I just released a longform essay on Spire: The City Must Fall! It’s about 50 minutes of comparison to RF Kuang’s “Babel: An Arcane History,” and covers the texts’ portrayals of imperialism, colonial extraction, and violent resistance. I worked super hard on this, so I hope folks enjoy!
Video- https://youtu.be/u4Teqrx3HH8
Transcript- https://aavoigt.com/f/spire-the-monstrosity-of-empire-the-necessity-of-violence
The real Asuka; the only Asuka
- she/her
she/her, 29, low resolution brain goblin, prolonged Cinema-Media-Arts and Polisci undergrad, ongoing Gender Situation. Asuka for short, Asukapaper for long, and Jill for real
Discord ID: asukapaper (they took away the funny numbers, curses)
You must log in to comment.
in reply to @aaronsxl's post:
Wonderful video! This was an excellent triangulation of colonial extraction economies in history and in fiction.
This video leaves me with a question though: how does all of this information enter the dialogue of play? I could presume that somebody familiar with Babel and British Colonial economic history could run Spire and introduce people to those topics through a game of Spire, but do you have any insight as to how this information augments the player experience?
Thanks for watching! I thought about how you could run a session of Spire in the Babel universe while writing this too, and I think it's possible, but it would be challenging. Spire's playbooks and their moves are so intrinsically tied to its setting that it would take significant reworks to put it in a real-world story like Babel. Some classes would be just fine, but stuff like the Carrion Priest and Midwife would take some fiddling with (maybe swapping hyenas out for large dogs, spider powers out for medical knowledge and potions).
Thematically, I think it would actually be way easier to structure a session around British colonial extraction, because in Spire, the extraction is mostly in drow labor. If you start with the premise that your antagonist faction is going to want silver, translators, opium, etc, you could swap out the various districts and factions of Spire with those in Babel. The Spire Council is a pretty direct conversion to Parliament or members of the Oxford Translation Institute.
I don't know if that answered your question!!
Haha 😅 not really. Your response is interesting, but to restate my question more clearly:
If someone was going to play, not just run, this Spire game (set in Spire or Babel) how do you think the comparison points of either the history of colonial extraction or Babel particularly enhance the experience of the roleplaying game?
I think at the end of the day, a game is what you bring to it. But at least for me, it would be interesting to use those methods of extraction as objectives and goals for players to target. I would personally love a game where the logistics of empire were a big target (sabotaging shipyards, blackmailing sugar traders, manipulating Parliament into infighting), because that would allow some of the more insidious and hidden aspects of colonialism to be brought to the forefront. Starting a strike at a factory that disrupts the carts and axes being used to mine silver, for instance. Or, as is brought up in Babel, forcing the Empire to deal with a worker uprising, because in the end they'd rather not damage the people they use to extract product.
Pinned Tags