Game Reactions: Spire - Shadow Operations (One-shot collection)
Link: https://rowanrookanddecard.com/product/shadow-operations-a-spire-one-shots-book/?v=7885444af42e
Eleven one-shot missions for the Spire roleplaying game.
[Quick note, I’m never concise in these, but I waffle a *lot* at the start here. If you’re already comfortable with Spire and are just curious about Shadow Operations itself, you can skip to after the Wayland’s Forge link.]
Spire is “a fantasy-punk RPG about rebellion, brutality and oppression” by Rowan, Rook and Decard. Shadow Operations is a collection of 11 one-shot scenarios to play with Spire. If you’re not familiar, the game is set in the titular city, a mile-high construction of unknown origin. It’s run by the aelfir (high-elves), while the PCs are drow working for an organisation called the Ministry, who the aelfir would call terrorists. The game itself is a d10 dice pool mechanic that RRD call the Resistance system. It’s close to a FitD/PbtA style, ‘fiction first’ setup, with graded levels of success depending on the dice roll. Fails (or compromised successes) result in characters marking ‘stress’ against a relevant ‘resistance’. Whenever stress is marked, a check is made for ‘fallout’, or some concrete consequence, e.g., taking fallout to your Blood resistance might mean that you have a broken leg. The more stress you build up, the more likely fallout is, and the worse it will be the higher the stress is when it hits. That’s a whirlwind tour, but in short - it’s a great system, for me it’s just about the perfect level of crunch. It’s way less restrictive and crunchy than a D&D, but still gives enough of a framework to support players (and GMs) who might struggle with a very rules-light system.
On top of that, the world (and the art in the core rulebook, wowsers) is fascinating. The ‘fantasy-punk’ label makes sense once you start reading, as it combines classic fantasy creatures with more modern elements like factories, trains and so on. Good touchpoints might be Dishonored or Arcane. There is an abandoned train network that was designed to manipulate space-time itself, and has left behind a seemingly infinite labyrinth of tracks and stations. Underneath the city is the Heart, which there is a whole other game dedicated to. The Heart is organic, or magical, or maybe technological, but it’s definitely messed up, has a tendency to drive people beyond the bounds of sanity, and possibly created the city of Spire. There are ‘mega-corvids’ that can be used for travel. There’s a distant war with gnolls that receives armies from the barracks near the base of Spire, and returns corpses and injured soldiers. Speaking of corpses, there are ghosts, and also people who can commune with the dead. There’s an intelligence housed in a crystal that is recruiting ‘followers’… or something, I can’t fully remember that bit. Needless to say, there’s a lot of lore. It’s a really cool world that is not the same old shit you’ve seen a thousand times, and offers a lot of opportunity to be creative. It’s also a lot to try to take in, especially as a GM whose players will probably need to ask a lot of basic questions about how the world works, what their characters would know etc. In fairness, there’s a lot of world detail in the core book, and quite a few supplements that add more, but also a lot still left undefined, and explicit permission (even encouragement) from the authors to make up whatever sounds good for your game.
That latter point is appreciated, and I certainly have made use of it. I’ve played a single one-shot of Spire, and then last year GM’d a mini-campaign (about 8 or 9 sessions) using the ‘Snuff Out the Sun’ scenario provided in the quickstart. I was winging it a lot, and making up whatever felt best at the time, and it went great. I was running it for 2 players, both from my regular D&D group. We all started TTRPGs with D&D in 2020 (guess why!) and I’m predictably the nerd that got super into the whole scene and branched out from D&D itself. I’m the primary force behind us ever playing any non-5e games, much to their chagrin at times. With some scheduling conflicts, I’d suggested setting up a secondary weekly slot for these 2 players, that gave them a chance to keep playing, in return for letting me experiment with other games. Spire was the first game we’d really played that was fundamentally different to the D&D approach. Up to then we’d played Cyberpunk Red, Mork Borg, Cy_borg. It took some time for the players to adjust to things like no, we’re not using roll20, you don’t have HP, there are no maps for tactical combat, and yes, it’s ok that I just asked you to tell me what your relationship is with this new NPC, you can pretty much do what you want within reason, and we are making this story up together as we go.
Honestly, it took time for me too. I’ve been used to D&D-style adventures that broadly know where the characters need to go and how they will need to solve the situation they’re dropped into. Spire is more of a ‘play to find out’ game, which I absolutely love! I’m also not always the best improviser on the spot, so it’s a challenge too. The quickstart scenario gives you a cast of characters, a list of locations, and a goal, and wishes you luck. Players need to prevent a religious zealot from ascending to a seat of power. My players skulked around, gathered information, curried favour, bribed, and generally politicked their way through. My partner, by contrast, had fought the city guard and kidnapped the archbishop within 2 sessions! [Side note, there’s something so interesting in that split, where my videogame/D&D background players expended every effort and ounce of wit they had to avoid any potentially dangerous situation, clearly retaining a primary goal of keeping their characters safe at all times.] This is all great stuff, but had made me very curious about how to introduce more adventures/missions, and especially how you might write more for the game. So when I saw Shadow Operations, I was eager to pick it up.
Quick shoutout, I bought this (and two other Spire supplements I may post about) on a trip to Wayland’s Forge, an excellent RPG/boardgame shop in Birmingham. I love the place, and if you ever get the chance, you should visit: https://www.waylandsforge.co.uk/
Wayland's Forge
Shadow Operations itself then, contains 11 standalone, one-shot scenarios for Spire. Each is by a different writer, but all have the same construction. There’s a pitch, suggestions for useful classes, a list of key characters with descriptions, a series of locations, a few suggested scenes, a few ‘props’, an explanation of the scenario’s twist, and a suggested reward for successful completion. Just like Snuff Out the Sun, there is not a linear sequence of events, you’re being handed a toolkit that, at its best, can facilitate any of a number of fun stories for your group. If you’re curious about the ‘twist’ - for most of the stories it is a literal twist, i.e., the straightforward mission pitched to the players gets a complication, some sort of rug pull like ‘that NPC you’re here to rescue actually defected and left of their own free will’.
It’s a fun structure, and for the best examples, it gives the GM a great framework with interesting characters that have multiple conflicts going on and no clear right or wrong, but a few obvious paths that players could take. These Feral Saints is the last of the scenarios, where a ‘hallow’ (a reincarnated drow saint) is walking around a lower level of Spire, performing miracles and gaining followers. Not all is quite as it may seem, as you’d expect, and there are multiple characters with their own agendas and (understandable) motives. My brain exploded with possibilities reading this one, and I’d really look forward to running it.
Powderkeg is another favourite, setting up two rival pubs that are both allies of the Ministry, and on the brink of open violence. Your players need to find a resolution that works out well for their organisation. Does that resolution need to benefit everyone else involved? Not necessarily. Again, there are a handful of strong characters with different motives, that would likely react in interesting ways to any attempted interventions the players make.
These scenarios, as well as a few others, do exactly what I need as a GM - give me sufficient scaffolding that I can kickstart the players into action, and have the world push back in fun ways, without struggling to look up or invent a ton of lore along the way. Those scenarios above are both, at their core, fully comprehensible to anyone familiar with human stories of any kind. The rich, unique lore of Spire is a creative bonus, not an impediment.
Some of the others don’t meet the same level, for me. Where that’s the case, it’s always because I feel like I don’t have enough to go on. If you’re a strong improviser, and like to invent a lot during play, or your players are particularly good at collaborating to construct the world and story as they go, you might feel differently.
As an example, House of Leaving is set in a place called the Infinite Library, which has only a couple of paragraphs describing it in the core rulebook. A researcher found important information and has disappeared. The answer to the mystery is very simple, the cast of characters is small, and the number of people who know the answer to the mystery (and can tell the players) is even smaller. Just the name Infinite Library sounds great, and you have a lot of scope to build out the story, but the amount of concretely useful detail in the scenario could be delivered in a couple of sentences. I think my players would draw a blank on how to get started, and I wouldn’t feel confident enough that I could help them, or throw up interesting obstacles once they got going.
Similarly, The Last Train is set in the Vermissian, the abandoned train network that exists partially outside reality. I love this part of the world-building, but it gets very abstract whenever it’s mentioned. The objective here is again quite simple, and there isn’t a great deal in the scenario as written to complicate it. I’d hesitate to run this one, and if I did, I’d feel a need to put in a lot of prep work to give myself more characters, locations, and events to pull from, as well as more setup and guidance for the players.
Overall, I really like this approach to writing ‘adventures’, in contrast to the worst of the stereotypical D&D adventures that are very linear rollercoaster rides for the players. Forgive my videogame background, but this is Stalker rather than Call of Duty, for example. That said, it is a mixed bag at times, as it’s a very fine line to walk between being too prescriptive and not giving GMs enough to work with. If you’re a Spire fan though, and want some inspiration for your future games, it’s definitely worth picking up.
