Strata - A Spire RPG Sourcebook (HC)

Silver Ennie Award 2020 for Best Interior Art

Strata is the first full-length sourcebook for the Spire roleplaying game. Written by Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor, and with ten scenarios from a wide variety of other authors, Strata gives more details on the best and worst that the city of Spire has to offer:

• Two new classes: the purple-prose black-magic pulp fiction occultist Inksmith and the multifaceted and fractured Shadow Agent
• Many new extra advances for any class: such as the flower-skinned Druid of the Living Spire, the muckraking Gazetteer, the sigil-scrawling Children of the Runestack and the language-hunting Lexicutioners
• Ten scenarios (detailed below), allowing you to start a campaign of Spire easier than ever
• More details on the richest and poorest parts of Spire: the shadowed and fecund Garden District, the decrepit grandeur of Ivory Row, the nightmare industrial bowels of the works, the alien luxury of Amaranth, and more
• Beautiful full-page, full-colour artwork from Adrian Stone throughout

The scenarios in Strata are:

• Better the Devil (by Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor). Forge unusual alliances as House Starys of the drow, long thought fallen, returns to Spire to take control.
• Home Is Where The Hatred Is (by Helen Gould). Infiltrate and assassinate a wealthy aelfir household ruled by a cruel undying matriarch.
• Bisquiet (by Xalavier Nelson Jr). Overthrow the government via the medium of arcane patisserie.
• Lines in the Dirt (by Pauline Chan). You and your cell are being evicted from your Derelictus tenement. It’s not much, but its yours — can you bring the other residents on-side?
• Eye of the Beholder (by Christine Beard). An aelfir artisan is surgically modifying drow to act as tormented "masks" — unless you break into her lavish auction and put a stop to it.
• The Fall of Glasshelm (by Mary Hamilton and Kira Magrann). Bring down the Glasshelm corporation, and put a stop to their dreams of bulldozing the undercity to make way for new aelfir housing.
• The Forgotten (by Laurence Phillips). After the death of their protector, a group of vulnerable citizens must navigate the dangerous world of espionage after they are caught between the Ministry and the Solar Church.
• Ironshrike (by Ben Brock). In the depths of Derelictus, the cell are tasked with eradicating a sacred market built in the worship of predatory capitalism. How do you kill a place?
• The Sulphurous Presses (by Coman Fullard). Given a printing press and some run-down premises in the Works district, the cell must gain dominance over the newspaper market by publishing their own propaganda and sabotaging rival papers.
• Dark Harvest (by Chris Farnell). After a mission goes wrong, the Ministry bundles the players off to the deep farms of La Grotte du Corde — but, of course, nothing is what it seems in this idyllic pastoral village.

Strata requires Spire to play.