Spire Sessions 0: Jodi's Hierarchy of Villainy
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-filled hole in reality or what can best be described as the House on Ash Tree Lane, but with subway tunnels. Given how thorough (and thoroughly excellent) Spire's lore is, as well as how open-ended the system is, I'm hoping it goes well.
Regardless, expect this space to be the Spire Zone for the next few months. Every week or two, I plan to release a new Spire Sessions entry, which will be filled with general brainstorming for the campaign and maybe some brief asides describing how recent sessions went. To start with, however, I'm gonna be going all in on the villains.
Every story needs a good antagonist. In Spire's case, the "big bad" of any given campaign will always be the systems of systematic oppression put in place by the aelfir to subjugate the drow and pretty much every other species on the planet. Aelfir suck, y'all. But you can't exactly give Rampant and Ever-Present Bigotry a stat block, so I'm gonna need to introduce some tangible, personal baddies for the party to go up against. These early Spire Sessions, then, will be dedicated to describing villains: who they are, their goals, motivations, abilities, and their relevance to the wider themes of the story. Furthermore, I'll be brainstorming what locations, NPCs, and objects might be relevant to them, as well as possible directions players could be encouraged to take when confronting them. Mini-campaign modules, essentially, so other future Spire GMs won't have to do as much fucking work as I'm doing.
But even though this is a West Marches game, the players need progression. You can't just throw, say, a rampant Spirewhite plague, a veritably apocalyptic scenario, at a party of players who have no advances. To that end, I've written up a system of categorization. Basically, it lets you rate your antagonists on a scale of 1 to 5, determining how far-reaching a threat they are. The numbers are really just arbitrary--in fact, I expect the Big Deal Villains that the party actually enjoys facing off against to have numbers which fluctuate as their storylines continue.
Anyway. Onto the categories!
Category 1: the villain is only out to get a person or small group of people. These are your scummy aelfir aristocrats forcing a family they don't like into a durance, or a run-of-the-mill serial killer who isn't picky about their victims. Examples from the core book are a House Quinn street gang aimlessly wandering the streets of Ivory Row and the Candlegate Killer.
Category 2: the villain poses a threat to a specific faction or group. This group can be active in multiple districts of Spire--as long as the group is specific, they fit this category. For example, the Paladins of the Solar Basilica from the core book are Category 2 because they're ostensibly only out to get the Ministry of Our Hidden Mistress; sure, they benefit from the systems of oppression, but the only people they wanna drag out into the streets and hang are Ministers and their friends.
Category 3: the villain poses a threat to an entire district of Spire. These are your movers and shakers--the Three from Ivory Row are all good examples because their cold war over turf and drug supply lines threatens that district. Again, groups like the Paladins don't normally meet this category--they just wanna kill Ministers--but if they were to become convinced an entire district was under Ministry control, they'd be bumped up to Cat 3.
Category 4: the villain threatens multiple entire districts of Spire. These are big threats, big enough to sustain entire campaigns. To give an example, the large-scale drug ring the party goes up against in the Eidolon Sky campaign module qualifies as Cat 4: their reach only extends through the up-spire districts, so places from Red Row down aren't under the immediate threat of a gang war or district-wide descents into addiction.
Category 5: the villain threatens all of Spire. If you want to go truly crazy and fucked up, this is your category. Cat 5 villains could just be, say, a Spire-wide drug smuggling ring, but they could also be truly cataclysmic threats, like a terror cell committing demonic incursions across the city. You could even go out on a limb and rate the Heart as a Cat 5, considering that its reach is slowly extending out to the rest of Spire. No matter how well a fight with a Category 5 antagonist goes, the city will never be the same after.
I hope this system is useful, if only to give GMs a framework for how to build up antagonistic forces in their campaigns. If it seems abstract, well, that's because it is, but upcoming entries in Spire Sessions will hopefully put the system in perspective.
That's it for me this time. Hope you stick around for the first proper Spire session, in which I'll be going over my first villain, a guy called The Wilted Man.
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-filled hole in reality or what can best be described as the House on Ash Tree Lane, but with subway tunnels. Given how thorough (and thoroughly excellent) Spire's lore is, as well as how open-ended the system is, I'm hoping it goes well.
Regardless, expect this space to be the Spire Zone for the next few months. Every week or two, I plan to release a new Spire Sessions entry, which will be filled with general brainstorming for the campaign and maybe some brief asides describing how recent sessions went. To start with, however, I'm gonna be going all in on the villains.
Every story needs a good antagonist. In Spire's case, the "big bad" of any given campaign will always be the systems of systematic oppression put in place by the aelfir to subjugate the drow and pretty much every other species on the planet. Aelfir suck, y'all. But you can't exactly give Rampant and Ever-Present Bigotry a stat block, so I'm gonna need to introduce some tangible, personal baddies for the party to go up against. These early Spire Sessions, then, will be dedicated to describing villains: who they are, their goals, motivations, abilities, and their relevance to the wider themes of the story. Furthermore, I'll be brainstorming what locations, NPCs, and objects might be relevant to them, as well as possible directions players could be encouraged to take when confronting them. Mini-campaign modules, essentially, so other future Spire GMs won't have to do as much fucking work as I'm doing.
But even though this is a West Marches game, the players need progression. You can't just throw, say, a rampant Spirewhite plague, a veritably apocalyptic scenario, at a party of players who have no advances. To that end, I've written up a system of categorization. Basically, it lets you rate your antagonists on a scale of 1 to 5, determining how far-reaching a threat they are. The numbers are really just arbitrary--in fact, I expect the Big Deal Villains that the party actually enjoys facing off against to have numbers which fluctuate as their storylines continue.
Anyway. Onto the categories!
Category 1: the villain is only out to get a person or small group of people. These are your scummy aelfir aristocrats forcing a family they don't like into a durance, or a run-of-the-mill serial killer who isn't picky about their victims. Examples from the core book are a House Quinn street gang aimlessly wandering the streets of Ivory Row and the Candlegate Killer.
Category 2: the villain poses a threat to a specific faction or group. This group can be active in multiple districts of Spire--as long as the group is specific, they fit this category. For example, the Paladins of the Solar Basilica from the core book are Category 2 because they're ostensibly only out to get the Ministry of Our Hidden Mistress; sure, they benefit from the systems of oppression, but the only people they wanna drag out into the streets and hang are Ministers and their friends.
Category 3: the villain poses a threat to an entire district of Spire. These are your movers and shakers--the Three from Ivory Row are all good examples because their cold war over turf and drug supply lines threatens that district. Again, groups like the Paladins don't normally meet this category--they just wanna kill Ministers--but if they were to become convinced an entire district was under Ministry control, they'd be bumped up to Cat 3.
Category 4: the villain threatens multiple entire districts of Spire. These are big threats, big enough to sustain entire campaigns. To give an example, the large-scale drug ring the party goes up against in the Eidolon Sky campaign module qualifies as Cat 4: their reach only extends through the up-spire districts, so places from Red Row down aren't under the immediate threat of a gang war or district-wide descents into addiction.
Category 5: the villain threatens all of Spire. If you want to go truly crazy and fucked up, this is your category. Cat 5 villains could just be, say, a Spire-wide drug smuggling ring, but they could also be truly cataclysmic threats, like a terror cell committing demonic incursions across the city. You could even go out on a limb and rate the Heart as a Cat 5, considering that its reach is slowly extending out to the rest of Spire. No matter how well a fight with a Category 5 antagonist goes, the city will never be the same after.
I hope this system is useful, if only to give GMs a framework for how to build up antagonistic forces in their campaigns. If it seems abstract, well, that's because it is, but upcoming entries in Spire Sessions will hopefully put the system in perspective.
That's it for me this time. Hope you stick around for the first proper Spire session, in which I'll be going over my first villain, a guy called The Wilted Man.
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