The Importance Of Powerful Deaths

Spire is a game about ill-fated dark elf revolutionaries fighting a hopeless war against an authoritarian Aelfir (high-elf) government in a towering city, the Spire of the title, that is filled with cults, monsters and occult magic.  Having taken us beneath the city with the multiple ENNIE award winning Heart, we now have Sin, a new sourcebook that introduces both new lore and mechanics for the city’s forces of religion, crime, order and more.

The company behind Spire, Heart and Sin is Rowan, Rook & Decard, a small but dedicated team of artists and game designers. At the core of the company are three friends, who met at university in Norwich and have since managed that rare thing, to turn their passion for games into a living. Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor, the creative leads, and Mary (Maz) Hamilton who is responsible for the business side of things. 

“There is an underpinning of love and trust and that we have each other's best interests at heart,” Howitt tells me while explaining how the company works, a sentiment that all three of them express to me in different ways throughout our conversations. 

It is an important dynamic and one they all recognise as potentially risky. Going into business on such a creative project can, and has, fractured friendships in the past. However, by embracing creative freedom, keeping their first principles in mind, building a loyal community and, importantly, producing good games, they have not just survived but thrived. 

Spire is a world in which a subjugated Drow population try to undermine the corrupt, beautiful and strange Aelfir’s rule. It is a world of occult societies, illegal religions and wild beautiful magic that Howitt tells me was inspired by Warhammer and “the grand irony” of the 40K universe. 

Whilst powered by its own innovative system, one that encourages narrative through gameplay and short, exciting misadventures,  Spire began life as a spy-craft focused hack of Dark Heresy (the late ‘00s Warhammer 40,000 RPG). From there the game went through numerous iterations eventually coming to emphasise acts of rebellion rather than spying and with Games Workshop’s IP out of bounds and both Howitt and Taylor frustrated with Dark Heresy’s system, Spire had become very much its own thing.

“It is an evolution of what I wanted Dark Heresy to be, a dark, fascinating, kind of sexy game,” explains Howitt. 

Not so much of a Warhammer-head, outside of the world of games Taylor’s principle inspiration is from horror films, especially rural folk horror along the lines of Midsommar, though he does also admit to being partial to the Saw franchise. “It is garbage torture-porn, but you are not going to get a better bottle episode for a horror game,” he explains.

And it is horror that runs through both Heart and Spire. This is a universe full of monsters and body horror and a game where the players are constantly aware that their quest for justice is probably going to have hideous consequences for themselves, the people around them, or as likely both. 

An important background to their work is an extensive zombie LARP that the three of them ran whilst at university. Howitt mentions it to me, but it is Hamilton who helps me see how it fits into Spire. Describing the biggest game they organised, which saw them rent out an abandoned shopping centre for it, Hamilton tells me that the innovation was to encourage good deaths, “Everybody dies in these games, but did you die well? Did you die in a way that made you feel powerful?” It’s an idea that still informs Spire’s philosophy where death is highly likely, but how you go is what matters. 

In Spire failure is no bad thing. In fact, it is at the core of Spire: The Resistance, the system that powers the game. As the players roll failures or successes with consequence, they accrue stress, not damage. Eventually, that stress will metastasise into a tangible outcome. 

If you take fallout as the result falling of a building, you might break a leg. If you receive a critical fallout while pissing off the Duke, she might drop an insta-kill cannon shell on you and everybody near you but the game then asks, what will you do with those last few seconds before the shell impacts?  

Taylor explains that through failure manifesting not as a number, but as a narrative event, you create more interesting stories. Questions like, “What do I do now that I've broken a leg because I've fallen off a building?” drive the story forward. 

He expands this suggesting that you can not only fail forward but also sideways. “Failing forward means you’ve broken your leg, but you’ve saved the day. But what if you’ve broken your leg and your problem isn’t the fight at the top of the ravine but the crocodile at the bottom and you are on your own and you’re neck-deep in mud?” The resistance system was developed to give players and DMs a way of creating stories like this with simple dice rolls. 

The engine that drives the creation of Spire is the relationship between Taylor and Howitt. Though their roles blur, generally speaking Taylor handles rules and Howitt is focused on world-building. You get a glimpse into that partnership when you listen to their podcast Hearty Dice Friends, where they bat around design ideas whilst attempting to make something like a finished game. 

I ask them how representative the podcast is of their real process and they both agree that it looks similar, though Taylor admits that there is a more performative side to the podcast and that their actual process is more chaotic. 

The way that Taylor thinks about game design is to consider the way the rules feel, the concept behind them and then try to express that in dice. He doesn’t worry about probability curves and balance. “It has always been about how it felt to roll those dice physically; to take them and roll them and to see what the outcomes are.”

Taylor also thinks a lot about the balance and tension between rules and free storytelling and believes that “less rules allow a story, but more rules generate it.” Whilst he tends to lean towards rules-lite systems where he is more comfortable, he sees his job as to try and find a balance between these two contradictory points. 

But Spire is not just a set of mechanics, it is also a setting. When it comes to their world-building the point most emphasised was that there is no single truth, possibly another hangover from Warhammer 40,000 which is famously lore-deep but has no official canon. 

The books explicitly do not answer key questions about the Spire and leave filling in the details up to the players. “Once every few months somebody asks me how tall Spire is and [I say], ‘as tall as you need it to be, on you go.’ ” says Howitt, though Taylor cheekily lets slip that there is a canon that they keep at the back of their heads, but, “We're not going to tell you it.” 

With the new books adding to the setting I ask them if by adding their creative authority to areas previously left empty, they are unintentionally building canon. “I guess by default we are,” admits Taylor, “though we can not and do not want to control people’s interpretations. If a canon starts forming, whatever.” 

Howitt has a similar view: “I think it is possible people are shutting things down, but there is enough room for people to say ‘oh my Spire is different.’ ”

The other key aspect of their world-building is that it all takes place in the present tense. “We focus on what is happening now because that is what happens in games. I don’t care what the gods did 1000 years ago,” says Howitt. 

The game is built for short, punchy campaigns. Moreover, it is about finding gaps in the aelfir system that can be exploited by our brave revolutionaries. By setting the game’s lore firmly in the present, it emphasises these two key elements. 

An important guide to their writing as well as their business strategy is their company manifesto, Hamilton points out. Just as “no dead levels” informs their design philosophy, “everyone gets paid” does their business strategy and Taylor emphasises to me that Rowan, Rook & Decard is an accredited living wage employer.

Hamilton tells me that they all touch base regularly to make sure their mission statement and initial values still apply and refer back to them when making day-to-day decisions. Hamilton describes those values as “corporate tools,” but “most corporations use them as a sticky plaster over gaping wounds. If you actually use them in the way that they are intended to be as guides to behaviour and action, they become something quite powerful.”

Hamilton has an impressive background in the media and helps run the company in addition to their regular work. “The way I have tried to describe my role before is, I think about all the stuff that would get in the way of Grant and Chris doing what they are best at.” 

I ask about the state of the company and Hamilton tells me it is going well though they also explain that growth is not necessarily the aim of the company. “We’ve always talked about the idea of sustainability, not growth. Grant and Chris want to make books about elves for the rest of their lives. What do we need to build so they can do that?”

Refreshingly, all three mention mental health during our conversations and Hamilton clarifies how the company was set up to accommodate the group’s mental health, neuro-divergency and disability needs. “We work in a way that is congruent with those things rather than trying to fight against them.” 

But Rowan, Rook & Decard is not just the work of three friends anymore and the latest book Sin has an expansive range of contributors. The new writers worked most closely with Howitt who explains “We treat them the way we want to be treated. The person doing the brief says, ‘right here are two pages of notes and here are some things you have to hit and here are some vibes. Go and come back when you’ve done it. Any questions, let me know.’ ” 

Howitt explains that they were looking for writers who, “Get the joke, get the cruelty. They get the hope and excitement in it.” 

One person who clearly gets it is Basheer Ghouse. His section in Sin expands on the forces of order: The jackbooted city guard, fanatical paladins, courts, prisons, army and everything keeping the Spire in line. Ghouse says that in particular he drew inspiration from the British Raj and found that he could use real-world politics like American policing to find the satire of Spire. 

He expanded Order by looking at the areas of Spire that he thought would be interesting. Moreover, he thought about what sort of systems of government would be needed to have created the Spire of the core book. Then it was the process of expanding the ideas and finding the ways players could interact with them. “Once I had those, I filled it in with NPCs specific plot hooks and stuff like that.” 

Ghouse also breaks new ground, introducing the High Elf Gnoll War, with the lack of existing lore giving him more room to improvise. I ask him if he felt nervous writing in somebody else’s world and he admits that he felt some trepidation writing for an existing fanbase but that “as long as you pick one of the more fucked up things and expand it, you are in pretty good standing in Spire.”

The crime section of the book was written by JP Bradley, who explains that in Spire crime doesn’t necessarily make a person bad; it is the exploitation that crime enables that makes a person villainous. Once this core idea was in place his direction for crime, who his villains were and what to focus on became clear. 

For example he explains that early on he decided to not include material about sex workers. “I felt like using sex workers as the victims of crime has a corrosive effect on their safety… you could definitely write something about it, something nuanced, but I was not the person to do that. So I drew a red line under it.” 

Instead, for him, crime was, “about cops and robbers” and he drew inspiration from, “the rich tradition of British gangland crime and US mafia.” His inspiration for the North Docks of Spire is drawn from his hometown of Manchester and “the pubs I used to drink in, the old men at the bar, the shady guys who would hang out in the alleyways.”

Adrian Stone is Spire’s artist and his vision of the city is of something “monolithic, a bit J.G. Ballard… like a massive brutal cathedral.” 

The genre that Stone’s art best fits into is sci-fi, which, he tells me, sometimes doesn’t match the high horror-fantasy of Spire and he appreciates that whilst his style might not always match what Howitt and Taylor are looking for they have given him the freedom to create the art that he wants. 

Drawing inspiration from artists like Mike Mignola and Amedeo Modigliani,  Stone’s work consists of bold angular figures and architecture that loom darkly against backgrounds of primary colours. He wanted it to look like it was a collage and that, although he works digitally, it could all have been made with a pair of scissors and card. “I like that kind of high contrast, highly graphic style,” he says.

His art has developed from Spire to Sin. “The style hasn’t changed as much as the composition,” he explains, with more dynamic character perspectives that bring a bit more three-dimensionality to his work. He is excited about the future of Spire and thinks, “it can get way darker.” 

A sometimes under-appreciated part of a book is the layout which, for Spire, Mina Mcjanda, is responsible. A sophisticated game designer in her own right Mcjanda has worked on a huge range of publications and with her own UFO press recently added to Rowan, Rook & Decard as an imprint, she has become the company’s latest full time member,

Mcjanda got her start designing layouts as a cost-saving measure for her own games but enjoyed the process of designing books and started taking commissions. She looks at game-books as reference manuals and sees her job is to guide readers through the book and to create markers in their minds. 

Mcjanda wanted the main book to be unified and easy to navigate. However, she found there were extra pages that gave her a bit of space to be more creative without cluttering the text. A list of pubs in the North Docks, or the page of potentially useful similes that are amongst some of the most characterful in the book.

The other important role of layout and design is to establish a game’s tone, in the case of Spire one of “decaying elegance”. To that end she incorporated a lot of 1920s design elements like the headers, font and filigree, that she then puts distressed textures and stains on top of, creating an effect where “the sidebars are very geometric and fancy at the top but they become ragged and torn at the bottom.” 

At the same time Mcjanda  wanted the book to show the point of view of the player characters. Not the people who are writing the book but those “who are drawing graffiti in the margins.” 

I’ve GMed Heart and, players willing, I’d like to run a Spire campaign soon. As I’m far from an experienced GM I wanted some tips on running the game from those behind it. 

Bradley tells me that Spire swings and I’m going to see things changing under me, keeps it simple and “expect the unexpected” he advises. Taylor recommends that I should listen to my players, that they will tell me what I want out of the game. “If you’ve got a player who wants to fight everything, give them something to fight.” 

Howitt echos this advice telling me to look at my players' domains and build the game around those. He adds that is important to give the players opportunities to change the Spire and Mcjanda has similar advice. She tells me that it is worth building a couple of little shadowy organisations covering a few different domains, then setting them up “like a Rube Goldberg machine.” 

She also advises me to take the problems my players may face and mix them up, “from the mundane to high-concept spy and cult business, […] the weird, the grand politics and street-level politics into a nice tasty soup.” 

Finally, Ghouse encourages me to think about how the Spire itself is a fucked-up, friction-heavy system that “doesn’t work and kind of hates itself. Lean into how messed up this thing is, even if overthrowing it isn’t viable for your PCs, you can do a lot of damage based on the dysfunction of the system.”

I hope to see my players do a lot of damage to the Spire, encounter all the strange things it has to offer and die powerfully in the process.

Sin - A Spire Sourcebook is out now from Rowan, Rook & Decard

This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Vol.1, Issue 3 (Oct '22)