, which really leads me to think that if you had a group of people who like the system and like toppling unjust regimes enough to play generations of different ministry cells building on their predecessors progress. Does any of the lore mention a approximate population? I don't remember reading that, but the saying "you're never more than six feet from a corpse in Spire" really stuck with me.
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Jun 16, 2022 07:55
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rear end-penny posted:A friend ordered me the Spire core book and that got here Sunday... I had no idea what I was looking at but the blurb on the back sounded cool. Once I started reading the book I had a hard time putting it down, it is crazy dense with lore. I don't know when I'll be able to get a group together for it, but I'm really looking forward to taking a crack at this game. Nah, other than like big enough to be an industrialized nation state where there's not enough open real estate.
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Jun 16, 2022 08:26
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I saw the Shut up and Sit down review on this game so it brought me here. It seems extremely my jam, but his notes at the end mention that the book itself is so jammed with background and lore that it might require players to really dig into it themselves so they have an idea on how the world works. It makes sense in games where players have narrative agency themselves and I think player abilities here allow them to make some fun changes. For people who have run this before does that sound about right? My players typically don't pick up and read through the book of a game we're about to play these days so it might be a bit hard to get buy-in and I really don't feel like painstakingly explaining everything I've read from the book just to get everyone on the same baseline.
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Jun 17, 2022 15:04
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DarkAvenger211 posted:I saw the Shut up and Sit down review on this game so it brought me here. It seems extremely my jam, but his notes at the end mention that the book itself is so jammed with background and lore that it might require players to really dig into it themselves so they have an idea on how the world works. It makes sense in games where players have narrative agency themselves and I think player abilities here allow them to make some fun changes. Eh, how creative are your players at making stuff up, or for that matter are you down with spinning what they make up into setting details? I only had 1 giant lore nerd, and 1 player that at least mined the books a little to find stuff related to his character, and everyone else either didn't read the book or read just enough to get basic rules. I did have a problem player who really didn't want what spire was selling, and he had to duck out midway through the story though. I think it's worth reading to get a good feel, and it's a drat cool setting tailored to having a billion plothooks and jumping off points, but the GM can do the heavy lifting in terms of reading and connecting world stuff to what happens at the table or making Spire fit the story your group is telling-as long as there is buy in for the kind of games Spire does well. On that note: Hammer home the system stacks the deck against the player characters, it is not a game where the flavor is they are underdogs but the mechanics are weighted around their inevitable victory.
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Jun 17, 2022 20:19
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DoubleDonut posted:I've been reading through the book for this and a lot of it seems really cool, but I'm really not especially keen on some of the core conceits basically being "you will do horrible things and then you will die, having achieved, at best, nothing at all, and every player character is aware of this." It just sounds like it would make for a pretty miserable, pointless time overall. I kind of have been leaning this is the game of small victories. I have only played one session, but they have been trying to feed and arm the Hidden, the people who are the illegitimate squatters in the Ivory Row. One of the characters is an Idol, and they happened to know people who are involved in the Sunlight Collective, and they asked where the guards avoid/where could we find the Hidden without running into opposition, so I gave them both a haunted mansion in Ivory Row, where one of the original families lived and a bride had killed her groom on her wedding night in front of dozens (found the Hidden and got them to join up easily (the firebrand kept rolling 10s the whole session, hosed me up good as a GM), as well as a merely neglected house on the edge of the district. I styled this other house as being extremely on the fringe of the Ivory Row, the end of the block being a Vermissian station that connects to the garden district below, and actually the garden district being likely where the Hidden are coming from on this side of the Ivory Row.
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Jul 5, 2022 05:17
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DoubleDonut posted:I've been reading through the book for this and a lot of it seems really cool, but I'm really not especially keen on some of the core conceits basically being "you will do horrible things and then you will die, having achieved, at best, nothing at all, and every player character is aware of this." It just sounds like it would make for a pretty miserable, pointless time overall. I have several Spire books, and they are all loaded with cool ideas, but when I realized how railroady many of the adventures were I decided that I was unlikely to ever actually run it. Spire gives players some really spectacular options for changing the world, but it doesn't seem to actually follow through and let you explore how using those abilities should change things pretty significantly. I view Spire as a collection of cool ideas you can and should loot for other games. The game can absolutely be enjoyed from that perspective. Alternatively, you can absolutely just ignore the sections that say "whatever the party does or tries to do, THIS happens next". Just be aware that if so you could easily fall outside the bounds of the very specific stories the devs want to tell with their RPG.
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Jul 25, 2022 21:43
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