WE HAVE NOISE.
over 6 years ago – Sat, Aug 12, 2017 at 06:10:21 PM

ECHOES OF SPIRE

We did it! We've hit our goal of commissioning Tim Roven of Tabletop Audio to write us seven bespoke background tracks designed to evoke certain parts of Spire. We're not sure which one we want to hear first, to be honest. There's probably a lot of interesting noises coming out of the Heart.

(Can I also just mention how brilliant the Soundpads are? Each one comes with a load of samples that you can turn on and off, or set to repeat, as the session goes on. Going to have to use these next time I drag my laptop to the gaming table.)

The next stretch goal, set at £45,000, is an entirely new class - the Midwife.

Midwives, protectors of unborn drow children held in communal hatcheries, are fearsome monsters. Not only do they boast vast amounts of arcane and divine knowledge, each one is a trained occultist and combatant. As if that wasn't enough, they can shapeshift parts or all of their body into that of a giant spider. At low levels these changes are minor (conjuring extra eyes to pick out details in a murder scene, growing venomous mandibles to deliver a deadly bite), but as the character grows in power they'll be able to transform into a nightmarish spider-drow hybrid and tower over anyone who would dare to threaten their charges.

Plus, past that, we haven't written the Midwife yet, so we don't know what other kinds of powers they'll have. Spider swarms, specially generated through illegal magic into a target's mouth and throat? A web-like area sense, with twinkling skeins of ethereal web vibrating in time with intruders' footsteps? Spells that hex or bless the unborn?

We'll see, if we hit £45,000.

- Grant

Welcome to the Vermissian
over 6 years ago – Sat, Aug 12, 2017 at 05:31:02 PM

Some light admin first...

GRIM TIDINGS, MADDENING MAPS.

We've passed two stretch goals since the last update! We're happy to announce that we're commissioning a book of utter weirdness from Jordan Shiveley (who has already sent us over a document talking about THE SHADOW MOTHER and the CARRION OAK and some sort of CAT HOMUNCULUS) and another map from Tim Wilkinson Lewis, this time examining the undercity of Spire in great detail. 

Next up, excitingly, is our very own soundtrack! I use ambient tracks all the time when I run games at home, so I'm pretty buzzed to have the capacity to have some specially-written for the game. If you'd like to get an idea of what it'll sound like, so to Tabletop Audio and have a listen. (I like Derelict Freighter, myself.) If you fancy getting your hands on some audio tracks, please - keep spreading the word and letting folk know about this project. We've done so well so far.

Oh, also: all ten BECOME A GOD backer levels are sold out now, which is frankly a little unbelievable. Looks like they're probably going to have to get their own chapter.

WELCOME TO THE VERMISSIAN.

This time, we're going to take a closer look at the broken transport network that punches through the walls of the Spire - the Vermissian. Below is an excerpt from the core book, which we hope you'll enjoy:

The Vermissian is a grand failed experiment - an attempt at a mechanised mass transport network throughout the Spire. About a century ago, human engineers were tasked with boring out tunnels in the structure of the city and building trains, powered by barely-understood unearthed katakos technology.  

Had the project come to fruition, it would have revolutionised the way that people lived in the Spire. But thanks to the overreaching ambition of the humans who designed it, the cut corners on the aelfir-funded drow work crews that led to tunnel collapses and thousands of injuries, and several notable pushes from the owners of the existing transport infrastructure present in the Spire, the Vermissian failed. The skeleton of the thing - a network of unstable tunnels and half-finished stations, unlit caverns full of junked train carriages, and miles of maintenance ducts - remains, and as with all things in the Spire, the people put it to use.  

What’s more, the Spire is a strange place, and the act of carving tunnels into it on such a grand scale - coupled with the pulsating hub of psychic weirdness at the centre of the structure - has tweaked those tunnels several feet off-centre of reality. Like a virus spreading through a body, the dark energies of the Heart have spread through the city using the veins of the Vermissian.  

ENDLINE  

A rusted, precarious mess of discarded carriages and machinery, last visited by officials - according to the records - thirty years ago. Since then, detritus from the junked network has ended up down here, thrown on the pile of jagged metal and broken glass, like silt settling at the bottom of a river. Given the vast scale of Endline, even though most of the exterior carriages have been stripped of all useful materials, there is always a hope that something valuable is still sitting undiscovered at the centre of it, or in some long-forgotten pocket of machinery. 

To that end, scavengers swarm over the wreckage and defend their territory with vicious tenacity, spilling blood over new finds or contested access routes through the area. Here are several gangs of scavengers that will try to kill you and take your things upon entering endline: the acrobatic Crows, the coiffured and filthy Dandy-boys, the razor-fingered Merkers, the train-worshipping Kerberites, the brash and boastful Butchers and a heretic sect of disheveled Carrion-Priests, exiled from New Heaven, whose arrival is heralded by the howling of emaciated, spittle-flecked hounds.  

THE LAST TRAIN  

Legend has it that there’s one train still working on the rails of the Vermissian, powered by Goddess knows what, and it cannot be stopped. Crewed by a collection of engineer-mystics, the Last Train is kept in constant movement, screaming up distant tunnels and, if it can’t find rails to guide it, smashing through obstacles and operating on raw momentum until it finds some. Headed up with magelights blazing through the dark, the train’s furnace pulses with unknown energy and the entire front car has been converted into an altar through which the inhabitants of the train bargain with, and sometimes steer, the locomotive. Which is nonsense, obviously. But if someone needed to get somewhere very quickly indeed, the Last Train would be the way to do it.  

THE SHRINE TO OUR LADY OF VENGEANCE, FORBIDDEN GODDESS OF THE RED MOON  

Deep in the tunnels towards the base of the Spire, which are long-flooded with effluvia and runoff from decades of misuse, a cult of extremist dark elves operate a shrine to Lekole, the blood-moon. It is rare for this sect (commonly known as vigilites or crimsons) to maintain stable shrines or temples, given that their religion is not only outlawed by the aelfir but actively opposed by many drow - even those in the Ministry - but here, in the crumbling ruins of a vermissian station, they hold court.  

Viewing all occult magic as an assault on the benevolent energies of their mistress, the cult operate cells of agents - many of whom might be someone you know - who silence and kidnap magicians then drag them down here to be drowned in the stinking mire, adding their fear and rage to the burning braziers that line the altar in the centre of what was once Godstreet Station.  

THE RATS  

If you need to get somewhere in the Spire - but you can’t let anyone see you get there, and speed isn’t an issue - then the Rats can help you, for a price. A diverse bunch of outcasts, criminals, and gutterkin, the Rats (some of whom are actual rats) can lead you through the winding tunnels of the Vermissian, navigating the treacherous terrain and avoiding the most obvious threats.  

Of course, that’s if they’re not on the take, and are just going to deliver you to one of the many corpsehouses squirreled away in the system that supply bodies to the Garden district. Or not if you get one of the particularly deranged groups, or show weakness or look even slightly robbable, else they’ll slice your hamstrings, take your stens and get the hell out of there. But sometimes you have to take what you can get. 

A selection of Rats you might meet: Pox, a club-footed drow with a fear of half-open doors; Spurrin, a warty gullman who carves devotional items out of shinbones; Moppet, a toadgirl with a wet sack full of unfertilised spawn, looking for a partner; Greysen, a bent-backed disfigured aelfir poet; Sinder, a human ringleader and guttermage with control over vermin. 

 THE VERMISSIAN VAULT 

The drow Home Nations are in turmoil, torn apart by civil war and ancient rivalries. A cabal of sages, mages and scholars have taken it upon themselves to preserve what they can of the splintered, violent history of the dark elves by securing it within the walls of the Vermissian. 

The Vault is a term for a collection of storage rooms and libraries that the sect have created over the decades, using the unique powers of the Vermissian to hide things just out-of-step with the real world. For those who know the way, there are vast stores of knowledge and culture hidden within the cracks of the tunnels - the Glass Library where information coalesces like dew on leaves; the Locked Stacks, where knowledge is interred if it deemed more useful dead than alive; the halls of the Gadoliv, mute and bandaged servants of the vault; the Great Museum, where artefacts from lost histories and impossible futures sit side-by-side; and the Anastomosis Device, which leaks falsehood into the world. 

Given their obsession with dark elf history and culture, the vault is of great interest to the Ministry, and the scholars who tend it are often ministers themselves. 

---

That's us for now.

Speak soon,

- Grant

DREAD SINGLES
over 6 years ago – Sat, Aug 12, 2017 at 04:33:02 PM

MORE ART.

We punched through our £30,000 goal yesterday, meaning that we can afford to commission even more art from Adrian Stone. We're still working out what to focus on - the districts of Spire, or iconic portraits for all the classes. We'll see.

DREAD SINGLES.

We're shuffling around the stretch goals. We couldn't announce it before, but now that everything's confirmed, we're super-excited to say that Jordan Shiveley, the brains behind the eldritch and terrifying Dread Singles twitter account, has signed on to write a splatbook for the Spire which we'll release as a PDF to all backers who have access to the stretch goal content on the Kickstarter. 

This will replace the current £33,000 goal - we'll bump it further down the list, because we didn't want to pass up this opportunity.

Right now we're still chatting with Jordan to see what sort of stuff the book will contain, but we're pushing pretty hard for a Lonely Hearts of Spire column.

That's all for now,

- Grant

Welcome to Grist
almost 7 years ago – Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 02:31:54 PM

Hey, we're nearly funded! Thanks so much for getting us this far.

In this update we're going to show you an excerpt from our setting section, as well as a few rules that GMs and players can use to help tell stories. There are some examples of unusual (and gross) player advancement options, along with some details of Grist, a neighbourhood in Derelictus, an impoverished drow settlement in the ruins of the undercity.

WELCOME TO GRIST   

A handful of decrepit buildings - dimly-lit houses, the occasional long-empty warehouse, a single bar where the beer is terrible - cling to the towering internal walls of Spire down here in the cold, wet depths of Derelictus. This is Grist: a backwater dead-end in a maze of backwater dead-ends.

The place is badly-lit, because light costs money unless you know the trick of levering out and relocating magelights (buzzing glass tubes that provide grimy washed out blue or yellow illumination, installed by goddess knows who in Spire in eons past). Folk stay close to their candles or spireblack lanterns to see. There’s a big drow community down here, because it’s so far from the sun and because no-one from up-Spire bothers them too much.  

But Grist is quiet, for the most part, and crime is lower than you’d expect, and the people support each other through hard times. On the surface, there are far worse places to end up than Grist.  

However: the place is ruled by cannibals who worship a lunatic demigod that lives in a flooded basement.  

THE CANNIBALS 

When you eat thinking-flesh, or talking-flesh - the flesh of people - you begin to change. Over a number of years, your appetite for the forbidden meat increases, your senses sharpen, the tone fades from your complexion until you are ashen-skinned, and your body becomes lean and muscular and strong save for an elastic gut that can be distended with vast amounts of flesh. You become a ghoul. 

Cannibalism is banned on pain of capital punishment within the city walls of Spire, but given that the city contains so many people and so few of them have enough food, it’s more common than anyone would like. Ghouls congregate together, drawn to each other through scent - the sweet stink of rotting flesh exuded through their pores - and mark their territory with bone shrines, taking up residence in corpse pits and harassing the crows and hyenas that peck at corpses in New Heaven. But in Grist, shadowed and desolate Grist, they have formed a community around a new god. 

The majority of the inhabitants of Grist are luckless, destitute individuals trying to survive from day to day, unable to afford anywhere better to live. And so, in a token effort to placate the ghouls that haunt the streets and stalk the rooftops, they have instituted a system of criminal prosecution that sees offenders (or, in lean months, any outsider they can catch) bound to stakes in the centre of town, awaiting justice for their crimes at the hands of their cannibal masters. 

GHOUL  

This is an example of the sorts of monsters and rules we have in the game. If you're playing our quickstart campaign Blood and Dust, feel free to use a ghoul or two.

Names: Broken-Hand, Last, Miriam  

Descriptors: Clutching a badly-sutured wound, Covered in devotional tattoos to King Teeth, Wearing their old clothes in an attempt to disguise themselves 

Difficulty: 0 

Resistance: 5 

Equipment: Nothing of value, save a few trinkets from their previous life, but their long dirty claws backed up by ropey muscles are (D3, Ongoing D3, Brutal) weapons

KING TEETH 

 A hugely bloated and ancient cannibal known as King Teeth resides under the streets of Grist on a reeking pile of splintered bones and half-chewed limbs, and something about his power has drawn in the other ghouls to worship him as a god - and, because Grist sits so close to the heart, he can hear their prayers, and grant them miracles in return, and the process is driving him irrevocably and utterly insane. A prayer to King Teeth can let you eat a person whole by detaching your jaw from your skull and pushing them, live and screaming, down into your belly; or, if you are among the most devoted, produce a roiling mass of acid in your belly that you can retch up – acid that will dissolve rocks and melt platemail to the wearer's skin in seconds. 

ADDITIONAL ABILITIES: THE FAITHFUL OF KING TEETH 

Any character, regardless of their chosen class, can pick additional abilities when they gain an advance as long as they fulfil the requirement to access it. A lot of the abilities in Spire are focused around the worship of minor gods like King Teeth - although it's unlikely that a player would pay tribute to him, unless they wanted to hide their cannibalism from the other characters as a roleplaying challenge.

Requirement: Worship at the feet of the nightmare demigod King Teeth in Grist. Pay tribute to him in the form of the flesh of elf or man or gnoll. Eat of the forbidden flesh yourself, and take your first steps towards ghoulhood. 

Refresh: Eat the flesh of elf, man or gnoll. The more you eat (and the tastier it was), the bigger the refresh dice. 

LOW 

SKITTER [Divine]: Mark D3 stress to Mind or Blood to cast this spell. Your fingernails and toenails (don’t wear shoes) grow long, hard and yellowed until the end of the current situation, at which point they will grow brittle and splinter off your fingertips. Not only do they now count as D3 weapons, but you gain mastery on any Pursue or Stealth checks that involve climbing or hanging off ceilings. 

GORGE [Divine]: When you reduce someone to 0 resistance, you can immediately eat them whole by unhinging your jaw and forcing them into your guts, where they will squirm around and die. If you do this, remove D6 stress, and anyone who sees it happen takes D6 stress to Mind (D8 if they knew the guy). After you eat them, you’re not good for much until you can digest them - a process which takes about 8 hours. 

MEDIUM 

RETCH [Divine]: Mark D6 stress to Mind or Blood to cast this spell. You vomit up about a bucket’s worth of hideously strong stomach acid over anything in front of you. It will melt through pretty much anything, and it can be used as a D8, Devastating weapon against someone you’ve grabbed first.   

Funded!
almost 7 years ago – Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 02:31:43 PM

Phew! We can exhale, now. It's been a tense week watching the number tick up, and it feels great to know that we can relax a little bit. 

We'd like to take a moment to thank everyone for their support - both in backing this project, but also for saying such nice things about it on social media and spreading the word. Folk have said such nice stuff about us on Twitter and in podcasts (including a segment in this week's edition of Caffeine and Conquer which is so glowing we have to suspect that we bribed them to do it), and we're endlessly thankful for it.

STRETCH GOALS

So, now we can look forward to the rest of the campaign, and towards those stretch goals - while we're excited about the opportunity to have our very own soundtrack and to sit down and work out exactly what the best rules for the Deep Apiarist character class are, the next one coming up is our very first supplement by another author. 

Written by infosec specialist and author of the Cryptomancer RPG Chad Walker, Secrets Kept From the Sun is a tome dedicated to how the ministry of Our Hidden Mistress, the central revolutionary organisation in the game, manages to keep secrets hidden from their enemies in the Solar Guard, who have sworn to hunt down and kill every last one of them. Seeing as our knowledge of fieldcraft and information security is next to nothing, we're fascinated to see how Chad will apply real-world logic to our setting and get down to the nitty-gritty of trust, data and secret communication networks.

That comes in at £27,000, and there's plenty more after that. We've got some other stuff under our collective hat that we're still finalising, but rest assured it's all going to be weird and beautiful. If you're interested in seeing more from Spire, please - don't stop spreading the word. You've been awesome so far.

HOW DETAILED IS THE MAP?

Tim printed out a copy of the map at A0 to test the resolution, and we're happy to report that it's still crystal clear at that enormous size. Here it is on his living room table:

The high-quality prints we're sending out with the Luxury Edition will be A2, so they're a little smaller, but you'll still be able to pin it to the wall and pick out every detail of Tim's strange mind on the paper.

That's all for now!

- G