In November 2024 we resurrected two offers featuring urban fantasy-punk RPGs from Rowan, Rook, & Decard: the December 2020 Spire Bundle, about dark-elf resistance against cruel high-elf overlords, and, from December 2022, Heart, the standalone companion game about Spire’s nightmarish undercity.
SPIRE: THE CITY MUST FALL
[from Dec 2020]
Revived for a second time, the 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 (Eat the Reich, 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.
This revived December 2020 Spire Bundle gave players a new chance to bring bloody revolt from the lawless undercity of Red Row to the frozen mile-high towers of Amaranth. There were five titles in this revived offer’s Starter Collection (retail value $45) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete Spire: The City Must Fall core rulebook, plus the free Spire Quickstart; the Strata sourcebook; and three “campaign frames” (all sold Pay-What-You-Want) that get you started playing quickly: Blood and Dust Eidolon Sky, and The Kings of Silver.
Those who paid more than this revival’s threshold (average) price also got this offer’s entire Bonus Collection with 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 include seven MP3 tracks from Tabletop Audio composed as backer rewards for the Spire Kickstarter campaign and not for sale anywhere else.
HEART: THE CITY BENEATH
[from Dec 2022]
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 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 revived December 2022 Heart Bundle presented the entire Heart line to date for an unbeatable bargain price. There were five titles in this revived offer’s Heart Collection (retail value $45), including the complete standalone Heart: The City Beneath rulebook, plus the free Heart Quickstart and four supplements: Burned and Broken, Vermissian Black Ops, Sanctum, and the campaign frame Doors to Elsewhere.
Ten percent of each payment (after gateway fees) went to these two Spire revivals’ 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.
