Character

Generally, a character will have all of the following facets at the start of a Resistance campaign:

• Access to skills and domains
• Extra slots in some resistances
• Basic equipment
• A refresh condition
• An NPC bond
• A PC bond
• Two or more abilities (see below)

As they advance in power and progress through the story, they’ll have the option to pick up more facets in the categories above through earning advances.

Refresh Conditions

Refresh conditions allow players to remove stress from their characters through performing certain actions. These actions are crucially important to the character and form the core of their identity - a police officer, for example, might refresh when they bring a criminal to justice, or a mechanic might refresh when they repair or build a complicated machine. In Spire, classes and additional advances come with a refresh condition attached to them. When you create classes, you can attach refresh conditions, or you can have players select theirs from a list.

Refresh conditions define the day-to-day goals of the character - but they also drive play in a certain direction. By establishing interesting refresh conditions, you can steer your players towards roleplaying choices that they might not otherwise make, because they’re rewarded for doing so.

Here are some examples of refresh conditions:

Community Leader: Do something that improves the lives of those in your area.

Cowardly: Avoid your problems for a while, which makes them worse.

Creative: Make or build something that has a lasting impact on the world.

Cruel: Hurt someone’s feelings - someone who matters.

Curious: Uncover hidden information.

Desperate: Make someone adore you.

Hedonistic: Engage in reckless excess.

Insecure: Prove your dominance over another.

Kind: Help someone without any obvious benefit to yourself.

Lonely: Share a moment of intimacy with another person.

Manipulative: Get someone to do what you want, against their better judgement.

Protective: Defend someone from danger.

Religious: Commune with your god and gain insight on your problems.

Vengeful: Gain retribution for a real or perceived slight against you and yours.

The above conditions are provided in the most basic terms, and may well not fit your game; you should come up with your own. When doing so, it’s important to strike a balance between too easy (“Drink a coffee”) and too hard (“Save the world”). A character should be able to satisfy the condition in _some _way with a little effort during downtime, but earning a big refresh should require a bit of setup and roleplaying. It’s also important to consider what sort of play you want to reward - do you want wildly different conditions for each character, or would you rather they were able to team up and clear stress all at the same time?

Finally, how do characters gain access to refresh conditions? If you’re using classes to divide up your abilities (see below) then each class should come with a refresh condition. Otherwise, you may want to have players select one or two at character creation and go from there.

Abilities

“Abilities” is a broad catch-all category for special rules that a character possesses that other characters may not. Abilities generally possess one or more of the following functions, but this should not be treated as a complete list:

• Ask the GM certain questions that must be answered truthfully*
• Bypass rolling for certain actions, and instead succeed automatically
• Establish truths in the fiction around a theme
• Frame scenes of a certain type *
• Lower difficulty of challenges or enemies
• Gain access to a useful location or faction
• Create temporary bonds at a certain level
• Gain a permanent, specific bond
• Gain an additional refresh condition
• Gain temporary additional slots in a certain resistance
• Gain a valuable piece of equipment
• Bestow temporary access to a skill or domain
• Gain benefits in the fiction with no specific mechanical change*
• Ignore fallout from one resistance up to a certain level
• Remove certain kinds of fallout
• Improve an existing piece of equipment by adding or removing tags or improving stress dice type
• Put off or delay fallout until later
• Reallocate stress from one resistance to another, or from one individual to another
• Remove stress from a particular resistance
• Roll with mastery in certain situations
• Confer one of the above benefits onto another character, rather than your own

Functions marked with asterisks above have additional description below.

Abilities may have costs or limits associated with them too, such as:

• Usable once per session
• Usable once per situation
• Use requires a roll, and can result in stress marked to a certain resistance or failure
• Use requires (1, D3, D6, D8) stress marked to a certain resistance
• Useable once only (rare)
• A trigger condition that must be fulfilled to activate the power
• Use requires time be spent preparing or activating
• Additional conditions where stress is marked (weaknesses)

Abilities may also come with bonuses to resistances, NPC bonds, knacks, or access to skills and domains.

Notes On Ability Functions

Ask the GM certain questions that must be answered truthfully. This function is designed to skip long scenes where your character uncovers information - especially information that may not be crucial to the progression of the game. The information gathered will be specific (for example, “What does this person _want _right now?” or “What’s the quickest way out of here?”) and often tied to the character class that the ability is a part of.

Frame scenes of a certain type. When a player is given licence to frame a scene, that means that they set up the elements and the core motivation of it, rather than the GM - but they’re given restrictions. For example, “CUT A DEAL” allows a player to establish that they have access to an NPC that has the ability to sell them anything they desire - but it doesn’t define the cost, or the willingness of the NPC in question to trade. Framing scenes is pretty much an advanced, slightly more complicated version of establishing truths.

Gain benefits in the fiction with no specific mechanical change. This broad function allows players to define things about their character that don’t directly increase their mechanical input to the system. For example, if a character becomes a police officer as part of an ability, it stands to reason that they’d be allowed to make arrests, enter a police station, and command some respect from the majority of civilians. The rules only affect the fiction, rather than the numbers that underlie it.

Ability Scales And Ordering

In Spire, we divided up abilities into three categories - Low, Medium and High - and tied them to advances of an equivalent scale. You can do the same, if you wish.

We did this because we wanted to show a player character’s growth through their story, and to give players something to look forward and aspire to - as well as being able to do some really crazy stuff with the High-level abilities. It also allowed us to offer different levels of reward for different actions whilst allowing the GM some control over the level of advancement.

You might not do this, and that’s fine; all your abilities can be of the same power, or you can arrange them like a skill tree from a video game, and players must purchase the first power in a tree before they have access to the second, the second before they have access to the third, and so on. You might have Major abilities that define a character’s modus operandi and Minor abilities that add little tweaks. It’s entirely up to you, and we encourage you to experiment to see what works best.

Fiction

Abilities also have fiction attached to them - anything which is not a mechanic. Generally, this comes before the mechanical details. For example, while an ability might be:

“Once per session, gain +3 additional HEALTH slots for the remainder of the situation. At the end of the situation, these disappear; if they’re filled with stress, that stress is first allocated to empty additional slots and then directly to your HEALTH resistance.”

The fiction attached to it depends on the world in which the game is set. In a gritty PI game, it might be:

“DUTCH COURAGE. You keep a flask of the good stuff in your coat pocket; when push comes to shove, you drink it to bolster your resolve.”

In a sci-fi game, it might be:

“STEELSKIN. Your skin is laced with molecules of an organic polymer that can harden in response to an electrical stimulus.”

When you write fiction for an ability, you’re solidifying it within the game world, and adding content through it. You’re also responsible for making powers feel evocative and exciting, so write abilities that players will want to choose!

Classes Or Pick-And-Mix

Abilities will form the majority of how characters are mechanically defined by their players, so it pays to think about how they’re sorted and distributed. There are two main paths:

PICK-AND-MIX makes every ability available to every character, although some may be locked off for reasons established in the fiction. (For example: a player wants their character to have access to ATLANTEAN SECRETS, but their character hasn’t made contact with the secret cult that guards the world-changing magics. They can’t gain the ability until they do.) Some powers may be “gated” behind other ones. (For example: you can’t gain ARMOUR-PIERCING ROUNDS until you get the GUN ability.)

It’s a good idea to group similar abilities together to aid players in building their characters, rather than shoving them all in one place and having them wade through it.

Pick-and-mix is great because it allows a player to build any character they desire, and it allows you a lot of freedom as a writer to add additional content as and when without it impacting the game too much.

It’s not ideal because abilities are harder to balance (as any combination of powers is available), players could find it hard to get a clear image of their character, and they’ll have to spend a long time sorting through all available abilities.

CLASSES are pre-defined sets of abilities - a player picks their character’s class during creation. Choosing abilities from other classes may be impossible, more expensive, or limited in some way, but characters may also have access to smaller sets of powers that aren’t quite full classes but come with their own requirements for entry. Classes can also come with starting abilities that are added to the character, or access to skills and domains, additional slots in resistances, and so on.

Classes are great because they allow a new player get to started right away, picking a “package” of resistances, skills and domains etc that fit within the setting. They’re difficult because they limit player choice, and you’ll have to offer enough variety so two people playing the same class can make mechanically different characters - and you have to make sure that each class has enough abilities in it to sustain growth over a full campaign.

We don’t have a preferred method - it depends on the game and the story the system is being used to tell. We tend to veer more towards classes, but that’s because that’s what we’re used to, and we don’t want to stop you from designing the best game you can.

Example Abilities

Wwi Trenches

WEAPONS MAINTENANCE. [Low] The first time you or a nearby ally triggers the Dangerous or Unreliable tag on one of their weapons in a situation, ignore it.

TOUGH AS OLD BOOTS. [Low] +2 GRIT. The first time you take GRIT fallout in a session, ignore it and carry on.

PESSIMIST. [Medium] When a nearby player character (other than you) suffers minor or moderate Fallout, refresh D3. Refresh D6 if they suffer severe fallout.

CHIN-WAG. [Medium.] Once per situation, when you help someone out, they remove D3 stress from SANITY. Once per session, when you sit down and talk to someone, they can tell you a secret about themselves and remove D6 stress from Sanity.

GRENADIER. [Medium] You are entrusted with a supply of grenades. They have the following profile: (D6, Thrown, Spread D6, Short Supply).

CRACK SHOT. [Medium] When you’re firing a weapon, ignore all difficulty modifiers for weather conditions, smoke, movement, cover, and so on. Essentially, so long as the shot is possible, you’re treated as attempting it whilst standing still on even ground in good conditions.

RAPID FIRE. [Medium] Any ranged weapon you carry that can hold more than a single shot gains the Spread D3 tag.

OVER THE TOP. [High] Once per session, activate this ability. Any nearby allies do not need to roll for fallout as a result marked to GRIT or SANITY for the remainder of the situation; once the situation ends, roll as normal.

Ghost Hunters

MAKE MANIFEST. [Minor] Mark D6 stress to SOUL or FUNDING to perform this rite. Any ethereal creature nearby to you is forced to become present in the physical realm, and as such can be interacted with through normal means.

MEMENTO MORI. [Minor] Gain the Scry skill. Whenever an undead creature is near you, you are subject to visions and allegorical images that show how it died. Mark 1 stress to MIND to share these visions with others as a ghostly projection.

POSSESSION FIEND. [Major] +2 SOUL. Something about you seems inviting to ghosts, and you enjoy the loss of control when you let them in. When you’re possessed, refresh D6.

DETRITUS MIND. [Minor] Gain the Ancients domain. Years of exposure to haunted material has left your brain a mess of echoes, full of half-remembered events that may or may not have happened to you. Once per session, select a Skill or Domain you do not have access to; you have access to it until the end of the current situation as the spirits whisper instruction to you.

RELIABLE INCOME. [Minor] Gain the Commerce domain. You have access to a small stipend that doesn’t require any input from you - investments, a trust fund, or residuals from a popular book sale. Once per session, clear D6 stress from FUNDING.

DOG OF WAR. [Major] Gain the Battle skill, +1 BODY, and access to a revolver (D6, ranged). In addition, once per session, you may describe three elements that are present in a dangerous situation - cover, egress routes, unattended weapons, and so on. The first time you or an ally acts using one of these elements, they roll with mastery.

GODLY. [Major] Gain the Church domain and +1 SOUL. You are a pious and devout Christian. Once per situation, when a ghost would act directly against you (possession, attack, theft etc) you can declare that it acts against someone less religious instead. Commiting sinful acts, at the GM’s discretion, can inflict stress on your MIND and SOUL.

Sci-Fi Knights

Aegis Ability Tree

An aegis is an armoured hazardous environment suit, designed to protect the user from all kinds of threats - kinetic, radioactive, phantasmic, spiritual or gravitational. As the user bonds with the strange technologies in their suit, it will learn to protect them better. The aegis counts as an Armour 2 piece of equipment.

Tier 1: Medical Support

+1 CORPUS. While wearing the aegis you are immune to disease, and the internal air reserves and recycling units can provide you with several days’ worth of oxygen before you’ll need to refill them.

Tier 2: Regeneration

Aegis is now Armour 3. Once per session, while wearing the aegis, clear a minor or moderate CORPUS fallout or downgrade a severe CORPUS fallout to moderate.

Tier 3: Martyr’s Halo

+1 CORPUS. Mark D6 stress to CORPUS to activate this ability. Roll a D3. For the rest of the situation, when a nearby ally marks stress to CORPUS, the stress marked is reduced by the amount rolled on the D3.

Tier 4: Rebirth

Should you die whilst wearing the aegis, you do not die, and instead clear all stress. At some point later in the session you emerge from the aegis, now brittle and glass-like, to reveal your second form - work with the GM to figure out what this is. You are now treated as wearing the aegis at all times, and it cannot be removed. In addition, choose one of the following abilities:

ASCENDANT. You can now fly, granting mastery on MELEE and HUNT checks against non-flying targets

ETERNAL. Once per situation, clear D3 stress from CORPUS

RUIN. Add the Brutal tag to any MELEE weapon carried