Lines in the Dirt interview
over 5 years ago – Sun, Nov 04, 2018 at 12:30:50 AM

One of the scenarios we're most excited by is Pauline Chan's Lines in the Dirt, a very small-scale game based around low society characters being evicted from their tenement block and fighting to stay there. Pauline's never written for RPGs before, but her pitch really won us over - and we're happy to say that her scenario is more than up to scratch, too.

We had a chat with her about the scenario, which you are now about to read:

This is your first published RPG scenario, how has it been writing it, and how has it been working with Spire?  

As a new writer, it was a pretty big leap from writing recreationally to writing for a contract on a deadline. It definitely helped to have run some games before, especially when trying to figure out what content was worth including. When I've run games against scenarios, I often end up deviating from their storyline for one reason or another, so it was liberating to write for Spire's looser scenario structure and be able present a bag of ideas rather than a linear plot. 

Of course, I wouldn't have done any of this at all if not for Spire itself, which reminded me a bit of Hong Kong when it was still a British colony, and of my family's stories from that era. Especially in fantasy, there's a lot of stories about maintaining or restoring kingdoms and empires without interrogating whether those power structures should still exist, so when I first read through the Spire sourcebook, what drew me to the game was that it challenged all of those assumptions and empowered the drow to resist their occupiers. That was definitely something I wanted to honor in this scenario.  

In Lines in the Dirt you have chosen to really focus in on a single location in Derelictus, detailing an apartment building and its strange inhabitants. Tell us a little more about them.

 Funnily enough, while I was still brainstorming on scenario concepts, the two ideas I wanted most to include were a community of people who had fallen through the cracks...and the aunties. Everything else—the apartment building, the plot about the evictions—fell into place around the people. I spent maybe an absurd amount of time thinking about why people might choose to live in slums of Derelictus, and in this building specifically, and then started coming up with the residents based on that. Some of the residents, like Guensy, the illegal dentist trying to build a new life after a scandal forced them into Derelictus, were loosely based on research. Others, like Mama Loukes and her propensity for collecting trash and then working them into useful gadgets, came to mind almost fully formed. 

 We particularly like “The Aunties” - a pair of elderly matrons who have the social fate of the player characters in their hands. How did they come about?

The aunties are some of my favourite NPCs, so I'm delighted that you liked them too! They'e actually a cultural nod, inspired by the Chinese aunties I've met over the years who, though often unrelated to me, have fussed and clucked and shoved food at me over the years. In speaking to friends, I understand that they're also quite prevalent in other cultures as well! 

This seems to be a very personal story to the characters. Why did you choose that direction, rather than a grand sweeping tale of revolution? 

 Hmm, I don't think it would be hard to turn this into a grand sweeping tale of revolution. But I was more interested in looking at how small, everyday incidents of injustice can spark anger and rebellion, how normal people can get drawn into revolutionary movements (whether they want to be or not), and how to center the community the player characters are supposed to be fighting for as Ministry operatives. So I wrote a scenario about fighting an eviction notice, which sounds terribly mundane compared to ghouls and reality-bending magic. It probably won't be the end of the world for everyone in Spire. But the player characters and their impoverished neighbors living in this apartment building in the slums of Derelictus can't afford to move and they have nowhere to go, no one to appeal to. It might as well be the end of the world for them, except that no one else knows or cares, which almost seems worse. 

 If you could be asked any question by us during an interview, like what’s happening now, what would that question be? 

 Oh, that's a tricky one. How about this: why did you include LGBTQ+ representation but not address any LGBTQ+ issues? 

 I think a diverse representation is important, but that part of striving for more diversity is letting LGBTQ+ characters have problems independent of their gender, sexuality, or identity. Like, you know, getting evicted. Or trying to hide a makeshift malak lab from the authorities. It's part of who they are, but it's not the only part of them. Players are of course welcome to explore LGBTQ+ issues within the scenario if they want to, though! 

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That's all for now. We've hit the blasted hinterland at the middle of every Kickstarter campaign where half our backers have already backed and the other half won't turn up until the last 48 hours - if you're feeling kind and enthusiastic (and you fancy getting your hands on some of those stretch goals) then please do share the hell out of this project, froth about how excited you are to your richest friends, and generally help us help you help Spire fall.

- Grant, Chris and Mary

Bisquiet Funded, The Forgotten interview
over 5 years ago – Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 10:33:30 PM

BISQUIET.

We broke £40,000 yesterday, which means that a) we're unlocked Xalavier Nelson's baking-based scenario for Strata and b) we've broken into the wild hinterland of our post-launch stretch goals. We'll post an interview with Xalavier later this week where we get him to shed some more light on his revolutionary biscuits.

THE FORGOTTEN.

Would you like an interview with Laurence Phillips, author of The Forgotten? Of course you would. Here you go:

Tell us a bit about yourself and your previous works, how did they influence your work with Spire?  

Well, I’ve been working as a freelance writer, mostly writing articles and reviews about videogames for various outlets. I’ve been writing my own RPG materials and systems since I was a child, but my break into professional RPG writing was when I signed on to write a setting supplement for the Legacy 2nd edition kickstarter, called Primal Pathways. It’s a evolutionary biology spin on the civilisation building mechanics of base Legacy, and I’m pretty proud of it! 

 Although there’s not really a thematic connection, my work on Primal Pathways has had a big influence on this project. I’m more confident, more clued in on the whole development process, and a lot less anxious thanks to this not being the first Kickstarter I’ve been involved with. 

 I’ve got an academic background studying history and politics, which has a huge influence on my work. There are a lot of untold stories in our past, especially those concerning marginalised people. A lot of those stories are lost forever, but through RPGs we can make new ones. 

 I’m also autistic, and I spent most of my young education in special schools. That’s definitely informed how I approach the representation of disabled characters in my work. 

 The Forgotten is rather unique in that the character don’t necessarily begin as Ministry agents. Tell us a little about the scenario. 

 The scenario is centred around a refuge for the disabled based in Pilgrim’s Walk, run by a drow called Jarome Patallion, an important figure in the local Ministry cell. When the refuge is destroyed and Patallion kidnapped the former refuge residents are pulled into a web of betrayals, secretive plots and political machinations. 

 Spire is a game all about oppression, and how oppression is baked into institutions so as to be self-perpetuating, making the complete destruction of those institutions the only reliable escape. The problem with this is that even corrupt, oppressive institutions form some kind of support structure, and plenty of political movements and ideologies fail to make allowances for the people who rely on those structures. The reason why the scenario is called “The Forgotten” is because it centres on the kind of people who have been historically left behind by revolutions and political upheaval, or even outright exploited and demonised by them. Societies make a habit of hiding and ignoring the disabled, and the revolutionary groups that rise out of those societies are not immune to that. For me it was vital that the characters not start as Ministry agents, because I wanted to make the players feel that frustration of being left behind by a cause you believe in. Most of the pre-gen characters believe in the Ministry’s cause, but due to their very existence being counter-revolutionary, they have been ostracised. 

 I wanted an element of defiance to this story. To express the frustration of people looking past you, ignoring your needs. Sometimes you just want to shout “Yeah, we’re inconvenient - f*ck you, deal with it!” Honestly, it’s heavily influenced by many real-life conversations I’ve had! In 

The Forgotten the player characters all live with disabilities. You are keen to improve the representation of disabled people in RPGs, is that correct? 

 Absolutely! 

 RPGs don’t have a great track record when it comes to representing the disabled. Usually they’re either set-dressing (howling maniacs outside the tavern, abandoned wheelchairs in spooky asylums, etc.) or they’re a form of punishment (going mad and getting sectioned in Call of Cthulhu, getting an arm or leg chopped off in D&D). If you play a disabled PC in a game, it’s usually because you had to take another Flaw to balance out all your Feats/Quirks, and rarely because the game has made any effort to tell a disabled story. 

 This isn’t surprising in the least, in fact it’s almost understandable. Representing disability in cold, hard mechanics is a really tricky tightrope to walk. You don’t want to undersell things and erase the very real difficulties that disabled people struggle with, but you also don’t want to oversell them and turn every disabled character into a Victorian caricature. Putting the job of playing marginalised people into the hands of normal players and GMs is always a risky proposition, you have to make sure the game is built to facilitate understanding and not reinforce stereotypes. So, er, I guess I’ll have a go then! 

 The pre-generated characters you present provide an interesting cross section of all the people in Spire. Can you go into a little more detail on this? 

 Of course. Out of the pre-gen characters, three are drow, one is human and one is Aelfir. There’s also a section in the scenario giving roleplaying and settings notes on creating new non-drow player characters. 

 The main reason for this is that disability is a cross-cultural conduit for societal oppression, and one that is sometimes harder to detect immediately. There’s a great book which I’d recommend to anyone called “Autism in History: The Case of Hugh Blair of Borgue”. It’s about a middle-class Scottish man who lived in the 18th century. His family was reasonably well-off, with property and a business - not aristocracy, but definitely not poor. Despite that, he was stripped of most of the privileges of his birth because of his autism. His marriage was annulled before a court, his property and inheritance were seized by his brother, and he was denied a career. It’s Hugh Blair who I thought of when I wanted to include a disabled Aelfir pre-gen character - a person who was was born into the ranks of the oppressors, but does not fit there and is not welcome. This mirrors the disabled drow, who should be natural Ministry revolutionaries, but are denied that privilege due to their conspicuous nature and physical disadvantages. 

 Disability attracts its own types of hatred and disdain, I wanted to allow players to experience it that way. No matter if you're Drow, Human or Aelfir, the world makes no apologies or provisions for the disabled. 

 If you could be asked any question by us during an interview, like what’s happening now, what would that question be? 

 “Would you be willing to shamelessly plug yourself for a bit?” Yes, I suppose you could twist my arm. 

We don't recall asking you to answer it, but continue.

 My most recent big announcement is that I launched a Patreon! You can find it at Patreon.com/HardyRoachGames, and I write monthly one-page RPGs for it, starting with “Allow Me, Sir!”, which is a game about playing Edwardian household staff and bothering/murdering your social betters. 

 The Patreon also helps support my larger projects in development, which include a card-based game about surviving apocalyptic manifestations of hell, a Powered by the Apocalypse game about political maneuvering in Italian renaissance courts, and a passion project about disabled teenagers trying to thwart paranormal activity centred around their special school. Otherwise you can follow me on Twitter at @SarkyFrood! 

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Okay, that's all for now. Speak to you soon!

- Grant, Chris and Mary

MORE STRETCH GOALS ANNOUNCED
over 5 years ago – Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 02:08:54 AM

GET STRETCHING.

Given that we're going great guns on this project - 300% funded in under a week! - we decided that we'd firm up the stretch goals past 45 grand, so we've got something exciting to work towards. To that end, here they are!

£45,000 - Adopt a goat. Goats are becoming a strangely important part of Spire. We’re going to adopt one and gift it to someone who needs a goat. (We’ll get you all to help us name it, if possible.) In addition, once everything’s done and dusted with the Kickstarter, the three of us are going to go to deepest darkest Kent and hang out with some other beautiful goats, take a bunch of pictures, and recuperate a bit.  

£50, 000 - Book of Masks. A (mostly) in-character illustrated brochure advertising the latest and most fashionable masks available to the aelfir and wealthy drow who want to look good whilst hiding their faces. Where appropriate, we’ll attach an advance to the masks so you can use them in-game. Backers at the digital hardship level and above will receive a free PDF of the brochure, and it’ll be available as a physical add-on after the campaign has ended.  

£55,000 - Goats of Spire wallchart. Have you seen a goat? Wondering precisely what kind of goat it is? Does it have too many eyes? Human-like hands? Is it picking a lock with its tongue? Can it not stop yelling? Identify and enjoy the myriad goats of Spire with this elegant and informative wallchart. Backers at the digital hardship level and above will receive the chart as a free PDF, and it’ll be available as a poster print as a physical add-on after the campaign has ended. 

 £60,000 - The Magister's Guide. We’ll publish a series of articles, also downloadable as PDFs, that outline how to hack the existing rules in Spire into managing and running a revolution: expanded rules for safehouses and covers using the bonds system, ongoing campaigns with tiers of fallout representing the encroaching aelfir threat, and so on. 

 £65,000 - Book upgrades, both physical and fictional. We’ll ask the backers of this Kickstarter to pick from a variety of options for an additional “thing” within the book - a Silver Quarter Casino, a Derelictus temple, etc - and, once they’ve voted, have Adrian Stone illustrate it. In addition, we pledge to put at least one (1) ribbon page-marker in every physical copy of Strata. We are unable to include digital ribbons in digital copies. 

£75,000 - Pocket Guide to the Vermissian. “Glittering jewel of industry! Vast machineries that offer most elegant affordances to elf both high and dark! With this convenient and handsome guidebook, the myriad tunnels of the Vermissian will be revealed to you, young reader, and at an affordable cost!” This in-character booklet is one of the few surviving original guides to the Vermissian, long-since collapsed into an interdimensional nightmare realm, which details the way that things should have been if the Heart hadn’t infected the entire network. In addition, the booklet has been updated and the aelfir propaganda corrected by a keen scholar, who’s copied in more accurate historical texts and, where necessary, written in warnings and guides themselves in a lunatic scrawl. 

 Every backer at the digital hardship level and above will receive a free PDF of the Pocket Guide, painstakingly written by Mary Hamilton with support from Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor, and physical copies will be available as an add-ons once the campaign is over.

Right, that's all for now. Please - if you're excited about any of the stretch goals and you'd like to see the project hit them, spread the word about Strata (and Spire) and encourage your wealthiest friends to throw money at us!

- Grant, Chris and Mary

GLASSHELM unlocked, Chris Farnell interview
over 5 years ago – Sun, Oct 21, 2018 at 03:47:22 PM

GLASSHELM

Want to overthrow a massively corrupt and cruel banking system from within? Well, you can go get a job at a multinational banking consortium, or if that sounds like a lot of work you can just play Kira Magrann's GLASSHELM, the new scenario that's been unlocked as a stretch goal. It's all about black magic banking, computers in the brains of captured wizards and hex-hacking. Which is nice.

DARK HARVEST INTERVIEW

We had a chat with Chris Farnell, writer of the Dark Harvest scenario, to find out some more about the situation the player characters find themselves in as they hide out in a backwater village deep within the Garden District.

So Chris, you’ve written some actual books before! Tell us about them and you. What challenges did writing a scenario provide?  

I’ve had a couple of books out. The first was a YA novel way back in 2006 when I was a fresh-faced graduate, and you can still find that floating around some libraries and second-hand booksellers. Most recently I’ve published an anthology, Dirty Work, which contains stories about, to pick some completely random examples, a hierarchical dystopia, a resistance fighter, an occult ritual, and a cursed object, which is nice if you like that kind of thing.  

Writing an RPG scenario was a completely different experience. I’m redrafting a novel at the moment and, however complex it gets it’s still a sequence of words and the reader will start at the first word and keep going until they read the last one. With Dark Harvest, it was less than 10,000 words but you’re trying to keep an unwieldy, constantly rotating structure in your head at all times. It’s like writing flatpack instructions, except the person building it gets to decide what kind of furniture they’re building and the component list includes “Three things from around your home” and it still all has to fit together. It’s been so much fun but has been exercising writing muscles I didn’t even know existed.  

Dark Harvest has more investigating than we’re used to seeing in Spire - we’ve been pitching it as Midsomer Murders but with elves. Does that sounds about right? Tell us about it.  

Midsomer Murders with elves is exactly right. I think Spire is a game about trying to live in and use power structures that don’t have your best interests at heart. We’ve seen how that functions in the arenas of high politics and the grim underworld, but I wanted to see how it translated into the crappy villages like the one where I grew up. You still have all the deadly scheming, secret feuds and conflicting factions, but this time the battlegrounds are church fêtes, parish council meetings and the One Pub.  

It is a uniquely English situation that the Player characters find themselves in. What elements of English folklore and culture did you draw on?  

I wanted to keep things rural, and British, but apart from that I’ve stolen from pretty much anywhere and everywhere. If you look there are references in here to Black Shuck, the Ninth Legion, Brigadoon, the stories of Thomas Hardy, and a Midsummer Night’s Dream. One thing I found while researching, particularly listening to folk music and watching British rural horror movies, is that despite our history being mostly about making sure we’ve invaded every single place at least once, in our rural mythology we cling to this idea of ourselves as being an occupied country, whether it’s by Romans, Normans, Protestants, or city types buying holiday homes. I mean, if you watch The Witchfinder General, a lot of it feels like a Vietnam War movie set in Norfolk. That felt very Spire to me, as well as being sort of horribly relevant.  

You're changing one of the fundamental parts of Spire, the Vermissian, with your scenario. Tell us more about the Arbor Vitae.  

We know the Vermissian, Spire’s hugely ambitious transit system, was a doomed venture, but when they tried to build into the Garden District it was even more doomed than usual, as they don’t take kindly to unified transport infrastructure round these parts. The Sage can still find their way into the places where the Vermissian should be, but what they will find is something far older and stranger. Basically, it’s important to the campaign that the players stay in the village they’ve been sent to, so I couldn’t have one of the character classes be able to hop on the tube and leave whenever they like. While their abilities remain intact, instead of accessing the Vermissian, they access the Arbor Vitae, the much older extra-spatial cave network that the Vermissian was built onto. It’s also an excuse for me to throw in as much weird folklore stuff as I possibly can.  

If you could be asked any question by us during an interview, like what’s happening now, what would that question be?  

“Have you recovered from that time we hired you to be an NPC in a LARP interrogation scene and the players started chopping your arms and legs off before they even asked you a question?” No. No I have not.

We didn't ask you to answer it, but thank you anyway, Chris. Also: sorry.

Ironshrike unlocked, Interview with Ben Brock
over 5 years ago – Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 02:55:16 PM

IRONSHRIKE.

We just keep hitting those stretch goals! We've unlocked Ironshrike, Ben Brock's scenario for Strata, which deals with architectural magic and the god of predatory capitalism. We had a chat with Ben about what his plans are for the adventure.

RRD: So, you’ve never written for roleplaying games before. What do you do in the real world, and has it helped you write up a scenario for Spire?  

Ben: In my waking life I’m an editor of non-fiction books, which has been sort of helpful in that I spend my day tinkering with other people’s writing and ideas, which helps me think about mine. Obviously something like Spire is ‘fictional’ but I think spending time in the entrails of non-fiction - books that are meant to guide and explain and illuminate, and that aren’t linear – is probably a better way to learn about writing scenarios than reading narrative fiction (or, I hope so, at least).  

We’re really interested to see how players manage to kill a place in the Ironshrike campaign frame. Tell us a little bit about it, and what you’re hoping to achieve with it.

Ironshrike is the last market before you hit rock bottom. It’s the urban equivalent of the weird, ineradicable black mould between the tiles in your bathroom: extremely persistent and pretty bad for you. The Ministry wants it gone, because it’s a source of chaos and villainy and other exciting stuff, and because there’s a cult feeding of the chaotic flow of silver and suffering down there: but how exactly do you kill a place? (And do you even have the right to do so?) That’s up to the players…  

The whole thing is kind of an exercise in taking the subtle underlying ideas in Spire and making them concrete and unsubtle: the city itself is the main character, and arguably the big bad, of Spire, so why not ask the players to actually kill (part of) it? I want to find out what happens when the abstract and the concrete starts crossing over with each other. (But also I just wanted to write about a wretched hive and an evil cult of people with silver teeth.)

It’s also my attempt to write an RPG about city planning, because RPGs and city planning are two of my favourite things. I think we could achieve a lot by replacing the standard planning permissions appeal process with teams of dark elf revolutionaries.      

You’re going into a great level of detail on Derelictus, and Ironshrike Market in particular, with this scenario - we’ve generally treated districts with a broad-brush approach. What kind of people can the players expect to meet there?  

Yeah…Ironshrike is sort of halfway between being a district and an individual location. You can expect to meet a handful of specific stallholders, and to be given tools to generate more as the tides of silver ebb and flow. They’ll all have desperation in common, though: nobody wants to ends up selling fungal scrapings and gutterkin jerky in Ironshrike, but the Laws of the Market (apparently) demand that someone’s gotta do it.  

Of course, there will be aelfir as well: two in particular who have reached down from their lofty perches and put their long, cold fingers in the mud pie of Ironshrike. One of them is a Machiavellian master of manipulation, entirely ruthless and unfathomably subtle: the other one is something much worse - a property developer.  

What new concepts are you introducing to Spire with Ironshrike?  We’re kind of into the idea of the normally benevolent Azur being warped into a god of predatory capitalism. 

 I guess my counter-question here is “how could a god of money ever be benevolent, maaaan?” 

That's entirely fair.

I do want to take a good long look at Azur and to explore what worshiping money means. In line with what I said above about the abstract and the concrete, I also want to look at the whole idea of systems and markets and commerce and play with the weird imagery there. Bull markets, booms, the invisible hand: these are metaphors that deserve to be made literal again. This has always been present in Spire, though – the fact that you can deal damage in the form of money is in my opinion one of the most brilliant things about the game, so I want to run with that idea and see how far it goes. 

If you could be asked any question by us during an interview, like what’s happening now, what would that question be?      

I notice you haven’t asked me for an answer here, so I’m going to respectfully request that you ask me “how can we better know the shadows that lurk within the chambers of our hearts?”