Review: Spine of Eternity

I'm back to read through Spine of Eternity: Everyone Wants to be a Star, a newly released pbta game, by Eva Terra.

I've been interested in Spine for a while! I follow Terra on twitter, where I saw some early tweets about the game that piqued my interest. The pitch: play as magical streamers / influencers, hoping to amass enough fame to ascend to eternal stardom, in a world governed by the laws & pressures of genre fiction. Even better, the introduction cites Heart and Spire as inspiration, particularly their stress & fallout system - neat!

The text jumps pretty quickly into the rules; we get a pretty standard pbta style "roll 2d6+Stat" baseline, but the real energy is given to the stress system. Characters have 12 stress boxes, two levels of 1-6; when they take stress, they roll D6s, and have to mark off the corresponding number/s. But you only have two instances of each number - if you'd roll a number a third time, you have to "take a decisive blow" (reminiscent of Masks' similarly named move). You also have to keep track which kind of stress was taken - stress attaches itself to one of the six stats. So you might take Body stress and roll a 1 (so your 1-1 stress box gets marked with a B), but then take Spirit stress and roll a 1 again (meaning you'd have to mark the second level box, 2-1, with an S). If you rolled a 1 again, that's a decisive blow.

A common consequence for suffering a decisive blow is to take fallout, the process for which is nearly identical to Heart & Spire's rules. Fallout can be immediate or ongoing, minor fallout can be upgraded to major; new here is explicit permission to remove fallout due to the fiction, and a note that fallout is "counted" (as part of the result for decisive blows) - minor fallout counts as 1, and major counts as 2. In Spire and Heart, fallout can be mostly "mechanical" (stuff like "doing XYZ is Risky") or "fictional" ("you made the cops here mad"), and the text came with pages and pages of fallouts to select from, with prompting writeups. By contrast, Spine's fallout list takes up about a page, and they're pretty much all "fictional" - it's easy to imagine that they might have impacts on the "mechanisms" in the rule procedures, particularly when living in pbta-land, but there isn't a whole lot of guidance in this first section about that.

There are a bunch of ways that stress numbers can be modified, too, and these are pretty inventive, although not immediately intuitive to me; Prowl means you can move the number you inflict (roll a 3, but inflict a 4); Burning stress fills an additional box, if the two "surrounding" boxes are both burning (roll a 1 and a 3 with Burning stress, and 2 will also be inflicted). There's Advantage and Reroll, Crescendo and Flip, No Fallout, Only Fallout, Shielding... it's cool, and seems like it could be fun, but it also makes me worried that it'd be a lot to keep track of. There are also load bearing tags to describe the "approaches" for inflicting stress - these are usually simpler, but have the occasional serious rules meaning - the Friendly Fire tag, for example, has a specific effect on a 6-.

There's one additional rules quirk that stood out to me - instead of "+1 Forward / Ongoing," Spine has Momentum, which can be spent to add to the roll, or change the "effect or danger" - these are Spine's versions of position and effect from Blades in the Dark, kind of - they just refer to how much stress the roll is risking, incoming (danger) and outgoing (effect). By default, they're set to 3. It's possible to suffer negative momentum (and actually, this came up very early, as a suggestion for how to make GM rulings on actions that might be difficult), although it's not immediately clear to me who gets to decide what happens with it.

There are a few other little rules things - there are "critical hits," a play structure that includes downtime (the rest of the game happens in "showtime," which I think is wonderful), tiers (ala Armour Astir, but here, tiers have implications for momentum), and some small rules for changing class.

This is all before we get into the moves! Moves are broken into three types here (plus a fourth, alluded to in the earlier rules); conflict moves, basic moves, and downtime moves. Conflict moves come with all three success tiers well-defined, but basic moves leave the 6- "miss" tier open to interpretation (de rigueur for contemporary pbta I think). The basic moves leave me a little cold. Part of the problem might be that there are just too many stats, a full complement of 6, ala D&D, and each needs a basic move. They're all pretty standard! The one that stands out is "Read the Small Print," Spine's version of a question asking move, which forgoes a question list to make space for more options - players can declare info or find out foes' weaknesses instead of asking questions on a 7+. The other thing I noted is that each basic move uses the exact same structure - "10+ it happens, 7-9, with complications, 6-, expect the worst." They're pretty much exactly the moves I would come up with if someone needed to trigger them but I'd forgotten the actual rule. Not awful, but not exciting to me. There's a generic move in the style of Apocalypse World ("when you act regardless of danger, roll+Nerve..."), as well as a resist-style move that has you roll with the most applicable stat.

There are six downtime moves, one for each stat, and they all share the same basic structure too - 10+ nets you a resource, 7-9 gets you a resource but something goes wrong, and a 6- gets you nothing but consequences. This maybe feels like even more of a missed opportunity - since downtime moves don't happen all the time, I think the procedures here could be a little more written-up, with some more serious lifting, since they don't need to be used quickly and commonly. What if failures inflicted fallout, or 10+ successes had special, move-specific bonuses? It would go a long way towards making the stats feel different, I think.

All this has taken about 90 pages - the next 90 pages are devoted to character options, of which there are no fewer than 24. There are 12 classes, which are largely in line with your standard class-type character options, but there are also 12 "arcs." These are sort of akin to Heart's callings - small modifiers that determine what kind of story you're in. They establish your bonds (and the bond strength) with other characters, your xp questions/"narrative triggers," and each has a unique "spotlight" which is activated when you roll snake eyes. They're things like Runaway Idol, or Fading Flame, or Heretic, or Tiresias. That last one is a little tongue in cheek - like the greek mythological figure, it's for playing a character who has been magically turned into a beautiful woman.

Like Heart, the arcs lean towards broader tropes / motivations (I'm including Tiresias in here), while the classes aim to get a little bit more specific. But Spine doesn't have the wealth of worldbuilding that Heart does to situate the classes inside of. There are also just a lot of them. The result is that I found them a little thin. A few hit some extremely fun ideas - the Contradigma breaks the laws of physics and is a melee fighter (reminiscent of Ichor Drowned's Paracausal Pugilist, another Heart-adjacency); the Damsel performs fragility to get what she wants; the Literatech makes machines out of narrative devices. Most have a good set-up or initial hook, but there isn't enough runway to get them off the ground. The writeup for the Contradigma, for example, thinks the class is breaking the rules of genre, while actually situating the character quite firmly in contemporary superhero (or particularly shonen) fiction; the Literatech's machines have nothing to do with narrative; the Killjoy's schtick revolves around using "spoilers" to kill "bookworms" but this has no real meaning - your spoiler is just a big modular weapon. 

Frankly, there's just not a lot of class stuff to do any lifting. Every class gets a specialty, some kind of special ability that costs a scar to use (scars are session-permanent stress points), and a few small choices to modify it; a choice of class move; a choice of flaw, which is a small thing the GM can put in your way; and approaches, which are like weapons in that they determine your damage & damage type in conflicts. I'd be interested to see how this plays, because writing them all out, it does kind of sound like a lot, but in reading, I was a little let down! Maybe it's that every class's specialty has the exact same cost (take a scar in X to do Y), so I'm just imagining that they all play the same way... Unfortunately, the class moves don't help a lot here - most of them are quite small, on the order of "roll this basic move with this class's favorite stat" or "take +1 Momentum when you Z." A few do have bespoke rolls attached, but largely the class moves feel incidental; the identity is in the specialty and the approaches. The best of them establish things about your character (which again puts me in mind of Heart's minor advances) - things like "you can talk to animals" and "your limbs are stretchy," etc.

I want to take one last crack at classes before moving on - Heart's classes are a high watermark of character-facing game design for me, but even those don't all hit, and they get pages and pages of things to choose from and supplemental lore to build a story. It's probably more fair if we try to stick to other pbta games. Masks is a game that packs a lot of characterization into a smaller space - most of those playbooks come with a "specialty" unique to the playbook, a variety of moves, and some genre-and-archetype appropriate superpowers to choose among. Why do Spine's classes feel flatter? I think it comes down to the fact that the play pattern reads the same between all of them. A Masks playbook's special might be about my troubled past, or about my superheroic family - both of those are about characters that will be played by the GM, and probably lean towards playing out during downtime-y scenes. But those two "specials" have different rules; their different structure means that they support different modes of engagement. It's not just the difference in fiction that has to do all the lifting - and the best of these added bonuses have their quirks well incorporated into the mechanics.

We're into the final third of the book! The chapter for GMs on running the game is slight - a lot of stuff you might find in here was actually in the beginning. Here is where the text places the GM's principles, which look kind of like highlights from past pbta games' agendas & principles sections, so you get principles like "be a fan of the main characters" (a classic Dungeon World agenda) and "address the characters not the players" (a principle from Apocalypse World, which I have never cared about). There's a section on failing, but instead of having a list of GM moves to make, in support of the principles, the text says "the narrator can do whatever they want." That's a little uncharitable - the section goes into detail about playing towards an ideal of "failing forward," which I think covers most of the bases I'd like to see. But I think it's an odd choice to abandon GM moves, which serve exactly this purpose.

This is also the section where enemies get written up. There's not too much here, which I think is just how I like it. Mechanically, we're kind of in a blend of Armour Astir and Fellowship - like Armour, enemies are defined by how many fallouts they can take, and like Fellowship, small enemies band together, and strong enemies (like Tyrants) require you to address their generals or secret vaults of power, or etc. Both of those games have a move that lets you shortcut to the end, though (Armour's Strike Decisively, or Fellowship's Finish Them!) - in Spine, once enemies take fallout, if they're not taken out, their stress track clears, and you have to do it all over again. We also get a little writeup of what it might mean for an enemy to take fallout, with some examples. These are really cool! I think fallouts don't quite scale as perfectly as, say, conditions (what Masks uses as HP), but I think that's pretty slight.

The very final sections are for "premade content." First are 8 prewritten locations, basically adventure modules, which come with special moves and other little hacks. One is an underwater city with mechs; one is the inside of a giant whale; one is a beach episode. They're quick but full of fun little ideas, and these start to play with the form of the rules a little more. I really liked most of them! There are also 20 NPCs - these are a little harder for me to imagine using, since the results are so idiosyncratic. All-Star Liberty, the clumsy cheerleader, might be a tough fit if we're playing in the eternally-embroiled-in-civil-war france setting from the previous section. But they're fun, and a nice resource to have. They're anime in a self indulgent way that I can't help but smile at, although it's another indicator to me that the game probably isn't for me.

At the very end is basically a glossary of terms to communicate some of the fun metafictional stuff at the core of the premise - bookworms get explained here, and are fun; the volatile substance that appears when the reality of the Spine is impacted is called Gutter, and can be used like oil; there are air currents in the area around the Spine called trains of thought. All of this is pretty cute and I like where it's aimed! I wish it made its way further into the rules text, instead of languishing back here. As-is, most of this stuff winds up feeling ancillary to the "game" part of the game, when I'd like it to feel central!

There's a lot of heart in Spine of Eternity. It's clearly a labor of love, and there's a lot to like in it! Ultimately, I'm not wowed enough by its structure to reach for it, particularly if I was hoping for a pbta game with a twist on the formula. But I think for folks who are excited by the stress-box ticking part of the game and eager for some kind of goofy anime-inspired play, Spine seems like an easy pick.