Another two RPG Bundles - Spire and Heart

[ffutures]

Two bundles of RPGs from Rowan, Rook, & Decard  -  one a repeat and the other all new.

Spire

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Spire2020

This revived December 2020 Spire Bundle is one of two offers in progress featuring different fantasy-punk RPGs from Rowan, Rook, & Decard. This revival returns you to the towering mile-tall drow city of a thousand gods, Spire. The all-new companion offer, Heart: The City Beneath, presents the standalone dungeon-delving game set in the nightmarish undercity beneath the Spire.

Spire: The City Must Fall is a game of revolution in a towering industrial fantasy-punk city of a thousand gods, where retro-engineers dig up arcane technology from forgotten dungeons, then hotwire it and sell cheap copies. Underground lakes brim with algae; bloodwitches from the Heart, a rotten hole in reality at the city's center, carry mystical diseases that rewrite minds; spider-skinned midwives sprout chitinous limbs to defend unborn drow; magic masks are sutured to unwilling faces; mysterious Morticians pluck out hearts and store them in jars, so the owners gain eternal life.

Spire tasks you with changing this city, whether for good or ill. You are a dark elf, hiding from the light in Spire's lawless undercity. The monsters you fight aren't out in the wilderness; they're living above you in obscene luxury, dominating your people in the aftermath of a brutal war. Capricious high elves, the occupying rulers, are destroying your religion, your culture, and everything you hold dear. You've joined the secret Ministry of Our Hidden Mistress and have sworn in blood to destroy the high elves through subterfuge, insurrection, and terror. What -- or who -- will you sacrifice to achieve your aims? Will you evade the attention of the authorities, or end up shot in the street like so many before you?

Funded in a July 2017 Kickstarter campaign, Spire was the biggest game to that time from Grant Howitt (Goblin Quest, Paranoia Red Clearance Edition, Honey Heist, Crash Pandas) and his co-designer, Chris Taylor. Using a straightforward skill-based D10-pool system, Spire puts a new and flavorful twist on many fantasy tropes. You don't just play a Ranger; you play a Carrion-Priest, a hyena-worshipping death cultist. You're not a Rogue; you're a Bound, and you pray to the small gods in your ropes to stop you from falling off the side of the city. You don't play a Fighter, but a Knight of the North Docks, from a long-fallen order of nobles who now swagger in flashy quarter-plate and operate Spire's bars. Yet in this setting saturated in weirdness, players face dilemmas of compliance versus resistance -- conformity or courage -- that speak to all of us today. Like a citybound D&D crossed with Unknown Armies -- Gormenghast meets Necromunda -- Spire is a game of hard choices, painful decisions, and personal loss.

This revived December 2020 offer once again presents much of the Spire line – everything you need to bring bloody revolt from the lawless undercity of Red Row to the frozen mile-high towers of Amaranth. We provide each title complete in .PDF. Like all Bundle of Holding titles, these ebooks have NO DRM (Digital Restrictions Management), and our customers are entitled to move them freely among all their devices. (By publisher request, the DriveThruRPG versions of these files are inobtrusively watermarked.)

Ten percent of each purchase (after gateway fees) goes to these Spire and Heart offers' designated charity, the Diana Jones Award Emerging Designer Program. Each year, the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, amplifies the voices of up-and-coming game designers by featuring them during an expenses-paid visit to Gen Con. The global Emerging Designer Program focuses on creators from marginalized communities.

The total retail value of the titles in this Spire Bundle revival is US$79. Customers who pay just US$12.95 get all five titles in this revived offer's Starter Collection (retail value $45) as DRM-free ebooks, including the complete Spire: The City Must Fall core rulebook (retail price $25), plus the new Spire Quickstart (free); the Strata sourcebook (retail $20); and three "campaign frames" that get you started playing quickly: Blood and Dust Eidolon Sky, and The Kings of Silver (all sold on a Pay-What-You-Want basis).

Those who pay more than this offer's threshold (average) price, which is set at $19.95 to start, also get this revival's entire Bonus Collection with five more titles worth an additional $34, including the scenarios and sourcebooks Shadow Operations (retail $9), Black Magic (retail $9), Codex of the Deep Spire (retail $5), Book of Masks (retail price $9), and Secrets Kept from the Sun (retail $2). We also include seven MP3 tracks from Tabletop Audio composed as backer rewards for the Spire Kickstarter campaign and not for sale anywhere else.

Heart

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Heart

This all-new Heart Bundle is one of two offers in progress featuring fantasy-punk RPGs set in the mile-tall drow city of Spire from Rowan, Rook, & Decard. This offer presents Heart: The City Beneath, a standalone RPG of thrilling and desperate dungeon-crawls in the unreal world below Spire. The companion revival from December 2020, Spire, has the Spire rulebook and supplements for the urban fantasy-punk RPG of dark-elf resistance against cruel high-elf overlords.

Where Spire was a game of social brutality and revolution, Heart is set on the frontier of an unexplored and ever-changing world. Characters are more self-sufficient, less subtle, and rely far more on their equipment than their counterparts in the City Above. As a Deadwalker, tech-armored Vermissian Knight, Junk Mage, Deep Apiarist, or other obsessed character, you delve into the outlawed cathedrals, predatory buildings, and twisted night forests of a nightmare undercity that will give you everything you've ever dreamed of – or kill you in the process.

We provide each title complete in .PDF. Like all Bundle of Holding titles, these ebooks have NO DRM (Digital Restrictions Management), and our customers are entitled to move them freely among all their devices. (By publisher request, the DriveThruRPG versions of these files are inobtrusively watermarked.)

Ten percent of each purchase (after gateway fees) goes to these Heart and Spire offers' designated charity, the Diana Jones Award Emerging Designer Program. Each year, the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, amplifies the voices of up-and-coming game designers by featuring them during an expenses-paid visit to Gen Con. The global Emerging Designer Program focuses on creators from marginalized communities.

The total retail value of the titles in this Heart Bundle is US$61. Customers who pay just US$16.95 get all five titles in our Heart Collection (retail value $61) as DRM-free ebooks, including the complete standalone Heart: The City Beneath rulebook (retail price $25), plus the free Heart Quickstart; and four supplements (retail $9 each): Burned and Broken, Vermissian Black Ops, Sanctum, and Doors to Elsewhere.

 

Last time I said (of Spire):

I've only had a quick look at the rules etc. but it seems to be a reasonably playable game, provided the GM is prepared to put some work into it, inverting a lot of the tropes of fantasy RPGs; the adventurers are members of the underclasses, not aristocrats or knights, and many of their actions are attempts to subvert or overthrow the "legitimate" high elf government and bring about bloody revolution. Some of the character illustrations are reminiscent of revolutionary propaganda posters from various eras, others look like a cross between fantasy and Judge Dredd. It looks like you get quite a lot for your money, and I can't think of any other RPG that quite covers this territory. Recommended.

I think that this still applies.