Spire: The City Must Fall & the End of Dwindle Pt 1

 Our game group has really blossomed in the past few months. And with everyone having families and responsibilities it is increasingly difficult to schedule a session with everyone present. We are currently sitting prettily at 7 members. I dropped hints at the game where we reached 6 members, that it might be time to move from our Dwindle campaign. Then there was lockdown level 2.5, a major holiday, and several near game days where we just couldn't get the players together.

Saturday, we decided to just get whoever could make it and run a one-shot. I gave the players a choice between TechNoir and Spire: The City Must Fall. They really dug the setting for Spire, so that is what we went with, mostly.

I had a super busy weekend. A day at Imjingak, tutoring, and travel times left me little time for prep. So I took a TechNoir transmission, and filled the master table with bits from Spire. I rolled up 3 items from this table: A Knight Pub at North Docks, The Guild of Morticians, and a Worker Strike as a Threat. Our 3 NPCs ended up being the owner of the pub, and two unionized workers, Jethro and Jebro. I decided that the Morts had infiltrated the Pub, and put in a plant to rile up worker unrest to start a riot. I needed a reason for a peaceful protest that could turn violent, so I set up a story that an important shipment of Ivory (a very expensive drug) had disappeared. The high elves blamed the longshoremen and teamsters, and were freezing their pay for 2 months as punishment for losing their lost drugs. The workers are of course, pissed, and worried about their families. A perfect boiling point for a riot.

The ministry tasked our 3 (randomly rolled) PCs with stopping the riot (the opposite of what my group usually does). They did some investigating, and picked up the trail to an off shot of the Guild of Morticians, the Carrion Priests. I through in a combat for our fighty character and everything went well for our group.

Thoughts of TechNoir's Plot Map

The plot map device worked really well. Even only having an hour to build a random table with pieces picked from the Spire book, I was able to create a believable plot, on-the-fly, at-the-table. I can see starting the next session of the same story by rolling another item or two from the table, tying them into what is already there, and watching the story build out, bringing in new elements as well as recurring characters.

Thoughts on Spire's Mechanics

It was easy to jump into as 2/3 of the players and myself had experience with Blades in the Dark. Just like Blades in the Dark, I felt the PCs, at least in my player's hands, succeed without consequence too much. Granted the first half of the game, I took Spire's suggestion, and didn't have them roll very much. This caused a couple of them to be at a loss. They wanted to roll, to use abilities, to create that tension.

But, when they did start rolling, it was 9s and 10s nearly constantly, as they had 2 or 3 dice. This, coupled with their additional soak in some of their resistances, meant it wasn't until the very end of the game when they began to get into trouble with fallout.

One interesting thing happened near the end. The caster suffered fallout from casting a spell. I ruled (not sure what the text says in the situation) that the spell worked, but there was a side effect that spooked them, and caused them to Panic (they chose to run away). 

Another character had a serious fallout that caused him to have holes in his memory.

As it is written, the system relies on few rolls with potentially large doses of stress. I really felt this made the resistance and fallout system (arguably the core of the game) only matter during the most action packed parts of the game.

I think this system would work better with more rolls, but slowly ticking away at the stress. There is always a chance a 1 will come up on the fallout die! As it stands, the players didn't really feel pressure until they scene was already providing pressure.

I did really enjoy that it was a GM facing system, so that the players did not have that power gauge in front of them.

I already have some ideas for hacking the system, blending it in with TechNoir's adjectives.