Remembrance Beast

If you have no idea what the hell Kingdom Death: Monster  is beyond its awesome name, I don't blame you. The game itself, copies of which are essentially made on a case-by-case basis, is incredibly expensive. Like, $400 per core box expensive plus $80-150 per expansion box. Yes, fucking really. And the community around Kingdom Death is highly secretive, remaining close-lipped on the game's inner workings so as to not spoil it for new players. That's their rationale, at least--on paper, it's really just more RPG gatekeeping that's grown very tiring and needs to stop but oh shit I'm about to go off aren't I? I found out about Kingdom Death: Monster  a few years ago when a let's player I like began dropping a short playthrough of the game, using a Steam Workshop mod for Tabletop Simulator rather than shelling out the money for the physical game. I was immediately taken with the game's overall aesthetic. One look at the immaculate miniatures and art will...

"On the Darkest day    May we hold to temperance   To quell their vengeance."  -official motto of the Eclipse Paladins "Bleed 'em dry--it's what they deserve!" -unofficial motto of the Eclipse Paladins Twice a century at most, the day of the Harvest Equinox in the third season of every year is not just a day of celebration and mourning. Sometimes, the full 24 hours of sunlight are...diluted. The moon gets in the way. And for an entire day, the city of Spire is bathed in the dim light of a solar eclipse. On equinox days like this, the agents of the Crimson Vigil either fall back to their boltholes and hide or go out into the streets prepared to die and die fighting. It's a day when even they are filled with fear. A day when the Eclipse Paladins arrive to cull their ranks in a great conflagration. The Day of Crimson Ash has arrived. You are not ready. Jason Nguyen The Eclipse Paladins The Solar Basilica is a place built on old sec...

Spire's worldbuilding is incredible, let's be real. The massive amount of lore, extensively detailing the many facets of the city and life within it, is staggering, while still somehow leaving some openings for GMs and players to create their own new concepts. It all fits together. But. As great as I think Spire's lore is, it overlooks some prime opportunities for great extra content. Case in point: a small passage in the Strata sourcebook, which introduces the outstanding  concept of possession junkies. The idea of people addicted to letting ghosts drive them around is great, but it's dropped quickly so the worldbuilding can continue. Part need to mechanically represent one of my players' backstories and part public fucking service, I present to you a big box of lore for Spire's ghosts and, most importantly, a full extra advance for playing a junkie. Enjoy. The Nature of Ghosts Contrary to popular belief, most deaths in Spire are very much final. Dead ...

[CW: ableism, unreality, slight body horror (text only).] "They want us to be that which we cannot be. We are only happy to oblige." --chicken-scratch found etched on the wall of room #D27, since removed. Room was unoccupied at the time. Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth; Dave McKean The crumbling hostile architecture of Ashford Street Asylum is located in the uptown of Ivory Row, the area owned by Lady Theryn Thorns-on-Silk. Upon buying the land, Lady Theryn ordered the building demolished. She visited the place exactly once, retracted that order, and has never returned since. Created by an aelfir looking to do good (a rarity nowadays), the Asylum now stands as a testament to petty cruelty. Though it now houses any number of patients declared violently mentally ill--usually wrongfully so--it was built with a much more specific goal in mind. That goal? Treating the maladies inflicted upon the people of Spire by the Heart itself. From lapsed Deep Apiar...

Hiram The-World-Rises-With-the-Sun can't remember what it was like to have eyes anymore. His have long been replaced with dry, wilted flowers; they itch at times, yes, but what can you do? The fusion of aelfir and plant is something that must be done in order to truly become all that the world wants him to be. That said, though, he is... Different. For the flowers, bark, and stems that make up most of his body now have long since begun their slow descent into entropy, decaying slowly. It is as if they do not want his body. As if his flesh is not fit for reclamation. Which is what a fool might say, he thinks. The truly enlightened such as himself know the truth: the once-fertile land of Spire is long dead. It is long dead, and we who chose to occupy it are responsible. And the only way to resurrect Mother Spire is by killing us all. Hiram The-World-Rises-With-the-Sun can't remember what it was like to have eyes anymore. But here, in the Garden District, he has found a...

Howdy. It's been a minute since, uh, my first post, but I'll likely be using this thing more often in the near future. That's because I'm about to begin GMing a campaign using Spire , Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor's fantastic 2018 TTRPG about playing as drow revolutionary cultists fighting against oppressive high elf gentrifiers/colonizers in a massive tower-city. Check it out if you haven't--seriously, 5E wants what it has. My campaign won't be using any pre-existing Spire campaign modules, but will instead be using my own original stories. I say stories, plural, because I'm also taking a West Marches  approach to running the game. The party is huge but players will drop in and out session by session, multiple story arcs could occur at once, and I'm generally just taking a collaborative approach to storytelling. Hell, I may even move over to Spire's  Heart  sister title every once in a while if the story calls for journeys into a body horror-f...

Recently (by which I mean, like, months ago), a game dev I follow on Twitter, Kai Tave (whose work you should absolutely go and check out and whose Patreon you should support if you're a Lancer fan) discussed the difficulties of putting quality boss fights into tabletop games. I had never really thought about it before, despite the fact that I insert bosses into my games all the damn time, so, after reading the brief thread they posted, I went back and looked at my own fights. My boss fights were, to put it lightly, fucking terrible. The vast majority of the bosses I had pitted my players against in my campaign were incredibly easy, missed most of their attacks, and often had some incredibly lame gimmicks in their movesets. The ones that did turn out fun were basically just extended setpieces, during which I had players primarily make non-combat rolls with some brief fighting sprinkled in. My boss battles sucked, and I'm upset at myself for making my players do them. N...