In December 2022 we presented two offers – one revived, one all-new – featuring two different fantasy-punk RPGs from Rowan, Rook, & Decard: the revived December 2020 Spire Bundle and its new standalone companion, Heart: The City Beneath.
SPIRE [from Dec 2020]
This revived December 2020 Spire Bundle returned to the towering mile-tall drow city of a thousand gods, Spire. Retro-engineers dig up arcane technology from forgotten dungeons, then hotwire it and sell cheap copies; underground lakes brim with algae; bloodwitches from the Heart, a rotten hole in reality at the city’s center, carry mystical diseases that rewrite minds; spider-skinned midwives sprout chitinous limbs to defend unborn drow; magic masks are sutured to unwilling faces; mysterious Morticians pluck out hearts and store them in jars, so the owners gain eternal life.
Spire tasks you with changing this city, whether for good or ill. You are a dark elf, hiding from the light in Spire’s lawless undercity. The monsters you fight aren’t out in the wilderness; they’re living above you in obscene luxury, dominating your people in the aftermath of a brutal war. Capricious high elves, the occupying rulers, are destroying your religion, your culture, and everything you hold dear. You’ve joined the secret Ministry of Our Hidden Mistress and have sworn in blood to destroy the high elves through subterfuge, insurrection, and terror. What – or who – will you sacrifice to achieve your aims? Will you evade the attention of the authorities, or end up shot in the street like so many before you?
Funded in a July 2017 Kickstarter campaign, Spire is a major game from Grant Howitt (Goblin Quest, Paranoia Red Clearance Edition, Honey Heist, Crash Pandas) and Christopher Taylor. Using a straightforward skill-based D10-pool system, Spire puts a new and flavorful twist on many fantasy tropes. You don’t just play a Ranger, but a Carrion-Priest, a hyena-worshipping death cultist. You’re not a Rogue; you’re a Bound, and you pray to the small gods in your ropes to stop you from falling off the side of the city. Are you a Fighter? No, you’re a Knight of the North Docks, from a long-fallen order of nobles who now swagger in flashy quarter-plate and operate Spire’s bars. Yet in this setting saturated in weirdness, players face dilemmas of compliance versus resistance – conformity or courage – that speak to all of us today. Like a citybound D&D crossed with Unknown Armies – Gormenghast meets Necromunda – Spire is a game of hard choices, painful decisions, and personal loss.
The December 2020 revival gave players a new chance to bring bloody revolt from the lawless undercity of Red Row to the frozen mile-high towers of Amaranth. This revived offer’s Starter Collection (retail value $45), included the complete Spire: The City Must Fall core rulebook (plus the new Spire Quickstart), the Strata sourcebook, and three “campaign frameworks” designed to get you started playing fast: Blood and Dust, Eidolon Sky, and The Kings of Silver.
This offer’s Bonus Collection added five more titles worth an additional $34, including the scenarios and sourcebooks Shadow Operations, Black Magic, Codex of the Deep Spire, Book of Masks, and Secrets Kept from the Sun. We also included seven MP3 tracks of atmospheric ambient sound from Tabletop Audio, previously available only as Kickstarter campaign backer rewards and not for sale anywhere outside this offer.
HEART [all-new]
Beneath the Spire sleeps a red wet heaven, a dimension of infinite possibilities and unknowable intelligence. For centuries the underclass of Spire settled around this dark gateway entity, the Heart. But when Spire’s architects tried to power their undercity rail network with raw unreality by piercing the Heart, chaos ensued. Time and space have come unstuck; paths shiver and fade, or reconnect; walls of flesh erupt into terrible life; doorways to other worlds creak open and promise riches beyond. The Heart fills the undercity with desire – yours, and its own. It is a god, more or less, in these lightless caverns beneath the earth, so it knows your wishes and can fulfill them. But the Heart is strange.
Funded by 2,400 backers in a big September 2019 Kickstarter campaign, Heart: The City Beneath is a dungeon-crawling, story-forward standalone roleplaying game about delving into a nightmare undercity that will give you everything you’ve ever dreamed of – or kill you in the process. Sharing a setting with Spire, Heart expands the unreal world beneath the mile-tall city. Where Spire was a game of social brutality and revolution, Heart is set on the frontier of an unexplored and ever-changing world. Characters are more self-sufficient, less subtle, and rely far more on their equipment than their counterparts in the City Above. Heart uses an expanded and updated version of the Resistance system, the mechanics that power Spire, to help you tell stories of desperation, hubris, and adventure in the City Beneath. What will your characters lose pursuing their dreams in the chaotic darkness beneath the world?
This all-new Heart Bundle provided the entire Heart line for an unbeatable bargain price. Use the rulebook and sourcebooks on their own, or combine them with Spire for an all-encompassing view of the City from summit to deeps: the complete standalone Heart: The City Beneath core rulebook (plus the free Heart Quickstart) and the supplements Burned and Broken, Vermissian Black Ops, Sanctum, and Doors to Elsewhere.
Ten percent of each payment (after gateway fees) went to these Heart and Spire offers’ designated charity, the Diana Jones Award Emerging Designer Program. Each year, the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, amplifies the voices of up-and-coming game designers by featuring them during an expenses-paid visit to Gen Con. The global Emerging Designer Program focuses on creators from marginalized communities.
