Strata: A Spire RPG Sourcebook

by Grant Howitt, Christopher Taylor

Strata is the first full-length sourcebook for the Spire roleplaying game. Written by Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor, and with ten scenarios from a wide variety of other authors, Strata gives more details on the best and worst that the city of Spire has to Two new the purple-prose black-magic pulp fiction occultist Inksmith and the multifaceted and fractured Shadow Agent Many new extra advances for any such as the flower-skinned Druid of the Living Spire, the muckraking Gazetteer, the sigil-scrawling Children of the Runestack and the language-hunting Lexicutioners Ten scenarios (detailed below), allowing you to start a campaign of Spire easier than ever More details on the richest and poorest parts of the shadowed and fecund Garden District, the decrepit grandeur of Ivory Row, the nightmare industrial bowels of the works, the alien luxury of Amaranth, and more Beautiful full-page, full-colour artwork from Adrian Stone throughout The scenarios in Strata Better the Devil (by Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor). Forge unusual alliances as House Starys of the drow, long thought fallen, returns to Spire to take control. Home Is Where The Hatred Is (by Helen Gould). Infiltrate and assassinate a wealthy aelfir household ruled by a cruel undying matriarch. Bisquiet (by Xalavier Nelson Jr). Overthrow the government via the medium of arcane patisserie. Lines in the Dirt (by Pauline Chan). You and your cell are being evicted from your Derelictus tenement. It s not much, but its yours can you bring the other residents on-side? Eye of the Beholder (by Christine Beard). An aelfir artisan is surgically modifying drow to act as tormented masks unless you break into her lavish auction and put a stop to it. The Fall of Glasshelm (by Mary Hamilton and Kira Magrann). Bring down the Glasshelm corporation, and put a stop to their dreams of bulldozing the undercity to make way for new aelfir housing. The Forgotten (by Laurence Phillips). After the death of their protector, a group of vulnerable citizens must navigate the dangerous world of espionage after they are caught between the Ministry and the Solar Church. Ironshrike (by Ben Brock). In the depths of Derelictus, the cell are tasked with eradicating a sacred market built in the worship of predatory capitalism. How do you kill a place? The Sulphurous Presses (by Coman Fullard). Given a printing press and some run-down premises in the Works district, the cell must gain dominance over the newspaper market by publishing their own propaganda and sabotaging rival papers. Dark Harvest (by Chris Farnell). After a mission goes wrong, the Ministry bundles the players off to the deep farms of La Grotte du Corde but, of course, nothing is what it seems in this idyllic pastoral village. Strata requires a copy of the Spire RPG to use the rules and setting within to the best effect.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Gaming, Fantasy

235 pages, Hardcover

Published June 1, 2019

Reviews

[Benjamin]

How? My Spire/Heart reading list.

What? I didn't know what this was, but it's actually a sourcebook for Spire (the game where you play oppressed dark elves fighting the oppression of the aelfir (elves) in a weird city). There's some new classes, new power moves, and many new scenarios. Also includes some factions proposed by Kickstarter backers, a thing I have taken to loathing.

Yeah, so? Like the floppy scenarios I reviewed in my read of Heart, the scenarios here are pretty open-ended, including details on what's happening (though I wish these were written for quick reading rather than atmosphere in the intro), what NPCs are involved and what scenes you might have with them, and what threads of plots/sub-plots there may be. I actually like the adventures best in this book -- I'm not sure I really need new classes or magic powers or factions.

Also: although the book is really written with an eye towards the thematics of oppression and salvation (impossible); and though I appreciate their notes on, say, playing disabled characters in a world that doesn't welcome them; I also find throughout a sense of... what should we call it? Dark twee? Somber whimsy? There's a sense of _occasionally_ forced awe to some of the weirdness that I think I'd have to carefully modulate as a GM.

[Meredith Katz]

Another great supplement -- though I found the one-shots made the real meat of this. I'd sort of hoped the other half would have been more like a directory that really built out each district and what was in it, but although it did build out a few key locations it didn't quite provide the info I'd been hoping would be in there, based on the map. (I might end up building this out myself for my own campaign). I did like the closer look at the politics of some of the major districts!