#SlaytehSpire

[onemorestepinduskvol]

The 7 Tiers of Ascendency Part 1. The Map

I like to think if you looked at the above and had a guess of what it might mean you would be close to the sentiment of the idea. It is simply a way of abstracting the kind of goals a crew may have at each tier. But to expand on that point... There's something about BitD that to me feels, inexplicably, like an old arcade game where crossed with a competitive virtual reality environment (if you have ever seen the 2001 polish film, Avalon, by Mamoru Oshii, you'll have a better sense of what I mean). The challenge, the enemy, is the environment, the world. The city is trying to kill you. Your goal is to survive. In this world, the only way to survive is to thrive; you stand on the necks of your opponents to climb higher or you don't. BitD already has Tiers which vaguely reflect groups' relative power but that is not quite the same as the kind of schlocky 'level 1' and 'level 2' progress structure that I am outlining here.

Also, one complaint I have heard levelled against BitD is that the character can become more powerful than their environment too quickly and too easily. I'm not commenting on that but I will say my taste is that a game is more satisfying when you have to work to beat level 1 and when eventually succeed at Level 3 after being beaten by it many times.

In the next post, I'm going to talk about '7 Tiers of Ascendency', what each might mean and what each might look like and how you might use it in your games to give give players a kind of direction for their ambitions and to give GM's an abstracted sense of what a crew may be aiming to achieve. But first...

Blades in the Spire

The savant amongst you will have noticed the picture is adapted from Slay the Spire, another excellent game about climbing higher, and I use it to capture a few ideas;

Giving crews 2 or 3 scores per level.

Discrete bands of challenge can justify an exponential increase in difficulty between them (Tier 2 twice as difficult as Tier 1, Tier 3 twice as difficult as Tier 2 etc.)

I like goal being not to 'win' but to see how high you can go. Remember this is a game about making stories. Ime, characters comfortably retiring is as close as you can really come to failure.

Giving crews several discrete options for their scores. Some will find this helpful, some won't.

Connected points on the map help players form and see narrative arcs. If we do take the Heist job to rob the Marimon's caravan, then it may mean next we need to silence his security chief. These arcs can be done projectively and/or retroactively.

Each point on this map could be a kind of score (or even a non-score objective or event), and so the players might enjoy picking a path between 'assassination', then 'heist', then completing/disrupting a ritual.

This creates an opportunity to compel diversity in the kinds of score the crew takes, pushing Crews out of their comfort zones and mastered skills after Tier 1 or 2. Smugglers needing to steal, Thieves needing to protect... this can be very useful for encouraging crews to diversify their skills and hence and/or keeping the challenge level high.

Similarly, it can be the case that there is no path to Tier 3 that doesn't go through at least one of many different kinds of heist.

It can be fun to make and share this map ahead of time or conversely leave it blank and players to fill it in as they go though I would say leaving some record of the missions and scores they didn't take can be deliciously juicy for story building later on.

Perhaps the most important thing to bear in mind is that the crew still decided what each of these scores are. I think it's fine to say 'At some stage you will need to complete a Heist/Theft' but make sure that where, when, and what is stolen remains firmly up to them. A little structure, not too much.