The party gets into a pretty hefty fight with Undead and a fiendish creature in one of the Lakes of Salt Marsh. Injuries are handed out, and after it was all said and done I forgot a Ranger ability. Still getting use to a return to acutal plays.

Title

I spent an hour taking a solo run at SPIRE while waiting for my friend yesterday. This is that tale.

SPIRE is a game about drow living in a mile-high city under the control of the high elves who wrested control from the drow hundreds of years ago, “allowing” the drow to still live there after four years’ durance when they reach maturity. I’m the member of a hidden resistance cell and adherent of a suppressed religion. I played a bound called Caerphallon.

I set up this session with a simple hook and a list of NPC names and “actionable” facets. Whenever a new character was referenced, I’d roll on both of these tables. SPIRE has an excellent system where there’s a 70% chance of your character getting some form of stress, so I used this to extrapolate the complications of the situation.

My ministry contact set me up with my mission — a lot of activities from other cells have been shut down by the city guard. There’s an informant somewhere on both sides — find them and fix the problem.

Caerphallon started in a local seedy bar, called Too Proud to Spit. He walked straight up to the bar and tried to spin out whether some locals have recently started spending above their norm. Unfortunately, the barman was having nothing and called upon me to pay up the bar tab Caerphallon had been slowly building up across the last months… Knowing that he’d need to use the bar again later, Caerphallon broke into his mother’s house and took some especially valuable materials — tab covered. When paying back his tab, Caerphallon managed to convince the barman to top up his (enchanted) bottle, and when the two shared a swig from it, the barman opened up about the crimes he’d been turning the other cheek to. A local lout, Reyen Strachan, has recently been paying for loads of drinks with requisitioned glassgems.

Caerphallon broke into Reyen’s house and took a lock of hair from Reyen’s sleeping children. Waiting downstairs, he offered the hair as a reason for Reyen to open up. It didn’t take long before Reyen opened up and revealed the source of their recent wealth to be a drow guard called Harrie.

The next day, Caerphallon surveiled Harrie’s workplace. She arranged for a meeting with Anton, who works in a different unit. The meeting was to take place in Too Proud to Spit, so Caephallon tried to work out a place he could overhear the conversation from the roof, but couldn’t manage to find somewhere. Instead, he managed to get involved in a dodgy game of cards in one corner of the pub — and in doing so outed one of the other players who was cheating. Nevertheless, it provided excellent cover for Caerphallon to overhear the conversation between Harrie and Anton, and Caerphallon was able to work out from the descriptions that their “mutual friend” was a drow called Shelle.

Caerphallon found Shelle at work. He sneaked up on her, but failed to make a killing coup-de-grace. Some awkward stabbing led to a frenetic fight, where Caerphallon’s slipperiness meant he avoided the heavier blows from Shelle’s hefty (and not entirely legal) sword, while his own god-knife cut a number of painful wounds, and taking her life.

Before he left, Caerphallon left a particularly bloody corpse as a message for anyone else who were happy to collude with the aelfir, and without looking behind him, he vanished into the Red Row streets…

+ FIN +

The party arrives in Morgansfort. The first job is offered and one of the members gets into some trouble.