Hi everyone.
As you may know, the last post was some time ago and described that all of the projects that were being worked on had been halted for a hiatus. Well, hiatus over. I’m ready to start working on things again.
Actually that’s not quite accurate, I already have been working on some things. But now I’m ready to start sharing and talking about them again. It had been too much for me to manage trying to keep the Diamond RPG running, this site running, operating paid Pathfinder games, and working on new stuff, while being a stay-at-home dad. So I had to restructure my life a little bit. Celebrate a birthday (I’m 32 now!) and come back at this stuff with a more solid ground beneath my feet.
All that is to say, the first (and flagship) thing I want to make will be the Atlas Spire tabletop RPG. This post is going to talk about it a little bit.
What is Atlas Spire?
I have a background in exploration. I used to live and work at resorts and facilities in state parks, usually cooking food for travelers and employees. In my free time, I’d often go off into the wilderness, whether that was woods, mountains, swamps, whatever, and just see how long I could last without needing to come home. I wouldn’t pack more than a bottle of water or two, a notebook, and a pen.
I once got lost in the Rockies, at night, and in the middle of winter. I dug out a shelter in a snowbank to sleep in for the night. I didn’t get much sleep to be honest, but I stayed warm enough for the sun to come up and the light to help me find my way back home.
I have never had a game accurately portray what it feels like to be an explorer, or an adventurer. I’ve never had a game give me the sense that nature itself was enough to kill my character and pose a relevant hazard. Sure, maybe you could say this was partly the fault of the DM / GM. But at least some of the fault lies with the games just not being about that kind of thing, despite calling their main characters “adventurers” and despite supposedly valuing “exploration.”
Hypothermia is a dragon when you’re lost and alone in the cold. The sun is a basilisk when the desert sands are endless and your skin burns a bright red. No game has captured the sensation for me that the “adventure” doesn’t begin when swords start swinging, or end when you’re looting the corpses.
Atlas Spire seeks to remedy this feeling by making every decision matter, but without letting the game get bogged down by minutia. The system has been named “The Triumvirate System” and features three pillars of play. Quarters, Journey, and Dungeon.
The Quarters Pillar
The Quarters Pillar governs mechanics that center around the players home life. When the game begins players and the GM will collaborate on building their starting town from a selection of districts. What shops, trainers, factions, guilds, and amenities are available to your characters is determined by the players from the very start.
It will be easy for players to feel a connection to a town they helped build. Since this process will occur at the same time as character creation, it’s also very easy to insert their backgrounds and history into the town and enable them to feel like proper “locals” and a part of the towns history. There are no murder hobos in Atlas. Everyone is from somewhere.
The Quarters Pillar is also where players will advance their characters, find new quests to embark on, convert treasure from their last haul into Wealth, and where they can enjoy their victories using a “Limelight” mechanic that lets them capitalize on the celebrity of a successful adventure.
Coming home from a dangerous trek into the deep, dark, unknown? That’s a cause for celebration! Sell those treasures and trinkets and buy a few rounds at the tavern. Enjoy a dinner as esteemed guests in the presence of local dukes and nobles. Gain more contacts, more information, bigger and better abilities, gear, and leads to even more perilous quests that need adventurers of your caliber to handle. The social system is designed to be fun and put your players at the center of attention. But celebrity is fleeting and the news cycle moves fast. To enjoy those lifestyles, you have to stay relevant. Which means there’s always another dungeon to conquer.
The Journey
The second cornerstone, our Journey Pillar, helps to direct the mid-point between adventures. You cannot reasonably succeed in the dungeon alone. Atlas Spire dungeons are massive and strange. They hate intruders and will chew you up and spit you out if you dare to come unprepared. So naturally, you pack a caravan of brave souls. Scouts who help you plan. Supply Runners willing to bring tools and messages from the camp outside to your party inside. Mercenaries to establish “frontline” defenses, a small fort within the dungeon for you to fall back to. But in order to employ all these followers, first you have to get them there.
Your ability to lead and compose a team will be tested, as will their faith in you. Nature is enough to kill a man, no goblins or highwaymen required. Competency and mastery over the dark forests, jagged crags, arctic wastelands, and infested swamps that you trek through will be demanded of you. After all, you’ve inspired these people to place their trust in you. Whether for the purpose of driving back a great and terrible evil or simply for collecting fantastic riches along the way. You’re responsible for them now, and if you show them that you can’t handle that kind of trust, you can expect to suffer the consequences. Treat them right and you’ll never hear a whisper of mutiny. Lose their trust, and you can expect to find yourself abandoned in your time of need.
On the road the players will be presented with minor events called “Preludes.” These act as early warning signs for potential dangers, or fantastic opportunities. Correctly identifying what signals indicate what may be around the next bend can mean the difference in a successful expedition, or a quick trip back home with your tail between your legs. Guides can help you recognize that the flock of birds who just flew off in a panic might not be a great sign of things to come. But that sound of moving water will likely be a prime hunting ground. As players you will have abilities that help you identify Preludes, or even change the outcome. The nature of tabletop games is such that we gather to share the responsibility of crafting a wonderful narrative. By controlling what happens after a prelude, you get to set your own chapter of the story within the bounds of the mechanics at play.
As you camp and hunt and carve down the overgrowth to clear a path, you leave behind signs of your trek. This is measured in a mechanic called a “Profile Die.” The Profile Die indicates to the group roughly how much of a profile a potential tracker might be able to form out of the clues and evidence you’ve left in your wake. Whether these are bad actors looking for a target to rob, or a hungry predator looking for an easy meal during nightwatch, you’ll want to keep your profile low on your way to the dungeon. Make yourselves too overt, and you run the risk of trying to storm a dungeon on high alert before you’ve even worked out how to kick in the front door.
The Dungeon
You’ve left home, you survived the trip, you’re at the gates now. It’s dark, it’s terrifying, but onward you press. You light the torch and begin down the stairs. Every footstep echoes off the stone into the unseen depths below. This is what you’ve come for. This is where it happens. The Dungeon.
Atlas Spire employs a very old-school philosophy to dungeon design. This is not a friendly place where the big damn heroes kick in the door and slaughter everything inside like a 9 to 5 day job. This is a strange and awful place where the rules are different. The dungeon hates you, and it wants you gone.
Atlas Dungeons are massive, sprawling things that fill themselves with horrible creatures and deadly traps. As you march through them by torch light you’ll slowly chip away places of relative safety. Once you secure a foothold you can call back to your Mercenary followers who will catch up to you. They leave marks with chalk and trails of rope or spilled wax or paint behind them to find their way back out the entrance. They set up barricades and reinforcements and become a new shelter for you as you push forward. You, the vanguard, dictates which direction the expedition continues.
As you move, the supply runners follow the mercenaries trails bringing food, water, medicines, and updates on the time of day to the frontlines. You, the vangaurd, take up another position. The mercenaries split their numbers and form a new camp at your new foothold. Slowly, you all crawl closer to your goals.
In the next hallway, rubble blocks your path. Laborers are called from the main camp to come and move the rocks. While they work, you explore a new direction. There have been small skirmishes in the rooms and halls leading here, but this next area is quite the fight. Almost losing, you decide to head back to that frontline and rest.
If you treated your crew well, they’ll still be here. A roar comes from the room you’ve left behind. You’ve made too much noise in the dungeon and the more terrible creatures are starting to take notice. You get back to the frontline and everyone heard that beast. They considered that you might not be coming back, but waited a bit longer just to be safe. The laborers report that they’ve cleared the other path… They’re scared, but you’ve secured no loot yet. After coming all this way, it’d be a shame to leave empty handed… what do you do next?
The decisions you make in the dungeon should feel terrifying and important. Every door, every bend and long hallway is a choice with weight. All the while the Tension ramps up. The dungeon becomes more lethal with bigger enemies, and more traps, the longer you stay and push your luck. There is no “Finishing the dungeon” there is no “Final boss room” just around the corner. There is just an endless pitch black void underneath the earth and stone. And it hates you.
Release Date?
The game is still being made, but testing starts soon. Check out the Subscriptions page if you haven’t seen it. When I’m looking for playtesters, I’ll start with our highest tier subs. Also when the game actually releases, it will be distributed with an AI art-filled version for Guild Founders and Guild Members. Mercenary subs will get a text-only PDF. Once we have the funding to do a fully commissioned version, that will be released for Guild Founders as well.
Aiming for a full release in Q3-Q4 of 2023.
Archfossil 