Spire: The City Must Fall (often referred to simply as Spire) is a Tabletop Roleplaying Game written by Grant Howitt & Christopher Taylor, and published by Rowan, Rook and Decard.
The Spire is an impossibly old, mile-high city. Once, two hundred years ago, the Aelfir high elves of the far north took the city from the Drow. The players are a cell of revolutionaries, working for The Ministry and trying to regain freedom for the Drow.
Spire: The City Must Fall contains the following tropes:
- Cop Hater: This is a mindset that's actively encouraged to a degree by the setting sourcebooks themselves, you are playing a member secretive cell of freedom fighters looking to overthrow their oppressive colonialist conquerors after all. This is also despite the fact that many of the enforcers you'll go up against are Drow themselves, who were pressed into upholding the Aelfir's status quo, as passage in the Sin sourcebook points out, no matter how personable that law officer may be or whether they're "just doing their job" any form of law enforcement within Spire ultimately perpetuates a system of oppression and indentured slavery.There is no such thing as benevolent law enforcement in Spire. To enforce social order is often a brutal task; to do it on behalf of a colonial monstrosity enslaving your kin is vile. Regardless of any individual guard's intentions, or even any particular institution, the rot they perpetuate is murderous and evil. The best, kindest, most virtuous guard in Spire still perpetuates the power of an instituation that will see their children handed into slavery for years. The "good cops" are traitors, dead, or quit. The best anyone else gets is unwilling or corrupt. The Ministry will never forget that. Neither should you.
- Our Elves Are Different: Elves are split into two groups, the Dark Elves commonly known as Drow, and the High Elves commonly referred to as Aelfir. Whether the two races are even relatives of the same species is an active point of contention in-universe with an unclear answer. The most commonly known story is that the Drow were once Aelfir themselves but were split off when the Aelfir, for reasons that have been lost to time, laid an ancient curse half of their own number that caused exposure to sunlight to burn them.
- The Drow are a monochromatic race of Elves, ranging from dark black, to ashen grey, to alabaster white, whose homelands are vast underground cities that lie in the West. They do not bear live young, instead laying fleshy eggs in clutches of 2 or 3 that are incubated for 6 months in communal nurseries, the incubation process is tended to by both the parents of the unborn child as well as a specialized caste of spiderlike Drow known as Midwives. Possibly due to this communal raising process, Drow culture and religion has a very strong sense of community built into it. The Drow are the native inhabitants of Spire, where the game takes place, but the city has since been invaded and colonized by the Aelfir and the Drow have been reduced to an oppressed underclass.
- The Aelfir hail from an Empire in the cold and frozen North ruled by the immortal Everqueen, whose armies have invaded and colonized the City of Spire, and now continue to march South to wage war on the Gnolls. They are characterized by being creatures of blazing passion and beauty, as well as great self-absorbed arrogance, perversely hedonistic indulgences and capricious cruelty.
- La Résistance: The players are a cell of Drow revolutionaries intending to overthrow their Aelfir overlords.
- Multiple Life Bars: Depending on the situation, you may take damage to your body, your mind, or even your wallet.
- My Species Doth Protest Too Much:
- As the Sin sourcebook exposits, no race is a monolith. Despite the Aelfir's well-earned reputation for narcissistic hedonism and nigh sociopathic disregard for other races, there are Aelfir who rebel against the traditions of their culture. Many of whom leave the pleasure domes of Amaranth to live in simpler, though still privileged and comfortable, lives tending to birds or pursuing more scholarly activities in other parts of Spire, and some even find themselves living among the underclass in Derelictus or the Docks.
- Some Aelfir take it even further and fund liberation fronts, supporting revolutionaries like the very Ministry players are working for. Sometimes this is just an Aelfir taking an opportunity to indulge in the ultimate taboo for the thrill of it, and they'll abandon their allies the moment things get too dangerous or they simply get bored of it, but at least half the time they're genuinely devoted to the cause.
- Spin-Off: Heart: The City Beneath takes place in a vast dungeon beneath Spire.
