Backerkit soon! Also, details on our GM screen
almost 3 years ago – Tue, May 25, 2021 at 05:50:13 PM

Hey folks,

Just a quick update: we're a few days off launching the Backerkit which will let all of you input your addresses, add stuff to your pledges, and so on. We had to get some quotes in place for the products so we were sure we weren't going to over- or under-charge you!

You'll receive an email with a request to fill out a questionnaire when the pledge manager is ready to go.

CONSPIRACY KIT AND GAMESMASTER'S SCREEN

I'm not into GM screens. More power to you if you use them, but they're not for me. But a few people asked for one for Spire, and it seemed like a nice stretch goal to put into the campaign, so Chris and I got to thinking about how we could build a GM screen that we were excited to use. Here's what we ended up with:

The CONSPIRACY KIT centres around a booklet and 18 postcard-sized portraits of people and places in the city of Spire; in the booklet, there are dozens of random facets for each of the people and places that the GM can choose or roll for - things like motivations, weaknesses, secrets, connections, assets and scenes. With a few rolls the GM can stitch a number of elements of their choosing together into a secret conspiracy that the players can exploit, infiltrate, destroy or be subsumed by - and build a quick plot around them too. 

Here's where the GM screen comes in: on the GM side, it has all the useful info you'd expect on it (result tables, fallout, stress ratings, quick NPCs, etc) and on the player side it's done up to look like a wall from an ancient temple of Our Hidden Mistress - the goddess of the paramilitary cult that the player characters belong to.

In the world of Spire, building a map of people and places involved in your investigation around a shrine to Our Hidden Mistress is an act of religious devotion as well as a handy representation of the data. You can see it in this picture here:

So: the players can tack the portraits to the outside of the GM screen, allowing them to keep track of their investigations, and the GM gets to sit at the middle (technically behind) a web of conspiracy in the city of Spire, and it's all in-character and rather nice, I think you'll agree. (Of course, it still works as a GM screen even if you don't stick pictures to it, and you can always use a corkboard if you want to leave your screen unadorned.)

Hopefully we've managed to build something that can inspire GMs and players; we reckon it's going to be pretty good.

---

More soon,

- Grant (and Chris, Mary, and Mina)

Phew!
about 3 years ago – Mon, May 03, 2021 at 07:13:01 AM

We've just funded at 93 grand. We continue to be amazed by your faith in us.

Here's the deal: we aren't a big company. (Most of us in the industry aren't!) We're four people who made a risky choice to do what we love instead of throwing ourselves headlong into capitalism. We've worked hard to build something that supports us and allows us to keep a roof over our collective head, to put food on the collective table, and that's all thanks to people like you.

I can't hold down a regular job; my brain doesn't work properly. When I'm in a bad way I might go for weeks without doing anything useful, and because I run my own business, I can plan for that. I don't want to speak for anyone else, but: Chris and I have both struggled to find our place in the world, creatively and as people, and setting up Rowan, Rook and Decard has let us do just that. And, again, it's due to the support of people like you.

We've been so enthused and delighted by how people have taken to Spire and Heart; how they've grasped the reigns we gave them and made their own worlds, their own Spires and Hearts, and the stories they've told. Our community has allowed us to prosper as a business; and not, you know, wild get-on-the-news prosperity, we're not in this for the money. (Wrong industry.) We're in this to secure ourselves long-term; to build something valuable that supports us, and all of our team and the contractors we work with, to earn a fair wage making excellent work.

It feels good to build these worlds and welcome people in. And we couldn't do any of it without people like you. 

I'm going to lie down now; there's a great deal of work ahead of us, mainly writing all the stretch goals that we agreed to do during this very Kickstarter, but I think I'm done for the day. 

So: thank you for believing in us, and supporting us, and letting us make this a reality. We'll open up the Backerkit as soon as we're able (usually it takes about three weeks) and there you'll be able to add physical versions of all the stretch goal content as well as any and all books that we sell, including all of the Spire and Heart lines to date. 

Yours,

Grant (who wrote this update), Chris, Mary and Mina

New Stretch Goals
about 3 years ago – Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 11:34:07 AM

NEW STRETCH GOALS

We’ve passed all of our stretch goals, which is great! But it means we’ve had to come up with some more, which is difficult. It’s a good problem to have. We’ve done a bunch of thinking and not a small amount of maths and here are the NEXT TWO stretch goals:

£73,000: BONUSES FOR EVERYONE! Everyone who we hired for this project will get some more money because we (and you!) like them. It’s not very extravagant and doesn’t quite pull in the pledges like a GM’s Guide but hopefully it’ll be nice for them.

£80,000: GM SCREEN AND CONSPIRACY KIT. We’ll make a GM screen pack with the following things in it:

• A nice GM screen with art from Adrian Stone on the front
   
• Several panels of said GM screen with important rules referenced in brief (mainly: the result table, fallouts, and instant NPC generators)
   
• 12 postcard-sized illustrations of NPCs
   
• 6 postcard-sized illustrations of locations
   
• A guidebook with random tables for each location and NPC that you can roll on to stitch everything together into one big conspiracy with differing motivations, weaknesses and dirty secrets
   

All you’ll need to supply is the corkboard and red string, and you’ll have your very own murderboard ready to go! The Conspiracy Kit will be used as the basis for the scenario in the Quickstart, too, so it’ll be an easy way to expand outwards from your first few sessions without a) restraining you with a rigid adventure structure or b) not giving you enough of a structure to work within.

Which is exciting, isn’t it? All backers at PDF level and above will get free digital files of everything listed above, and we’ll make the physical thing available through Backerkit as with everything else we’re producing.

Should we pass 80 grand, we have some more ideas, but we're going to keep our cards close to our chest for now.

- Grant, Chris, Mary and Mina
 

Additional high-tier rewards added
about 3 years ago – Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 07:43:58 AM

Hello!

We have opened TWO Cult of Personality level slots (you get a bespoke cult, rules and artwork included in the book) and FIVE Non-Player Character Assassination (you are immortalised as a supremely killable NPC in the book) to allow folks who missed out on them the first time the chance to get involved.

We've also hit our Give Everyone A Bonus level, which means that we'll be paying everyone an additional 10% on top of what they've already earned. (Employees - so that's Grant, Chris and Mina - get a small monthly pay rise instead, because our primary goal is to make a business where we can keep doing this for ages.)

That's all for now. Thanks for your incredible support!

- Grant, Chris, Mina and Mary

Funded, and also three stretch goals, and also you lot are ridiculous
about 3 years ago – Tue, Apr 27, 2021 at 07:47:36 AM

Funded in 46 minutes! 

That's a new record. Mary's graphs are all out of whack. We need new graphs.

I continue to be amazed by the enthusiasm and the support that our community shows to us. We started this business from the ground up, which is very much the wrong way to get into tabletop games and instead you should pursue a profitable career in something else before bringing over your cultural cache to this industry and making out like a bandit. Or maybe acquiring a lucrative license and making a game about that - that's much easier, too. Certainly smarter.

But: no. We've clawed our way up and built our own brand, our own world, our own style. We create on our own terms and don't work for anyone that we don't want to. We wanted to write books about wizards for a living and have enough money to put food on the table, and it's thanks to people like you - our supporters - who make that dream possible. Thank you all so, so much for what you've done and what you're doing, still, for us. 

(Minerva made a load of graphics for the Kickstarter so you're damn right I'm doing to use them as much as possible)

STRETCH GOALS

When I woke up this morning we'd hit three stretch goals, which is nice. Here's more detail on those:

NORTH DOCKS PUBCRAWL MAP

When Kyle Latino got in touch with us to show us his portfolio we knew that he'd be an excellent fit for the North Docks. Look at that grimy detail! Chris and I have been quietly in love with the North Docks since we came up with them, oh, five years ago - and handing the keys over to JP Bradley, who wrote the Crime section of the book, has been a bit scary and very exciting. (He's done a great job.) I want to see if we can't get some pilgrimage vibes into the pubcrawl map - maybe re-enacting the historical path of St Benefras as he walked (stumbled) from inn to inn, giving out benedictions (receiving free drinks in exchange for mumbled blessings).

SPIRE QUICKSTART 

We don't have one of these, and we needed one, so we figured that it would be a sensible idea to fund it off the back of this Kickstarter's spare cash. The Heart Quickstart has been successful in terms of providing people with an easy route into Heart (so successful that we had to do a fresh print run earlier this year), so it makes sense to do one for Spire too.

Current plan is to write a one- or two-session scenario (similar to the ones in Shadow Operations) to go along with a sawn-off GMing chapter, the core rules of the game, some pregren characters and some player-facing advice too and sell it for cheap in physical and pay-what-you-want in digital.

SOLAR BASILICA MAP

 Carly A-F uses loads of colour and big, bold shapes, so we thought she'd make a great fit for the map of the Solar Basilica - the heart of the aelfir religion in Spire. Made up of four seasonal temples (artistic Spring, generous Summer, murderous Autumn, precise Winter) around a big central basilica, we've never really gone into too much detail on the structure before - so we're excited to see where it goes. Maybe we'll get Carly to just do the entire thing as a fever-dream painting by an aelfir artist?

That's all for now. Again - so, so thankful for everything you're doing for us. This support allows us to sustain the business for longer, keep paying everyone's salaries, reprint books, etc, etc. Thank you.

- Grant (also Chris and Mary)